Recording Studio Quotes

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

He was supposed to record in the studio this afternoon, and pow—he gets shot. This fuckin’ album is cursed, I tell you.

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

I laughed. ‘It’s a cellar Phil, calling it your recording studio does not make that sentence any less creepy.

Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee.

His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People—particularly older ones—still spoke of putting film into a camera, or gas into a car. Even the phrase “cutting a tape” was still sometimes heard in recording studios—though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies.

The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one’s own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old and was considered not very bright. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from a news anchor job because she was thought to be unfit for television. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination. Thomas Edison was called stupid by his teachers. The Beatles were told they didn’t have a great sound and rejected by Decca Recording Studios. Dr. Suess was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. Abraham Lincoln had a long list of failures, including eight election losses and a nervous breakdown.

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.

Outside of the recording studio, every aspect of my life was decided by a committee in those days, with Tommy acting as chairman of the board. (Oddly enough, I was never invited to the meetings.)

I'm the drummer for Stage Dive." Mat set the crazily expensive camera on the seat beside him. "You can't order me around, child bride." "It's so cute that you think that's still funny, calling me child bride." From her back jean pocket, Ev pulled out her cell. "Am I calling Anne to tattle on you for refusing to give Jimmy and Lena some privacy or not?" "You wouldn't dare." Her fingers moved across the screen. "Oh, I think I would." David and Ben chuckled in ther manly way, but did as told and went back into the recording studio. They clearly weren't messing with the girl. A second later, Mal followed. "I do not like you women all being friends. This is not okay." "And you should tell your grilfriend all about it when you see her tonight. I'd love to know what she says." With a final wave, Ev followed him back inside the mixing room or whatever it was called.

All the hours and years since then inside vans, on buses, in airplanes and airports, in recording studios and lousy dressing rooms and motels and hotels were possible only because of the music that sustained that life. Music that could only have come out of New York’s bohemian downtown art scene and the people in it

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.

The Beatles were working on an album called Everest (actually named after a brand of cigarettes). When it was suggested they should get the photo for the record cover taken at the actual place the album was named after - and being too lazy to travel to the Himalayas - they renamed it to Abbey Road, which was the street on which their recording studio was.

All records are moments. But the great records are for moments to which we wish to return.

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.

Duran Duran chose me—I had no choice in the matter. I still remember, clear as day, the first time I saw the “Hungry Like the Wolf” video. It was like I was being possessed. From then on, everything was different: Everything I thought and felt was in the name of Duran Duran. I traveled to their concerts and waited outside their hotels and recording studios. I ran an internationally known Duranzine before pursuing a career in entertainment journalism just so I could be paid to be near them. I married a man named Simon, only to divorce him for an even hotter guy named John. I have lived for them, lied for them, and questioned my own sanity over them. And I’d do it all again. Don’t say a prayer for me now—save it ’til the morning after!

Love it or hate it, thrive in it or still getting the hang of it, the recording studio is the place where your main product is going to be captured, recorded, mixed and created. You need a clear platform from preproduction to the schedule, tracking to the overdubs, vocals to the final mix. The best-laid studio planning will save you the most money and greatly reduce stress.

There really is no happy place; it's all about your mindset. However, if I was to choose a place which contributes to my well-being, it would be the recording studio – no contest. There is something magical about people coming together to share ideas, pieces of themselves, and where the song can take you. Within those walls, music is unpredictable... a wildcard... like dreaming in sound.

Eventually they [Sarunas Marciulionis and Don Nelson] got a call from a representative of the Grateful Dead, whose members had been inspired by Lithuania's struggle for independence. Nelson and Marciulionis showed up at the address they were given in San Francisco, which was a small, nondescript garage. 'I thought we were the victim of a practical joke until we opened the door and there was a state-of-the-art recording studio' says Nelson. 'I still remember the Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like "Here Comes the Sun" and "Hey Jude"... but they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally and, well, maybe there was a little pot going on. So Sarunas pulls me aside and says 'Donnie, no way these guys are famous. They're terrible.' '.

[Jimi Hendrix] dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. “The language of peace. You dig?” I did.

There was a studio with sophisticated recording equipment, but there was also very sophisticated security equipment outfitted throughout the house—listening devices, motion-detecting cameras—recording my every move.

I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.

The Indiana Jones films have a built in Disney connection, as director Steven Spielberg sent his sound designers down to Disneyland to record Big Thunder Mountain Railroad to provide a soundtrack for the second film's mine chase scene!

Live your life in real time -- live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time -- your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your revolution in real time -- not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in real time -- the whole thing on video from start to finish. Penetrate your body in real time -- endovideoscopy: your own bloodstream, your own viscera as if you were inside them. Nothing escapes this. There is always a hidden camera somewhere. You can be filmed without knowing it. You can be called to act it all out again for any of the TV channels. You think you exist in the original-language version, without realizing that this is now merely a special case of dubbing, an exceptional version for the `happy few'. Any of your acts can be instantly broadcast on any station. There was a time when we would have considered this a form of police surveillance. Today, we regard it as advertising.

They’re right. Los Angeles isn’t a city. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio. Everything is off the record. People don’t have time to apologize for its not being a city when their civilized friends suspect them of losing track of the point.

It's this human porosity that bothers me and that I can't escape since it is the faith of my skin, the extra sense which is everywhere in my being, this lack of eyelids on the face of the soul, or perhaps this imaginary lack of imaginary lids, this excessive facility I have for catching others, I am caught by persons or things animated or unanimated that I don't even frequent, and even the verb catch I catch or rather I am caught by it, for, note this please, it's not I who wish to change, it's the other who gets his hooks in me for lack of armor. All it takes is for me to be plunged for an hour or less into surroundings where the inevitable occurs--cafe, bus, hair salon, train carriage, recording studio--there must be confinement and envelopment, and there I am stained intoxicated, practically any speaker can appropriate my mental cells and poison my sinuses, shit, idiocies, cruelties, vulgar spite, trash, innumerable particles of human hostility inflame the windows of my brain and I get off the transport sick for days. It isn't the fault of one Eichmann or another. I admit to being guilty of excessive receptivity to mental miasma. The rumor of a word poisons me for a long time. Should I read or hear such and such a turn of phrase or figure of speech, right away I can't breathe my mucous membranes swell up, my lips go dry, I am asthmaticked, sometimes I lose my balance and crash to the ground, or on a chair if perchance one is there, in the incapacity of breathing the unbreathable.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.

