Stephen Street and the Art of Man-Management

Stephen Street began his career in music in the early 1980s at Islands Records’ Fallout Shelter Studio. From the mid 1980s onwards he worked with the Smiths, first as an engineer and later as producer. Since then his production credits have included Blur, The Cranberries and The Kaiser Chiefs.

In a nutshell can you describe what you see as the role of the producer?

Because of the genre I work in, which is mainly with bands, I’ve always kind of thought of it as taking a kind of aural snapshot of that particular group of musicians at that particular point in their history and capturing it and presenting it in the best possible way. I don’t mean in the best possible way that absolutely smooths out all of the little things; little imperfect things that make them special. I think it’s just capturing, to the best of my ability how I really see them at that point in their history. It often surprises me that you’ll get a bunch of girls and guys who’ll form a band and they’ll create a bit of buzz because of what they do and they get snapped up by a label and they want to try and smooth out some of those little things which make them special.  So my involvement as producer is just to bring out the best of that group of musicians the best that I can, and hopefully make it come out the same way to the public.

Do you think generally that your former description is what can be considered the role of the producer, or is that something that you’re……

Well, for me I mean, that’s the way it’s been. You’ll get some producers who’ll perhaps work with a solo artist and they’re working much more in a co-writing kind of way and so on, and they might actually prepare the backing tracks as such for the (artist)….. I mean the only time I really did that was when I worked with Morrissey on his solo record, so obviously that was stepping more into that domain, but to be honest with you for most productions I’ve done over the last 20 years or so there’s been a little more of a just ‘being there’ as kind of big brother – and not a big brother as in 1984 big brother. Someone like, ‘if I was you I’d do it this way’ you know what I mean. Or ‘have you thought about doing it this way’, or just guiding a band through the minefield of making their record.

Can you describe some ways in which your role has changed throughout time?

Well to be honest with you I don’t think it has changed greatly. I think we’re all as producers these days in awe of people like George Martin who were pioneers – I mean the first guys who were producers in a modern sense as opposed to the old fashioned sense of going out finding the artists, putting them in the studio you know. George Martin was the first one who realised he was working with a great talent, and so his thing was not to get in the way of it, but to nurture it and to see it thorough and let it portray itself in the best possible way. So I think he set the blueprint for most modern rock and pop producers to this day. Because I’m lucky in the genre of music that I work in, my role hasn’t really changed, whereas someone who’s working with out and out pop artists perhaps that has changed. Say you’ve got the likes of Brian Higgens producing Girls Aloud. He is writing the song, creating the backing tracks, and the band just come in and sing their parts on the track. The kind of acts I work with play their own instruments and are capable of creating their own backing tracks. I ‘direct’ them like a film director directing actors, getting the nuances right, choosing the right tones, instrumentation etc……., as I say Higgens is basically doing the whole ‘kit and kaboddle’, getting the girls in, so that’s a different kind of thing….

So to what extent do you think technological advances have enhanced and/or inhibited the role of the record producer?

Well I mean there’s no doubt about it…… the art of recording onto hard drive and being able to edit and so on is a great. You do get the situation however where sometimes people mess with things because they can rather than whether they need to or not. That’s where you’ve got to know the fine lines. You know, am I fiddling with this because I can or because I really need to and that comes down to experience and just being a good judge of when to apply that and when you don’t, I mean there’s no doubt I tried to resist ProTools[1] for years and the first thing I actually went on to digitally was using the Radar[2] system which I loved. I think the first record I ever did with that was the Blur album – the one with Bettlebum and Song 2 on it. There’s no doubt that having that led to certain songs being the way that they are. For instance Song 2, the drum loop on that at the beginning was just me fiddling around on Radar and I’d recorded basically just a room microphone on the kit and there were 2 kits in the room. Damon was playing one and Graham was playing the other and they were just jamming and out of that came that little….. and cause I was able to loop with radar, I thought this is great, lets just loop that and you can play on top of it. So if I hadn’t have had Radar that wouldn’t have been. So that’s an example of equipment dictating the way the production went. So it was great and in the last track on the record Essex Dogs, there was a 13 min jam and I just cut it down into all the best bits and it was great because you could do edits and if it didn’t work you could undo it you know. So it was great to be able to do digital editing, and the Radar sounded really good at that time. It still does I think and that was the first 16…(unclear audio in interview – perhaps 16 bit version[3]) on that album. It sounds great because the converters[4] were so great. So equipment has changed the way we work, but you’ve got to know when you rely on it and when you don’t.

