There’s been a lot of hits from the past that you continue to hear on the radio, but a perennial favorite is “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” from Blue Oyster Cult. The song comes from the band’s 1976 album Agents of Fortune album, where it hit #12 on the Billboard charts and has been around ever […]
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It happens to all of us. We’re trying to recording a sound source and for some reason it’s just not happening. What to do? It’s easy to just try a bunch of random things but sometimes that makes you more confused than ever. That’s when to try this following recording checklist when all else fails. […]
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Here’s a great piece of archival footage that shows the only film ever taken of the legendary Louis Armstrong in the studio. This was during the 1959 recording of the album Satchmo Plays King Oliver and it shows Armstrong and his All Stars recording the master take of “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” as well as silent footage […]
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My guest this week is Michael Perricone, who’s not only a movie and television re-recording mixer (mean post-production mixer), but a musician and screenwriter as well. Michael has worked on tons of movies and television shows, and has mixed a number of music episodes involving Heart, Cheap Trick, ZZ Top and many others as […]
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Those tiny Eurorack synth modules have been growing in popularity, going from a simple 10×20 foot booth down in the no-mans-land basement at NAMM to a huge pavilion on the main floor. While everyone loves hardware, for many of us its just impractical in our musical creation so the new Softube Modular Eurorack emulation plugin addresses […]
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“Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas has been burned into our minds thanks to 40 years of constant airplay, so it’s fun to listen inside the song to what’s really going on. Here’s its isolated guitar tracks, and you’ll be surprised with at least some of them. As with just about any hit, there’s […]
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A few months ago Avid proudly put out a press release about how they just hired 250 new employees to staff new facilities in the Philippines, Taiwan and Poland, and how they would save $68 million as a result. Oh, and by the way, that was at the expense of closing down offices and downsizing […]
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When signal processing is timed to the pulse of the track, everything in the mix sounds a lot smoother. This applies to compressors, delays, modulators, and especially reverb. One of the questions I get a lot is, “How do you time your reverb to the track?” There’s a step by step tutorial in my Audio Mixing […]
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Through the years Behringer has developed from a small company that copied successful products then pioneered making them China, to a powerhouse global brand. In fact, the company has grown into a holding company known as MUSIC, that controls not only Behringer, but well-respected brands like Midas, Klark Teknik, Turbosound and the TC Group (which itself […]
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My guest this week is musician, rapper and entrepreneur Chris Greenwood, who goes by the stage name of Manafest. Chris has released 8 critically acclaimed studio albums that have either won or been nominated for a host of GMA and Juno awards, and he’s self-financed his last 3 projects with crowdfunding campaigns. Chris has also […]
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Every songs wants a signature sound and as a result, we often spend days at a time in the studio searching for just the right one to put a stamp on a recording. The one cool thing is about some of the latest electronic plugins and pedals is that it’s getting easier and easier to […]
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How many times have you heard a cover band play Stevie Wonder’s seminal “Superstition” and think, “That doesn’t sound like the record.” One of the reasons why is because there’s more than one clavinet on the track, a fact that’s usually overlooked by the band. In fact, according to Bob Margouleff (who recorded and co-produced the […]
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I’ve always been a huge Who fan and just as big a fan of producer Glyn Johns work. This video is from an interview at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, November 19, 2012, and focuses on the recording of the seminal Who’s Next. What’s especially interesting is how many of the main parts in […]
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One of the things about having your own studio is that you can do a project at your own pace. The problem there is that some artists never know when to declare a production finished and they end up with “the project that never ends,” literally spending years on it. Here’s an excerpt from the upcoming […]
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The Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, loved to double track vocals but hated the act of doing it. Not only that, back in the 4 and 8 track days, the doubled vocal would take up a track that could have been used for another element of the production. That’s why Abbey Road chief engineer, […]
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