Each of us was on a journey to bring our priorities to a wider audience, to participate in the global discussion and to tilt the world our way. We were both also part of a bigger trend. “We have never seen a time when more people could make history, record history, publicize history, and amplify history all at the same time,” remarked Dov Seidman. In previous epochs, “to make history you needed an army, to record it you needed a film studio or a newspaper, to publicize it you needed a publicist. Now anyone can start a wave. Now anyone can make history with a keystroke.

I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all." The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south." Transparanoia owns this building," he said. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism. She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first.

BEFORE THE TREE HOUSE WAS A RECORDING STUDIO FOR PODCASTS, IT WAS:* A grotto for mermaids and mermen. Piles of seashells. Buckets of sand from our old sand table. Fabric in shades of blue hanging everywhere. A fairy house. Shimmer fabric in shades of pink, yellow, and green. Tissue-paper flowers. Cutout butterflies with huge googly eyes. The boxcar from the Boxcar Children books. Spoons, tin plates, a knapsack, crackers, and plain cookies. Red-and-white-checked fabric for the windows. A keep. Cardboard swords wrapped in foil. Many, many of them. The Gryffindor common room. Red and gold, with wands made out of repurposed foil swords.

Hackie said, Reggie Wright Jr. told him (during a conversation at the Death Row studios in Tarzana) that the case against Snoop was destroyed when important evidence disappeared from the West Los Angeles Police Station. Wright seemed to imply that one of his friends on the LAPD had taken care of this for him, Hackie recalled.

Tech? Bring it on! The more, the better. I have no “ol’ school” pretensions à la analogue vs. digital. If anything, the advances have helped me in terms of the ability to record myself at home in my basement without a producer or studio expenses. Creativity is another discussion: something you have or don’t. Technology can be a tool, or a crutch, or a graveyard…it all depends on you!

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. “The language of peace. You dig?” I did.

Briggs was living in Toronto at the time and had started a studio called Thunder Sound. He recorded the Massey Hall show. He thought this live show should have come out right away and was disappointed and disagreed with my decision to instead put out Harvest-he thought it was not as good as the Massey Hall recording. "It's great, Neil," Briggs said. "Put it out there." But that was not to be. When I heard the show thirty-four years later while reviewing tapes for my archive performance series, I was a little shocked-I agreed with David. After listening, I felt his frustration. This was better than Harvest. It meant more. He was right. I had missed it. He understood it. David was usually right, and when I disagreed with him, I was usually wrong. Every time I go into the studio or onstage, he is missed.

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow.

What I’ve always tried to explain to those artists is that the reason they’re feeling out of whack is because they got too caught up in the celebrating. If you’re an artist, what truly makes you happy isn’t buying new cars or popping bottles. It’s making beautiful music for other people to enjoy. That’s it. You’re going to be your happiest when you’re in the studio writing a song, not when you’re out celebrating how many records that song eventually sold.

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince’s writing style(s) during the course of the album’s recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of ‘Electric Chair’ among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that “he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn’t really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious—it’s like something you’d do if you had no access to any equipment. He’d use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he’d record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song—and most likely, he’d have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he’d do his one man band approach to recording a song. He’d know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the ‘click track’—the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo—he’d then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He’d build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there’s your demo.

Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.

analogue tape is notoriously forgiving on transient peaks, applying small amounts of tape saturation (or distortion) on the occasional stray hit, and thereby keeping the transient levels in some degree of order. Of course, in an entirely digital production chain, it’s highly likely that these transient peaks have passed through the majority of recording and mixing without any of these pleasant ‘non-linearities’ slipping in, and therefore the average level is several decibels quieter than a comparable analogue recording.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?" So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

A queen of the layered California seventies-rock sound, Ronstadt was amazed by Young’s approach in the studio. “The way Neil makes records, oh my gosh. I have a very, very meticulous way of working. I’m an oil painter—I take a long time to get all the parts real in tune, get ’em right with multiple tracking, doing it over and over. With Neil you don’t get the chance—you’re lucky if you’ve figured the part out, he does things so fast. Neil’s a sketch artist. He just washes the color over it, it’s done and it’s brilliant. He’s really got an uncanny instinct to go for the throat.

Recorded at the same time, but not destined for release until 19 months later, was John’s ‘Across the Universe’, melding the sweetest and loneliest of his lyrics (‘Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box…’) with the mantra he’d soon be chanting in the Himalayas. He wanted a female chorus totally without artifice so, rather than professional backing singers, it was decided to use two of the fans permanently on watch outside Abbey Road studios. Paul was deputed to fetch them, and picked out a pair he recognised from his own front gate in Cavendish Avenue. The girls’ awestruck voices created just the right effect for ‘Across the

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

The recordings soon reached the point at which the cast had caught up with the author: "They were recording part of the show in one part of the studio, while I was in another part of the studio actually writing the next scene. And this escalated to the point where the last show was being mixed in Maida Vale about half an hour before it was due to be broadcast from Broadcasting House. At which point the tape got wound round the capstan, and they had to take the tape recorder apart to unwind it, then get it onto a motorbike to be taken to Broadcasting House. At one point, we nearly sent them the first half of the tape, then we were going to unwind the second half and get it down to Broadcasting House before they had finished playing the first half. Geoffrey Perkins, Paddy Kingsland and Lisa Braun all deserved medals for that!

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization-be it an animation studio or a record label-is an ecosystem. 'You need all the seasons,' he says. 'You need storms. It's like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There's no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn't rain, things don't grow. And if it's sunny all the time-if, in fact, we don't even have night-all kinds of things don't happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that's how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can't only be sunlight.' It is management's job to figure out how to help other see conflict as healthy-as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run.

De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation.

