THEORY
Working Happy
Or: How I learned to stop chasing popularity and (mostly) love my job When I was an assistant engineer at a prominent studio—back when those two things existed—I worked a short stint with a well-known rock producer. After a long first day that featured band...
HOME RECORDING 101
All you need to know to start making recordings at home that don’t suck. I’m going to lay out a ton of very basic information on you about recording, gear, and a little personal philosophy at the end. You can go in depth with anything written below with a...
Studio Etiquette: Everything Your Engineer Wants You To Know But Is Afraid To Say
Audio engineers are translators. We translate ideas into sounds. Creative descriptions into technical decisions. Drunken late-night texts into mix revisions. That’s the secret to this job: we manage personalities and egos, insecurities and interpersonal dynamics, and...
How To Pick A Studio (or: “Hey FB, what’s the best studio in town?!?!”)
I see a lot of Facebook posts like “What’s the best studio in town?” or “Who’s your favorite mastering engineer?”, and they kinda drive me nuts. The way award shows drive me nuts. In the mid-90s I was in high school and Rolling Stone did a best-of poll. Readers...
Parallel Dirt (or: Esteban’s Snare)
I got to sit in on a mix session with Michael Brauer1 in (I wanna say it was) 2000. This is before Gearslutz and Youtube, and his ABCD parallel bus compression method was a very new concept (to me) and kinda blew my young mind. Now parallel compression is the norm...
The Salad Bowl Leslie
I'm a big fan of cheap alternatives and creative solutions in the studio, mostly because recording gear is so damned expensive. The Wilkinson Audio 421 clip, or just about anything from Naiant Studio and Stam Audio are good examples of exactly this. A few years...
Limitations & Creativity (or: Sgt. Pepper’s was done on a 4 track, what’s your excuse?)
Picture a guy from Boston who encompasses everything you know or think you know about guys from Boston. That’s Dan. You’re picturing Dan right now. I used to work with him at a guitar shop when I was in college. One morning before opening the store, a rep for Jackson...
Source vs. Sound
When I was in college I got the opportunity to sit in on a session with a (and I hate this word, but it's accurate) legendary engineer. This guy recorded Hendrix, Zeppelin, etc. I was all full of nervous dorky energy. It was a tracking session, and as the day wore on...
Recording Philosophy
I love gear, I love great music, but I don’t think you should record with someone just because they’ve got an amazing rare vintage analog warm fat tube tape thingamabob, or because they worked with a semi-famous band years ago. Any engineer worth his or her salt has...