Ry Cooder Quotes

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

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

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

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'm really anti-option, so computers have been my nightmare with recording. I don't want endless tracks; I want less tracks. I want decisions to be made.

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.

I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.

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.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.

I am such a gearhead. In my recording studio, I personally engineer and edit everything on computers.

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.

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.

I prefer recording drums in the analog format, but that does not mean I would only do it that way.

All I know is that when I mix to digital and when I mix to tape I compare them and the tape always wins out.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

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 started in a research lab for TV cameras, then I worked at a tape duplication facility. That was the first introduction for me to recorded music and hi-fi.

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.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

The records that I like, they have life and warmth and soul in them. Like the slap back on Scotty Moore's guitar on 'Mystery Train.' You're not gonna get that in a computer. You're gonna want a live room, you're gonna wanna bounce the tape, you're gonna want real musicians, in a room, vibin' off of each other.