Time for the next chapter in the tracking of The Ballad of Stumpy Ron. Tonight I worked on tracking the bass. My goal was to get a very solid bass tone that would add the needed beef to the mix without cutting through too much or obscuring the guitars. To [...] Read more »
POD X3 Live Patches: Tracking Guitars for “Stumpy Ron”
I’m currently working on recording final tracks for a song titled The Ballad of Stumpy Ron. The overall sound and feel of the song draw heavily on Black Sabbath but fall somewhere between there and Wolfmother. My new POD X3 heavily influenced my approach for tracking this song. I decided [...] Read more »
Line 6 brings it with TonePort UX8
Even more great stuff is coming soon from Line 6. I’ve using the TonePort UX2 for a few years now. It is a great unit for quickly capturing quality tracks without fussing with a bunch of setup. Using a mixer with a conventional soundcard is a necessity to minimize setup [...] Read more »
Taming Vocals: Compressors In Series
Taming vocals can be a very tough job. I have a few techniques that I use based on the song I’m mixing and the vocalist on record. A few ways to tame a vocalist are “riding” the fader, compressors, other dynamics processors, EQ, and even reverb. Sometimes you will use [...] Read more »
Cakewalk SONAR 7 PE includes Boost 11
I’m not a regular Cakewalk user but if I had to find a new DAW as a home, that DAW would be SONAR 7. It is not version 7.0 specifically, I have been a fan of Cakewalk’s workflow since Pro Audio 9.0 (prior versions were just too wonky). Cakewalk are [...] Read more »
Getting The Late 80s CD Sound (Part 3)
Continued from Getting The Late 80s CD Sound (Part 2) Step 8: Boosting Levels Using Multiband Compression The master should be sounding pretty good at this point. The only thing left is to get a little more consistency across frequency bands. Add the Waves L3 MultiMaximizer to your track right [...] Read more »
Getting The Late 80s CD Sound (Part 2)
Continued from Getting The Late 80s CD Sound (Part 1) Step 5: Mastering Reverb In Ozone 3 A mastering reverb can really help tie your mix together and put a nice polish on it. Mastering reverb is quite a bit different from track reverb. The goal of track reverb is [...] Read more »
Getting The Late 80s CD Sound (Part 1)
The Modern Mastering series focused, as its name implies, on a very modern sound. This is great for mastering metal, rock, pop, dance, and other very modern styles, but it is not really what you would want for some more down to earth styles. I recently worked on a bluegrass [...] Read more »
Modern Mastering (Part 2)
Continued from Modern Mastering Part 1 STEP 6: Multiband Compression Add the Waves Linear Multiband processor to the track right after the REQ4. Click the Load button on the LinMB interface and choose Basic Multi from the drop down list. Play your entire track without stopping playback. You now have [...] Read more »
Modern Mastering (Part 1)
Modern music has a mastering style with a very limited dynamic range. Limited dynamic range does not mean the music has limited range. This modern mastering style just means the quiet parts are nearly as loud as the loud parts. Psycho-acoustically, our ears and minds can still tell the difference [...] Read more »