Matt Cameron Quotes

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.

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

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.

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them.

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

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

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.

Engineering and mixing are absolutely key. Once a song is done, for me personally, it's usually two or three days to get the mix down.

I always liked the intensity of the recording.

I try to listen to a lot of music when I'm in the mixing process of a record, when I'm in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way.

I record all the time.

Producing is getting the performances, tracking it, making sure all the parts are there. Mixing is when you take the finished work, and you make sure all the levels are right. It's putting all the parts together.

I think anyone who knows the audio process knows what mixing and mastering is.

When you're recording live, really good vintage instruments onto two-inch tape, it's the best fidelity you can get.

If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.

I love tape. It's another member of the band, the way it settles and blankets everything.

Since I was doing all of it myself, I had to decide where I wanted to go with the songs, how to proceed with the chords, if the sound was alright, and all that detail on my own.

I felt that the studio recording process makes you stand still too long.

We certainly strive for trying to make a quality record throughout, and I think that's true of all of our records.

I don't think people realize how much work it takes to make an album.

Every time I went into the studio some engineer tried to impress me with how they're going to capture my sound with all kinds of tricks. But they limited the sound and never allowed me to play how I felt.

Well, they put me in a booth and then did some nice things to the speaker to make it come out sounding ok.

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.

You just went right in and just recorded songs and listened them, and if there were any mistakes, then we would correct them and just went on... one take or two take.