If you are even casually interested in recording, I cannot recommend highly enough that you subscribe to the (free!) magazine Tape Op, which basically since the mid-90’s, has set the industry standard for music business magazines. Completely organized, written, and curated by actual working audio engineers, the magazine is a rarity in our time, and only looks better as the years pass.
Part of the reason for this is editor-in-chief and publisher Larry Crane’s love for long-form interviews. The interview itself has become a bit of a lost art (especially in music – how many cringe-worthy YouTuber interviewers have you come across?), and it’s notable that Larry & co. have been putting so much time into that in Tape Op, since record engineers are so often relegated to being spoken to as technicians, not as people.
But engineers (non-grumpy Warped Tour stage engineers aside) often have incredibly unique perspectives, especially the ones who work with a wide variety of artists. So I was excited to see this lengthy interview that Larry conducted with Manny Marroquin at Mix With The Masters. Marroquin is an immensely talented mixing engineering, having helmed almost all of modern pop and maistream hip hop music’s great albums – his resume includes belt-notches by Alicia Keys’ Songs in A Minor, Kanye West’s Late Registration, Common’s Be, and albums by John Legend, Linkin Park, Imagine Dragons, among many others.
Check out the interview below:
