Brian Setzer Quotes

I think I have a basic sound aesthetic that is in most of what I do.

The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal.

Different boards do different things to the sound that's coming through them. An old Neve desk does embellish it in a way that makes it sound sort of bigger or warmer. It doesn't change the performance but it does enhance the way that it sounds.

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.

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

I take sounds and change them into words.

I have been using delay and reverberation since the middle 1960s. I use them to make what is almost inaudible to the ear, audible. I do not use them to play loudly but to make the higher harmonics heard.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

What is auto-tune? I don't even know what auto-tune is.

The Police could get away with doing an entire record with really no audible reverb, which I have always admired and thought would be a lot of fun to try to re-create.

I don't see anything wrong in using auto-tune.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

The voices on the record, that was trying to treat my voice like guitar players treat guitar tones.

As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.

I really like iZotope Trash, which is a great plug-in for distortion, as is Ohmicide, which I love. It's an absolutely crazy multiband distortion, compression, EQ and filter, which pretty much lets you do anything.

The studio part, to me, can be pretty laborious. You're inside for hours on end and can be pretty frustrating to get the sound you hear in your head to come out of those speakers.

'Sinister' is the first score I've done in which there's no orchestra in it whatsoever. There are traditional instruments I sampled, then manipulated, so you don't even recognize the source anymore.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

I do most of my vocals - aside from a couple of little one-shot vocal samples. I record everything into the Saffire with an SM58 then scratch it with loads of plug-ins. I don't do much vocoding to be honest. All my vocals are usually done with Melodyne and a ton of other plug-ins to make it sound weird.

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.