Music Production Tips - The Stereo Bus Blog

This post focuses on ways to insure your equipment and protect yourself from liability.

I know insurance is probably the last thing on most people’s minds when they get into music production.  Let’s face it, though… we have a lot of expensive stuff lying around and we, as businesses, open ourselves up to liability.  The good thing is that insurance for musicians and producers isn’t very expensive and, for many, it makes a lot of sense.  The two main areas of concern are equipment and liability.  Gear insurance is insurance against damage, theft, and loss of equipment.  Liability insurance is protection in case something goes wrong and you get sued.  As with most things I discuss here, there are some good strategies for mitigating both risks.

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This post. focuses on the secret rock mixing practice of using a DeEsser on overheads.

Rock overhead tracks are downright scary.  Many rock drummers constantly wash out their cymbals and play in the studio with ‘live’ cymbals that have too much presence, designed to cut through stage noise.  EQing the cymbals leaves you with mush and a loss of clarity and sheen.  What is an engineer to do?  A little known secret of the pros is to use a de-esser (essentially a special purpose multiband compressor) to cut down on the sybillance.

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This post focuses on an idea I’ve had for a while: a rolling station that can be moved easily around the studio to ease tracking difficulty when working alone.

One problem that I’ve run into is that, when working in a studio setup that includes a control room and a tracking room, it becomes very difficult to track in the tracking room by yourself.  Changing preamp settings, controlling the DAW, and monitoring all get complicated when working alone.  For a while now I’ve had an idea to create a rolling station to add on to my standard DAW setup.

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This 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 effects.  Now it seems rather quaint to do so, but there are a good number of engineers who simply don’t like using artificial ambience.  And real rooms offer a very different, tangible process as opposed to the knob twiddling of ‘verb processors.

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This 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 drums.

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This 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 much impossible. On thing I learned when singing in college is that you don’t need that many esses or hard consonants to make the word intelligable. In fact, only about 1/3 the choir really needs to sing them at all. If you’re singing ‘voice’, 2/3 of the choir can effectively drop the ess sounding c to sing ‘voi’. The result is a much cleaner presentation of sound. The same thing works in music production when layering vocals. Let one or two similar takes contribute the sybillant sounds while the others drop them. It works great. You can even edit out the sybillant sounds after-the-fact, if you’d like. Just add a short fade at the end of the word to make it sound more natural.

I did this in my song Vocal from my album, Sonoluminescence. You can listen to it here. I dropped almost all of the ess sounds from ‘voice’ in the backgrounds.

This post focuses on a unique way to produce backwards phrases with any instrument.

I used to have a bit of a fascination with backwards sounds when I got my first computer sound card. I would record my voice and play it backwards or record an instrument and play it backwards. At one point I realized that backwards sounding things could be played forwards and then reversed. So I tried speaking a word, reversing it, then record my attempt to reproduce the backwards sound with my mouth. After that, I would reverse my backwards attempt and see how close I could get to the original word. If I did it well, I sounded either like I had a speech problem or I was British, depending on kind you want to be to a Liverpool accent.

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This post focuses on convolution as it applies to audio - the capturing and reapplication of the qualities of sound.

A few years ago some new-fangled audio processing engines started to leak out of the lab and into the market involving a process called convolution. The name convolution comes from the type of math involved, but applying the process to audio signals provides for some pretty interesting opportunities.

Essentially, the process of convolution really requires two things: deconvolution and convolution. It’s actually a little backwards from the conventional use of the prefix ‘de’, although that again comes from its math roots. Deconvolution is the process of capturing the audio changes imposed upon a signal when fed through an environment, whether that be a physical room or a piece of equipment. Convolution is the process of applying those changes to a different signal. So, in essence, deconvolution would be ’sampling’ the way an environment affects the signal, whereas convolution would be making that sample into an effect, which is applied to other signals.
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This post focuses on the use of piezo sensors and pickups in pro audio applications.

Most people don’t think of piezo technology very often. Basically, piezoelectric sensors involve using mechanical vibrations against the sensor to create a signal. It’s a unique way to generate sound and signal, meaning that it can be used in applications where traditional sound capturing devices don’t work well. In fact, sometimes piezo sensors are called contact microphones. Some common applications include acoustic guitar pickups and drum triggers, but there really is no reason why you couldn’t use piezo sensors anywhere that produces vibration (and therefore, sound).

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This post focuses on the availability of free, open source software for audio production.

Free Open Source Software (or FOSS for short) has been with us for a good while now, the most popular example of it being the high profile alternative web browser Firefox, sponsored by the Mozilla corporation. Open Source software means that anybody can download the code, use it, and redistribute it - and it’s completely legal. Obviously this can be a huge advantage to folks with modest budgets or who are strong supporters of intellectual property freedom. Ubuntu Linux, my operating system of choice, has been making strong inroads in taking a share of the market. Recently there has been a lot of progress made on audio software in the open source community. Since I featured the FOSS program Audacity in my last post on noise reduction, I got inspired to feature some of the exciting projects coming out of the community.
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