As we mixed down the song “Rocket Queen,” Axl felt that the bridge needed something; some other element to elevate the drama. He suggested that Adrianna Smith, who was with us in the studio that day, fuck him in the live room so that we could record her vocals and layer them over the breakdown. We’d been drinking Jack pretty heavily all day, so it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I was all for it; I knew too well what she was capable of vocally—she had kept me up for the past three nights. So we lit up some candles for atmosphere, then she and Axl went out into the live room, got down on the floor by the drum riser, and we recorded Smith’s performance in all of its honest moaning and groaning. Enjoy it—it’s right there in the final mix. That breakdown said it all; I couldn’t think of a better song to close the album and I couldn’t think of a more telling slice of our lives at the time to hand to our fans.

Her disillusionment with the business had intensified as the need to simplify her stories increased. Her original treatments for Blondie of the Follies and The Prizefighter and the Lady had much more complexity and many more characters than ever made it to the screen, and adapting The Good Earth had served as a nagging reminder of the inherent restraints of film. Frances found herself inspired by memories of Jack London, sitting on the veranda with her father as they extolled the virtues of drinking their liquor “neat,” and remembered his telling her that he went traveling to experience adventure, but “then come back to an unrelated environment and write. I seek one of nature’s hideouts, like this isolated Valley, then I see more clearly the scenes that are the most vivid in my memory.” So she arrived in Napa with the idea of writing the novel she started in her hospital bed with the backdrop of “the chaos, confusion, excitement and daily tidal changes” of the studios, but as she sat on the veranda at Aetna Springs, she knew she was still too close to her mixed feelings about the film business.48 As she walked the trails and passed the schoolhouse that had served the community for sixty years, she talked to the people who had lived there in seclusion for several generations and found their stories “similar to case histories recorded by Freud or Jung.” She concentrated on the women she saw carrying the burden in this community and all others and gave them a depth of emotion and detail. Her series of short stories was published under the title Valley People and critics praised it as a “heartbreak book” that would “never do for screen material.” It won the public plaudits of Dorothy Parker, Rupert Hughes, Joseph Hergesheimer, and other popular writers and Frances proudly viewed Valley People as “an honest book with no punches pulled” and “a tribute to my suffering sex.

He spent a little time with me on the stairs and told me his vision of what he wanted to do with the studio. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio. “The language of peace. You dig?” I did. I can’t remember if I actually went into the studio, but Jimi never accomplished his dream. In September I went with my sister and Annie to Paris. Sandy Daley had an airline connection and helped us get cheap tickets. Paris had already changed in a year, as had I. It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly. As we walked down the boulevard Montparnasse I saw a headline that filled me with sorrow: Jimi Hendrix est mort. 27 ans. I knew what the words meant.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

I open the door to see him on my doorstep and he doesn’t even say hello. He says, “Let’s cut the crap, Daisy. You need to record this album or Runner’s taking you to court.” I said, “I don’t care about any of that. They can take their money back, get me kicked out of here if they want. I’ll live in a cardboard box.” I was very annoying. I had no idea what it meant to truly suffer. Teddy said, “Just get in the studio, love. How hard is that?” I told him, “I want to write my own stuff.” I think I even crossed my arms in front of my chest like a child. He said, “I’ve read your stuff. Some of it’s really good. But you don’t have a single song that’s finished. You don’t have anything ready to be recorded.” He said I should fulfill my contract with Runner and he would help me get my songs to a point where I could release an album of my own stuff. He called it “a goal for us all to work toward.” I said, “I want to release my own stuff now.” And that’s when he got testy with me. He said, “Do you want to be a professional groupie? Is that what you want? Because the way it looks from here is that you have a chance to do something of your own. And you’d rather just end up pregnant by Bowie.” Let me take this opportunity to be clear about one thing: I never slept with David Bowie. At least, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I said, “I am an artist. So you either let me record the album I want or I’m not showing up. Ever.” Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.” I shut the door in his face. And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end. The way I was working then, I’d have a loose melody in my head and I’d come up with lyrics to it and then I’d move on. I didn’t work on my songs after one or two rounds. I was sitting in the living room of my cottage, looking out the window, my songbook in my lap, realizing that if I didn’t start trying—I mean being willing to squeeze out my own blood, sweat, and tears for what I wanted—I’d never be anything, never matter much to anybody. I called Teddy a few days later, I said, “I’ll record your album. I’ll do it.” And he said, “It’s your album.” And I realized he was right. The album didn’t have to be exactly my way for it to still be mine.

told me more about what happened the other night?” she asked, deciding to air her worst fears. “Am I under suspicion or something?” “Everyone is.” “Especially ex-wives who are publicly humiliated on the day of the murder, right?” Something in Montoya’s expression changed. Hardened. “I’ll be back,” he promised, “and I’ll bring another detective with me, then we’ll interview you and you can ask all the questions you like.” “And you’ll answer them?” He offered a hint of a smile. “That I can’t promise. Just that I won’t lie to you.” “I wouldn’t expect you to, Detective.” He gave a quick nod. “In the meantime if you suddenly remember, or think of anything, give me a call.” “I will,” she promised, irritated, watching as he hurried down the two steps of the porch to his car. He was younger than she was by a couple of years, she guessed, though she couldn’t be certain, and there was something about him that exuded a natural brooding sexuality, as if he knew he was attractive to women, almost expected it to be so. Great. Just what she needed, a sexy-as-hell cop who probably had her pinned to the top of his murder suspect list. She whistled for the dog and Hershey bounded inside, dragging some mud and leaves with her. “Sit!” Abby commanded and the Lab dropped her rear end onto the floor just inside the door. Abby opened the door to the closet and found a towel hanging on a peg she kept for just such occasions, then, while Hershey whined in protest, she cleaned all four of her damp paws. “You’re gonna be a problem, aren’t you?” she teased, then dropped the towel over the dog’s head. Hershey shook herself, tossed off the towel, then bit at it, snagging one end in her mouth and pulling backward in a quick game of tug of war. Abby laughed as she played with the dog, the first real joy she’d felt since hearing the news about her ex-husband. The phone rang and she left the dog growling and shaking the tattered piece of terry cloth. “Hello?” she said, still chuckling at Hershey’s antics as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Abby Chastain?” “Yes.” “Beth Ann Wright with the New Orleans Sentinel.” Abby’s heart plummeted. The press. Just what she needed. “You were Luke Gierman’s wife, right?” “What’s this about?” Abby asked warily as Hershey padded into the kitchen and looked expectantly at the back door leading to her studio. “In a second,” she mouthed to the Lab. Hershey slowly wagged her tail. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Beth Ann said, sounding sincerely rueful. “I should have explained. The paper’s running a series of articles on Luke, as he was a local celebrity, and I’d like to interview you for the piece. I was thinking we could meet tomorrow morning?” “Luke and I were divorced.” “Yes, I know, but I would like to give some insight to the man behind the mike, you know. He had a certain public persona, but I’m sure my readers would like to know more about him, his history, his hopes, his dreams, you know, the human-interest angle.” “It’s kind of late for that,” Abby said, not bothering to keep the ice out of her voice. “But you knew him intimately. I thought you could come up with some anecdotes, let people see the real Luke Gierman.” “I don’t think so.” “I realize you and he had some unresolved issues.” “Pardon me?” “I caught his program the other day.” Abby tensed, her fingers holding the phone in a death grip. “So this is probably harder for you than most, but I still would like to ask you some questions.” “Maybe another time,” she hedged and Beth Ann didn’t miss a beat. “Anytime you’d like. You’re a native Louisianan, aren’t you?” Abby’s neck muscles tightened. “Born and raised, but you met Luke in Seattle when he was working for a radio station . . . what’s the call sign, I know I’ve got it somewhere.” “KCTY.” It was a matter of public record. “Oh, that’s right. Country in the City. But you grew up here and went to local schools, right? Your

