"One of the main struggles I had with my monitoring, one which led me onto a 6-month "monitor quest," was finding something with honest and extended low end. I didn't feel like I was getting a good picture of the lowest lows of kick drum, electric and upright bass, tubas and sousaphones (yes I record those). With some regularity, I was just so far off scaling the low end in the way I was trying to. The Ganymedes were a big improvement in this area, but also offered me a different look (one that is, dare I say, more modern?) at the midrange, one that I have found very useful."
About
Taylor Hales
Taylor Hales returned to Chicago to intern at Electrical Audio and learn tape recording from the studio's veteran staff, and he has stayed on ever since, now serving as the studio's manager as well as a recording and mixing engineer. His engineering work spans an unusually wide range of Chicago music, from Third Coast Percussion's arrangement of Philip Glass's Aguas da Amazonia and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett's Braided Together to the reunited '80s punk band Verboten's debut LP and the free-jazz explorations of Drazek Fuscaldo with players like Hamid Drake, Tatsu Aoki, and Joshua Abrams. When Steve Albini died in 2024, Hales was one of the people who stepped up to keep Electrical Audio running, telling Block Club Chicago that the staff wanted to honor Albini's legacy and that the studio stayed booked solid for months afterward. Outside the control room, he plays bass in Paper Mice and the Arts of Life Band, staying a working musician even as he spends most of his hours capturing other people's records to tape.
Selected Credits
Cabinet of Wonder
Natalie Merchant