DJ Premier 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.

When we recorded our first album sixteen track machines were the thing.

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

My dad used to do a lot of music when he was young, so he had an 8-track MiniDisc recorder, and when he realized that I was getting on with it, he brought it upstairs to my room and showed me how to record and how, once you finished eight tracks, you can cut it down to two and have another six tracks to play with.

'Brace the Wave' is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

From a very early age, I started to get really interested in how songs were put to tape. Not just listening to the songs, but the way the songs were recorded.

I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take.

When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.

I'm always most comfortable in the studio. It's my comfort zone. I love being there, and I love making records.

We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.

I don't have a formal home recording studio, but I can record tracks on my computer upstairs in my office.

I'd always wanted to work in the studio and experiment with sounds. Things that I'm really influenced by and that I love are like The Beatles and Radiohead, and all those records by bands whose music is really involved.

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

There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

Darrell is really good in the studio. I mean, he has a real working knowledge of how the process works, and what sounds good coming back over tape, and how the stuff works together.

I learned so much about recording and about singing on records from Ken Nelson.

Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.

I've always been interested in what happens in the studio.

I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.

I prefer playing in the studio because you have much more control over things.

The tracks on 'Sleep' were recorded live to 2-track. I did a fadeout or two of them, but that's really it.

You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.

In those days I don't' think they were even demos.