When I’m recording, I usually just mumble and hum a melody and then fill the words in as I go.
In addition, I’m finishing a track for the movie ‘Waking Up In Reno’, but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.
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.
As a recording engineer – someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day – you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school.
It wasn’t not being famous any more, or even not being a recording artist. It was having nobody who needed me, no phones ringing, nothing to do. Because I’m still too young to do nothing. I was only 24 when all that happened. Now, at 40, I feel I’ve got more to give than I ever have.
In fact, I’d just like to own something. Everyone thinks I’m glamorous, rich and famous but all I’ve got is some recording equipment and a battered old BMW.
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.
Ideally, the music composed these days should sound much better because of the technology, right? But that’s not the fact. The sounds that you hear out of technological recording are programmed sounds coming out of a computer.
I saw Damien Rice in Dublin when I was 13, and that inspired me to want to pursue being a songwriter… I practised relentlessly and started recording my own EPs. At 16, I moved to London and played any gigs I could, selling CDs from my rucksack to fund recording the next, and it snowballed from there.
After the first couple of years recording, I did a lot of praying. I said, ‘Lord, please give me a hit.’ I want one so bad.
About two months into the Whisky, I borrowed some money and rented a remote recording truck.
You have to focus hard on recording songs that you believe in.
What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.
I read numerous books – loads in fact – and, as I always do when recording a historical project, immersed myself into the subject matter. I spent many hours at Henry’s old homes, such as Hampton Court, and visiting the Tower of London. I read no other books during that period.
Mere recording of an event will not make it a historical document. It will become obsolete with time. Only those that emotionally connect with the audience will stand the test of time.
When I do my music, I don’t even go to the studio. It’s just me and my engineer in a dark room somewhere, recording.
I write a song to be recorded. And to some extent to be performed, but definitely more to be recorded than performed, because the recording will last longer than a performance.
I’m a performance artist first; I’m a recording artist second.
I’ve never stopped writing, never stopped recording.
When we’re recording, I always dress up.
For a long time, I was shy about recording gospel music, because I didn’t necessarily want to show the inside of my soul, Milsap revealed. But now, the spiritual side of me is really shining through.
I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that’s the joy of recording – you want to hear what you’ve done and what you’ve contributed – but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.
Piper took me one step further in that it got my first real recording contract but the band just didn’t quite mature. It didn’t break things open, but it got me to the door.
I’ve been with Def Jam Records for five years and they gave me my first recording contract so for that I’m forever grateful.
I have no ancestral link to the mountains. But I really do feel close to mountain culture. Their ways of food, of thinking. The way they hang out with no recording devices and just sing songs with each other.
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.
I’ve always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of technology in music, not only in recording, but in the keyboard. It’s amazing the way you can apply technology to an art form.
I mean there are tons of reasons. Well first of all. I write my own record. I don’t take other people’s materials. And I have a job which is being Willa Ford on top of getting back in the studio and writing and recording.
I used to have a radio show. That’s how I started foolin’ around with recording.
The friendship I had with Elvis began to take shape in 1968 when I was recording in Memphis. I’d record during the day, and Elvis would send one of his guys over to bring me to Graceland at night. Everything you’ve heard about Graceland during Elvis’s glory days is true and then some.
When I was recording my first solo album ‘Imaginaryland,’ I was listening to a lot of movie scores.
I’m always working on new songs. With the technology these days, any idiot can record on Pro Tools on your laptop. All you have to do is plug a microphone into the input jack and anybody can have their own recording studio. So I’m always down in my basement, singing along to riffs or whoever I’m collaborating with.
My intention when I came into this industry was to be a musician, not necessarily a recording artist, just a musician in general. And that’s the reason I went to college and got my degree, which has been great for me. It’s helped me a lot with my career.
I’m very attached to Paris because I have a base there and am also recording there, but New York is home to me when I’m in the U.S., because it’s nice to have a bed to go back to.
When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring.
I love working with a cast and a group of people every day, which is different than recording because you’re usually pretty isolated and alone. They serve as a good balance for each other.
We left ‘Byker Grove,’ had a short recording career and suddenly it finished. The invites to premieres dried up and overnight things stopped. We realised very quickly how fickle this business is. Thinking you’ve lost it all makes you appreciate it a lot more and it sticks with you.
One of the more surreal days I’ve ever had in the recording studio was Martin Fry teaching Hugh Grant his old dance moves. Showing him how to do the hair-flip and the point, and all these sort of trademark moves of his.
I was following my muse and I was very fortunate in having good people around me and it turned out to be a pretty good recording in my opinion.
Hollywood and the recording industry argue that current law permits the copying of songs and movies, and sharing them on the Internet. This enables young people to grow up learning how to steal.
When you first start writing a song, it’s fun, then when you start recording it, it’s fun, but by the time you’ve finished recording it, you’re sick of it.
I don’t particularly enjoy standing alone and recording my own voice or my own stuff. It’s sometimes fun to do for demos and stuff, but I really enjoy the social act of recording records, because writing it is so lonely. And it has to be.
It is a lot cheaper to spend eight hours in a rehearsal hall than in a recording studio.
On our first record, man, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just playing. I was over playing. You’re as green as you can be with no experience in recording or knowing how sometimes a song can work: when it’s too much, when it’s not enough, when it’s not right.
I wore out the Broadway ‘Tommy’ recording. I just loved it.
I have to admit that I was a little nervous when I showed up for my first official ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ recording session.
It is not that I don’t like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.
I put some songs on the Internet back in 2009 – that’s kind of how everything started with Washed Out. I had never really planned on being in a band or anything like that. It was kind of a hobby I did on my own, just recording music.
After school, my mom would pick me up and I would just go to visit my dad in the recording studio, and I would see him working with Mark Hamill or hear him doing the ‘Transformers’ or a ‘G.I. Joe’ or the ‘Rugrats.’
When I was recording music, I’d record all the parts myself, and I wouldn’t let other people in; that’s essentially what Blood Orange is the result of; me trying to find the most comfortable I can be with everything.
When I was young, I was offered my first recording contract in 1971 and was offered quite a bit of money if I would change my character and be a ’70s version of Cher.
I think the recording industry is founded on that principle: to approximate the live experience, to approximate that thing that evaporates as it’s happening, disappears as it’s happening.
