Gadgetory

an alarm usek has had a big resurgence in recent times with the success of vinyl records one music label has gone back to basics with an all analog studio and a sound that harks back to the 60s and labels like Motown and Stax dapped own records located in the converted house in Bushwick Brooklyn is home to such artists as Sharon Jones & the dap-kings and Charles Bradley DAP tone is also recorded artists such as Amy Winehouse and Australia's king gizzard and the lizard wizard engineer and producer Wayne Gordon showed me around the small studio it's packed with vintage gear which includes a massive Hammond b3 organ and an old-school 8-track reel-to-reel recorder which is used for all of the sessions Wayne told me that the limitations of analog actually helped the creative process if someone comes in and records a guitar solo and they say hey I want to record it again you asked them okay we can do it again but if you do it you're gonna you're gonna go over your other guitar solo even with vocals that happens a lot of times and then you see this thing in their head with it they kind of make that decision like okay you know this is probably the best I can do and then you have some words like you know I know I could definitely do better every note on adapt own recording was played by the band in the studio not fabricated later in other words it's an auto-tune free zone there's no undo there's no thing dapped own has been around since 2001 and it was built with the help of the musicians who actually record their the thing about this place that's why it feels magical is because it's not like a label where you know say you're a personnel and you're walking you say oh that's everybody we're family everybody's friends and when someone's down someone's gonna give you a call and be like yo what's wrong you know let's pick you up let's go have lunch let's talk about it you know like that's that's the vibe this place and even even as far as records if someone's working on the record you know everybody's around to say I'm here to help what do you need to make your record happy you know it's a it's a very family affair Wayne says that while he loves recording in the space he says that the gear is secondary to the people who record there he says that in the age of fixing it in Pro Tools there's no substitute for a good musician you can buy a compressor you can buy the same way you can buy you know the same guitar but you can buy the same Claire like that's just something you can't do the paper I'm bold enough to say 95% of the magic and his records are comes down to musicians you know and I think for me the way I look at it it's my job to just kind of capture that while Wayne works primarily as an engineer adapter he has also produced one of my favorite new bands the mystery lights he said replicating their live show was his main priority even gave the singer handheld mic so he could jump around as he sang there's this energy they have about him I don't be ever so that's what you kind of want to capture and that was definitely something I've always really gained on well some producers obsess over every detail for Wayne it's the field which is intrinsic to the depth own sound it's more important than fixing mistakes we're not sitting here doing brain surgery you know what we're making music I mean it's not that we're gonna do is going to destroy the world if anything we're helping the world no matter what we do Steve Guttenberg for cnet.com you