The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on some of the basics of nearfield speaker placement, where and why and a little how.

It used to be that studios had huge wall-mounted speakers that required equally large rooms to work properly.  Commercial studios are carefully acoustically tweaked.  I won’t go into acoustic treatments here, but needless to say a properly tuned room will make any monitor system work much better.
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This post focuses on the topic of creating a sense of depth in mixes.

It’s not too hard to make things sound big.  It’s not too hard to make things sound wide.  But it is very hard to do both while also creating a sense of depth.  There are a myriad of tools available to the mix engineer to accomplish this, but there are three in particular that, when used properly, can create mixes that you can ‘walk into’.
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This post focuses on convolution as it applies to audio - the capturing and reapplication of the qualities of sound.

A few years ago some new-fangled audio processing engines started to leak out of the lab and into the market involving a process called convolution. The name convolution comes from the type of math involved, but applying the process to audio signals provides for some pretty interesting opportunities.

Essentially, the process of convolution really requires two things: deconvolution and convolution. It’s actually a little backwards from the conventional use of the prefix ‘de’, although that again comes from its math roots. Deconvolution is the process of capturing the audio changes imposed upon a signal when fed through an environment, whether that be a physical room or a piece of equipment. Convolution is the process of applying those changes to a different signal. So, in essence, deconvolution would be ’sampling’ the way an environment affects the signal, whereas convolution would be making that sample into an effect, which is applied to other signals.
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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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