Producers and engineers are constantly trying to come up with something new when mixing their latest creation. To that end, they invest in plug-in and...
Formants are usually associated with vowel sounds; they are the natural resonances of the vocal tract that give vowels their character. Acoustic instruments...
Horticulturalist Luther Burbank is credited with defining a weed as any plant that is growing in the wrong place. In that same spirit, one could consider...
You can think of a vocoder as a morphing multiband equalizer, in which the morphing is controlled by a spectral analyzer. Typically, speech (called the...
If you're skilled at composing, arranging, and producing, there's money to be made writing music for advertising. As with television and film scoring,...
Imagine spending an entire week working on a critically important music project. You toil day and night orchestrating, programming, and recording. You...
What's the question that musicians hear the least? No, it isn't Is that the trombone player's Porsche? It's How'd you get that nice pad? One of the most...
If you're thinking about buying your first set of dedicated studio monitors or about upgrading the ones you have, it can be daunting to try to assimilate...
You can often use several instances of the same plug-in to achieve realistic-sounding effects. The cumulative result of serial processing with subtle...
In an ideal world, every musician would have professionally printed, slick-looking labels for the CDs and DVDs they record. But the reality is that when...
When Mackie unveiled Tracktion in 2004, more than a few industry veterans scratched their heads in perplexity. There were already several good digital...
A couple of years ago, on the advice of famed producer Byron Gallimore, I began tracking my country-music song demos in Nashville. My Oregon-based studio...
We've all heard it: If you want to do a job right, use the right tool for the job. If your job is to record something, your main tool is the microphone....
When we think of stereo recording, left/right stereo typically comes to mind: two independent channels of audio, one carrying information from the left...
Your mouse and keyboard provide a great degree of precision, control, and accuracy for interfacing with your DAW. Hardware control surfaces, with their...
As a saxophonist, the first time I heard a keyboardist use LFO vibrato I almost choked. That was a long time ago, but in most synth patches, the LFO is...
Several months ago, this column looked at how to leverage your recording smarts into technical-writing gigs (see Working Musician: Landing the Write Job...
In Ableton Live, each audio or MIDI clip that you place in a Session view slot contains a list of options that dictate what will happen after the clip...
In the late '80s and early '90s, rap music and hip-hop culture were slowly working their way into the fabric of mainstream America. With acts like Jazzy...
Most DAWs have two kinds of automation: time based and clip based. Time-based automation is tied to the DAW's timeline, whereas clip-based automation...
Timing Is Everything
A New Look at Vocoding
Jingles All the Way
Better Safe Than Sorry
The Art of the Pad
Listening to Monitors
Xtreme Processing
Label Enablers
Gaining Tracktion
Hired Guns
Vive la Différence
Front and Center
(Not Quite) Random Notes
On His Own Terms
Enveloping Strategies
