Archive for February, 2008
Quieting Your Computer and Noisy Gear
February 10, 2008 DAWsThis post focuses on how to reduce the noise produced by gear, thus producing cleaner recordings. Anyone who has worked on audio with a typical desktop PC gets to know the hum and fan noise of their PC very well. There are lots of different ways to get a quieter environment, from moving the equipment [...]
Read More »How MIDI Works: The Basics
February 9, 2008 MIDIThis post focuses on describing MIDI – what it is and what it does. Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was created in 1983 to address the need for controlling instruments electronically. As synthesizers grew more and more common, it became more and more difficult to control them all. MIDI was created to allow musicians to [...]
Read More »11 Pointers for Buying and Selling Gear
February 8, 2008 Buying & SellingThis post focuses on some tips for getting the most for your equipment when you decide to flip it on the market. I worked in used music store for three years not only as a salesman but also as a buyer. It’s an interesting job, particularly in the city: I caught some thieves, made some [...]
Read More »Adding Real Ambience After-the-Fact
February 7, 2008 Mixing, TrackingThis post focuses on capturing ambience by playing back and re-recording sounds in acoustic spaces. The idea of piping sounds into a space and retracking it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Before the advent of reverb processors it was common practice to route audio to speakers in reverb chambers to achieve ambient [...]
Read More »Increasing Attack with Gates
February 6, 2008 Gates, MixingThis post focuses on the trick of increasing the attack of sounds using gates. Most people reach for EQ or compression when they want to add punch to their sounds. But I’ve found another way to accomplish a very specific kind of attack transient using gates. I sometimes use this trick to add attack kick [...]
Read More »EQ Crash Course
February 5, 2008 UncategorizedThis post focuses on the basics of equalization. Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players. Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges. There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric. [...]
Read More »The Anatomy of a Song
February 4, 2008 UncategorizedThis post focuses on the various parts of a song and many typical ways in which they are arranged. Over time several tendencies in songwriting have emerged as far as the arrangement of music is concerned. It all comes largely from classical music, which often is composed with attention to variations in musical ‘motifs’.
Read More »Subtly Using Delays to Add Energy
February 3, 2008 UncategorizedThis post focuses on using delays to subtly add or change the energy of a sound. I’m a big fan of delays. They add a lot of the depth and texture that people usually grab reverbs to achieve without taking up as much of the space. This distinction helps avoid sandboxing your mixes in the [...]
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Recording Guitar and Vox Simultaneously
February 2, 2008 UncategorizedThis post focuses on a technique for the tricky task of recording guitar and vocals at the same time. One of the classic tricky engineering situations is recording guitar and vocals at the same time. Generally they bleed into each other and effects that make the guitar sound good make the vocals sound horrible and [...]
Read More »Taming Background Vocal Sybillance
February 1, 2008 UncategorizedThis post focuses on a trick I learned in choir to avoid a large number of conflicting sybillances when stacking vocals. If you’ve ever listened to a high school choir concert recording, chances are good that you’ve heard some outrageous sybillance happening. Getting fifty people to sing their esses at the same time is pretty [...]
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