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that “the way that Prince’s music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he’s sitting down at the drums, he’s derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that’s a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he’s thinking about James Brown’s horn player, on one aspect; and when he’s playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it’s not rock, it’s not funk, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues—it’s just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I’m thinking ‘He can’t play that, that’s Gary Newman.’ And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks ‘Do you like Gary Newman?’ And I said ‘You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.’ And he said ‘There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Still dark. The Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through a file of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?” “An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.” “You’ve been awake a whole hour?” “My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide out. I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.” “You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.” I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?” In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?” “Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.” I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.” She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.” “I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.” “Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.” I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.” Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?” “No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.” Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?” “Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS AND LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and the a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.” She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?” The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.” “But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.” I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.

a good producer. His job is not only to help a band make a great record, but also to bring out the best in his musicians by creating an encouraging, comfortable atmosphere in the studio, so that everyone feels good about themselves.

There’s a great story that Roger Hawkins tells. He’s the drummer on some of Aretha Franklin’s most iconic songs, like “Respect” and “Chain of Fools.” As part of a group of studio musicians in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he was drumming on hugely important R&B songs when he was just a teenager, far too young to have any sense of, or ego about, his talent. So one day Hawkins was playing on a session that Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records was producing. Out of the blue, Hawkins claims, Wexler walked down from the control room and into the studio and told him, “Roger, you are a great drummer.” Wexler wasn’t involved in some larger conversation with Hawkins. He just wanted to tell him. Hawkins’s reaction to it, in his own words: “So I became one.” That story always made sense to me. I’ve had that same moment of feeling like everything’s changed because of one compliment, one tiny bit of encouragement. That, in a nutshell, is what Peter Buck did for me. Not that he ever walked into the studio just to tell me how great I was. No, but he made me feel like an equal.

Both ‘Childhood’ and ‘Smile’ were recorded live with an orchestra at the Hit Factory on the same day, with the majority of Michael’s live vocals from the sessions used on the final versions. But Michael was so unhappy with his vocals for ‘Smile’ that he recorded over a dozen takes. “Michael did a bunch of takes live with orchestra that would be called amazing by most standards,” Rob Hoffman said. “He then did more later that day, and I think some the next as well. In all I think there were 14 takes.” Michael may not have been satisfied, but the orchestra was blown away by the performance. “When we finished recording with the orchestra, Michael asked me if he could go out in the studio and meet the musicians,” Bruce Swedien said. “During the recording, the entire orchestra had been listening to Michael sing through their individual headphones. When Michael walked out in the studio to meet the orchestra, they gave him a standing ovation. Every member of the 50-piece orchestra stood up and tapped their music stands with their bows, as loud as they could! Michael was thrilled.

There should be no opportunity for the audience to question the speakers directly through the phone during a live talk show because many people ask indecent questions or make vulgar comments. Someone from the studio can record the questions asked by the audience during the program. He can keep the good questions and remove the bad ones. Later on, the presenter can make the specific speakers listen to the questions accordingly!

Eternal Cowboy was the start of an era for Against Me!. It was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, a location I chose because I was on a Replacements kick at the time and wanted to do it at the same place they had recorded my favorite album, Pleased to Meet Me.

In May 1969, Melcher agreed to visit Spahn Ranch again, and this time he showed up. Melcher listened to Manson’s music and promised him a recording session with a friend who owned a mobile recording studio in a van. Melcher returned in June with the recording van, but the entire day was a disaster, and Melcher declined to support Manson any further.

Roth swung around in his seat. With his voice raised, he said, “Look, don’t think for a second that this is over! This is how it’s gonna be. We are really going to go into recording studios. We really are going to be a big name. You’ll see. Just keep at it!

Many of today's personal computers are equipped with optical drives for storing and retrieving data on compact discs (CDs) or digital versatile disks (DVDs) that can be removed from the drive. A CD is a silvery plastic platter on which a laser records data as a sequence of tiny pits in a spiral track on one side of the disk. One CD can hold 680 MB of data. A DVD uses smaller pits packed in a tighter spiral. Some Blu-ray disks (high-density optical disks read with a blue-violet laser) can hold multiple layers of data-for a total capacity of 200GB, sufficient storage for many hours of studio-quality video and multi-channel audio.

