Words about music (760): Lou Reed

For years I've thought: ‘How come my voice and guitar sound so much better on the demo I made at home?' Simple: on it you hear the natural echo of my apartment, and the messy, blending sound of normal instruments and amplifiers. I love the hum of an old amplifier: that tingling whoosh when the red light comes on and before you play your first chord. I get a real buzz outta that. The miserable equalizing of professional studios is like sandblasting a beautiful old building with a patina of three hundred years. That's what irritates me most about my lost weekend; I was too preoccupied with all that chemical junk to whistle back at those engineers.

Lou Reed