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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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 the basics of digital audio: sample rate, bitrate, and how analog signals are represented digitally.

We use digital audio all the time, but I am surprised on a fairly regular basis how many people are unclear about how digital audio works. Digital audio has two primary qualities that compose the way the audio is described. These two qualities correlate to the qualities of real world sounds more like metaphors than anything else. Real sounds have frequencies and volumes. In order to measure real world sounds and represent them digitally, we have created sample rate and bitrate as digital’s audio qualities. Sample rate determines how analog frequencies are described digitally whereas bitrate determines how analog volume is described digitally. The two qualities need each other in order to describe a sound. You can’t have volume without frequency or frequency without volume.

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