Audio Editing Quotes

I do most of my vocals - aside from a couple of little one-shot vocal samples. I record everything into the Saffire with an SM58 then scratch it with loads of plug-ins. I don't do much vocoding to be honest. All my vocals are usually done with Melodyne and a ton of other plug-ins to make it sound weird.

I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.

As for me, my foundations were laid in the south. We did the post-production of 'Hum Paanch' in Chennai, with many technicians from here working for us.

That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, 'Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out' - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.

Keep in mind, you can use Auto-Tune and you can know how to work it perfectly, but you still have to know how to write a good song.

We're so used to everything being properly manicured, like you can hear every footstep in a movie, you can hear every bit of dialogue, and everything is in its place.

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.

On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.

I love being in the studio.

It's so legato it's difficult to splice. Sibelius was famous for that.

I studied communications, only because I could get my own show on the campus radio station. I never thought of it as a career. Music was always a really passionate hobby - it was like collecting DVDs or stamps.

You can talk to a fade but a hook won't listen.

At the beginning of each project, I like to create a palette of sound for that particular project.

With digital technology there's a huge spectrum of flexibility in what you can do to manipulate sound and image - which you can push into a really artificial realm if you aren't careful.

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine?

I had been using a 4-track and a digital 8-track in the '90s, and it was this huge complicated thing. But GarageBand is right there.

Let's say music is needed for only 43 seconds of film. You have to score it so it is an entity, so it won't bother anyone when it ends so quickly. Or if a song runs 2 minutes and 45 seconds, but the titles run a minute longer, you have to arrange that song so it doesn't get repetitious.

You probably know me as a producer for 'This American Life', a top podcast in iTunes.

My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location.

It's the worst noise in the world: me analyzing the reasons for making a podcast about U2.

The best way to use the auto-tune is not to! And that's what I do: I do not use auto-tune!

There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.

Susie Lynn, the producer of those segments, goes in and lays all the voices over the video.

I write and do all my arrangements on my Mac. And um, I use Logic Pro, which is a great software program.