Archive for March, 2008
The Second Opinion of Friends and Colleagues
March 23, 2008 UncategorizedThis 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 [...]
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How to Hum Your Way to Better Compositions
March 22, 2008 UncategorizedThis 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 [...]
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Mastering Experiment: “But They Do” with the Focusrite Liquid Mix
March 8, 2008 MasteringThis 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 [...]
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How to Group Tracks to Save DAW CPU
March 8, 2008 DAWs, MixingThis 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 [...]
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Speaker Placement: Nearfield Monitors
March 7, 2008 NearfieldsThis 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 [...]
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How to Create Depth in a Mix
March 6, 2008 MixingThis 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 [...]
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A Guide to Creative Commons: Giving it Away
March 5, 2008 LicensingThis 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 [...]
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How to Use Visual Audio Analyzers and Scopes
March 4, 2008 Plugins, VisualizationThis 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 [...]
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How to Use Analog Tape as an Effect
March 3, 2008 Tape Machines, Tape SaturationThis 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 [...]
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Synchronization of DAWs with MTC & MMC
March 2, 2008 DAWs, SyncThis post focuses on the use of MIDI Time Code (MTC) and MIDI Machine Control (MMC) to synchronize multiple DAWs together. SMPTE timecode was create for the purpose of synchronizing audio systems together, such as tape machines, computers, and other time sensitive audio devices. MIDI timecode is an extension of SMPTE timecode into the MIDI [...]
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