Luka Sulic Quotes

Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.

I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.

I just recorded in studios, you know, people pressed the buttons for me. So I just started recording the bass lines and guitar parts with my voice, covering classical pieces, or just making up melodies so I could learn how to use it.

Sometimes I like them artificial and sometimes I like them real. And the reason is because sometimes I like a real close sound. And I like a very specific snare sound and I can't get that in the big room.

Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can't just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.

What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.

To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.

I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track...' and so on.

I am not that thrilled about the way our records sound anyway. Don't get me wrong, I work hard on them and I want them to sound fantastic but I'm happy to have another interpretation of them anyway.

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.

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.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

I do have electric guitars, because I've always believed, especially when I'm working in the studio with other bands as producer, that there should be a really nice Strat around.

Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it.

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.

A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.

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

The thing people forget about Kevin Shirley a lot of the time is that he's not only a great producer, he's also a world-class engineer. He really knows how to get a sound.

I got really excited about it. But then we went into the studio and tried to record some with different musicians, and it didn't sound good. It didn't work. So we put together the album [Unchained] with just a guitar and myself.

I didn't really think about the sound of my songs before I started recording things in the studio.

When you've got insane drums and a lot of guitar, it's really hard to mix the vocals, to mix it all well.

As a producer, I'm an objective observer, helping a band form their ideas into a cohesive album. It's a step back from the intimacy of creation.

If you listen to my early music, I didn't know how to mix. I barely knew how to record for real, and I didn't care.

I know of some guitar-based rock bands that refuse to record anything that they can't play live. But some of the best stuff I come up with are studio-based performances - bringing out whatever accident I had in the studio and building a song around that.

When you're making music, you don't look at what's going on in the studio next to you.