Guest Book

The great thing about digital recording technology is that it puts pretty-good sounding recording equipment in the hands of musicians at a reasonable cost - you can get 16-track digital Yamaha workstations for less than a grand. I recorded demos for my band on one and for the price of a studio session we got a pretty good demo AND kept the recording equipt!. That being said, there's a reason why nearly every great guitar player is using tube amps and nearly every high-end recording studio uses tube mic preamps, mixing consoles and tube tape recorders - it just sounds much better. There's a great interview in a recent TapeOp magazine (a free magazine - go to tapeop.com) with Walter Sears, top NY recordist, where he discusses how tubes, while they distort, distort in harmonic fractions of the original tone, thereby creating a warm, musical sound. Microchips distort in nonharmonic fractions creating the brittle character of digital recording. The speed and ease of editing with digital is far greater than with tape, a big reason producers and engineers love it. It's also far cheaper than analog magnetic tape and tube stuff. But if you've got a vinyl copy of the first ABB album and a good stereo, drop the needle and hear how HUGE the opening riff of "Don't Want You No More" sounds! I also recently listened to Ry Cooder's "Bop 'til you Drop" which I believe was the first record completely digitally recorded and mastered and compared it to his most recent record, recorded in an ancient Cuban studio with tube and tape technology and the Cuban record sounds ten times more musical, rich and drenched with sound. The death of analog recording is probably an economic inevitability but it's a great loss musically.