Jason Isbell Quotes

The late '70's and early '80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording.

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.

I always say that when I was recording with Phil Spector, he would not let me really sing, you know? And even to make me sound younger, he would speed the track up. He still wanted that real nice, little, quiet, sweet little sound.

I don't see anything wrong in using auto-tune.

Sometimes when it comes to music, effects or sound engineering, it is difficult to achieve what you want within a fixed time frame.

For my first album, I thought it was most important for people to hear my voice and to not let it be drowned out by too many lasers and other sounds.

On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening.

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.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

The voices on the record, that was trying to treat my voice like guitar players treat guitar tones.

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.

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've watched and learnt from DJs and remixers and paid way more attention to how I want my voice to sound. Before, as long as it was loud and in tune it was fine. I've discovered the difference made by various microphones and effects, so each track has a different vocal sound, my voice is woven into everything and it's above everything.

I do go back and listen to my songs. I'm biting my fingernails the whole way through, but I do listen. I have a lot of songs I've wanted to re-record just because of how advanced technology is and the different instrument sounds that I'm more experienced with.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

We incorporate various electronic devices - the echo plugs and things like that. Actually, all we're trying to do is make that sound musical. As opposed to just making sounds, we do musical things with them.

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

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 take sounds and change them into words.

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 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've always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of technology in music, not only in recording, but in the keyboard. It's amazing the way you can apply technology to an art form.

Nothing had been attempted like that, to lift Dad's voice, literally, off of that track and put it on a brand-new one, and then line it up, match it up, get the phrasing right. I remember listening - everyone listening at the end, and we were just enthralled. It was really wonderful.

What is auto-tune? I don't even know what auto-tune is.