The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting here much lately.  I’m not dead!  I’ve kicked up my French horn practice schedule to 2-3 hours a day and have been working harder at trying to sell our house.  I don’t currently have the time to make daily posts, unfortunately.  I will post when I have a chance!

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on an experiment with my new Focusrite Liquid Mix, with which I mixed and mastered a song of mine that was in need of polishing.

First of all, I will be out of town until the 19th… meaning that I won’t be making any posts here at TSB until then.  But, I thought I’d offer you something to make up for it: free music!
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on how to group tracks to save CPU or DSP processing.

When I first started mixing using a computer, I would throw up inserts on everything.  Everything was processed independently.  As you might imagine, my mixes were insanely CPU intensive and hard to manage.  Soon I realized that many of the tracks were being processed in exactly the same way and that I didn’t need to have separate DSP processes on each track.

The solution?  Groups (or auxes in Pro Tools land)!
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on some of the basics of nearfield speaker placement, where and why and a little how.

It used to be that studios had huge wall-mounted speakers that required equally large rooms to work properly.  Commercial studios are carefully acoustically tweaked.  I won’t go into acoustic treatments here, but needless to say a properly tuned room will make any monitor system work much better.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the topic of creating a sense of depth in mixes.

It’s not too hard to make things sound big.  It’s not too hard to make things sound wide.  But it is very hard to do both while also creating a sense of depth.  There are a myriad of tools available to the mix engineer to accomplish this, but there are three in particular that, when used properly, can create mixes that you can ‘walk into’.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on Creative Commons, a collection of licenses designed help give creators of intellectual property the ability to reduce the strength of their copyright.

Creative Commons was created in 2002 and has since shown a substantial amount of support from the community.  Essentially, when a person creates something they receive a copyright for it automatically.  This copyright gives the copyright holder exclusivity with respect to the rights to sub-license, duplicate, make derivative works, etc. But sometimes the creator wants to share their work and doesn’t want everyone to have to ask them permission to do so.  This is where CC comes into play.  CC is a collection of licenses that strip away varying degrees of your copyright.  You just need to choose the right one for your application.  All CC licenses give up the exclusivity of the right to duplicate the works.  This is extremely helpful in the digital medium, particularly online.

There have been some high profile uses of Creative Commons lately, including Nine Inch Nail’s latest release, Ghosts, MIT’s OpenCourseware and much of Flickr’s content is CC licensed.

One benefit of using Creative Commons is that it increases your chances for exposure on the Internet because people can legally distribute it.  If your market is particularly ethical or committed, you might even be able to earn some money by requesting donations. ala NIN.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on ways to use visual audio scopes to gain more understanding about what’s going on in your audio.

It’s important to state right off the bat that working with audio should primarily be an auditory experience.  In general people won’t be looking at visual representations of audio as much as they will be listening to the audio.  And ears are more accurate than eyes.  There are lots of situations where audio looks awful on a scope but sounds incredible.  Scopes can, however, be very useful for gaining a different perspective on your material.  Sometimes the speakers available don’t reveal as much of the lows or highs as is needed for the material, for instance.  Using scopes to dissect phasing, frequency response, and peak levels can further inform the impressions your ears are giving you.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the use of analog tape’s warm, unique compression as an effect.

When engineers and producers started to make the switch from analog to digital, they found that digital was not only cleaner sound, but it was also somewhat unforgiving.  Most producers were quite fond of ‘driving’ the tape a bit by sending it slightly higher levels than the tape was normalized for.  Turns out that the sound produced by this overdriving was a subtle compression resulting from the saturation of the magnetic medium.  If you try to throw signal at digital above and beyond what it is normalized for, you’ll end up with brick-wall distortion.  This is one of the reasons why tape is considered by many to be warmer and ‘fatter’ sounding.  Drums, in particular, work extremely well with tape because the compression allows for a rounding of the transients and a certain punch not typically found in the digital domain.  I know some engineers who still track drums to 2 inch tape.

Digital captures exactly what it’s given, whether good or bad.  As a result, piping in warm, punchy signal from an analog tape machine will be captured warm and punchy.  So, if you have access to a high quality tape machine, why not take advantage of it?

Read the rest of this entry »