My guest today is engineer Gary Noble, who has won 3 Grammys and been nominated 18 times for his mixing and recording work. Gary’s credits include Amy Winehouse, Jesse J, Nas, Josh Stone, Fugees, Wyclef Jon and many more. Gary will share his tips about making electronic tracks sound real, getting the best sound from […]
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One of the problems with building a studio in your house or garage is that when you move it can’t go with you. You’ve spent a lot of dough on something that mostly likely the next owner won’t appreciate, and you’ll have to do it all over again in your next house. A way around […]
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It’s inevitable. No matter how many times you’ve built a studio, you have that “Oops, I forgot,” moment at the end. If you’re lucky, it’s something that isn’t major, but a lot of people have been known to do things they’re sorry for later like close up walls before installing the electrical or the mic […]
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Producer/engineer Sylvia Massy is well-known for creating outside-the-box recording techniques, and one of them is the “Dick Mic.” Essentially it’s a mic positioned in the middle of the drum kit and pointed at the drummer’s crotch. It’s used to fill out the sound of the kit, only it provides a somewhat closer sound than a […]
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Working with a mouse or trackball is second nature for some people, and torture for others. As a result, a number of different types of controllers have come to market recently, but most center around the fader, with other functions being secondary. The fact of the matter is that we use all those other functions […]
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If you ever watched Live From Daryl’s House (which is a favorite of so many musicians), you probably have a lot of questions about the show. I was lucky enough to have the show’s musical director, guitarist Shane Theriot, on my latest podcast to pull back the curtain on how the show is done (and […]
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Musicians have been trying to figure out the first chord to The Beatles Hard Day’s Night every since the song came out. Most get it wrong because there’s more going on than you think. The mystery might finally be solved however. A few years ago, Randy Bachman (of The Guess Who and BTO fame) had […]
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With a who’s who list of credits such as Queen, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Rory Gallagher, Sparks, Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Billy Squire, and Extreme, the producer/engineer who goes simply by the name Mack has made his living making superstars sound great. Having recorded so many big […]
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Many of you reading this may not be recording a trombone anytime soon, but I thought that this comparison of 9 different mics was interesting nonetheless. Paul The Trombonist played into a number of mics that varied greatly in price so you could hear the difference between them. There’s no conclusion on the video about […]
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Autopanners are pretty cool in that they can add motion to an element of a mix to make it more interesting. Most autopanners are pretty much a variation on the same theme however, going left to right at either a predetermined speed or dynamically induced by the program material. The new Waves Brauer Motion plugin […]
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Vance Powell is one of the few engineers to make a successful transition from live sound to the studio. After serving as the chief engineer at Nashville’s acclaimed Blackbird Studios, Vance stepped out on his own with a string of Grammy awards from Jars of Clay, Buddy Guy, Chris Stapleton and The Raconteurs. Since then […]
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We’re very used to creating artificial acoustic environments in mixing all the time, many times without actually thinking about how this new environment might actually interact with the voice or instrument in nature (although that shouldn’t be the case). Here’s a great video where you hear Joachim Mullner (also known as The Wikisinger) cleverly sing […]
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If you’re recording a live performance, then you want to pick up some of the audience to make it sound realistic. Here are some techniques and considerations culled from the latest edition of my Recording Engineer’s Handbook. “Audience recording is both the key and the problem with live recording. It’s sometimes difficult to record the audience […]
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Abbey Road Studios senior engineer Sam Okell had the unenviable task of remixing one of the most listened to and beloved album of all time – the 50th anniversary release of The Beatles seminal Sgt Pepper. Sam and producer Giles Martin (son of original Beatles engineer George Martin) were tasked with a job that many […]
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Some microphones just don’t have enough output when you need it, causing you to crank up the preamp and the noise along with it. Cloud Microphones released a solution for this a few years ago with its Cloudlifter, and now it’s gone another step with its new Cloudlifter CL-Zi, which is finally shipping. The original […]
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