The coffee’s cold and the room’s too bright, but there’s a P-bass bobbing through a pair of NS10s and I’m reaching for something other than the latest Pro-Q. That happens more often than you’d think on a session where the goal is tone, not surgery. Some days you don’t want a scalpel. You want a […]

The tank is out of the amp again. We’ve got a ’65 Twin on the bench with a busted pan, and until the replacement spring arrives we’re leaning on plugins to finish a surf session that’s already three days past due. Which has been a useful forcing function: we spent the week A/B-ing everything in […]

The Tone Master Pro has been sitting on the floor next to the desk for three weeks now. Not in the rack, not patched into the interface. Just there, on the rug, a guitar cable trailing across the room. That placement is the whole point of this piece, really. We didn’t set out to compare […]

The first surf thing we ever recorded in this room was a mistake. We had a Jazzmaster plugged into a little practice amp, a single dynamic mic pointed at the grille because that’s all we owned, and the whole take was bleeding into a closet door we’d forgotten to close. It sounded terrible in the […]

We were tracking a slack-key piece last week, the guitar capoed up on the third fret, and somewhere between takes the conversation turned to the old question: if you had to pick one big plugin bundle to build a small studio around, Universal Audio or Waves? Nobody settled it, of course. We finished the take. […]

The other week we had a clean Strat DI’d through a Fender Twin sim, and it sounded like a cassette of a cassette. The playing was fine. The room was fine. But every note had a hard, glassy edge we couldn’t EQ out, because the amp sim was already baked into the tone. Chasing a […]