Paul Gilbert Quotes

I love loud music. I listen loud, and that's part of how I've learned how to do this. Record softly and play back loud and a whole other thing happens.

I've discovered that sheer quantity doesn't necessarily make for a heavier sound; if anything, overdubs make guitars sound mushier.

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

You shouldn't really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

I recorded 'Play God' in a shed. I don't know how we got it to sound as good as it did.

The only technical things I know are treble, volume and reverb, that's all.

When the Grateful Dead needed a quality sound system to deliver our sonic payload, I learned electronics and speaker design.

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.

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

It all begins with the initial tone coming from the cabinet, but EQ at the board is very important.

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.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

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 worry about technical details - did I mix the cello half a decibel too high? Things like that.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

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

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

I've never made a record that didn't sound better than what was in my head - that's sort of my rule.

All you have to know is mathematically how many times to scratch it and when to let it go - when certain things will enhance the record you're listening to.

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'm on this eternal quest to get the best guitar sound in the world, but my vision of what is 'the best' changes every time I go into the studio. Sometimes my goal is to make my guitar jump out, and sometimes I want it to lay back.

I don't really care about audio quality. If people saw some of the ways that I record stuff, they'd see I don't care in that respect. I obviously care about things sounding good, but I think quality exists through other things like emotionally connecting with a lyric or a feeling, or whatever.

The room is the most important thing about recording.