The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

The focus of this post is on capturing SysEx information from external MIDI devices in order to have a record of your presets right in your session or automate the settings throughout the track.

It happens to producers time and time again: you’ve created an awesome synth sound or guitar tone, you’ve recorded the midi part, but when you load up the session to work on it some more your sounds are completely different! Oh no! You didn’t save the preset…

Don’t let this happen to you! There are a ton of cool things you can do with a special feature of MIDI called SysEx. Essentially, SysEx is a way for a MIDI device’s system settings to be transfered over MIDI. This means that you can save the settings to the patches on a synth, guitar tones on a MIDI capable modeler, or automation/device states on a capable digital mixer.

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This post focuses on making your tracks sound more dynamic with automation.

Automation has been with us for a long time. Before there were computers, it wasn’t too uncommon to see engineers, producers, and assistants all at the board to move faders and push buttons in real-time as the mix ran its way through the board. These days we have computers to do the handiwork for us, we just have to know when and how to automate our work.

Automation can be used for creation motion, enhancing performances, customizing sounds, and adding flavor with effects.

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This post is going to focus on using compression on sends vs. compression on inserts in order to retain fidelity while adding punch.

Throwing up an insert on a track is an obvious way to control the dynamics of the track or to add punch. Unfortunately, sometimes adding compression to the sound itself dulls the high-end or introduces undesirable distortions, such as in the case of overhead cymbals or piano. One way to achieve the effect of punch or sustain without compromising the fidelity is send a copy of the signal to stereo send/aux with the desired compression effect on its insert and blend to taste.

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