Audio Technique Quotes

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

The secret to the sound is to drop the bass on the floor!

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

With a huge storm, you need a lot of volume, but it can't become one loud noise. Dolby Atmos helped a lot because it gave us the separation of those elements.

Sound design is always critical, especially when you're doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

Micing it from two different angles in front of the speaker sounds huge, and it's so simple.

Sometimes in films it's nice to have violins on either side, rather than on one side, so you've got more of a stereo picture with the violins. Sometimes it's good to have the basses in the middle.

Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.

The Police could get away with doing an entire record with really no audible reverb, which I have always admired and thought would be a lot of fun to try to re-create.

The drone is a very fundamental part of my music, although it's not always present.

I tried to make a honky-tonk country record - rough-hewn, cut fast, and all analog - like I wasn't hearing anymore.

I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.

With 'Midnight Special,' the sound was used as a narrative construct. The audience is looking in one direction when a sound suddenly erupts from the other direction.

The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic.

When I was 14 years old, I had the opportunity to meet Buddy Holly. I asked him how he got that big, powerful sound out of his guitar amp. He said, 'I blew a speaker and decided not to get it fixed.'

I know all my different formulas to get certain sounds. I've been doing this so long that I don't experiment anymore. Or let me rephrase: I've been doing this so long that I don't have to experiment as much. You always want to evolve and change, but if I go in and I know it's a certain type of song, I know exactly where I'm going to place the mics.

Oh, the foghorns... even the foghorns, they're all brass. It's something by Ingrid Marshal called Fog Tropes. It's not a sound effect. It's an actual piece of music. If you listen to what's going on after he has a flashback about his wife you'll hear... it sounds like the humpback whales in a way. But it's all music. And we use it again later, too.

It's amazing to me how often the answer to making something sound better is to play something less.

The way I work is by infinitely playing a very simple loop over and over, and then I start layering things.