Hollywood was called Tinseltown for a reason and I was caught up in its glitter. My friend Ken seemed to know everyone and once took me to the NBC Studios in Burbank, where he introduced me to Steve Allen. “Steverino,” as he was known by friends, must have thought that I wanted to get into show business and promised that if I applied myself, I would go places. I hadn’t really given show business much thought, but it sounded good to me. However, I’m glad that I didn’t count on his promise of becoming a star, because that was the end of it. I never saw Steve Allen again, other than on television, and I guess that’s just the way it was in Hollywood. Later Steve Allen starred in NBC’s The Tonight Show, which in more recent times has been hosted by Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and now by Jimmy Fallon. Steve Allen had a rider in his contract that whenever he was introduced as a guest, the introduction would include: “And now our next guest is world-renowned recording artist, actor, producer, playwright, best-selling author, composer of thousands of songs, Emmy winning comic genius and entertainer – Steve Allen.” He was a funny guy and he would crack me up, but more than that, he would frequently crack himself up. Steve was loved or hated by people. It was said that he was enormously talented, and if you didn’t believe that, just ask him. Jack Paar, who followed Steve on The Tonight Show, once said, “Steve Allen has claimed to have written over 1,000 songs; name one???” The truth is that he did write a huge number of songs, including the 1963 Grammy award-winning composition, The Gravy Waltz. He wrote about 50 books, one of which is Steve Allen’s Private Joke File, published in 2000, just prior to his death in that same year. He also has two stars on the “Hollywood Walk of Fame,” one for radio and one for TV. Say what you want…. He cracked up at least two people with his humor, himself and me!

AR confesses that 1989 was a turning point in his life. ‘I had my studio at last,’ he says. ‘The only problem was that the room was an empty shell. I would sit in it and look around at the empty space and wonder if I could ever afford to buy any equipment to fill it.’1 Kareema Begum took yet another bold decision at that point. She sold all the gold jewellery she had saved for the marriage of her two younger daughters, Fathima and Ishrath. ‘We had to take loans too,’ recalls Fathima. ‘But Amma was very firm about it. I used to go with her to get a loan for the generator and so on.’ With all this money his mother managed to raise, AR got his first Fostex 16-track mixer-recorder. ‘Sitting in the music studio that night and staring at my new recorder, I felt like a king,’ says AR. ‘The new me was born . . .’2

If you go into a recording studio that’s soundproofed, something just feels wrong to your ears. Especially when they close the door—that’s sound deprivation, it’s anechoic, without echo, without sound.

is the strength of the songwriting. Dark Side contained strong, powerful songs. The overall idea that linked those songs together – the pressures of modern life – found a universal response, and continues to capture people’s imagination. The lyrics had depth, and had a resonance people could easily relate to, and were clear and simple enough for non-native-English speakers to understand, which must have been a factor in its international success. And the musical quality spearheaded by David’s guitar and voice and Rick’s keyboards established a fundamental Pink Floyd sound. We were comfortable with the music, which had had time to mature and gestate, and evolve through live performances – later on we had to stop previewing work live as the quality of the recording equipment being smuggled into gigs reached near-studio standards. The additional singers and Dick Parry’s sax gave the whole record an extra commercial sheen. In addition, the sonic quality of the album was state of the art – courtesy of the skills of Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas. This is particularly important, because at the time the album came out, hi-fi stereo equipment had only recently become a mainstream consumer item, an essential fashion accessory for the 1970s home. As a result, record buyers were particularly aware of the effects of stereo and able to appreciate any album that made the most of its possibilities. Dark Side had the good fortune to become one of the definitive test records that people could use to show off the quality of their hi-fi system. The packaging for the album by Storm and Po at Hipgnosis was clean, simple, and immediately striking, with a memorable icon in the shape of the prism.

Take advantage of marketing, such as: Listings on the Intuit App Center. Intuit offers two app stores, and I posted about 20 listings. The links from QuickBooks boosted my SEO considerably. Other app store listings that are free. If these became paid channels, you can simply delist. YouTube videos. I paid $200 for Camtasia Studio and recorded a video for each integration that I sold. I made about 15–20 videos and asked the user to start a trial at the end of each. Landing pages. I looked at competing products and used similar language on my landing pages. Content in help centers. I wrote several knowledgebase articles that were indexed on Google. These articles later linked back to my website.

The first episode of the story was remade between the third and the fourth as there was electronic interference on the tape of the original recording. (The episode was indeed remade, but the real reason was that talkback – i.e. the sound of instructions relayed to the studio floor from the control gallery – was picked up and clearly audible on the soundtrack of the original recording.)

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

Where Jolson conquered, Bing Crosby convinced and charmed, and like Astaire, Jolson too for that matter, he did not possess the physical gifts of a standard leading man (angles and ears and hair, yet again). Also like Astaire, he made it all seem easy, with the laid-back acting and the unforced way that devastating baritone could pour out and swing out. In one crucial sense he was more beholden to Jolson than Astaire, being primarily a solo performer who sang to people more than he sang with them. Recall: who was Crosby’s only steady partner on film? Bob Hope, in a partnership based in jokey rivalry. Other singers in Crosby films, besides Hope and Dorothy Lamour, seldom counted. Nor did most of Crosby’s films. Paramount, his home studio, was a formula-bound factory for most of the 1930s and ’40s, and the golden goose of the Crosby films did not countenance feather-ruffling. One after another, they were amiable time-passers, relaxed escapism that made a mint and sold tons of records and sheet music. For many then and some now, these vehicles offered unthreatening comfort—few chances taken, little deviation from formula, a likable guy ambling through some minor plot and singing mostly great songs. On occasion there was something as glaring as the ridiculous Dixie: as composer Dan Emmett, Crosby speeds up the title song into an uptempo hit only because the theater’s caught on fire. Generally, his films lacked even that cuckoo invigoration, which is why posterity dotes on Holiday Inn and its splashy, inferior semi-remake, White Christmas, and few of the others. While it would not be accurate to view Crosby as another megalomaniacal Jolson type, he lacked Astaire’s forceful imagination. Greater professional curiosity might have made his films—not simply his singing—transcend time and circumstance.

The so-called Rad Four donned comedic Technicolor dream coats, consumed seven hundred sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a ground breaking record no one actually likes.

Big Hit Entertainment made plans for an official social media presence on platforms used commonly by fandoms—such as Twitter, e Daum cafés, and KakaoStory—and established tailored goals and content styles for each platform. For instance, one of Big Hit’s goals after BTS’s debut was to attain a specific number of new followers on days BTS featured in a music program. This new approach to promoting an up-and-coming idol group played an important role in establishing a unique identity for BTS. Videos on the blog showcased unpolished compositions by the trainees, choreography practice in tiny practice studios, and glimpses into members’ genuine trepidations as they spoke into the camera without any airbrushing.

