Red Ant

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

I was just looking at out 2'' machine the other day thinking "you know, I don't miss you AT ALL"

And since we're there, this is the Gabriel I like - all angles, no smoothness whatsoever.

I get it. I just dont like it Instead of relaxing, I get annoyed.

What does song have to do with it? You asked about the best SOUNDING records, no? I dont care for the Tears for Fears album AT ALL, but it's on my list because of the question you asked. And So is far from my favorite Gabriel as well, but it's his best SOUNDING records, and a milestone in the recording art.

I dont think they're even in the same realm, as far as mixing craft. Dirty work is a nice tune, but this is a post-grad level lesson in mixing technique. So is all of Aja. Roger "The Immortal" Nichols was a giant among mixing engineers. I am not worthy.

I never liked the sound of ECM records... even when I liked the music. It's like painting with only pastels... everything is spacy and kinda washed out, I feel like there is no impact. Metheny, Abercrombie especially... how in the heck do you manage to make Jack DeJonette sound soft???

Also while it's not on my album list, I think this tune is what perfection in mixing sounds like.

That would depend on what you're after. Want to feel like you're IN the band, in the room, feeling the air moving? Start here: Want shiny, shimmery textured slickness? Want huge rock with depth, dynamic and timbral range?