The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on the practice of sampling and its legal ramifications.

Sampling has, for years, been a routine practice in the music industry.  Sampling is taking a part of an already recorded musical composition and repurposing it in a new composition.  It used to be that people would simply sample freely, release the material, and pay up if they got caught.  But, there were a good number of high profile court cases in the early 90s that showed that this wasn’t a very legally sound practice. The whole process of sampling is complex because the owners of the composition (the publisher or the artist) and the owners of the masters (probably the label or the artist) don’t have to let you use the material at all.  This means that they can essentially ask whatever they want from you if you a) approach them with an offer or b) get caught after releasing a sampled track.

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This post focuses on how to reduce the noise produced by gear, thus producing cleaner recordings.

Anyone who has worked on audio with a typical desktop PC gets to know the hum and fan noise of their PC very well.  There are lots of different ways to get a quieter environment, from moving the equipment to custom silencing solutions.

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This post focuses on a technique for the tricky task of recording guitar and vocals at the same time.

One of the classic tricky engineering situations is recording guitar and vocals at the same time. Generally they bleed into each other and effects that make the guitar sound good make the vocals sound horrible and vice-versa. There are a number of things that can be done to isolate the two, including using a DI for the guitar, but I’ve found that there is only one really good mic arrangement that gets the job done.

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This post focuses on digital sync between PCM digital audio devices.

Digital has been marketed and is generally understood to be bit-for-bit perfect, resilient to noise, and able to be copied infinitely without any reduction of quality. This is true… to a point. Digital audio is essentially data, reinterpreted as audible information. But, underneath all the simplicity of the digital medium lies quite an elaborate system of error correction and synchronization. Did you know that the hard drive in your computer routinely has data errors? There’s software running in your computer that looks for these errors and corrects them as the drive is accessed. Digital is a balancing act and the goal is to have it all balance out to zero errors.

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This post focuses on how to create a professional looking and sounding portfolio disc that won’t make more enemies than friends.

A good portfolio will open up a lot of doors for you as a producer or engineer. What makes a great portfolio? Well, it obviously should sound good. That depends on the quality of your work - you just have to not screw it up if it’s already solid. With a portfolio it also has to look good. Let’s face it - a lot of people to whom you’ll want to be dropping off your CD will be getting a lot of submissions. So what does that require? First, choose if you want to make a CD or a DVD. A CD is definitely easier, but a DVD is still a little unusual. If any of your material has been made into a music video or used in film, it’s great to include the visuals as well. Additionally, DVDs can display album artwork and additional information on the screen. It’s really up to you and your resources.

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This post focuses on tracking the snare drum, both on its own and as part of a kit.

I’m going to do a series on recording various instruments, from drums to woodwinds, and I’ve decided to do the snare first. Drums are a tricky bunch of instruments. They’re loud, bleed like hell, and generally don’t sound anything on tape like they sound in the room. Snare is probably the most complex of the standard components of the drum set. The top head is usually fairly tight and the material of the shell can be anything from aluminum to solid maple, each with unique characteristics. The bottom has the snares, strips of metal that vibrate against the bottom head when the drum is hit, which gives the drum its distinctive rattle. The top head is where the attack happens, the bottom head is where the crunch happens, and the tone is shared between the two. This means that you really need at least two microphones to get a complete picture of a snare drum. I would argue you may even need three to get the best snare sounds.

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This post focuses on the process of recording your MIDI sequenced tracks to audio tracks.

Bouncing is the process of recording one or more tracks of audio to one or more other tracks of audio. I think the term comes from the days when tape channels were limited and multiple tracks of audio had to be condensed to a mono track or stereo pair. Why is it called ‘bouncing’, specifically? Because ‘rerecording’ is boring and ‘flootzing’ made the engineer crack up, reducing the efficiency of the session.

These days we have all the audio tracks we could ever need in our computers. But bouncing is still quite useful for many reasons. One of the best reasons is the preservation of sequenced instruments such as synths or samplers, especially virtual instruments. The fact of the matter is that MIDI is completely dependent on the MIDI instrument to produce the sound. If your precious vintage synth were to kick the bucket or if you loose the dongle for your favorite virtual instrument, you won’t be able to play back the track. Bouncing to audio has two advantages: a) if the instrument is a virtual instrument, you’ll save the CPU usage imposed by real-time playback b) should something ever happen to your instrument, you can still work with the audio track.
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This post focuses on the process of removing noise that has made its way into your content using digital processing.

While it’s always best to avoid noise in ther first place by recording in a quiet environment, using well grounded equipment, and using balanced cables, it’s sometimes unavoidable that some noise will have crept its way into your recordings. Also, often you’ll receive tracks from another engineer or an artist that have been recorded using less-than-optimal conditions. To illustrate the techniques used in this post, I’ll be using a free, open source program called Audacity (I’m a big fan of FOSS software, but most of the FOSS audio software has a ways to go before it is as effective and as stable as commercial software. I use Audacity in this example mostly because the techniques are more or less the same regardless of what application you use.)

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This post focuses on the placement of sounds in the stereo image during the mix process.

Proper use of stereo imaging in a mix is probably almost as important (or even more important in sparse mixes) as equalization, yet it is largely overlooked as an area for improvement in engineers and producers of beginner and intermediate experience. Intelligent panning and equalization compose about 80% of a good mix, in my opinion.

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This post is focused on the simple, neglected, and powerful practice of labeling tracks in a session.

This post may seem like something entirely obvious that should remain unspoken… but it isn’t. You would be surprised how often I have seen session tracks titled “New Track” and audio files named “Untitled1.wav”. The first step to organizing your sessions is labeling your tracks well. Every little bit of efficiency and extra brainpower that can be saved makes things run smoother and cheaper.

The general rule of DAW software labeling is that all of your audio files will inherit their names from the tracks on which they were recorded. This means that simply throwing up a track called “New Track”, recording on that, and renaming the track after-the-fact will result in a disorganized mess of audio data. It’s really important to not be lazy here.

There are some conventions in the industry for naming tracks and I’m going to describe them. Sessions that are clearly labeled will make your collaborators giggle like schoolgirls. If that image in your head makes you smile, follow me…

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