Shura Quotes

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.

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.

The summer after high school, I got a TASCAM because I had been writing a lot and thought it would be cool if I recorded stuff not just on my phone.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

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 like working with modern sounds in the studio as much as I'm happy to work with a basic rock n' roll format.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

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.

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

I have Pro Tools on my computer, and I make CDs all the time.

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.

Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?

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.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.

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

I play keyboards and Pro Tools, if you want to look at it as an instrument.

I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.

I'm from the pre-Pro Tools era where you had to meet up with the artist and go over things if you wanted to record a track.

When I was a kid, I played drums, and when I first got a 4-track, I would put down drumbeats and then do the rest of the tracks on top.

I just tend toward more lush, full sounds in my productions. I don't have any preference when it comes to analogue versus digital; I use what's best for the application. Analogue synthesis is nice, but it's just one tool among many, and it has its place.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.

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.

Now with Pro Tools, you can play with layers and 100s and 100s of tracks. When we used to do it back in the day, you had one shot, or you would have to wipe it and carry on over that track.