The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This 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 be listening to the audio.  And ears are more accurate than eyes.  There are lots of situations where audio looks awful on a scope but sounds incredible.  Scopes can, however, be very useful for gaining a different perspective on your material.  Sometimes the speakers available don’t reveal as much of the lows or highs as is needed for the material, for instance.  Using scopes to dissect phasing, frequency response, and peak levels can further inform the impressions your ears are giving you.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the basics of equalization.

Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players.  Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges.

There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric.  Graphic EQ usually has set frequency points with sliders to boost or cut at those points.  Parametric usually has a set of moveable frequency ‘centers’ with a width control, combined with a cut and boost knob.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the differences between balanced and unbalanced connections.

When I first started engineering my high school band, I didn’t know what the difference between balanced and unbalanced connections was. I used guitar cables to link up all of 1/4″ gear and routinely used impedance transformers to convert between XLR to 1/4″ unbalanced. I thought the extra ring on TRS cables was just some weird novelty. Not so.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post focuses on the various ’standard’ ways to get a stereo image with microphones.

A class-A stereo image is one of the holy grails of audio engineering. It’s easy to get a decent image, but to achieve a stereo image that condenses down to mono, sounds rich, and evenly captures the entire performance is very difficult.

Most stereo techniques involve using two microphones but there are some that use more. Additionally, there are some very good stereo mics on the market such as the Studio Projects LSD-2 or the time-honored, appropriately expensive AKG C24.

Read the rest of this entry »