There once was a time when an engineer didn’t feel comfortable unless there were faders in front of him or her. Those days have largely passed since now even hardened “classic” engineers are okay with a wide range of controllers. Still, there are those times when having even one fader can be useful, and the […]
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Label exec Shan Dan Horan has spent the last 10 years breaking bands during his time at Century Media Records, then as president of Artery Recordings. He’s now the head of Outerloop Records and still has a huge passion not only for finding and breaking new artists and bands, but helping ones he doesn’t sign […]
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Taking a new electric guitar and making it look old, or “relicing,” has been around for a while and is not without controversy. Is it being done to fool people into thinking that’s it’s an original model so they’ll pay more? Is it to replicate the feel of an older instrument? It’s had a lot […]
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Many artists at varying levels of success put little thought into their stage presentation, and it shows. It’s a rare performer that can captivate an audience by his or her performance alone, and most audiences, even on a club level, expect to be entertained on multiple levels these days. In the following excerpt from my How […]
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The digital world that we live in presents a big problem for artists, labels, producers, engineers, and session players, and that’s getting paid and receiving credit for the work they’ve created. Even though a song is being streamed from the likes of Spotify, Apple Music or any of the other dozens of streaming platforms doesn’t […]
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One of the things that most of us hate about the studio is having to connect gear via a patchbay. It’s a necessary evil that’s been with us since the phone company started about a hundred years ago, but it’s prone to corroded connections, intermittent patch cords, and general time-consuming setup on a large session. […]
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Imagine that you’ve been given the task of taking the vocal from an album by one of the biggest artists of all times and tasked with putting more modern music around it, but you have to make it as seamless as possible. That’s what influential Nashville engineer Ed Seay did in working on a new […]
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It often happens that we read about a great studio somewhere in the world, and most of us are interested to see what it looks like inside. The problem is that a Google search will find us some pictures that usually don’t give us a feel for what the facility and the people that run […]
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One of the things I’ve found over the years is that it’s easy to interpret the demands of a client during a mix if you understand what they’re trying to get across. It’s amazing how just a single word can describe a frequency condition if we know what to listen for. That said, it’s sometimes […]
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One thing that musicians and producers alike forever longed for was software that would separate a mix into its vital instrumental and vocal parts. We’ve had this available for a few years now, but the next step is extracting different sounds from a video by pointing on the part of the screen that we want […]
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For about 20 years the Yamaha NS-10 was the standard monitor found in almost any studio. An untold number of hits were recorded on the speakers during that time, so it came as a major shock when Yamaha discontinued the model in 2001 as the wood pulp used in making the drivers became more difficult […]
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My guest on the podcast this week is engineer Clark Germain, who started in the business doing live sound around Hollywood for the likes of X, Circle Jerks, Agent Orange and Social Distortion to name a few. Eventually he began working at some of Hollywoods most prestigious studios, gaining credits on records by Michael Jackson, […]
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Guitarist Hank Marvin has been a huge influence on top British guitar players like Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler and Jeff Beck, who in turn became huge influencers on generations of guitar players that followed them. While Hank is a great player, one of the things that separates him from everyone else is the unique ambience […]
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Happy July 4th to all my American friends. To my readers from other parts of the world, nothing signifies this holiday celebrating the birth of our nation like the John Philips Sousa march “Stars And Stripes Forever.” It caps off our holiday festivities amid great fanfare and fireworks, especially when played well. No one plays […]
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Our electronic lives are based around a piece of electronics that most of us take for granted until it stops working. That’s the hard drive that stores all the data that we base our music around. The hard drive is an extremely complex piece of gear both electronically and mechanically though, and just how much […]
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