Music Production Tips - The Stereo Bus Blog

This post focuses a few quick tips for billing your clients and managing the delivery of the product of your service.

I’ve done some work for really professional clients and some work for very unprofessional clients. One things I’ve learned is that solid billing and delivery standards make a world of difference.
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This post focuses on the differences between balanced and unbalanced connections.

When I first started engineering my high school band, I didn’t know what the difference between balanced and unbalanced connections was. I used guitar cables to link up all of 1/4″ gear and routinely used impedance transformers to convert between XLR to 1/4″ unbalanced. I thought the extra ring on TRS cables was just some weird novelty. Not so.

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This post focuses on the various ’standard’ ways to get a stereo image with microphones.

A class-A stereo image is one of the holy grails of audio engineering. It’s easy to get a decent image, but to achieve a stereo image that condenses down to mono, sounds rich, and evenly captures the entire performance is very difficult.

Most stereo techniques involve using two microphones but there are some that use more. Additionally, there are some very good stereo mics on the market such as the Studio Projects LSD-2 or the time-honored, appropriately expensive AKG C24.

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This post focuses on creating individual mixes of elements called stems, and also on creating alternate mixes.

It’s pretty common in music production to, during the mixing process, print many different versions of the track to tape. Some examples might be: just the brass section (for performing the song live), a vocal +1 or -1 mix, an a cappella version, or a no-vocals (or just backgrounds, ie. karaoke) version.

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This post focuses on wrapping cables so that they unravel easily without knots or annoying insulator memory. Roadie wrap!

It’s way easier just to demonstrate with a video…

This post focuses on registering your music business with Uncle Sam to avoid liability, tax issues, and better business structuring.

I know, I know… registering a business is about as fun as a broken fretboard, but it’s a good idea when you start out. There are a lot of reasons why registering (and registering as the right type of business) is a good idea, but I’m going to focus on liability, structure, and taxes.
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This post focuses on the basics of digital audio: sample rate, bitrate, and how analog signals are represented digitally.

We use digital audio all the time, but I am surprised on a fairly regular basis how many people are unclear about how digital audio works. Digital audio has two primary qualities that compose the way the audio is described. These two qualities correlate to the qualities of real world sounds more like metaphors than anything else. Real sounds have frequencies and volumes. In order to measure real world sounds and represent them digitally, we have created sample rate and bitrate as digital’s audio qualities. Sample rate determines how analog frequencies are described digitally whereas bitrate determines how analog volume is described digitally. The two qualities need each other in order to describe a sound. You can’t have volume without frequency or frequency without volume.

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This post focuses on the super-important subject of keeping your hearing in tip-top shape.

The world around us is getting really loud. Music is blaring everywhere, masters are compressed without dynamics, iPods are being used to drown out crappy coffee shop music and bus noise. As a producer or an engineer, our hearing is our livelyhood so it’s extremely important to be able to make good decisions about how we use our ears from day-to-day. There are a few strategies we can use to reduce hearing loss and keep ourselves enjoying the sound that we love.
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This post is going to focus on the major ways people tend to assemble their music when producing.

Everyone has different needs in music production, needs that result from budget, genre, artistic preferences, and time. It used to be that music was documented in a totally live arrangement before artists such as Les Paul starting overdubbing tracks (the process of layering tracks on tape after-the-fact of the original recording). Now, there are music releases in which nothing is recorded live, such as many hip hop or electronic releases. Understanding what kind of workflow works best for your situation and needs is a critical skill of a successful producer.

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This post is going to focus on the always fun task of managing backups of your creative material and software assets.

Long before I was ever professionally into music I was a computer nerd. I started programming computers when I was in 3rd grade. As a result, the fact that music production is largely synonymous with working on computers doesn’t bother me a whole lot. But with this integration with computers comes many extra things to watch out for and learn. As far as analog tape and hardware equipment is concerned, it is either physically present and working or it isn’t. These things could get damaged or lost, but they won’t just disappear for no good reason or instantly stop functioning to the point where they can’t be repaired somehow. But these are the sorts of situations that creative people have to deal with when working in the digital realm. I have had at least two friends contact me, absolutely despondent, when the the lone hard drive containing five years of their creative output kicked the bucket. Without any other location for these irreplaceable resources, all of our hard work can be gone in an instant. This is why we make backups.

Not only can our creative work be lost, but we can actually loose our tools as well. It takes a long time to get a computer set up the way we like to work. Think about all the time we spend configuring our DAW, installing the software, authenticating the plugins, creating a workspace in which we feel comfortable. Having to recreate this environment in the event of a disaster is wasted time. This is yet another case for backups.

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