Original subtitles

hi I'm Steve Albini I am an analogue

recording engineer and I make records on

analog tape everyday

I'm at Studio la Fabrique the band ratna

magnificent have agreed to play some

songs for us and I'm going to show you

my normal working methods for recording

mixing and finally producing a finished

stereo master for an analogue recording

session

there's a bit of a magic sound notion

associated with analog tape people think

that the process of recording to tape

changes the sound in some magic way and

that's what makes it good it's very rare

that I would use the tape machine

outside of its normal parameters as a

special effect the session that we're

doing at la Fabrique is a 24 track 15

inches a second using the C Cir EQ curve

all tape machines have a range of

performance characteristics which allows

you to fine tune the session to suit the

music that you're recording now I'd like

to introduce my good friend and comrade

Greg Norman the chief engineer at

electrical audio the studio that I run

in Chicago I'll be playing back a 1

kilohertz tone and adjusting it for zero

on the vu meter which that's pretty

close but it's off maybe a quarter dB

I'll just go back and forth and show you

that's the whole kit and kaboodle state

each of the drums is audible

individually but you can also hear the

sort of ringing interaction between them

so one way to minimize that is to use

dampening on the drums now have a much

drier much more percussive sound so this

is the ribbon microphone

and this is the condenser microphone

and if I play them together you'll hear

that there's a hollow sound because one

of them is out of phase with the other

out of polarity with the other and if I

collapse the signal into mono then

you'll hear the cancellation effect of

the out of phase signals I feel a pretty

heavy obligation to the bands that I

work for to make a recording that can

survive potentially long enough for them

to find an audience and to find their

cultural significance