Music Production Tips - The Stereo Bus Blog

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.

This post is about the mastering process for my latest EP.  The session was booked at Minneapolis’ Rare Form Mastering.  Greg Reierson took the helm and did a really solid job overall.

First of all, I’m not the sort of producer who does mastering the same way for each album.  For my own material, I prefer a light touch and lower overall volume.  This is the sort of thing mastering engineers tend to prefer, so it works out well.  Obviously, a metal album would be a different story altogether (and my next self-produced release will be more along those lines.)

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I’ve completed work on my latest release, Love & Affection, which is available as a free download.

Please take a listen and pass it along!  It’s Creative Commons.

This post is about sharing our work with other musicians, producers, and folks in-the-know that we trust to get a second opinion on things.

A couple of days ago I was sitting on my computer getting ready to do some work when a friend of mine from high school came online.  He’s been doing very well for himself doing commercial music for film and advertising, while also performing his own music as Glorious Monster.  Every now and then we’ll contact each other and get a feel for what we’re up to.  It’s really nice to have other people who produce music to talk to and geek out with.  Anyway, he was working on a potential soundtrack for a theatrical trailer and wanted to get my opinion of the piece.
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This post focuses on the somewhat strange practice of humming to compose music.

At some point in my songwriting process I got tired of the pressure of trying to perform parts as I composed them.  Ever since I  was a kid I would hum and form musical parts with my mouth by vocalizing what, in effect, were the sounds of drums, guitars, brass and whatnot.  Surprisingly , this can be a very effective improvisation method when documenting musical ideas.
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