Archive
Monthly Archives: June 2017
Monthly Archives: June 2017
If you ever watched Live From Daryl’s House (which is a favorite of so many musicians), you probably have a lot of questions about the show. I was lucky enough to have the show’s musical director, guitarist Shane Theriot, on my latest podcast to pull back the curtain on how the show is done (and […]
Continue readingMusicians have been trying to figure out the first chord to The Beatles Hard Day’s Night every since the song came out. Most get it wrong because there’s more going on than you think. The mystery might finally be solved however. A few years ago, Randy Bachman (of The Guess Who and BTO fame) had […]
Continue readingWith a who’s who list of credits such as Queen, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Rory Gallagher, Sparks, Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Billy Squire, and Extreme, the producer/engineer who goes simply by the name Mack has made his living making superstars sound great. Having recorded so many big […]
Continue readingMany of you reading this may not be recording a trombone anytime soon, but I thought that this comparison of 9 different mics was interesting nonetheless. Paul The Trombonist played into a number of mics that varied greatly in price so you could hear the difference between them. There’s no conclusion on the video about […]
Continue readingAutopanners are pretty cool in that they can add motion to an element of a mix to make it more interesting. Most autopanners are pretty much a variation on the same theme however, going left to right at either a predetermined speed or dynamically induced by the program material. The new Waves Brauer Motion plugin […]
Continue readingVance Powell is one of the few engineers to make a successful transition from live sound to the studio. After serving as the chief engineer at Nashville’s acclaimed Blackbird Studios, Vance stepped out on his own with a string of Grammy awards from Jars of Clay, Buddy Guy, Chris Stapleton and The Raconteurs. Since then […]
Continue readingWe’re very used to creating artificial acoustic environments in mixing all the time, many times without actually thinking about how this new environment might actually interact with the voice or instrument in nature (although that shouldn’t be the case). Here’s a great video where you hear Joachim Mullner (also known as The Wikisinger) cleverly sing […]
Continue readingIf you’re recording a live performance, then you want to pick up some of the audience to make it sound realistic. Here are some techniques and considerations culled from the latest edition of my Recording Engineer’s Handbook. “Audience recording is both the key and the problem with live recording. It’s sometimes difficult to record the audience […]
Continue readingAbbey Road Studios senior engineer Sam Okell had the unenviable task of remixing one of the most listened to and beloved album of all time – the 50th anniversary release of The Beatles seminal Sgt Pepper. Sam and producer Giles Martin (son of original Beatles engineer George Martin) were tasked with a job that many […]
Continue readingSome microphones just don’t have enough output when you need it, causing you to crank up the preamp and the noise along with it. Cloud Microphones released a solution for this a few years ago with its Cloudlifter, and now it’s gone another step with its new Cloudlifter CL-Zi, which is finally shipping. The original […]
Continue readingMastering engineer Pete Doell was on the podcast a couple of years ago, but he has a brand new room at Aftermaster in Hollywood so I thought it would interesting to talk to him about how he put it together. We talked about gear, acoustics, and dealing with a room that he couldn’t change much […]
Continue readingI generally think that most high-end audio gear is pretty bogus (there are exceptions, of course), and that opinion comes from auditioning various equipment at hi-fi shows. Not the best place to listen, I agree, but in most cases things are so off that within the first 10 seconds of listening I know that there’s […]
Continue readingEngineer/producer Eddie Kramer has a resume that’s a mile long, but the credit that he’s forever tied to is Jimi Hendrix. I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time with him a few yeas ago, and he gave me this great interview for The Recording Engineer’s Handbook. Here’s an excerpt from his […]
Continue readingWhen building a studio without the help of a professional, most people are concerned with getting even absorption across the frequency spectrum. They don’t think about diffusion until later in the construction process, and then are shocked to discover that effective diffusors can take up more space than they were anticipating. Diffusors are important to […]
Continue readingOne of the byproducts of recording on tape is the fact that it added some glue to the mix that engineers have found lacking in the digital world. As a result, tape saturation plugins have become standard in many mixer’s plugin lists, and they’re getting more and more sophisticated every day. The latest tape emulator […]
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