Red Ant

I love BFA but its really just Help/Slip/Frank, Crazy Fingers and a bunch of filler. AB and WD are great collections of songs, but not particularly coherent albums. I can't speak for ITD, as I can't stand it.

Terrapin is an acquired taste, even amongst deadheads... its their Prog album

😢 While mainly known for producing multi-platinum blockbusters, he also produced the only coherent (and coherent-sounding) studio album in the entire Grateful Dead catalog.

Nothing whatsoever. Apparently my sweat isn't corrosive, as a set of strings will last me for a year of daily playing.

Been using GHS Boomers for seems like forever. They sound balanced, feel good to me and last a very long time. 9s on 25.5 scale and 10s on 24.75.

In 30 years of use, I've never really made friends with the 1176. I think it's a great "effect" compressor, meaning that it imparts its character to any source you send through it, and no matter how gently you use it it still imparts a particular color. Unfortunately I don't much care for the color it imparts - I find the whole "mids forward" thing it does more trouble than it's worth - except maybe on aggressive, "rock" bass guitar, especially when a pick is used <shudder> When I need a compressor that is faster than the LA-2A, my go to is the Tubetech CL-1B. Pretty much my favorite hardware compressor ever made - It can give you color if you want it, or it can remain virtually transparent while taming transient peaks, depending on settings. And when I want huge color and audible compression artifacts, NOTHING beats the Fairchild. I sadly do not have a Fairchild available, but the UAD emulation does a stellar job of it

Two knobs and the truth

I have an LA-2A in the studio, owned by my studio partner. It has never occurred to me to even open it to look - it sounds great, so I use it

With your zircon-encrusted tweezers gleaming in the moonlighty night

Another excellent choice! He knows everything...

Good call.... though it isn't even one of my favorites from this incredible album - those would be Ballad of A Well-Known Gun, Amoreena, Son Of Your Father and My Father's Gun. Hookfoot made an incredible backup band for Elton.

I came to get down!

Tomorrow Never Knows - Revolver The Overload - Remain In Light That Falling Feeling - Listen Now Flamenco Sketches - Kind Of Blue Vein Melter - Headhunters Eat That Phone Book Coda - Angel's Egg (Gong) At the end of the day When there's nothing left to play And you're all alone 'Cept for Radio Gnome Here's your angel's egg for Breakfast in the morning... bye bye!

This is one of those "I get how amazing it is, but it doesn't do any thing for me" albums - with the sole exception of God Only Knows, which gets an enotional response from me. The rest is just "oh, neat". Its funny cause 3 people who I've worked closely with and count as friends, or at least good acquaintances, "made their bones" on this record - Don Randi, Don Peake and Carol Kaye

I guess this is back when they didn't need attorneys to talk to each other.

What do Dweezil and Ahmet have to do with Brittney?

Well, the dirty secret here is it was meant for Bowie to sing, but didn't work out business-wise, somehow. Peter Hamill does a stellar job though - and another HUGE influence on Mr. Patton.

There are really two schools at play here - the school that says "capture the room as faithfully as possible and be done" and the one that says "the studio is a musical instrument - use it to express emotion and imagination". I like both, but when it comes to the art of mixing specifically, albums like ZZ Top 1 aren't in the running because there really was no mixing - put up the faders and let 'er rip to 1/2'' master. Again, nothing at all wrong with the approach, I just chose different examples thereof (Kind of Blue and Blues and Abstract Truth).

There is one album that brings all those twisted and related skeins together in one sublime album - Robert Fripp's "Exposure".

I LOVE ZZ Top's First Album. In fact I love all their output all the way to Deguello. But I fail to see what those records are doing in this thread. I mean they by no means sound bad, and Billy's guitar tones are ALWAYS stellar, but they're hardly a recording milestone.

After IV, Gabriel is basically dead to me And you know I'm not a fan of his Genesis output. For me, I through IV are essentially one continuously evolving experiment, and a masterpiece taken as a whole. I especially like I lately, for the same thing I used to dislike it for - the Bob Ezrin bombast And speaking of the Patton playbook:

I was about to post a clip of Moribund The Burghermeister, but shockingly, YouTube is down! Edit: Youtube's back! Mike Patton owes Peter a LOT.

Both great recordings, but there is no mixing involved, per se - these pre-date mixing. The balance was achieved by careful placing of musicians around the microphone, or a few mics at best - then cut straight to either vinyl acetate or a single-track tape machine.

He'd finally gotten laid

Haha digital xfer? What luxury! My studio nickname used to be Dr. Blade, cause I would edit 2'' tape like a madman, I'd splice together a master take from 4-5 different takes, all with just a razor blade and an edit block