Larry gets a break this month, as this issue's 'End Rant' is a behind the scenes peek at how this magazine gets put together every two months. In a nutshell, it's organized chaos and this issue illustrates that perfectly.
There are two questions we are constantly asked. Question 1: Larry has writers asking why the piece they submitted hasn't run yet. Question 2: Marketing people and publicists ask if we have an editorial calendar. We don't.
Tape Op is really more of a 'zine with glossy pages than a 'real' magazine. Larry fields tons of inquiries from people just like you who have ideas for stories. The ones that seem interesting he gives the green light on. We're much more interested in a piece from some home recordist in Ohio with no writing experience who's passionate about an interview they want to do, than a 'Top Ten Tips on (fill in the blank here)' from an established journalist. More than 50% of the green-lighted ideas are never finished. Nonetheless, we end up with far more editorial than we have space for. After Larry and our amazing copy editor, Liz Brown, get done with it, it gets dropped in my lap.
At this point I read the piece and see if there are any photos or graphics that go along with the piece. There usually aren't any. This is one reason for question number one above.
This is a magazine — not a book or journal. Magazines have photos. As the layout guy, I need photos to work with. Good photos get me inspired to design the page right away. Graphic design is a lot of fun, especially when you have good photos and art to work with. It's like making a record with great musicians in a great studio. When there are no graphics, or shitty graphics, it's like making a record with a tone-deaf singer-songwriter who thinks they're Dave Matthews. This is why the articles that get turned in with good photos get prioritized and run sooner. Larry sends all prospective writers guidelines on photos before he green lights an article. Still, quite a few pieces get turned in with bad color prints that were shot on a disposable camera and developed at a supermarket. This is the audio equivalent of doing your next album in a Karaoke bar. Even worse are cheap lo-res digital cameras. The photos these things take are so lo-res that by the time they are converted to print resolution they are about 1 inch square. This is the audio equivalent of recording your next album on an 8-bit sampler. Karaoke and 8-bit samplers are great, especially as an effect, but would you really want to only listen to those formats all the time? I'm not even going to go into poorly composed and boring photos that are technically perfect. Smooth jazz anyone? These are some of the reasons why some pieces take a while to run, or never run.
Then there are the interview subjects themselves. I think most engineers and producers prefer to be behind the scenes, and getting their photo taken is a bit tortuous for a lot of them. If they wanted to be in the spotlight they'd be in the band — not in the control room. But, when I started working with Larry on Tape Op, I felt strongly that I wanted the 'look and feel' of the magazine to emphasize the humanity of recording music just as the interviews do. Tape Op has always been more about the people makingthemusic,nottheequipmentthey'reusing. This is why I've always tried to get portraits of the folks we interview, preferably in any setting besides them posing behind a console. I'd rather run pictures of people and their pets, than of their gear. Of course sometimes we are tempted by cool, artsy photos of arcane vintage gear so we're not above breaking our own rules.