Beck Quotes

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

My music sounds different because the techniques are archaic, seeing as most people only record digitally.

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes I think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.

I'm thinking about recording everything to tape like it's 1991 and seeing how that sounds.

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.

There's a certain urgency that comes from the records of the early 60s before overdubbing and multitracking came into play.

I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.

When I started in '54, it was only one track on a quarter-inch machine. We didn't have recording studios much around the country; we went into the radio stations and recorded our records.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

When I write a record, I don't even touch a computer. I don't even bring my cell phone.

Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.

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

When I was really young, I was using VHS tapes to record.

What do I think of digital recording? Well, it's all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.

I was born in the overdub years. I wish there wasn't such a thing as a multitrack tape player, because what you heard would be the record.

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it's easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have.

I think musicians like me are drawn to those older desks, not just because they're legend and lore but also because they do something really specific that is hard to emulate or re-create digitally.

I don't have any computers in my studio, it's all analog tape. All analog tape, all old equipment, I mean my mics are like from the 60's and early 70's, everything in there is old.

When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.

I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.

Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools".

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.