Music Production Tips – The Stereo Bus Blog

I’ve added a mobile-friendly theme to The Stereo Bus!  Enjoy reading up with your iPhone or Android device.  Cheers.

Last month I spent some time looking around for useful tools to make it easier for my band to do its thing when we hit the road next Summer.  I remembered seeing an interesting web-app on one of the social news sites that was basically like Base Camp for bands.  After doing some digging, I found it again.  Bandize is an all-in-one set of tools for managing a professional band.

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Wow!  It’s been a while since I last updated the ol’ Stereo Bus.  But I haven’t forgotten about it.  I’m settling into San Francisco nicely, keeping myself very busy.  Unfortunately, space is too expensive for me to open up the studio that I planned to open here, but the good news is I’ve started playing bass guitar for the band Cuban Cigar Crisis.  CCC is gearing up for recording an album Summer 2010 and I’m already doing research into the production process.  I have decided that we should go with a high sample-rate recording this time around.  I’ve been working pretty much exclusively at 24-bit/44.1khz but now DAWs are fast enough and hard drives are cheap enough that there’s no good reason not to step it up.  192khz is simply overkill.  Most DACs simply upsample to achieve that rate and response can actually be poorer as a result.  This leaves the choice between 96khz and 88.2khz.

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Recently I was hired to finesse a rather rough live recording of Michael Franti‘s performance at the protest concert outside the Republican National Convention in 2008.  The recording was done with a pair of shotgun mics placed fairly close to each other.

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Thought I’d mention that I did some cleaning and tweaking of TSB today.  Should be loading faster and be a little easier to get around.

Last post I took some time to write up a review for Ohm Force‘s Symptohm synthesizer.  This time around I’ll be looking at their Ohmicide multiband distortion plugin.  I’m a sucker for distortions and was pretty excited to give it a spin.

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The guys over at Ohm Force, an indie plugin development group out of Paris, asked me if I wanted to do a review of some of their plugins.  I was happy to do so, as long as I could give an honest appraisal.  So in this post I’ll be reviewing one of the four plugs I had the opportunity to try out: Symptohm, a synthesis plugin.

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This article isn’t about mastering a CD so that the songs are all at the same perceived volume, it’s about getting your music collection to play back at reasonable volumes relative to each other.  It’s also about providing this feature to your digital distribution customers.

I’m sure you’ve at some point put your music collection into shuffle play only to find that the transition from Rachmanninof’s Symphony #2 into Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals is enough to make you piss your pants.  You aren’t alone.  The audio geekery community has come up with a solution to the problem of CDs having drastically different volumes: ReplayGain.  Apple has their own solution they call Sound Check, although by most accounts it seems to be less sophisticated.

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So you want to add a subwoofer to your monitor setup? Studio subwoofers can be tricky things that require a little bit of audio soul searching, auditioning, and planning to pull off well. But, a well integrated sub can make a world of difference in the right circumstances.

I, for example, just added a Mackie HRS-120 sub to my HR824 speakers and am quite happy with it after some tweaking.

Since pro audio subs tend to be expensive and add complexity, there are a lot of important questions that one should ask one’s self before investing in a quality sub.

• Why do I want to add a subwoofer?
• What kind of music do I tend to work on?
• Do I even like the sound of subwoofers? Is my room suited for subwoofers?
• What are the options that make sense for my existing speakers?

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As some of you may be aware, I am presently focusing more on web development than on audio in an effort to save up some funds to move to San Francisco.  This hasn’t left me with much time for writing.  The good news for all of you, however, is that reason for the savings is to focus on music and audio once we arrive.  We expect to make the transition in late June ’09.  I will be opening a small studio out there tailored for mixing, as this is what I do best.

This means that rather than spending my time throwing CSS classes around I’ll be turning more knobs, playing more instruments, and writing way more in this blog about my day-to-day activities.

So no – I’m not dead and I certainly haven’t forgotten about this blog.

Thanks to everyone who returns and to whomever keeps bookmarking and submitting my entries to StumbleUpon.  You rock.

Stay tuned.