Which aspects of vanishing technology do you miss the most and the least?

I think it’s more a case of knowing about good microphone placement and so on. I mean back in the 60s and 70s you always had assistant engineers who were constantly learning from the in house engineers and because of the turn over, things that were going on and working, you would develop through that knowledge a very good understanding of microphone placement and so on and so forth. These days I’m not sure that really is quite so prevalent really. A lot of studios at one point, because they were so strapped for cash, they were hardly employing any kind of ‘in house’ engineers so you just got an engineer who just came in for the day with his project, and because he wasn’t developing any sense of relationship with the assistant engineers so the assistant engineers weren’t really picking up as much information.

You know the Abbey Roads and the Townhouse Studios and stuff. Those studios were great learning grounds for young engineers. I mean I’m not saying that they’ve stopped being that. I know when I was working at Townhouse there were lots of out- house engineers coming rather than the in-house engineers being there. You didn’t really get that sense of anything being passed down.

So you mentioned in an interview over 10 years ago, that demos were becoming increasingly more impressive and sometimes you were able to work with a demo in the really early sessions of recording. That was a long time ago, do you still feel the same way?

In the old days, say in the 80s, a band would come to you and they wouldn’t have any experience at all recording themselves. They would say, ‘we play, you plug us in and you make us sound good’. Now bands are developing a sort of understanding themselves by playing around with ProTools at home so they’re much more familiar with the recording process. I find that when a band does a song for the first time, they hit upon something, the way they do something, and sometimes, not always but sometimes there’s a magic call the first time. Someone tries to record something and if it does feel good then it’s a good point sometimes to use as a starting point because you can transfer it easy enough. Great! Sometimes no, it’s not all the time. I would say the majority of the time when I start with a band I start form scratch, but there is a certain little magic captured in the way it’s recorded. Say it’s the room ambience they had in their house when they recorded it…slightly strange. You know it’s like why go through all the roundabouts to get to that again lets do that as a starting point. I’ll always remember when we did, Strange News From Another Star, from Blur’s fifth album, Damon’s demo on that, he had this really distorted electric piano but it sounded great. It added a certain vibe to it and so again that was taken as a starting point and that was transferred and we carried on tracking on top of that. I’m really into that idea. You capture a little kind of ambience of some kind on a demo that is different to a studio ambience and it’s worth keeping.

How do you see and /or how would you describe pre-production for you?

Pre-production for me normally involves going into the rehearsal room with the band and hearing them play the songs to me, or I should say at me. When you’re in a rehearsal room its so loud it’s just coming at you. Pre- production would be a case of running through, sometimes cutting out some of the fat; If you thought there was an arrangement there that could be trimmed down a little bit. …and often playing around with the keys because you’ll get someone who’ll sing the song and you’ll think its not bad but the keys stretching it a little bit so you talk about perhaps changing the key on something like that. I always say to bands I don’t need days and days of pre-production. Firstly I think you can over rehearse and you get tired of the songs before you even start.

Second the finer parts of production don’t really start occurring to me till I start hearing it coming through a pair of studio speakers, because as I said when you’re in rehearsal room everything sounds great because it’s coming at you but you start hearing it coming through the speakers you start picking out, ‘is that the right bass drum pattern there because it’s clashing slightly against – it’s pushing where it should be pulling’. Sometimes I think I work only to a certain point in pre-production because a lot of it starts becoming clear when I start hearing it through a set of studio speakers.

To what extent do you think post-production is the domain of the producer?

Well it’s that old saying, if something isn’t broken don’t fix it. If you go and see a band and you hear a few songs and you think that sounds really, really good, I’m really excited about it, there’s no need to do hours and hours of pre-production. But if you hit on something with a band and its good but the arrangements could be sharpened up etc, then basically all you’re doing is saving on studio time by doing it in the rehearsal room. Because of schedules, sometimes I’ve had to start on a record with a band and I’ve had the record label kind of panicking. ‘OHHH, we’ve not had a chance to do any pre-production with them are you sure you want to?’ I say ‘don’t worry, once we get them in the studio it will become apparent’. So what I’m saying is, if for whatever reason, financially or just time wise, I’m not able to do post production, I don’t let it put me off the project. Just get them in there and it will become apparent. Hopefully because I’ve got the experience working on quite a few records and so there isn’t that panic. Obviously it does help if you can listen to the tape before, or the CD, or whatever of the record, of the band as well, so you can familiarise yourself. What I always do when I’m working with a band for the first time – I listen to the tracks that we’re working on and – I mean you can’t beat pencil and paper – I jot down intro, verse one, chorus, pause, you know, guitar line….I sketch it out so I can see. I can familiarise myself looking at it as well as listening to it. I can see the arrangement in front of me and I make little notes like a possible edit here and so on and so forth. I still believe there’s a great need for a nice sharp pencil and a piece of paper in production again in a rehearsal room or at home, or actually when I’m tracking as well. I like to have a visual sketch.

