A Quote by M. Ward

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 like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time when I'm recording to 2-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.
After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.
My first songs, I would just record them on this little tape recorder, and then I didn't start recording songs I really liked until my friend gave me a 4-track (recorder) and that's when my ideas really started coming together.
Ideally, the music composed these days should sound much better because of the technology, right? But that's not the fact. The sounds that you hear out of technological recording are programmed sounds coming out of a computer.
When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.
Everything I'm doing musically is for its own sake. I'm recording at my house, trying really hard to write songs with a four-track tape recorder.
I'm thinking about recording everything to tape like it's 1991 and seeing how that sounds.
When my generation, those early days of television - I know I've been thinking about this lately - my two flashes of me as a little boy. One, I'm standing in front of the radio freaking out that Nat King Cole's singing 'Lady of Spain', just this stuff coming out of the radio, and Guy Williams singing 'Wild Horses' coming out of the radio.
My parents are musicians. I was listening to the radio and recording songs off the radio on cassette tapes and playing guitars and pianos. Just emotionally responding to music from a very young age.
I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.
When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record. I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like. I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla's bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play."
If you look at my track record, there was nothing on radio that sounded like 'Oh Carolina,' 'Mr Bombastic' when they came out.
People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.
I don't like the way recording to digital sounds.
I sequence during the entire recording process. The sequencing changes as I'm recording and as I'm listening. From when I'm, like, four songs in, I start trying to figure out which song should come after which. Which is important, and it changes as the album goes.
I think the most note-worthy part is that Stella [Mozgawa] had joined the band two weeks before we started recording, so that really influenced the way that the album was recorded. It was really important for Stella and Jen[ny Lee Lindberg] to lay down the drums and bass first for most songs, because they were determining how they needed to lock in together, and Stella was still kind of learning and figuring out her parts.
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