Jon Hopkins Quotes

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I'm not a fan of the sound quality of our first album, because there's a noise in my head.

When you're recording live, really good vintage instruments onto two-inch tape, it's the best fidelity you can get.

If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them.

The late '70's and early '80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording.

We always did our own mixing.

A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.

I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.

When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let's say, it sounds like you're right there at that moment. It's true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn't sound right. It has to be natural.

If you looked at the sound pattern of an old-fashioned record, it would be very spikey. But nowadays, there's no spikes - everything looks like a brick, so the quiet bits become louder. It's actually damaging because it's like listening to a drill.

Radio or no radio, I just like the way records sound when the drums and vocals are loud.

I try to listen to a lot of music when I'm in the mixing process of a record, when I'm in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way.

I love loud music. I listen loud, and that's part of how I've learned how to do this. Record softly and play back loud and a whole other thing happens.

It's a battle between record company, between producer and between mastering engineer. Because the louder you make your record in a digital process, the more dynamics are squished out of it. Nobody knows exactly what happens, but the dynamics in the performance disappear, and everything is at the same volume.

It was very important to establish a sound, so that people heard a record on the radio and knew immediately that it was you.

We can even sing off key, but if it's produced properly it can be a hit.

People say I play real loud. I don't, actually. I'm recorded loud and a lot of that is because we have good engineers. Mick knows what a good drum sound is as well, so that's part of the illusion really. I can't play loud.

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.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.