So, you want to record yourself, your band, or someone else at home. You have never recorded anything on a computer and are not sure where to start. The first thing you want to do is ignore everything complex and simply try to get used to the idea of recording [...] Read more »
Mix Recipes: Bass EQ and Compression
The bass guitar is an important element of every contemporary mix even though it rarely plays a prominent role. Sometimes the bass is felt rather than heard while other mixes have the bass in a much more audible sonic space. Your home recording studio is well equipped to shape your [...] Read more »
Vocal mixing: silence is golden
There are a lot of little noises that can sneak in between phrases. These extra noises are not noticed while the vocalist is singing but you don’t want to hear bleed from headphones, rustling paper, or any other distractions in between. It is quite common in the home recording studio [...] Read more »
What is latency? (and why you don’t care)
Latency is a word you hear thrown around the digital audio world quite a bit. A lot of people use the word latency to mean a lot of different things, and often are not clear on what it does actually mean or how it will affect their home studio workflow. [...] Read more »
Connect your home studio using a small mixer
Your home studio is a place for you to exercise your creativity. Often this must be squeezed between going to work, taking out the garbage, getting the kids to bed on time, and sleeping once in a while. You don’t want to spend a lot of time wiring gear together [...] Read more »
Gearbox Plugin Silver $99, OVER
The Musician’s Friend stupid deal of the day for today is the Line 6 GearBox Plug-In Silver Bundle. This is a VST and AU compatible plugin that gets you the sounds of Line 6 POD, Bass POD, and even a half dozen vocal preamps all within your DAW software of [...] Read more »
FX Tips – EQ: Mixing with high pass filters
A high pass filter is a type of equalizer that eliminates frequencies below a specified cutoff point. Since it is low frequencies that are removed, only high frequencies may pass (thus the name). You might also hear high pass filters (HPF) referred to as low cut filters which is a [...] Read more »
FX Tips – EQ: How to sweep an eq
We’ve all heard stories of the mystically powerful pro audio engineers who can listen to a mix and happily announce, “the guitars have too much 1k on them.” Or perhaps a nonchalant declaration, “the snare would really come alive with a little boost in the 3k range.” This is great [...] Read more »
Turn a mono track into rich stereo
Ever wanted to give a lush stereo effect to a mono track? You can resort to using a stereo imaging plugin but the effect can leave a lot to be desired. There is actually a very simple way to turn a mono track into a rich stereo sound in your [...] Read more »
Mixing Theory: Why can’t I hear everything?
How do you think about a mix? In conversations with other musicians who don’t do much mixing I often find they think about mixes in a very linear fashion. Mixes are anything but linear in nature. This article presents a non-linear way to visualize a mix. The concept can be [...] Read more »