Archive for the ‘Concepts’ Category
Mic Placement for Metal Guitar (Video)
April 15, 2012 Microphones, Placement, TrackingA brilliant video on mic placement & axis positioning for recording metal guitars.
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Why 24/192 HD Audio Distribution Does More Harm Than Good
March 6, 2012 Sample RatesToday I read an excellent writeup on the tribulations of distributing music at “HD” quality like 192khz/24bit. In his writeup he goes over some of the very things I’ve brought up in the past: harmonic distortion introduced by ultrasonic frequencies, storage considerations, and the extremely well-documented limits to human hearing. Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, an expert [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 [...]
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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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