Whether you’re a guitar or bass player or someone that records them, the one thing that you must deal with almost on a minute by minute basis is tuning. With the proliferation of inexpensive clip-on tuners like the Snark, tuning is less of a problem than ever, but there’s still the manual factor involved where […]
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My guest this week is award-winning sound designer and mixer Mike Rodriguez, who was another of my first guests when I started my Inner Circle Podcast 4 years ago. He was originally on episode #14. Mike is a senior audio mixer at Trailer Park in Los Angeles where he mixes everything from commercials to television […]
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I think most of us that play a stringed instrument love instruments of all types, but given a choice, will always pick a vintage instrument over a new one. While it’s true that new instruments are generally better in build quality than old ones in terms of consistency thanks to new computer controlled routing machines, […]
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One of the most overlooked or taken for granted elements in mixing is panorama, or the act of placing a sound element in the soundfield. To understand panorama we must first understand that the stereo sound system (which is two separate audio channels, each with its own speaker) represents sound spatially. Panning lets us select […]
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Gospel music has had a huge influence on American popular music, although the average consumer might not be aware of it. The music of such music giants as B.B. King, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston, just to name a few, have been anchored by their roots in the church. For musicians not directly connected to that rich history, […]
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Since the mid-1970’s, if you wanted an electric guitar string to sustain forever you turned to an Ebow, the ingenious handheld device that virtually every major artist has used on a recording at some point (case in point, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia bought the very first one). If you wanted that sound, the Ebow […]
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Gary Lux is one of Hollywood’s premier music mixers with literally thousands of projects to his credit with major artists like Usher, Keith Urban, Sting, Ben Harper, Janet Jackson and Rob Thomas. Before going independent in 1988, Gary was the head music mixer for Universal Studios, where he garnered two Emmy Award nominations for his […]
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Concert sound systems have grown in scope over the years and are truly marvels in analog and digital electronics and acoustics. They’ve never been more powerful and more controllable, and our understanding of their use has never been better. That said, even the most sophisticated sound system of today still has a ways to go […]
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One of the hardest things to record can be a vocalist who is not comfortable with the studio conditions. Even a seasoned pro sometimes can’t do his or her best unless the conditions are just right. Consider some of these suggestions culled from the 4th edition of my Recording Engineer’s Handbook before and during a […]
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Considering the giant influence that British music had on America in the 1960s and 70s, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when American instruments were banned by the British government. This forced English musicians to use a wide range of other Euro-based guitars and somewhat explains why many of our guitar heros […]
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When you need a box to do something that no one has thought of yet, you can be sure it will be soon available from the clever boffins at Radial Engineering. In this case, with backing tracks becoming such a big part of many artist’s live performances, adding a separate mixer onstage just for that […]
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My guest this week is composer, sound designer, musician and technologist Nick Peck. For the last 20 years Nick has been a sound designer and audio director for interactive projects and games at Skywalker Sound, Activision, Lucasarts, and now at Disney Publishing Worldwide. Nick runs the audio department at Disney that handles sound design, music […]
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Everything has a resonant frequency, even the human body. In fact, strange things happen when the the resonant point of a particular body organ occurs. All of these resonant frequencies are in the infrasonic range, meaning they’re below the point of natural hearing under 20Hz and appear more as clicks rather than a steady tone. […]
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Best known for his work the hard rock bands Dio, Dokken, Foreigner, Bad Company and Great White, engineer Wyn Davis style in that genre is as unmistakable as it is masterful. From his Total Access Recording studio in Redondo Beach, California, Wyn’s work typifies old-school engineering coupled with the best of modern techniques. Here’s an excerpt […]
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If you’re not a drummer or percussionist, thinking about a rhythm, especially a complex one, can easily result in your brain boiling over while trying to understand it. This TED-Ed video by John Varney provides a new way of looking at different rhythms that makes the pursuit much easier and enjoyable. In standard notation, rhythm […]
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