Archive for the ‘Concepts’ Category
Kanye West: An Inspiring Look at Recontextualizing with Samples
October 19, 2011 SamplingLove him or hate him, Kanye West does a great job of making catchy songs from classic samples. For me, being primarily a rock producer, I often neglect the inspiring sounding board that an excellent sample can be. This video demonstrates the original samples used in some of Kanye West’s hits both in their original [...]
Read More »
DIY Acoustic Panel Bass Traps: Treating Your Room Right
July 26, 2011 Acoustics, DIYBuild super-effective DIY bass traps acoustic treatments for around $75 a panel.
Read More »
Visual Analogy to High Definition Sample Rate Conversion
January 2, 2010 Sample RatesI’ve been working pretty much exclusively at 24-bit/44.1khz but now DAWs are fast enough and hard drives are cheap enough that there’s no good reason not to step it up. 192khz is simply overkill. Most DACs simply upsample to achieve that rate and response can actually be poorer as a result. This leaves the choice between 96khz and 88.2khz.
Read More »
Mono Sources in a Stereo World – Michael Franti @ RNC
July 14, 2009 Delay, Effects, Restoration, ReverbRecently I was hired to finesse a rather rough live recording of Michael Franti‘s performance at the protest concert outside the Republican National Convention in 2008. The recording was done with a pair of shotgun mics placed fairly close to each other.
Read More »
Review: Ohm Force Ohmicide Distortion Plugin
May 6, 2009 Distortion, PluginsLast post I took some time to write up a review for Ohm Force‘s Symptohm synthesizer. This time around I’ll be looking at their Ohmicide multiband distortion plugin. I’m a sucker for distortions and was pretty excited to give it a spin.
Read More »
How Do I Get My Songs to Play at the Same Volume?
February 11, 2009 Software, VolumeThis article isn’t about mastering a CD so that the songs are all at the same perceived volume, it’s about getting your music collection to play back at reasonable volumes relative to each other. It’s also about providing this feature to your digital distribution customers. I’m sure you’ve at some point put your music collection [...]
Read More »
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 [...]
Read More »
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 [...]
Read More »
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 [...]
Read More »
What’s this Class A, Class AB, Class B stuff?
February 24, 2008 Amplification, AmplifiersThis post focuses on the basics of the differences between various amplifier (and preamplifier) types, namely class A, B, and AB. When we first start out learning about audio equipment, there’s an awful lot of terms to sort through. One in particular that escaped me for years was what exactly the various ‘classes’ of amplifiers [...]
Read More »
