Music Production Tips – The Stereo Bus Blog

This post focuses on how to create your own cables using raw connectors and bulk cable.

There are some great advantages to making your own cables: you determine the quality, you choose the length, it’s usually cheaper, and you learn in the process.  Cables are one of the most marked-up categories of things sold in stores.  My first job was cashier at a CompUSA and I was shocked that the USB cables sold there had nearly a 1,000% mark-up.  It’s not much different in the audio world.  Cables are sold with high margins to make up for the low margins on more price competitive, expensive items. I find that I can save between 60-85% by making my own cables, when compared to cables of similar quality in the store.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on how monitoring with different kinds of speakers will help you achieve better mixes.

One of the things that sets professional studios apart from hobbyist studios is their collection of monitors.  Most studios have at least a couple pairs of monitors, from nearfields to farfields.  Many have boomboxes and ‘hi-fi’ stereos to give even more diverse listening options.  Having monitoring diversity helps reveal weak spots in the way the music translates from system to system.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the technique of comping, or creating a composite performance from various elements of multiple performances.

It used to be that in order to get a recording of a performance the performers had to run straight through the material.  But ever since the invention of overdubbing people have been changing the way music is made and performed for recordings.  In the analog days, tape was cut a spliced together to create edits in the material.  Now this process is even easier with computers.  A standard practice for many producers is ‘comping’, or the creation of a track that incorporates the best sections of multiple performances.  This is in contrast to another common technique called ‘punching’, where a performance is overwritten for a while with new recording passes until the desired performance is captured (at which point the recording continues with the material already on tape).

Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on using ring modulators, vocoders, or other tone resonating devices to produce artificial chords.

Creating unique sounds is a constant challenge.  Sometimes things just sound too ‘plain’ and you need to pull something totally off-the-wall out of your hat.  In these situations, it can be really interesting to grab resonating devices such as ring modulators, vocoders, and even pitch-correction plugins for some unconventional usage.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.