Recording - October 2021 - 62

B
1986
The music you make
" The most important thing about
recording, no matter where you are,
is that music comes first. Everything
else is secondary. And as soon as you start relying completely
on technology, you may end up with something that only shines
on the first listen. What you need is something that's going to
be interesting to you over and over. And the only thing that
gives you that is people, because machines don't have a soul. "
-Patrick Leonard, August 1988
" Creating music to fit the marketplace,
so that music can be heard? If
ever I thought that I even came close
to catering to the marketplace, or designing
my productions and my music
to cater to what is currently fashionable,
I would sell shoes for a living.
For me, the marketplace can rot in
hell. I will do music for the love of music
and for the love of people who listen to music, and absolutely
nothing else will drive me. " -Daniel Lanois, January 1990
The role of the engineer
" Many engineers today seem to
have a highly technical approach
to what they do. They seem to feel
that hit records are made by the
buttons and the knobs, and they're
not. Memorable recordings start
with purely emotional values, not
technical values. I've never heard
anyone leave the record store humming
the console! And on the other
side of the coin, of course it would
be good for a lot of musical people to learn as much technical
information as they can. That will bring a certain ease of reality,
a realization to their musical promise. If you don't have
the technical chops to put together a viable listening medium,
all the good ideas in the world won't get on tape. You know,
there's a happy medium. " -Bruce Swedien, October 1995
62 RECORDING October 2021
ack in 1986, the first issue of RECORDING (then called Home & Studio
Recording) hit the streets. Over 6,000 reviews and 420 issues later, here we
are, celebrating our 35th Anniversary issue-time flies when you're having fun!
We dusted off our flux capacitor and found a few gems from the early years for
your perusal. All of us here at RECORDING love what we do-we provide recording
musicians with the information they need to make the best recordings possible. Cheers!
-Brent Heintz, Associate Publisher
2021
" I feel I spend too much time
reading technical manuals and discovering
how things work and too
little time actually making music. "
-Alan Parsons, July 1992
Tricks of the trade
" In the studio, you just have to move
the mic until you find the right place.
The only complicated thing, obviously,
is how you perceive sound... I'm
really
very non-technical-a very
basic approach. I guess it's consistent
with how I've heard sound,
and most of the sounds I've heard
are on 78 records. Poor as they may be, it's amazing how
good some of those recordings are... you can hear everything
you want to hear; the balance is fine. A lot of the
equipment now is very complicated,
but the content is very simple. "
-Leon Redbone, September 1992
" Sometimes cheap low tech
works better than high tech. I'm
not afraid to use my answering
machine to record a sound. "
-Mark Mothersbaugh, June 1989
The home studio
" I would hope that a sufficient number
of people who go into the home
studio business do it just because it is
aesthetically right to express yourself,
and to do it for your own amusement
and for the amusement of the people
around you, without investing in the
equipment so that you, too, can become
a star. This star stuff has nothing
really to do with music as an art form. "
-Frank Zappa, March 1989
Recording - October 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2021
