Adrian Younge Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let's say, it sounds like you're right there at that moment. It's true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn't sound right. It has to be natural.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.

Every record I've ever done with Tool has been on tape.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

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

Sometimes I hear records that are being recorded at the absolute highest quality, and I just don't like the sound of it.

If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.

I think I make good beats, but when it's not mastered correctly, it can definitely make it sound like it's not a good beat, and that has been an issue sometimes with me in the past.

If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.

I listen to everything that comes in. I'm not real worried about demo sound quality. I can hear through that sort of thing. If a band can play, then they can play.

I prefer recording drums in the analog format, but that does not mean I would only do it that way.

My ears won't fool me. Even when I do a session on digital, we still warm it up somewhere in the process, in mastering or mixing, running the signal through some tubes somewhere.

Little things can make such a big difference during recording.

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

I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers.

I love sending stuff to Usher because it always sounds better than me.

Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.

I like to make records sound good. I'm more like a reducer than a producer. If an artist cannot produce themselves, what's the point?