Archive
Monthly Archives: January 2017
Monthly Archives: January 2017
We pretty much know about life in the studio around us, but how different is it in other countries? My former assistant Joshua F Williams has been one of the top engineer/producers in the Middle East for the past 10 years, and he’ll tell us what the music scene is like in the Dubai area […]
Continue readingAll of us know that animals respond to music (my cats Roger and Chloe love to hang with me when I mix), but are there certain genres that they like better? A new study by the University of Glasgow in conjunction with the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals found out that shelter […]
Continue readingIt looks like the days of the floor monitor are numbered as the live gig world quickly adapts to in-ear monitoring, something that the concert industry embraced many ears ago. Today IEMs are priced within reach of just about any gigging musician, but what really holds back many players from jumping in is the complicated […]
Continue readingLady Gaga’s debut album was a worldwide smash, and the 5th single off the record, “Paparazzi” continued a streak of hit singles that would last for years. The song was written by Gaga and former manager Rob Fusari, who also co-produced the track. The mix was done by Robert Orton and mastered by Gene Grimaldi at Oasis […]
Continue readingIt’s tough out there for songwriters and composers of every genre. There’s more competition than ever, thanks to better training and the proliferation of home studios, so the last thing that’s needed is another obstacle to go up against. That’s why the rise in A.I. composed music (meaning by artificial intelligence) is so disconcerting. Most of us […]
Continue readingToday is the final installment of my Winter NAMM overview, and we’ll look at a few very cool products, but mostly at the oddities of the show. As you may know, downstairs in Hall E is where the newer companies and first time exhibitors dwell – the “mad inventors” as we like to call them.As […]
Continue readingThe Winter NAMM show is always the one exhibition of the year to look forward to. Not only are some manufacturers now skipping AES in favor of NAMM, but it’s so much more fun and colorful, as musical celebs seem to be everywhere. Here’s a report from the show, from the big picture point of […]
Continue readingYesterday was a lot of fun looking at some of the major items that caught my eye at NAMM, but today we’ll look at some of the other audio products. Once again, this is in no particular order. Digigrid displayed a couple of audio interfaces called M Cube that allow you to connect to a computer […]
Continue readingWinter NAMM just ended and as usual there’s a lot to talk about. I’ll be covering the various new products and oddities over the next few days, as well as a big picture overview on my podcast.The show was generally filled with enthusiasm and everyone was feeling pretty prosperous. Hope it stays that way in […]
Continue readingThere are some songs that get ingrained in rock n’ roll memory and become classics, and The Clash’s “London Calling” certainly fits that bill. It’s always a great treat to hear inside a song as there’s usually much more happening than we’re aware of in the full mix, and this song is no exception. Have a […]
Continue readingFor 82 years Gibson made guitars a mandolins at the factory on 225 Parson’s Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 1984 the company moved all of its manufacturing to Nashville, but the skilled workers there still continued to make guitars just as they always had, only now under the name Heritage Guitars. Now the old factory is […]
Continue readingMany delay plugins today are either trying to directly emulate tape delay or have a tape delay setting. Setting up a tape delay used to be one of the first things you learned how to do when you started in the studio back in the day, since there was no other way to accomplish the […]
Continue readingiZotope’s Neutron is one of the new generation of DAW plugins that analyze the program audio and then make some pretty good suggestions as to the EQ and compression that will work for the track. Many engineers find this somewhat disconcerting, and are maybe a little intimidated by it, while others embrace it as just […]
Continue readingMost people (even many audio engineers) don’t realize that the sound effects that they hear in a movie aren’t real. They’re recreated to sound more dramatic or “more real” than they actually sound. That’s the job of the Foley artist, and there aren’t many of them, even in Hollywood. The process is named after Jack […]
Continue readingOne of the problems with audio interfaces is they just don’t have enough I/O sometimes. Most interfaces are either 8 or 16 channels, which is plenty in some cases and not enough in others. While the price for a single 16 channel interface might seem reasonable, when you put two of them together to meet your […]
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