Stephen Morris Quotes

If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.

Sometimes I hear records that are being recorded at the absolute highest quality, and I just don't like the sound of it.

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

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.

I've watched and learnt from DJs and remixers and paid way more attention to how I want my voice to sound. Before, as long as it was loud and in tune it was fine. I've discovered the difference made by various microphones and effects, so each track has a different vocal sound, my voice is woven into everything and it's above everything.

There is a lot of use of ProTools in professional studios, but this is mostly for the special effects it allows, not for sound quality. These special effects soon fall out of fashion, and I don't think this trend will define studios permanently.

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

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

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.

The first generation of CDs sounded terrible. Any chance to remaster would make the music sound better than what was already out there.

I worry about technical details - did I mix the cello half a decibel too high? Things like that.

It's a battle between record company, between producer and between mastering engineer. Because the louder you make your record in a digital process, the more dynamics are squished out of it. Nobody knows exactly what happens, but the dynamics in the performance disappear, and everything is at the same volume.

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.

The greatest records in the world were made without going to Auto-tune or Pro Tools, or having some click track. If they could do it, why can't we? Something's been lost in music. It's all been over-produced, squashed down, totally compressed.

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.

Time has changed and artists release more songs in a short span of time and that's where the auto-tune steps-in. One doesn't have to record a song multiple times to make it better.

That's what records do: represent a compressed, heightened version of the sound. Because of the compression of the tubes and microphones and the wax, it's magic!

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.

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.

When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It's already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that's your photograph. Then you don't really think about it anymore.

I don't have a huge amount of gear, but on the software side, I have a number of plug-in chains that act as abstracted versions of real instruments.

'Lemonade' is made out of bubbling, fizzing, popping, and 'Hard' is made from metal and latex - they are sort of sculptures in this way. I synthesize all sounds except for vocals using raw waveforms and different synthesis methods as opposed to using samples.