He explained to Steve that there was an important difference in the digital media value chain as well. In physical retail, Amazon operated at the middle of the value chain. We added value by sourcing and aggregating a vast selection of goods, tens of millions of them, on a single website and delivering them quickly and cheaply to customers. To win in digital, because those physical retail value adds were not advantages, we needed to identify other parts of the value chain where we could differentiate and serve customers well. Jeff told Steve that this meant moving out of the middle and venturing to either end of the value chain. On one end was content, where the value creators were book authors, filmmakers, TV producers, publishers, musicians, record companies, and movie studios. On the other end was distribution and consumption of content. In digital, that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content, as Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings to our long-term product vision.

Four years before I started CD Baby, as I was recording my first album, I needed to borrow $20,000 to buy studio equipment. My dad said, “Instead of my lending you money, start a corporation. Then the family business can buy shares in your corporation.

This time around, True Biz’s audiobook woke me from a dead sleep. I’d made my peace with audiobooks of my books, conceptually, and had kind of forgotten about the eventuality of this one. But this novel presented a whole new existential problem: in the writing itself, I had worked hard to make use of space on the page as a way to highlight the strength and clarity of ASL as a visual language. The result was just a small token of appreciation for what ASL can do—I had still flattened a 3-D language to two—but the signed dialogue looks and feels different than spoken dialogue in the novel, and I had no clue how they’d be able to make that distinction for a listener. I sent a low-key panic email to my editor. She said she’d flag it as a “challenge” for the audio team. Here’s what they came up with: The audiobook team would record the book as usual, and then record a signer performing the ASL dialogue in the book. Very sensitive mics would pick up the sounds of signing—the skin-on-skin contact, the mouth morphemes, the rustling of clothes. The listener would learn that these sounds beneath the dialogue were to mean the character was speaking ASL rather than English. We can’t capture ASL in sound form but, like the use of space in the printed text, it’s a token. I appreciate that a hearing team put some thought into the project, and were paying enough attention to notice that neither signed languages nor deaf people are silent. So yesterday, I went to the studio, rigged up with two heavy duty mics. When I first got into the soundproof room and looked around, I started to laugh. It was mostly foreign territory, but there was also a trace of the audiologists’ booths all of us deaf and hard-of-hearing people have spent so much time in".

therapy-speak, for in real life—chatting up girls, greeting a roomful of strangers, and walking into a recording studio—he had confidence that was unshakable. In later years he’d learn to be more subtle, offsetting this confidence with a charming, flirtatious bashfulness, but the seventeen-year-old David Jones seemed almost ruthless in his self-promotion. Enthusiastic, receptive, with an often brilliant sense of deadpan humor, he was also, say observers like Les Conn, “brash.” “He was sure he was going to be big. But the charm came later as he got more success.

Without knowing this, without having been to the future, there would be no way to situate this vision among the other items in my memory. And since most of our thoughts are as evanescent and hard to remember as dreams, I will be unlikely to remember this vision or notice how it corresponded to an actual event in my life some time afterward. It has often been suggested that déjà vu experiences may reflect this kind of “memory of a premonition,” although neural signals of familiarity may misfire for more mundane reasons, so it would be hard to substantiate such a claim in many, or most, cases. It is the same difficulty that J. B. Priestley identified in the context of his future-influencing-present effect: How often will it occur to people to (a) record their passing thoughts and moods in detail and (b) compare those recorded thoughts and moods to later events? Almost never. Yet as we will see later, when people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings are recorded for some other purpose, such as in psychotherapy, it sometimes does—quite by accident—reveal suggestive evidence for something like the existence of a perturbing influence of future events on prior behavior. “The brain is an illusion factory,” as neurobiologist Dean Buonomano puts it.52 Humans’ ability to vividly and realistically imagine things that haven’t happened (or haven’t happened yet) poses a huge challenge to studying anomalous experiences and ESP phenomena. One of the million functions of the Swiss Army Knife in our skulls is to serve as a powerful all-purpose imaging device, a special effects studio that would put Industrial Light and Magic to shame. It is able to create from scratch, instantly, vivid images to dramatize any piece of information or idea, real or fictitious, as well as translate complex thoughts instantly into pictures. It does this not only in dreams but also in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states on the edge of sleep, and even in waking reality when we “mentally time travel” or daydream or imagine possible scenarios.

We were a band,” Seiwell contended. “We’d just done all this touring, we’d knit as a unit, and at the rehearsals in Scotland, everybody was giving their all. So I said to Paul, ‘Can’t we just postpone this for a month? That studio in Lagos will still be ready for you, but let’s first break in a new guitarist, so we can go down and record the album as a band.’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Let’s just go down, and it will be like Ram—we’ll just get the basic tracks and do overdubs.’ That didn’t sit well with me.

On May 26—just five days after Ram was released—John brought ‘How Do You Sleep?’ into Ascot Sound, the new recording studio built for him at Tittenhurst Park. Although

Think, again, of the sheer amount of human organization required for the American Society for Testing and Materials to produce directive D3462-87 (“Asphalt Shingles Made from Glass Felt and Surfaced with Mineral Granules”) and then to enforce its mandates. We could, clearly, repeat this exercise for everything you see around you, and everything you hear, and everything you smell—all the infinitely more interesting activities always under way beneath all those roofs. As I write, for instance, I’m listening to Orchestra Baobab on Spotify. It was the house band at a Dakar nightclub in the 1970s, where its music reflected the Cuban beats that came with sailors to West Africa in the 1940s; eventually the group recorded its best album at a Paris studio, and now it somehow resides on a computer server where 196,847 people from across the planet listen to it each month.

technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room

Dear Voyagers, Your cameras have shown us the vastness of the universe, Our eyes too can gaze upon the heavens and revel in nature, But behind our eyes, There’s something called a mind that processes it all. What we call the mind Spins countless tales and stories, With such variety that one could say, For every human that has ever lived, there exists a different image, emotion, analysis, and worldview, and this can be beautiful and at the same time terrifying. I imagine mapping the universe completely, Discovering life in other systems and galaxies, Might be much sooner than charting the map that could explain human existence. So many questions remain for me, Like if, In the coming decades, poverty is eradicated, Freedom is universal, Mars is colonized, and people live there, Cities rise above Venus, Plant-based diets replace meat, Equality reaches every person and no one is questioned for their beliefs, orientations, or thoughts, Diseases are cured, Physical labor becomes meaningless, and robots end the hardship of human toil, Earth’s climate change is halted, Firearm possession is made free, and today’s concerns are all resolved—will everyone then live in peace? My mind, my eyes, they know the answer: “No.” Probably then, Conspiracy theorists Would say it all happened in a studio, Some would claim that veganism’s goal is to destroy chakras, Others would start revolts against order and law, criticizing even that beautiful state. This dissatisfaction doesn’t belong to any specific class or group, It’s what we all are. Environment and culture matter, but I think even if a brain chip were made To transfer every piece of knowledge on Earth, All fields of science, memories, Experiences, languages, and the stories of every civilization, every human, and everything ever experienced to our minds, We’d still harbor doubt. Our efforts to prove ourselves to each other Will be in vain. Perhaps the right path Is to continue and enjoy the unknown, Or maybe to accept and find joy in never truly experiencing joy. I play Hans Zimmer’s “Stay,” Yet my mind continues to drift, Time passes, Those around me age as I move forward towards an unknown destination. Perhaps someone, something, 4.5 billion light years away, Is staring at a point in the sky, They don’t know I’m here in an existential crisis, That Earth is in a fight for survival, How I envy them, Staring into that dark spot in the sky, They too are fortunate for not existing in this moment, Or for their light not having reached me. If Earth’s light reaches them, They would surely grieve for these restless, lost souls, For human history is tied to sorrow, pain, separation, and nothingness. Perhaps the Big Crunch, Absolute nothingness, Is the only cure for this pain— The pain of being and existing. Dear Voyagers, When your signal to Earth is lost, It will feel like the death of a loved one, Even though I know you’re alive somewhere, traversing an unknown path, Something I doubt will happen after human death, And even if it does, It wouldn’t lessen the grief of those left behind who have yet to join that unknown journey. I fear oblivion, I fear the oblivions that disappear from history and memories, as if they never were, Like the meal of a Native American grandmother a thousand years ago, Or the kiss of two lovers and the story of their union and parting, never recorded anywhere.

music label exists for four main reasons: talent scouring, financing to rent a studio (like startup capital for a business), distribution, and marketing. From Birdmonster’s angle, they could do all those things themselves, but better and cheaper. They already knew they were talented since they’d been getting gigs. Since they could edit the music on their own computers, they didn’t need financing to rent a studio. CD Baby provided distribution to all the top services like iTunes and Rhapsody, and weekly payouts instead of payout nine months later like traditional record distributors. The effect of their Myspace page (it was the early 2000’s) and a personal email to well known blogs was greater than anything record labels could provide in terms of marketing.

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.

Miles,” I said, confused, “am I in the band?” Miles turned to look at me, a hint of a smile on his face. “You makin’ a record, muthafucka!” he said. And then he was gone. That Tuesday, May 14, I went down to the CBS 30th Street Studio with the rest of the guys. We still had never really played the tunes for the record together, but Miles wasn’t interested in rehearsing. He just wanted us to play, with the tape recorders rolling, to capture whatever was going to happen. I later found out that this was the way Miles always recorded: He wanted to capture the first, most honest version of a song, even if there were mistakes in it. Miles believed that if you rehearse a song too much, you stifle the creative moment. Music was about spontaneity and discovery, and that’s what he tried to capture on his records. The first time the horns made it through the entire melody, that was the take that would be on the record. Miles didn’t waste words, and he didn’t waste time. In 1956, with his first quintet, he recorded four full records in one day—Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’—with just a few tracks added from an earlier session. He just went into the studio and played. When you record like that, it’s scary at first, but then it sharpens you up. You’re forced to go in with confidence, because you know you just have to do it.

tour that I’ve still got my sunglasses on, like some kind of fading starlet. I take them off as he’s patting a rack of devices with knobs all over them. “And these are forty-eight tracks of Neve preamps. I use them on tracking and again on mix for some things. They really sweeten the bottom end. And you’d be amazed at how they work on ambient mics – for acoustic guitar and cymbals.” “That’s great,” I say, quickly running out of terms that don’t make me sound like somebody’s slow cousin. The actual recording room turns out to be three chambers: an isolation booth for vocals, a wood-paneled drum room, and a larger room with sound baffles everywhere for other instruments. There’s a Baldwin baby grand piano in one corner, gleaming like an ebony sentry in the overhead lights. If there’s one word for the studio, it’s ‘impressive.’ Sebastian is equally impressive, and his enthusiasm, his love for what he

I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and the bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, videotapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The iPhone has a high-definition camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them — services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.

As on the first tour, we had almost no equipment, once again victims of empty promises from agents and record companies. It was Jimi Hendrix who saved us. Hearing of our problems (his managers also handled the Soft Machine) he sent us down to Electric Lady, his recording studio and storage facility on West 8th Street, and told us to help ourselves to what we needed. There are some real rock’n’roll heroes.

The other song we did was my cover of “Addicted to Love.” There used to be a sort of karaoke booth on Saint Mark’s, where anyone could go in and record themselves. I chose “Addicted to Love” because I liked Robert Palmer’s video, with its background cast of zombie models identically dressed and holding guitars. I took the tape with the canned version of the song back to the studio, and we sped up the vocal to make it sound higher in pitch. Later I brought the cassette mix to Macy’s, where they had a video version of the karaoke sound booth. You could customize a background while two cameras filmed you. For my backdrop I picked jungle fighters, and I wore my Black Flag earrings. The entire bill came to $19.99, and in a slick, commercial MTV world, it felt gratifying and empowering to pay for the whole thing with a credit card.

