The House passed a tax bill last week ostensibly to reduce the amount that the average person pays, but I think most Americans are looking at it as help for corporations and the wealthy and not so much for everyone else. According to the provisions of the bill, musicians would be especially hard hit. As […]
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I remember watching Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Ferrell manipulate his own echo effects on stage by manually controlling a Roland Space Echo. It was pretty cool sounding, but a bit clunky looking, and he it did it like that for his entire career. If you’re a singer that wants the ability to control your own […]
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My guest on this week’s podcast is Mastering engineer John Greenham, who has won 3 Grammy’s and been nominated for 6 others. His client list includes work for Katy Perry, Mary J Blige, Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez, Sam Smith and many more. We spoke at length about mastering via phone from his studio in in […]
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Just when you think you’ve heard every musical instrument there is you find that there’s one more. Don’t feel bad though, since no one has heard an aulos in more than 2,000 years. Only 5 complete original instruments are known to currently exist. The aulos is a double pipe with a reed at the top […]
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Many musicians, producers and engineers fight with the click track for various reasons, but most of the time it’s because the player just can’t hear it in a way that’s conducive to playing in the pocket. Here are 6 tips from the 2nd edition of my Music Producer’s Handbook (previously posted on my Big Picture blog) about […]
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Many of us have run our DAWs on Mac computers for a long time, and most of us have been frustrated by the fact that Apple hasn’t updated their flagship desktop Mac Pro in a long time. As a result, many of us (myself included) have migrated to an iMac as a powerful, compact, and […]
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As I’ve written before, there’s no need to do specific mixes for streaming services like Spotify, since most labels and aggregators like TuneCore will submit a 44.1kHz/16 bit file anyway. Plus, the streaming services do their own encoding and normalization, so there’s no benefit in doing it yourself. That said, it’s always good to know what […]
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Musicpreneur Hub is a global community of music entrepreneurs where you can ask anything about music and your question will be connected with handpicked, top industry experts to answer. Tommy Darker is a musician, lecturer at the University of Westminster, speaker at global music conferences, and the founder of that great music resource site. I […]
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We all know that music is a series of vibrations, but we hear those effects and generally don’t see them. What if we could see them though? That’s what the science of Cymatics is all about. It allows us to see those audio vibrations, and the results are surprisingly orderly and beautiful. In this excellent […]
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I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately asking how one goes about becoming a studio musician, so I thought that this excerpt from my Studio Musician’s Handbook (written with ace bass player and good buddy Paul ILL) might be appropriate. It’s about the 16 ways playing in the studio is different than playing live. […]
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You wouldn’t always know it by the number of clams that fellow musicians make onstage sometimes, but a recent study has found that musicians have better memories than non-musicians. This includes what’s known as “working memory” as well as short and long term memory. Working memory is the ability to retain information at the same time […]
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about everyone has a 500 series rack these days, but we usually load them with the same three categories of modules – preamps, EQs, and compressors. Audified might change your mind about what else you can load into your rack with the release of its new Synergy R1 500 series reverb module. The R1 is […]
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Recently Harman International decided to close its AKG Vienna operation, which was a real shame after 70 years of being an industry leader in microphone and headphone technology (I bet you have at least 1 AKG product in your audio toolbox). Usually a closure like that means that a lot of good people and industrial […]
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The Reverb.com gear site seemed to come out of nowhere and usurp eBay as the most used place online to buy and trade instruments and audio gear. Since it’s launch in 2013, the site has grown in leaps and bounds to the point where sales are expected to reach $429 million this year, according to the […]
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Over the years I’ve learned that there are a number of very simple items that I must bring to every recording session I go to just to be sure that my time in the studio is productive and comfortable. These items aren’t expensive, and while they may not be quite as important as your favorite mics […]
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