You don’t like to have a signature sound about your production is that correct?

Yeah that’s pretty true. You know my job is to make the band’s record not mine. So The Cranberries never sounded like Blur. Blur never sounded like Zutons. You’re just basically trying to get an aural snapshot of that band, of how they are and what they sound like. It’s not up to me to put my trademark on it. I mean some people would argue that you can tell – ‘that’s your sound’ – but that’s just something that evolves over time and I don’t really see it as being a signature sound to be honest.

Are there certain techniques employed to ensure a record has commercial appeal?

Fashions change don’t they! I can remember in the 80s they wanted that big huge gun- shot snare sound, and tons of reverb on vocals and then everything really dried up. When The Stokes broke though, everyone went back to really dry vocal sounds. You do tend to get swayed slightly by fashion. But obviously it’s a taste thing. My field is more alternative genre music. It’s not really up to me to make it sound commercial. I mean obviously there’s always that pressure. Drums are so often programmed these days and really tightened up with Beat Detective[5] and stuff. Sometimes you do find people – are they tightening up the drums because they really need to or because they can. Because sometimes initially it can sound really impressive, really bang-on, but sometimes the character goes out of it – which makes the drummer sound like a drummer sounds. I remember watching recently a great DVD about the Motown session drummers, Standing in the Shadows of Motown[6] and there was one drummer there showing he would play the same drum pattern as two other drummers. It was the same drum pattern but the swing factor…..the way he played it was completely different and it was fascinating to see. But if you’d taken those three drummers ‘Beat Detectived’ it and cropped it up and quantised it, they would have all sounded the same. It’s knowing when to step in and tighten things up, but there is that pressure on producers to make everything sound really, really shit-hot and tight because 90% of things played on radio now are shit hot and tight. Yeah, you know!

Do you think it outweighs the artistic motivation in making a record or it’s never gotten to the point where the commodity appeal has ever outweighed the artistic appeal?

I’m lucky as I say because of the genre of music I work in. I’m often working with young, up and coming bands and they’re not really kind of ‘sold-out’ as much perhaps, I don’t know! But you know they’re quite keen to capture what they’re about and I am too. I’m not saying I never use Beat Detective or anything because I do. If it needs it to make a song sound a little bit more impressive then I will do it, but I’m always keen to try and capture the essence of what a bands’ about, and if I feel technology is getting in the way of it then I don’t like it. Where technology does really help is that I can now really let bands just play completely live and capture the best bits, and if there is a kind of mess-up say by the guitarist in the second verse I can take it from somewhere else and slip it in. Whereas in the past you’d have had to have gone back and drop it in again, perhaps done another complete take. Now you can move things around a little bit, so you find you can capture a lot more live things, and you can just ‘tweek’ it, rather than going through the whole rigmarole of re-recording the track.

How do you approach the use of techno-musical procedures in recording? Is it something that you assume is more organic in that you’re leaving it up to the instrumentalists themselves to really play with these…?

