Brian Eno Quotes

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 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.

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.

We were never happy with the way cello was recorded, and we wanted to experiment in the studio to make the cello rock as much as possible. On the second album, we had great help from Bob Ezrin, who helped us develop our sound even more.

I just play intuitively and work the same way in the studio. I don't have any magical effects or anything that helps me to get my particular sound.

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.

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

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them.

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.

We just set it up and recorded it the way we played it. But that was the way we played it then.

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

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 don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

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.

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.

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

I don't think there's anybody that has such a keen sense of vocal production and attention to detail as Dre.

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.

The sound itself, the production, is of such great importance that it has become an integrated part of the composition.

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

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.