Jaxton smiled and caught his hand, holding it tight in both of his. “Are you burnt out? Is it all too much?” he asked, getting straight to the root of the matter, in one go. “Yes,” he sighed, hating that it was true. “Then you'll stay home.” “You know I can't. It's impossible,” Roman complained about the unfairness of it all. He was due to return to the studio in two days times, to finalise the tracks he'd recorded yesterday. Then he had to sit down with Jalen next week, to pick out a new piece of his artwork for the next album cover. And two weeks after that, he had three interviews with three different music channels, to film. “Try telling that to Ben.” Jaxton winked at him, then ducked down to kiss him. ~ From the Heart

Soon, I found myself criss-crossing the country with Steve, in what we called our “dog and pony show,” trying to drum up interest in our initial public offering. As we traveled from one investment house to another, Steve (in a costume he rarely wore: suit and tie) pushed to secure early commitments, while I added a professorial presence by donning, at Steve’s insistence, a tweed jacket with elbow patches. I was supposed to embody the image of what a “technical genius” looks like—though, frankly, I don’t know anyone in computer science who dresses that way. Steve, as pitch man, was on fire. Pixar was a movie studio the likes of which no one had ever seen, he said, built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology and original storytelling. We would go public one week after Toy Story opened, when no one would question that Pixar was for real. Steve turned out to be right. As our first movie broke records at the box office and as all our dreams seemed to be coming true, our initial public offering raised nearly $140 million for the company—the biggest IPO of 1995. And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner called, saying that he wanted to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve’s offer of a 50/50 split. I was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning. For me, this moment was the culmination of such a lengthy series of pursuits, it was almost impossible to take in. I had spent twenty years inventing new technological tools, helping to found a company, and working hard to make all the facets of this company communicate and work well together. All of this had been in the service of a single goal: making a computer-animated feature film. And now, we’d not only done it; thanks to Steve, we were on steadier financial ground than we’d ever been before. For the first time since our founding, our jobs were safe. I

We’d booked twelve weeks of studio time, a fantastic amount of leeway, given that my first record was cut in a total of twenty-four hours and This Year’s Model in a mere eleven days. We

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them—roots Americana, blues, and classic rock—began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they’d once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different—more heartfelt, raw, and organic—and the industry began to take notice.

The boys were, in fact, so animated in person that Martin was actually considering recording their first LP live at The Cavern. “If we can’t get the right sound there,” Martin had confided to the New Musical Express’s correspondent, Alan Smith, “we might do the recording somewhere else in Liverpool... or we might bring an invited audience into the studio in London. The Beatles work better in front of an audience.”[373]

Dalla festa del nonno ai mulini ecco il catalogo delle spese folli Secondo Confcommercio si buttano 82 miliardi l’anno C’è chi ha uffici in Nicaragua e chi paga corsi di merletto Nella foto a sinistra le «mutande verdi» acquistate dall’ex governatore del Piemonte Cota. A destra Franco Fiorito, in passato capogruppo Pdl nel Lazio, condannato a 3 anni e 4 mesi di reclusione Mattia Feltri | 752 parole Nel cassetto è rimasto un vecchio servizio dell’Espresso, giugno 2000. Un po’ più di quattordici anni fa e comunque non era una primizia: vi si leggeva, già con un margine di scoramento, dei 410 milioni (di lire) spesi dal Molise per commissionare alla Pontificia fonderia Marinelli la campana col rintocco adatto alle celebrazioni giubilari, oppure dei 65 stanziati dal Lazio a sovvenzione della festa del nonno di Ariccia, dove qualche notorietà la si deve alla porchetta più che al vecchierello. Poi c’erano i dieci milioni della Calabria per la cipolla rossa di Tropea, e avanti così, ma non era soltanto un festival dello strano ma vero: la Sicilia tirò fuori quattro miliardi per la valorizzazione dei mulini a vento e sei per l’individuazione di spiagge libere. Da allora i quotidiani e i periodici e la tv d’inchiesta coprono gli spazi e i momenti di noia con servizi di questo tipo, che hanno il pregio di essere infallibili; in fondo sono il modo superpop di cogliere l’attimo carnevalesco e, attimo dopo attimo, di spiegare come le Regioni siano in grado di sprecare 82,3 miliardi di euro all’anno, secondo lo studio presentato a marzo da Confcommercio. Vi si dice, fra l’altro, che il Lazio ne butta oltre undici, la Campania dieci abbondanti e la Sicilia - record - è lì per toccare quota quattordici. Il mondo è pieno di resoconti di questa natura. Il sempreverde è l’articolo sulle sedi di rappresentanza delle Regioni, con l’aneddoto strepitoso delle ventuno sedi regionali a Bruxelles, tutte indispensabili a mantenere il filo diretto fra Bari e l’Ue, Cagliari e l’Ue, Genova e l’Ue; piccolo dettaglio: le Regioni sono ventuno, ma Trento e Bolzano ritennero doveroso farsi una sede per provincia. Ai tempi di Giulio Tremonti si venne a sapere, con molta fatica e qualche approssimazione, che queste sedi sono 178 sparse nel mondo, il Piemonte ne ha una in Nicaragua e un’altra a Minsk, il Veneto in India e in Vietnam, la Puglia in Albania, le Marche a Ekaterinburg, dove ci fu l’eccidio dei Romanov e altro non si sa. Ha provato a metterci mano anche Carlo Cottarelli, il commissario alla spending review, e gli raccontarono (ne scrisse il Fatto) di quel consigliere regionale della Basilicata che voleva aprire a Potenza un ufficio di rappresentanza della Regione, e nonostante la Regione Basilicata abbia sede a Potenza. Insomma, se c’era un affare su cui si raggiungeva l’unanimità della nazione, era questo: le Regioni sono il tombino dei nostri soldi. Eravamo andati a vedere le consulenze distribuite in splendida allegria, i consulenti piemontesi sulla qualità percepita dagli utenti delle reti ferroviarie, i consulenti friulani sulle biblioteche nel deserto della Mauritania e su un corso di merletto, quello umbro sul monitoraggio delle tv locali. Siamo andati a verificare che la Valle d’Aosta (Regione e altri enti locali) ancora lo scorso anno aveva 493 auto blu, una ogni 260 residenti, mentre il Molise ne aveva 368 (tre soltanto a Montenero di Bisaccia, il paese di Antonio Di Pietro) ed era l’unica Regione, insieme col Trentino, che nel 2013 aveva aumentato anziché diminuito il parco macchine. Nel settore, una specie di bibbia è il divertente libro di Mario Giordano (Spudorati, Mondadori) che al capitolo sulle Regioni racconta che la Lombardia ha tirato fuori 75 mila euro nell’osservazione degli scoiattoli e cifre varie nel sovvenzionamento della Fiera della Possenta di Ceresara, dell’International Melzo Film Festival, della festa Cià che gìrum, del gemellaggio Pero-Fuscaldo. E la Lomb

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn’t get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer’s breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As