I’m finding now, I guess it’s a fashion thing, that I’m using far less reverb than I was back in the 80s say for instance. I’m a big fan of guitarists using their own pedals to get sounds because I do find there’s more character, and if you can capture it, if there’s a certain essence of a track and a vibe with the guitarist and the pedals and everything sounds good, then I’ll say just do that rather than saying let’s do it dry and then do it later. There’s never a track I’ve recorded where there’s been no reverb whatsoever. What I try to do these days is I try to capture a natural ambience that’s in the room, rather than actually dry and adding reverbs later. So you know if you’ve got a good sounding room. I mean I’ve got a good sounding room down here in the bunker, the recording area is in there, sometimes I mic up things in the hallway. There’s a real weird sound but it can sometimes work. I’m finding these days, because you can manipulate things a little bit more that it’s always worth just capturing a little bit of the natural room ambience and just seeing what you can do with it. The other thing I always have in every mix, even when I’m tracking is to have a simple delay line going of some kind. Just something that you can put on a slap back echo thing for the lead vocalist, or just a little quarter beat delay that suddenly…..Sometimes you can have a simple line and it sounds a bit flat, but as soon as you put a delay on it of some kind, it makes it into a part. A particularly great example of that was a Smiths track called There’s light that never goes out, and its got like a top flute line going through it. It sounded a bit flat so I put a delay on it, which I think was 3/16th delay and it just brought the whole line alive. It made it float you know, it made it feel right for the part so its always good, I always say whenever tracking, just have at least one delay line, and one reverb unit running so that you can create a sense of depth to what’s going on because if everything’s dry its just in your face. There’s no depth to it. But if you put a delay or a reverb on it, it gives it depth and so it’s always useful having it. As I say, when I’m tracking I’ll always have at least one unit, two sends, one going to a delay, one going to a reverb and its enough to give a sense of……….

In the actual mixing process are you quite collaborative with the assistant engineer and the band themselves?

Yeah I’ve got a very good engineer that I work with called Chenzo Townsend who I’ve been working with for the last 10 years or so now. What happens mixing wise is that I’ll say to him – you’ve got to basically set it up and play around with the drums in the mix, play with the compression, then I’ll come in and I’ll make certain key moves that I know, like ‘guitar needs to come up more there’, or whatever and so on.  Hopefully between the two of us we’ll have it in really good shape by the time the band’s in. I don’t want the band sitting behind me or behind Chenzo most of the time while we’re mixing. I’d rather them come in fresh, hear it fresh, like hearing a record for the first time, make a few comments, we act on those comments and hopefully we nail it. I don’t expect for the musicians to be there in the background, sitting on a sofa at the back of the studio while we’re mixing. You get bored of hearing the same thing, I mean I don’t like listening to the same song all day long. It’s great, as I say, that Chenzo can start the ball rolling, I can come in fresh and ‘tweek’ it, you know. The band come in for the final ‘tweek’.

Take for example two obviously different records. Blur’s Blur and The Cranberries Everybody Else Is……. In reference to production what were the biggest differences between the two records to you?

Well Blur’s Blur for instance, the band already knew what they were all about. They were very confident, top of their game, knew that they wanted to strip things back down again. Don’t want any strings on it. There was one track we put strings on, but there was going to be no brass section, no strings, everything was going to come, sound-wise from the band themselves.  So there was a feeling, and it was the first one I did with Radar so I was trying to capture the best I could get out of them, and being able to manipulate it that way.  It was kind of groundbreaking for me. It was a lo-fi production but at the same time, technology wise it was quite a hi-fi production. Whereas The Cranberries, the first album, they were really young and naïve. They were very unsure of themselves. I think Mickey was 17 years old; the bass player at the time they did that album, and that was a case of trying to guide a band who were just so nervous. When I first met Delores she couldn’t face the crowd when she sang. She used to sing sideways on because she couldn’t face the crowd. So it was nurturing that and getting her confident with her singing. That really was like nurturing a budding flower, you know what I mean! It was trying to kind of get the best out of her. So that was the main difference, one you’ve got a band who are absolutely top of their game, very confident; and next you’ve got another kind of band who are really just fumbling around trying to find their feet. Its just being that nice big brother in a kind of sense to guide you through you know………

With the American lo-fi approach that you took on Blur’s record. where there signature approaches that were used as obvious references to American lo-fi production? I mean what is lo-fi production?

I wouldn’t say it was American as such. I mean Graham was a big fan of all those American garage bands, but the thing was less overdubs. Graham limited himself to two guitar tracks most of the time. As I said there were no brass overdubs, the keyboard overdubs that were there, were kind of  ‘straightish’ sounding rather than being too straight, but there are keyboards on that record, as I say, you know, everybody said it was a lo-fi album, but there was actually quite a lot of effort went into it.

Well that’s the thing, I mean the popular music press ran with the term ‘lo-fi’, and even upon listening to the record myself I was slightly confused……..

