Justin Townes Earle Quotes

To me, recording with live instruments and tape takes things back to an older sound that I like but that's still fresh.

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 tried to make a honky-tonk country record - rough-hewn, cut fast, and all analog - like I wasn't hearing anymore.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

I didn't grow up working on 24-track - the first two Taste albums were eight-track and we always had tracks left over - we couldn't believe it, either!

I'm thinking about recording everything to tape like it's 1991 and seeing how that sounds.

Whenever I approach a record, I don't really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn's basement.

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.

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.

When I write a record, I don't even touch a computer. I don't even bring my cell phone.

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.

The tracks on 'Sleep' were recorded live to 2-track. I did a fadeout or two of them, but that's really it.

I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio.

I think the greatest records we've ever heard, from Zeppelin to Purple to Sabbath to The Who, were all recorded in the studio live.

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

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.

A lot of people record on a laptop and use plug-ins, which might be OK for the kind of music that they're doing. But for the kind of music that I'm doing, that just doesn't work. I can't cut corners; everything has to be organic.

It's so easy to make albums with overdubbing and editing these days, but I really prefer playing live and just getting the music to sound right because the musicians, the songs and the performances are good.

Singing and playing live can be difficult. Like, in the studio, I would record either the music track first or the vocal first. I don't necessarily do them together.

I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.

Every time we go into the studio and use a different engineer or producer I try to look, listen and learn their approach. That has helped with the gear I look for to use live and in the studio.

This was the rule that I had when we made 'Frampton Comes Alive!': being known as a live performer, I'm not going to go into the studio and overdub.

What do I think of digital recording? Well, it's all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.

When people are recording, and they're like, 'I want to get the drum sound of the Beatles,' I hate that.

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.