Recording

Disagreement can be destructive, but it can also drive a band on to new heights. So it was when 10cc's Kevin Godley turned up his nose at a love song penned by Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, insisting that it would have to be completely reinvented in the studio...

Will Mowat made his name first as a sequencer expert and then as a writer with Soul II Soul. As a world music producer, his recent projects provide inspirational examples of how to combine performance with programming and overcome the limitations of a bare-bones budget.

Back in 1986-7, there was an ad for an amazing and inexpensive technique which, it claimed, added many more audio tracks to your eight-track reel-to-reel tape machine. How did it work?

If I limit using a Alesis Nanocompressor when recording into my Emu 1820 soundcard, can I still limit the final mix with, say, Waves' L1 Ultramaximizer without any problems?

I've recorded several songs in 24-bit/48kHz. When I went to burn the CD,  I had to convert them to 16-bit/44.1kHz. So does it make a difference in the audio quality of the final CD tracks to record at the higher rates?

Listen to these tracks from SOS readers and see whether you agree with the good Doctor's prognosis...

The Who's final album with Keith Moon took almost a year to record and pushed the band to the limit. Engineer and producer Jon Astley tells the remarkable story behind Who Are You?'s title track.

The Dust Brothers changed the course of record production with a new approach to sampling. In their first ever in-depth technical interview, John King and Mike Simpson explain their unique way of making records and open the doors of their remarkable LA studio, The Boat.

Greg Ladanyi showed up at the right time in rock history to chair sessions for Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Warren Zevon, Toto, Fleetwood Mac and the Jacksons — but while 50 percent of life may be simply showing up, the other half requires a lot of hard work.

Pop shields are essential for most modern studio productions, but what are they and why are they so important?

East Norfolk Sixth Form College needed help integrating their hardware multitracker with their computer sequencing system, so the SOS team travelled over to Great Yarmouth to lend a hand.

They might have been the greatest production team of the disco era, but even Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards could fall victim to the elitism of New York's club scene — and their response was the most memorable of all Chic's hits.

When DJs produce their own albums, the results can be mixed — but Laurent Garnier is not your average DJ, and his 'The Cloud Making Machine' is anything but a conventional house or techno record.

Having been one of the UK's most popular rock acts in the early '90s, Thunder found that record labels were no longer willing or able to promote their releases properly. Now they have taken matters into their own hands, using the Internet and new methods of distribution to get their records back in the charts.

Producer Stephen Hague took New Order into the studio with an ambitious brief: to write and record a single that would break the band in America.

Myles MacInnes (aka Mylo) has given the dance world a wake-up call with his Destroy Rock & Roll album, blending house music and '80s soft rock to surprising effect.

I'll be recording a viola player to provide the string section for a track I'm working on. The plan is to track each part multiple times and thus create a string ensemble...

Celebrities from around the world were keen to contribute to a fund-raising single for victims of the Asian tsunami, and converting all of this goodwill into a finished record required innovative use of broadband Internet to collect together their performances.

Producer, singer/songwriter Trevor Horn has been at the forefront of technological innovation since his earliest work with The Buggles, in a career that has yielded countless classic singles and albums.

As the '80s drew to a close, The Stone Roses made rock music cool again, melding '60s psychedelia and acid house under the production guidance of John Leckie.

I want to record eight tracks at once into my Akai DPS12 multitracker, which has six analogue inputs and a stereo S/PDIF...