Adrian Younge Quotes

I was born in the overdub years. I wish there wasn't such a thing as a multitrack tape player, because what you heard would be the record.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes I think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.

The Beatles production is often so 'perfect' that it sounds computerized. 'Sgt. Pepper' really does sound like it took four months to make.

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

'Brace the Wave' is an acoustic-electric record recorded with electricity on analog-digital and digitally-analog equipment.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

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.

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.

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

With technology now, you can go in and sing a song, and for $100,000, you will sound flawless.

I prefer recording drums in the analog format, but that does not mean I would only do it that way.

I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day.

I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

I really don't think records should be made in the manner where you sit and write, and when you're finished writing, you start recording. That just seems conventional and old-fashioned to me.

When I write a record, I don't even touch a computer. I don't even bring my cell phone.

I am so in the past. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.

I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.

Nowadays you can record on your laptop with Pro Tools, which I do quite often.

You know, I do music. If you look under the hood of the industry I'm in, it's all based on technology. From radio to phonographs to CDs, it's all technology. Microphones, reel-to-reels, cameras, editing, chips, it's all technology.