Tony Visconti

Finally, I would like to remind record companies that they have a cultural responsibility to give the buying public great music. Milking a trend to death is not contributing to culture and is ultimately not profitable.

I could never have a better teacher in those days than my father.

Rock and Roll has certainly tried to take its toll on me. I’d rather not talk about my past excesses here, although some hardcore rockers might argue that those excesses were responsible for some great records, but I know which side I came out on.

Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it.

The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.

Today’s recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.

Marc Bolan had inspired so many people to pick up a guitar and join a band.

Since my teen years I was interested in martial arts.

It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new.

In August most of Europe goes on holiday.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 – 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.

Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production’s sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one.

But some great records are are being made with today’s technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn’t have emerged when recording was more organic.

I am flying back to New York as I write this. I will never forget these wonderful 35 days and I would go back to Copenhagen in a heartbeat to work there again.

I grew up to the sound of live music in our Brooklyn household.

Now I know what it’s like to be a rock star. No, I didn’t sleep with 5 groupies at once. But I was interviewed about 45 times in 5 days in 3 cities.

My father loved people, children and pets.

No one else in our family was a professional musician so this took an enormous leap of faith on their part.

In the last 17 years of his working life, my father was finally rewarded with having landed a great job as first, a maintenance engineer, and then a senior locksmith with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

I keep reviewing my feelings about the supernatural.

Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica, mom sang in English and Italian, and I played guitar. I’m so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.

I am not a creature of habit.

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father’s guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

I make records with an open mind, I always have.

My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.

Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer’s job.

I also mixed David Bowie’s Young Americans album in 5.1 earlier this year and it will be available very soon. Even the original stereo mixes have been re-mastered and sound amazingly good, better than ever, in fact!

Oh, it was so hard to leave Paris, just about my favorite city in the world.

Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

My dad’s sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal – his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

My profession is called record production.