Record Mixing Quotes

It seems when I put together records, as Henley used to say, they're just like movies. They should have action, tension, love scenes, places to relax.

I knew there was a way to blend records together, but I didn't know how to. This was haunting me when I was in my teens. In my frustration, I decided to start experimenting with electronics. I tested the torque factor on different turntables. I had to figure needles out. See, there are two kinds, elliptical and conical.

I developed the Clock Theory to help me time records; you know, spin the record back two revolutions or whatever and then play the break, spin the other one back two, play, like that.

I love to play the songs that got me to where I am. I like to take a little bit from all of my records and mix it up.

For instance, if you're playing a record with drums - horns would sound nice to enhance it so you get a record with horns and slip it in at certain times.

I never want to go back and remix old records, either. If a record sounds shitty, that's just the sound it has. I just take it as part of the music. Some of my favorite bands - their old records sound terrible. But that's just part of the sound. If they were perfect, I'd probably hate them. Same thing with movies.

I like to sort through music and see whatever pops out to me or inspires me. If I could have a production team going and kind of mix records with me, that would be cool; to take the records and have them sound the way I want them to sound. But I'd rather sort though music to find them things.

When you mix a record that someone else is on, you've got to send it to them. They've got to like the mix, you got to like the mix, the producer's got to like the mix. Too many people are involved!

The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.

With Dollars And Cents on the album, we had it as a band jam and I sometimes spend evenings playing with records over the top of things we were working on to see what works.