Monday, August 08, 2016

Music Education Monday: Recording
drums and more with Steve Albini

This week for Music Education Monday, you can get a little free advice on recording via some videos from producer Steve Albini.

Though he's known for his work with alt-rock and punk acts such as Nirvana, The Pixies, PJ Harvey, and Iggy Pop, the fundamentals of Albini's pragmatic approach to capturing full band performances in the studio on a modest budget can be applied to many musical genres, including jazz.

In the first video below, recorded in 2005 at a convention of readers of Tape Op magazine, Albini (pictured) discusses his preferred way to record drums, which relies less on close-miking and more on room ambiance than the methods employed by many engineers and producers. For more on Albini's drum miking techniques, see this article from Drum magazine.

After the jump, you can see four more videos in which Albini discusses various aspects of audio production. The first, "How to Produce An Album with Steve Albini," features him talking generally about how he approaches the production process when starting a new project.

After that, there are a couple of Q&A sessions with Albini, recorded in conjunction with his participation in a series of seminars called "Mix with the Masters" in 2014 and 2015. Last but not least, there's a shorter clip in which Albini talks about why he personally prefers analog recording to digital.










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