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.
When we recorded our first album sixteen track machines were the thing.
With the advent of radio and recording, music became an industry rather than just a tradition.
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?
Roughly 65% of American households owned a video recorder by 1989, when 'The Simpsons' was launched. This meant that fans could watch episodes several times and pause a scene when they had spotted something curious.
Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.
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.
People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.
When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.
Mozart didn't have Pro Tools, but he did a pretty good job.
After my second No. 1, my record company, Warner Brothers, gave me a beautiful present - quite unique at the time - one of the very first Sony stereos which had speaker and radio included so I could record the radio and build up cassette tapes of music, gospel singing, adverts, evangelists.
And then computers got to a point where you could just record directly into them. So when that happened, funny enough, I thought, Right, I'm going to learn how to do this because then I can understand that part.
I was broadcast-struck from an early age; I had saved up for a tape recorder and started making programmes.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
When I had my first camera - I was a child of the '80s. I remember what it was like reusing the same tapes over and over again, and having really bad quality and images kind of bubbling up from under the surface.
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
When I was really young, I was using VHS tapes to record.
Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.
I think we are coming to a new era where people will record much faster.
Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.
The IMAX cameras are big and heavy. And they're loud. So you have to be mindful of whether or not they're worth it; I'd say the image quality is incredible and the scale is amazing.
Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.
For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiments. Astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.
When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.