The main thing was the way we treated the vocals as well. It was always the way Damon sang. He stopped singing about certain character songs – Ray Davies type; pick a certain persona and write a song about them in a character way. He was writing more in the first person, much more personal sort of thing.  That was a big thing and the way he sang those songs. The distortion was obviously used sometimes and the vocals were drier as well. It brought everything much more to the fore. But really I think it was just not piling too many overdubs on, just getting two guitars to work in tandem, making them work well, quite a lot of space left there really for little effects and things to come through, but really again trying to capture the essence of a room, talking about that room sound for Song 2 you know. We used less effects when we were mixing. We were looking at everything actually happening organically, whether it was an LFO on the synthesiser or the drum ambience, or Graham with his pedals. I mean Graham’s great with his pedals; he’ll just fiddle and fiddle until he gets something happening. That’s it really. Relying less on applying lots of delays and reverbs in the mix.

To what extent are the roles of engineer and producer interchangeable?

They cross over a lot. I personally, first was a musician and then I stopped playing with a band and I got a job at Island Records at the Fallout Shelter[7] and I knew I had to engineer. I knew I wanted to break through from that side cause at that time in the early 80s there were a great bunch of new producers who were breaking through like Matyn Rushers, Martyn Hannick, John Leckie. They were all engineers who had broken through by working with all the new-wave bands, through to production. So I knew that was the route I wanted to take. Fortunately I managed to do it. I mean when I was working with The Smiths for instance, I was on my own and Morrissey often didn’t want anyone else apart form the band and myself in the studio. I mean I was even denied to have an assistant. You’re basically taken on board. When you’re working completely alone with a band and they’re just setting up their gear and they’re saying ‘right record us’. You’re taking certain production values on, you’re deciding on a drum sound and you’re deciding on lots of key things like guitar sounds and so on, and all of a sudden you’re in a situation where, you know you’re taking on the mantle of some production elements. If you haven’t got someone telling you how they want to be you’re having to second-guess them and if they like it they’ll use you again. So I think you know, that’s what happened. It was a nice and natural progression. My first session with The Smiths I was working with John Porter,  so I was working under instructions from John and he was saying he wanted this or that and I was trying my best to give him those sounds and then it obviously went on with Johnny, when I was working with him on my own, saying ‘can you do this or can you  do that?’ But then he often would say ‘well what do you think?’ ‘Does it sound ok?’ So straight away you’re becoming like a soundboard as it were. Bit by bit you’re progressing more into production roles, and it was a nice and natural progression for me. So they do interplay quite a lot, especially when the engineer is working freely with the band or the artist. Unless you’ve a dictorial position, “I want this, I want that”. If you do a good job and you’re not too pushy then it’s a good way of breaking into production and bit- by-bit you’ll start influencing the way that artist sounds.

How do the decisions made in the mixing of a record affect its occupancy within one or a collection of genres? Say for example the new Kaiser Chiefs record you’re working on compared to what The Cranberries were doing or Blur were doing. I mean is there anything that you employ in the mixing process to ensure that it’s got that signature kind of thing, so that it’s Britpop or it’s….. Do you think that there is validity in assuming that there are certain sonic references that belong to genres in terms of production?

I think when it comes to mixing you can’t really change the genre its in. By the time it comes to the mixing stage, you know it is what it is. You can balance it, you can play around with it, you can change, you know you can make things more compressed. But it is what it is, so it’s in the recording phase that you can swing which way it’s going to go as far as crossing boundaries, genre-wise I think. As I say, you know there’s been those cross elements where there’s been dance and sometimes you’ve got a dance track and you want to make it sound a little more rock, then we’ll put some guitar on it. Then when you’ve got a rock track and you want to make it sound more dance then you put a little bit of programmed drums on it so that’s where you get the cross culture. There’s always going to be elements you know, because of what I do with my work I’m more worried about what the band does.

Can you think of an instance when the lack of a common knowledge about sound, like a technical language or musical terms has had a strong impact on a project?

No not really, touch wood! I think really it comes down to the fact that I’m fortunate personally that, for at least the last 10 years or so, I only choose to work with it because I really particularly like it. I mean I suppose it’s a different situation for people when they’re working in the studio and they’re just working with whomever and they’re just booking the studio for the day. But because I tend to know what the band is all about, it makes it easier straight away to get onto a common ground as it were as far as communicating with them. Every now and then you’ll do something and they’ll say ‘well we don’t like it’ and you have to come to some kind of agreement somewhere along the line.  A lot of production is man management, it’s not just being good at ‘tweaking’ the knobs on the desk or being able to hear the best song formation. You’ve got to be able to bring the best out of them, make them feel comfortable, make them feel that they’re special while they’re doing their contribution to the track and a lot of it is man management.

