The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on how to group tracks to save CPU or DSP processing.

When I first started mixing using a computer, I would throw up inserts on everything.  Everything was processed independently.  As you might imagine, my mixes were insanely CPU intensive and hard to manage.  Soon I realized that many of the tracks were being processed in exactly the same way and that I didn’t need to have separate DSP processes on each track.

The solution?  Groups (or auxes in Pro Tools land)!
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This 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 sending it slightly higher levels than the tape was normalized for.  Turns out that the sound produced by this overdriving was a subtle compression resulting from the saturation of the magnetic medium.  If you try to throw signal at digital above and beyond what it is normalized for, you’ll end up with brick-wall distortion.  This is one of the reasons why tape is considered by many to be warmer and ‘fatter’ sounding.  Drums, in particular, work extremely well with tape because the compression allows for a rounding of the transients and a certain punch not typically found in the digital domain.  I know some engineers who still track drums to 2 inch tape.

Digital captures exactly what it’s given, whether good or bad.  As a result, piping in warm, punchy signal from an analog tape machine will be captured warm and punchy.  So, if you have access to a high quality tape machine, why not take advantage of it?

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This post focuses on some basic techniques for keeping your DAW running in primo shape.

It’s easy to take our computers for granted, but sometimes it seems like if you turn your back for a moment, your computer will destroy itself.

The reality is that computers are incredibly complex machines and that small, day to day things add up to create a catastrophe that seems to have come from nowhere.  Since we digital artists invest so much time, money, and love in our digital media, it’s important to treat the medium with respect.  Enclosed are some tips to help keep your DAW runnings strong.
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This post focuses on an idea I’ve had for a while: a rolling station that can be moved easily around the studio to ease tracking difficulty when working alone.

One problem that I’ve run into is that, when working in a studio setup that includes a control room and a tracking room, it becomes very difficult to track in the tracking room by yourself.  Changing preamp settings, controlling the DAW, and monitoring all get complicated when working alone.  For a while now I’ve had an idea to create a rolling station to add on to my standard DAW setup.

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This post focuses on capturing ambience by playing back and re-recording sounds in acoustic spaces.

The idea of piping sounds into a space and retracking it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination.  Before the advent of reverb processors it was common practice to route audio to speakers in reverb chambers to achieve ambient effects.  Now it seems rather quaint to do so, but there are a good number of engineers who simply don’t like using artificial ambience.  And real rooms offer a very different, tangible process as opposed to the knob twiddling of ‘verb processors.

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