Back in the 1970s, many recording studios chose to build their own consoles rather than purchase one from Neve or API. These one-offs often sounded much better than the production units by the big manufacturers, and helped these studios crank out the hits, and as you’d expect, most have been modeled into a plugin already. […]
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Despite what you might think, there is no standard mix element to start and build a mix from. Modern mixers employ various techniques and they’re all valid, especially in different genres of music. For instance, here are the places from which a mix can be started: Then there are some mixers that just push up […]
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In this week’s podcast episode, I sat down with two legends of the rock and classical music worlds, conductor Brad Thachuk and guitarist Steve Thachuk. Brad and Steve are the founders of Gravel Museum Music, an organization dedicated to preserving the rich legacy of rock music in the concert hall by presenting the repertoire with […]
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It doesn’t matter whether you’re working with real drums, samples or loops, getting the pitch right on the drums is critical to how the song ultimately sounds. That can be a hassle though, so much so that some songs are built around the drum pitch rather than the other way around. On big budget sessions […]
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In this week’s podcast episode, I sit down with audio legend George Massenburg, who’s a Grammy-winning producer, engineer, and educator. He has also worked with some of the biggest names in the industry, such as Earth, Wind & Fire, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, The Grateful Dead, and Phil Collins. A gifted audio designer, […]
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Transient shapers have become valuable tools for mixers ever since SPL first released their hardware unit a few decades ago. Today there are numerous plugins from various manufacturers and they all have basically the same parameter controls, which, while easy to use, also sometimes fall short when small adjustments are required. The new Trinity Shaper […]
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There was a time when the music industry rushed to replace magnetic tape with a digitized version of the media stored on hard drives. It sounded like a good idea at the time, since a hard drive took up way less space than their tape-based counterparts, but 30+ years down the road we’re finding that […]
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In this week’s podcast episode, I sat down with the founder and director of the metadata management company Noctil, Jacob Varghese. Jacob has over 24 years of experience leading complex technology projects in the telecom, media, and entertainment industries with Fortune 500 companies. When Jacob entered the music business, he wanted to solve technical challenges […]
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It’s hard to believe but there was a time during the early DAW days when there was no such thing as a monitor controller. You either used a console or kluged together an extra master fader in the DAW in order to control the level of your monitors, which was very clunky indeed. Today just […]
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We all love top 10 lists no matter what they’re about, but when it comes to guitar-based music, we usually see things like top 10 best guitar players. Billboard Magazine decided to go in a different direction though. It put out a Top 100 Best Guitars article that looks at the guitars made famous by […]
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In this week’s podcast episode, I sat down with someone you’ve already met before (in fact, he was one of the first people I interviewed on my podcast, specifically in episode 51), the amazing Mark Schulman. Mark is a world-class drummer and motivational speaker. He has played with rock n’ roll royalty, manning the drum […]
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I can remember a time when we never even considered putting a compressor on the mix buss except for a quick check of how a mix might sound on the radio, but those days passed as soon as SSL introduced its famed mix buss compressor on its consoles. Today it’s a given that you’ll use […]
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When I first came to Los Angeles I worked for an audio dealer who represented a computer notation device call the McClayvier. Music copying was all done manually in those days, and there were 3 and 4 story buildings on the film studio lots just filled with people copying music all day. Being able to […]
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In this week’s podcast episode, I sit down with the co-founders of Neural DSP, Doug Castro and Francisco Cresp. For those who aren’t aware, Neural DSP manufactures the highly regarded Quad Cortex amplifier modeler as well as a line of modeling plugins. Even though Neural DSP is located in Finland, both Doug and Francisco are […]
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It’s not uncommon for musicians with home studios to record everything with a single cardioid microphone. That can lead to a frequency buildup that must be tamed in order to keep the mix from sounding muddy. It appears that Shure has recognized this and has designed its new SM4 microphone to help counter that problem. […]
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