Sonic Valentine

and I know you do.  You owe it to yourself to listen to this Chris Thile interview.

Chris Thile Interview

It made me happy, made me sad and it made me think.  Chris is a true genious in our time and what he says made me really think about where we (us making the music) are headed.

Now don’t get me wrong I am not about to send back my “Chinese Pop” money cause Chris Thile told me too… but next time I am working on something I actually care about… well… I might look at it a little different.

I should warn you… if you did not know the following facts… you will be a little heartbroken like I am…

-Chris Thile now lives in New York – so I will not run into him in Nashville anytime soon, and that was one of my favorite things about Nashville.

-Nickel Creek is breaking up – ya I know… that one hurts, but with “Why Should The Fire Die” what a way to go out.

Your friend Ben

Man I wanted to buy this box… but I just couldn’t. This review is an addendum to what we said in the podcast… so you will want to watch that first.

From the moment that I heard about the API A2D I was extatic. Two API 312 preamps in the same box as API’s new analog to digital converters. I call that heaven. You see I grew up an API lover. The first studio I worked in had a 1972 API in one room. I loved that board, I miss that board. Thanks to the boards old owner I still have eight of it’s 550As in my rack. But I have been jonesing for the love of API’s amazing preamps.
(continue reading…)

Scott and Ben give the API A2D a good trashing, talk about Guerilla Recording techniques, and watch an old Reading Rainbow clip.

Sonic Valentine – Episode #4 from The Sonic Fedora on Vimeo.

Ok, I reallize that I screwed the pooch (what the fuck does that even mean). I stopped posting because my computer situation was just horrible in LA.

Fact of the matter is that most of the important stuff that happened, that you, the engineer cares about happens in the first few days. The set-up was the difficult part of this record. Once the ball was rolling it kept rolling.

Since the last post… ya we finished the record. I am proud of how it turned out… damn proud. Everybody really pulled together and gave it their all to overcome low budgets and less than perfect recording conditions.

Once Dan and I got back to Nashville we took the weekend off and didn’t talk to each other for two days. On moday we started disecting the parts we had recorded. The hardest part of all was Buz the fidler. We had recorded him three or for times and just prayed that we had enough. There were spots that we didn’t have enough. But thank God for Pro Tools. We made it work.
(continue reading…)