Ex-Stream Hater: 

Streaming has renewed and widened my enjoyment of music – a feat that crates of scratched CDs or a hard drive of legal and pirated mp3s could never do. It has expanded my listening repertoire to include songs I don’t like enough to necessarily buy…but feel like listening to at a given moment. I find myself cobbling together thematic playlists like, say…mariachi versions of 80’s metal songs for taco Tuesday or...

Society seems too quick to celebrate resourcefulness. This is no more apparent than its depiction in countless movies and TV shows over the years. Tales of makeshift battlefield medicine, homespun non-lethal weaponry, and abandoned kid-cobbled home security, all glorify the ability to get out of a jam using nothing more than improbable ingenuity. This spirit of on-the-fly creativity has consequently soaked into the fabric of r...

It’s complicated…my relationship with the guitar, that is.  The classic on-again/off-again saga has gone on so long that sometimes I look at my guitar and ask myself, “What is this thing?” What was once a would-be chick magnet turned into a pivotal career tool that led me to Los Angeles and onto multi-platinum recordings…but I never considered myself to be a real player. Well, not the kind of player that I hoped to be when I s...

Not-So-Level Headed

I don’t think that rock is dead, but I find myself nervously checking its pulse more frequently these days. And while the coroners of rock are mostly fixated on its front-facing performers, sometimes it’s a good idea to take the temperature of their enablers – a little health check for the people, like me, who largely work behind the scenes.  Could your mixes be the nail in the rock n’ roll coffin? Regardles...

Secrets of the Masters: Dokken’s “Dream Warriors"

By Frank Gryner (originally published in Premier Guitar)

Daryl Dragon (the Captain of Captain and Tennille) boasted that his 10,000 sq/ft studio nestled in the asphyxiating deep valley provided a low pressure and creative environment for his clients. Well, in early 1987 that comfort may have offset rising tension between members of the pop-metal band Dokken.   Well-documented ani...

Recording Heavy Guitars

By Frank Gryner (originally published in Recording Magazine)

Back when defiance was the primary sponsor for monster guitar tone, outcast rockers earned every second of that sustain with an attitude that would go on to change the world. Turning against the very technology that was originally built for clean amplification, an overdriven guitar offered a cutting-edge brand of rebellion—one capable of simult...

Spectral Dynamic Processing for Guitars 

By Frank Gryner (as published in Recording Magazine)

Up until the last decade, spectral dynamic processing or multi-band compression was largely reserved for mastering and broadcast applications.  The concept of allowing an engineer individual dynamic control over the separate sectors of the frequency spectrum is often looked upon as a corrective measure for an entire mix and less as a r...

Dynamic Guitar Tone Sculpting

by Frank Gryner (as published in Recording Magazine)

Last time we focused on multiband compression as a corrective measure used to fix problematic guitar tracks as opposed to viewing it as a viable creative tool to enhance your guitar tone. Being able to compress designated frequency bands separately that then blend into one sound can get a little confusing.  Old school audio engineers often contend...

Secrets of the Masters: Rob Zombie's "Dragula"

By Frank Gryner (originally published in Premier Guitar)

Specializing in mix re-creations for so many classic rock tracks, I can’t help but to be extremely critical of how a lot of these well-known songs were recorded. I know that those engineers would never imagine that their audio would be audited so long after the album was mixed and mastered, but new technology has exhumed the o...

The Thankless Job of Vocal Comping

By Frank Gryner (as published in Recording Magazine)

Okay, so you’ve just siphoned every last discernable noise from your singer’s mouth onto your hard drive and you have several complete, top-to-bottom vocal tracks to show for it. What’s next? Well, now comes the underappreciated task of vocal comping—when you edit the best moments from each of these takes and ‘compile’ a master vocal track

C...