TapeOpCon04

Thrasher Magazine, Sept, 2004 by Squeaky Capstan

MY PROFESSIONAL MOONLIT CAREER as a recording guy was really over before it started, before I'd ever threaded a reel of Ampex 456 onto an old, temperamental Tascam 388.

Physics, junior year of high school, 1992-'93. Physics class is when they teach you how waves work. I was landlocked in the Sierras, and had long since given up on 5th-grade dreams of killer tubes and beach-front property (dreams induced by my friend's complimentary subscription to a surf rag: said rag, to our zip code, shouldn't have offered subscritions). I'd kink the Slinky's and subsequently be charged to replace them in that experiment, and then there's the whole math thing ...

Little did I know back then (or more like I voluntarily failed to learn) that waves are very important parts of the non-thing I care most about: sound. It'd be 10 years before I'd start sticking condenser microphones in front of everything that generated noise (or, "waves," I guess), committing to tape things aurally pleasant (and things not so pleasant) in any number of scenarios and sequences, too scared or self-absorbed to find out what the hell was really happening between the sound itself and the tape itself.

So thank the good Engineer in the sky for TapeOp, and the cool recording conference they hold every year. TapeOp was started by John Baccigaluppi and Larry Crane in the later '90s as a black-and-white newsprint 'zinc dedicated to the DIY recording person, whether that person be a kid in the bedroom with a 4-track or a big-time NYC remix specialist who'll pick up a $3,000 pre-amp for the pretty colors alone. It's a bit glossier now, and the content is that much more inviting (the latest has interviews with Walter Sear, Bob Moog, Jay Bennett and Sigur Ros), but you're still likely to find a good answer to your really simple, elementary question inside, even though it seems everyone else in the recording world but you already knows what it is.

Then there's Craig Schumacher, the engineer and producer who owns WaveLab recording studio in Tucson, AZ; he organizes the conference part of TapeOp. This year it was the third annual TapeOpCon, held in New Orleans over Memorial Day weekend at the Fairmont Hotel and Orpheum Theater, although everyone ventured to the Howiin' Wolf in the evening to catch the likes of Calexico, the daylight hours could be spent entirely inside, taking part in workshops on studio construction and building your own mic pre-amp, or arguing the advantages of analog versus digital and the other way around. Then there's the seminars, where a bunch of music industry (the good part of the industry, in most eases) heavyweights argue about microphones mid major labels and the roles of producers and engineers and where the lines are drawn. These panels included the likes of Steve Albini, Don Zientara, Billy Anderson and Ian MacKaye speaking to thousands of self-diagnosed audio and gear geeks from around the world.

Anyhow, I'm still guessing on correct axis placement when it comes to an SM57 and a speaker cabinet. But if there's one thing I became more secure with through TapeOpCon, it's that it doesn't really matter, as long as it sounds nice. MacKaye put it well, making the point that a good song and a strong performance will far outweigh a perfect recording "I've never had a great song ruined for me because of a bad bass tone"--or, in the words of Mr Albini, "The dirty secret of making records and I believe this goes up to the highest echelon of the recording industry--is that every engineer feels that he's not that good, and that sooner or later everyone in the room is going to figure it out." www.tapeop.com