Whilst carrying on my research about Rick Rubin I came across the fact he started annotating song lyrics on the website Genius (formerly ‘Rap Genius’). He has poured forth his views on many songs that he worked on, including tracks by Kanye West, Slayer and Jay-Z. He has also commented on a number of tracks that he didn’t work on and his comments are often illuminating.For example on the Tom Petty album, ‘Wildflowers’ Rick Rubin begin talking about room acoustics.
“You could do a computer rendering of exactly what the best-sounding recording studio would be, and you could build it, and it still might not sound like anything. I mean, there are weird rooms that’ve been there for a long time, and a lot of people have recorded in them. Sound City is a good example. It was not very well designed, acoustically. But it sounded good!”
Although I have only been recording vocals this semester I can apply Rick Rubin’s approach and try different recording rooms to see what effect they will have on my recordings.
This post relates to learning outcome 2
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