“We''re going through all of these tubes and transformers, so tape is not as necessary,” Auerbach says. “Everything is literally either going through giant old transformers that were hand-wound in the late ''60s or ''50s tube gear. Sometimes both. Old tube mics or ribbon mics or a great old dynamic that already pre-EQs things. We''ve gone through a lot of gear; you find out what works for you, what gets those sounds. But it has less to do with tape than it does miking technique and the arrangements. When I record a band, I like to track to a 1-inch 8-track tape machine. But when we do a Black Keys record, I step away from the engineering side of things and try not to think about it so much. So I can just focus on the songs.”