Patty Griffin Quotes

A lot of times you'll hear bands and it's a different sound coming out than what's on stage. Because you can clean it up through a PA and make it sound completely different than what they really sound like.

A place like Sound City, which was just a big, beautiful room where you would hit record and capture the sound of the performer - a place like that isn't necessarily in demand anymore.

If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.

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.

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

I always feel like there's something magic in recording studios. There's a reason good music continues to be made in them. It's just some mojo element.

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

I bought an audio technician mic and Pro Tools SE, the demo version and was recording in the basement.

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

That's what records do: represent a compressed, heightened version of the sound. Because of the compression of the tubes and microphones and the wax, it's magic!

I went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.

I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.

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.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

It's harder to make real audio than special effects audio.

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.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

When I started in '54, it was only one track on a quarter-inch machine. We didn't have recording studios much around the country; we went into the radio stations and recorded our records.

And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me.

I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers.

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 have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.

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.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.