Jon Brion Quotes

I've always been a bit of a sound freak in the movies I've done.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

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

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

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

I think I have a basic sound aesthetic that is in most of what I do.

The first time I experimented with sound design was on 'Fruitvale Station,' where I recorded the BART train and manipulated it.

We mixed the sounds ourselves. If they were going to put the sound back onto our film [Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.], we wanted to mix it ourselves.

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

When you're recording, if you're not really clean in your playing, it sounds like a mess.

It's big production. It's huge. It's using studio technology to your benefit. You don't go in and play live and then just take the tapes and get them mastered. You have to create.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

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.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool.

The dubbing of the music and effects is really incredible today. You're feeling gun shots. I mean, it's not the way people say it is, but the gunshot sounds real. And cars sound real. Among the many things in the evolution (of movies) is to make the sound in the movie incredible. That's what you feel.

All you have to know is mathematically how many times to scratch it and when to let it go - when certain things will enhance the record you're listening to.

Aame' is a new attempt. The entire film was shot using live sound technique.

The number of times that anything is overdubbed on 'Frampton Comes Alive!'... the rule was, if it didn't make it to the tape, then we can redo it because it needs to be done. If it made it to the tape, and it sounds good, we leave it. So nothing was overdubbed on that album at all that wasn't absolutely necessary.

Sound is the most important thing on any film, especially documentaries.

I'm not a fan of the sound quality of our first album, because there's a noise in my head.

Ground zero for me is audio.

As far as animatronics, I started out in college working for Tom Holman. He was the inventor of the THX sound system. Through him, I got an internship at Lucasfilm.

I treat recorded tapes the way a film director treats his rushes.