James Blake Quotes

Young people have decided they like to listen to music in a certain way, through ear buds, and that's fine with me as long as it doesn't bother them that they're not hearing 90 percent of the music that way.

I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory.

I just want people to hear the music the way it's suppose to sound, the way we meant for them to hear it. You sit in the studio all this time and make the music, tweak it, try to get it perfect. They should be able to hear it that way.

The thing people forget about Kevin Shirley a lot of the time is that he's not only a great producer, he's also a world-class engineer. He really knows how to get a sound.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

It's always been difficult to make a good record. To be perfectly honest with you, it's really about the person that's pushing the buttons. No matter what type of equipment you have, you still have to have a certain talent to be able to make a good record.

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

Studios are designed to pull out all of that beautiful ambience you get from singing in a room, and then the engineer puts it back in digitally or through whatever machinery you've got.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I love sending stuff to Usher because it always sounds better than me.

My very first records, I was very interested in how you get the particular quality you want out of it, and I began to learn about the engineering and aspects of production and things very early on. I got hands-on with the process and taught myself how to engineer, as opposed to just being a producer who asked the engineer to make it sound nice.

I wanted to do something as an extension of my passion for music. My aim for the STREET by 50 On-Ear Wired Headphone range is to present music as it's meant to be heard, in studio-mastered sound.

I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let's say, it sounds like you're right there at that moment. It's true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn't sound right. It has to be natural.

You can't just stick someone's name on a headphone that doesn't know anything about sound.

The number of times that anything is overdubbed on 'Frampton Comes Alive!'... the rule was, if it didn't make it to the tape, then we can redo it because it needs to be done. If it made it to the tape, and it sounds good, we leave it. So nothing was overdubbed on that album at all that wasn't absolutely necessary.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.

I don't think there's anybody that has such a keen sense of vocal production and attention to detail as Dre.

I think I make good beats, but when it's not mastered correctly, it can definitely make it sound like it's not a good beat, and that has been an issue sometimes with me in the past.

I went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.

People are making a lot of music and higher and higher quality. I can't say the same thing for how people are listening to music. People are hearing music through terrible speakers, little computer speakers, there's a lot to get back to in terms of hi-fi and people listening to better quality, technically better quality music.