New Music Gear Monday: Abbey Road Studio 3 Headphone Reference Plugin

Everyone knows how difficult it is to actually mix on headphones. Since the drivers are so close to your ears, you lose the sense of space that you get with speakers, which means that some of your balance, panning and low-end decisions can be out of wack with what you hear on a pair of […]

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Music In 10 Years, Tinnitus, Pro Tools Computers, And Primephonic CEO Thomas Steffens On My Latest Podcast.

My guest on the podcast this week is the CEO of Primphonic, Thomas Steffens. Primephonic is a music streaming service dedicated to keeping classical music alive and serving the needs of the classical music consumer.  Most streaming networks are geared towards modern pop music and don’t serve classical well. It’s difficult to find what you want, and labels, […]

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Here’s What An 80 Inch Gong Sounds Like

A gong is a wonderful percussion instruments with a lineage that goes back centuries in most countries of Asia. It’s a member of the bell family, made from bronze or brass alloy, and has a wonderful unmistakingly unique sound. What you might not know is that there is a such a thing as a “Gong […]

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Is Mastering An Endangered Audio Job?

Mastering engineers are some of my favorite people in the music business and many of the best are friends that I speak with frequently. One subject that’s been coming up more and more in conversation is how much that business has changed, and that work is getting much harder to find. It’s No Surprise This […]

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Building The “World’s Second Best Speakers”

All of us have embarked on a do-it-yourself project from time to time, sometimes out of necessity when money is tight, sometimes to try to improve a piece of gear we already own, and sometimes just for fun. If that describes you, here’s a project that you might want to try building – something that’s […]

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New Music Gear Monday: United Plugins FireCobra Enhancer Plugin

Track enhancer plugins are all the rage these days and most of them do a great job of making a track or mix sound more alive. A new enhancer with a different approach is the FireCobra from United Plugins, which features a very unique user interface. The FireCobra is a fairly simple plugin with an […]

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New Billboard Charts, Smuggling With Speaker Cabinets, And Smart Studio’s Jim Dunne On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Jim Dunne, founder and senior acoustic consultant of the ground-breaking Smart Studio, which completely disrupts how recording studios and dubbing theaters have been built. Smart Studio supplies a modular system that provides not only isolation but excellent acoustic design. Jim has over 30 years experience in the acoustics and noise control […]

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The 4 Reasons To Add Reverb To A Track

Like many other aspects to mixing, the use of reverb is frequently either overlooked or misunderstood. Reverb is sometimes added to a track to create width and depth, but also to dress up an otherwise boring sound. The real secret is how much to use and how to adjust its various parameters. When you get […]

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Reconstructing Notre-Dame Cathedral’s Famed Acoustics

The recent Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in Paris was devastating, but work is now well underway for a complete reconstruction. Over a billion Euros have been pledged for the rebuild, and 40 teams of workers under the watchful eyes of 4 lead architects are now on-site. But as fighting over how much to modernize rages on […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Kazrog True Iron Transformer Emulation Plugin

One of the things that automatically happened during the old days of analog “big iron” consoles is that you got heft and weight in your recordings almost without trying. We can still get that today in our home digital worlds, but it takes a bit more of an effort to get there. That’s why whenever […]

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Music Publishing Revenue, Universal Vault Fire, And Female Musician’s Academy’s Bree Noble On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Bree Noble, who is a champion for women in music thanks to her Female Entrepreneur Musician Podcast and Female Musician Academy.  Bree quit her corporate job as a Director of Finance at a top opera company to pursue a successful run as a touring singer/songwriter where she won several songwriting and artist awards […]

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The History Of The Focusrite Studio Console

We all know Focusrite for building great computer interfaces, mic preamps and channel strips, but not everyone is aware of the company’s history building state-of-the-art consoles. Founded by none other than Rupert Neve after he left his namesake company, Focusrite didn’t build many consoles, but the ones that were built are highly prized and most […]

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Miking Horns With Trumpet Legend Jerry Hey

Engineers that don’t work with horn players much often don’t understand the difficulties or the technique for getting a great sound. Here’s an interview with Jerry Hey, who may be the most widely recorded horn player ever, from my Studio Musician’s Handbook that explains things from the player’s point of view. Bobby Owsinski: I understand that you have […]

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Finally, A Great Sounding Concert – Thanks ELO!

If you’ve following this blog for any length of time you know that I pretty much stopped going to concerts because most sounded so bad. It’s like an entire generation of FOH mixers learned (incorrectly) that the most important thing on stage was the kick drum. Well, I finally heard a great one at the […]

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New Music Gear Monday: DPA 4097 CORE Supercardioid Choir Mic

I like gear that’s build with a singular purpose in mind. Not because it’s fun to find alternate uses for (which it is), but because that one application is usually much easier to deal with when using that product. With that thought in mind, the new DPA 4097 CORE mic touches all those bases as […]

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