Music Production Tips – The Stereo Bus Blog

This 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 into shuffle play only to find that the transition from Rachmanninof’s Symphony #2 into Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals is enough to make you piss your pants.  You aren’t alone.  The audio geekery community has come up with a solution to the problem of CDs having drastically different volumes: ReplayGain.  Apple has their own solution they call Sound Check, although by most accounts it seems to be less sophisticated.

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This post focuses on the process of getting the vocal chain right for the given performer.

The signal chain for vocals is probably one of the most important production choices in pop music.  Of course, it helps to have a healthy selection of devices to choose from.  Every voice has unique qualities, some of which should be emphasized and some of which should be de-emphasized.  The tools available to accomplish this are, in order of affectiveness: microphone selection, mic placement, and preamp selection.

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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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