Recording Methods Quotes

A lot of people record on a laptop and use plug-ins, which might be OK for the kind of music that they're doing. But for the kind of music that I'm doing, that just doesn't work. I can't cut corners; everything has to be organic.

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

I'm thinking about recording everything to tape like it's 1991 and seeing how that sounds.

When I write a record, I don't even touch a computer. I don't even bring my cell phone.

When I was really young, I was using VHS tapes to record.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

Trent likes to record guitars direct, whereas I've always preferred playing through an amplifier.

I think the whole obsession with old gear is completely overblown. You don't need old-fashioned gear to make a great-sounding record. You don't even need [analog] tape.

I don't really care about audio quality. If people saw some of the ways that I record stuff, they'd see I don't care in that respect. I obviously care about things sounding good, but I think quality exists through other things like emotionally connecting with a lyric or a feeling, or whatever.

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

You just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference.

We hear so many records these days that are done with click tracks, as opposed to a drummer.

If I'm not in an environment where I can record, it's great to be able to write something down, to be able to know how to do that, to be able to write notation. You grab a piece of paper and there it is. It's the cheapest recording equipment you can buy: a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil!

I've always thought live albums were cop-outs.

Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.

The Police could get away with doing an entire record with really no audible reverb, which I have always admired and thought would be a lot of fun to try to re-create.

What do I think of digital recording? Well, it's all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.

When I started in '54, it was only one track on a quarter-inch machine. We didn't have recording studios much around the country; we went into the radio stations and recorded our records.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes I think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.

There's a certain urgency that comes from the records of the early 60s before overdubbing and multitracking came into play.

I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.

'Bob's Burgers' is done with the cast all together - not necessarily all together: some are in L.A. and some are in New York, but we're hearing each other. So scenes are performed as a group. And 'Archer' is just me alone in a booth.

Whenever I approach a record, I don't really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn's basement.

The more producers I talked to, the more I got looked at like I was crazy for wanting to make a live-sounding album.