Who taught you the most about recording and/or production and what was the most valuable thing you learnt?

Who taught me the most? Well I don’t know really. When I was working at Island, for awhile I was assistant engineer so I was working under all the in-house engineers there, and I learned quite a bit from them. But then again I picked up certain things from listening to records that I liked as well. You know you hear how certain drum sounds sounding right with guitars and things, so you try to copy that. You experiment in the studio. I think that some very good engineers that I knew at the time, a guy called Paul Schnidt for example……… But a lot of what I was working on was reggae and stuff. But sonically reggae is very interesting with the latest reverb, so I learnt a lot of how to use that stuff from working with them. But then again I didn’t learn a lot of the rock side of things there because we didn’t work with that kind of thing. So that I kind of learnt from myself to be honest with you. I had recorded with bands myself in the past. I picked up microphone placement and so on.

How do and did you deal with rows, sulks, and disagreements in the studio?

Well, there are times when people get a bit fractured and things get a little bit intense. Again that part of it hopefully gets easier as you get older because you hope people give you more respect/authority. I mean, I’ve been in performances where there has been two members in each other’s faces and you know you’re trying to say ‘hey, hey!’ It’s man management. You don’t want to be Mr Big Cheese all the time but you’ve got to know sometimes, ultimately the buck stops somewhere. But sometimes,  you’ve got to try and guide it along. I’ve been again very lucky. I’ve had very few sessions where it has completely broken down. There are going to be times when you’ll upset each other. Hopefully you’ll soon talk each other around.

Are there similarities from project to project in the way that the triangle of communication between the artists engineer and producer works?

Band members now are much more familiar with the recording process so they can say  “alright I’ll have a 3/16th delay on this because that’s what I have at home on my Pro Tools” or you know, “I’d like the compression to be blah”.  You are finding now sometimes with artists that they’re got a certain knowledge of technology. But as far as a common language – it’s rock n roll isn’t it! ‘That sounds great or that sounds weak, that sounds dry or that’s too wet.’ It’s…I don’t even think about it really. There is a common language. It’s just musical jargon.  You just pick out of it what you can and hopefully please the artist by making it…shape it…. you know…

A few producers I’ve spoken with, have described their role as providing a stabilising influence to others whose characters might have otherwise left them incapable of realising a recording project

Yeah there’s bit of common ground there.  That’s why I talk about that Big brother character. You’re being there as a stabilising influence, because artists by their sheer nature – being artistic, are perhaps going to be thinking sightly out of the box and sometimes that can be detrimental to pushing a project along.  Sometimes it’s not. sometimes it’s great – it gives you a new tangent to go along and it’s fine. But I think it’s being the first public filter. You know, when someone has a song, first of all it’s just that person and perhaps their co-writer, and then it’s the band, and then sooner or later, that’s going to be played to the public. Obviously there’s live gigs and so on, but the recorded version has to be played and presented to everyone and of course, you’re there as a first set of public ears, listening to it and saying ‘Yeah that sounds great, that sounds like a great record.’  If you hear a record on the radio and you think ‘oh, I don’t like that, I don’t like the vocal or I don’t like the way it sounds.’ That’s what you’re there for as a producer. The immediate feedback they get is the right feedback, to ensure that that song turns out correct and to its best possible standard. So the description you’ve given there, I would say I agree with 100% as well. It’s just the way of voicing it really.


[1] The Pro Tools software and hardware system of hard disk non-linear recording was developed by Digidesign from 1991 onwards (SZT).

[2] The Radar hard disk recording system was first distributed by Otari in 1994 (SZT).

[3] This probably refers to the change in 1997 from the 16 bit Radar 1 to the 24 bit Radar 2 hard disk recording system distributed by the Otari Corporation (SZT)

[4] Analogue to digital converters that transform the analogue microphone / line input signals to the digital audio format  (and digital to analogue for playback). (SZT)

[5] Beat Detective is a module available in the Pro Tools digital recording software package that manipulates the timing of recorded audio.

[6] Standing in the Shadows of Motown. (film 2002. dir: Paul Justman. Lions Gate Films)

[7] The Fallout Shelter was the in-house recording studio for Island Records (SZT)