First Take: By Musicians, for Musicians 

By Gino Robair

Since founding editor Craig Anderton launched EM more than 20 years ago, our primary objective has been to champion the do-it-yourself spirit in the personal studio. Over the years, EM has expanded its focus beyond kit-building projects to include all levels of audio production. And as new ways of working materialize, we’re here to help you, the musician, get a handle on them so you can fulfill your creative goals when they involve technology....

First Take: The Envelope, Please . . . 

By Gino Robair

The Editors’ Choice Awards issue is one of my favorites of the year. Although getting Electronic Musician’s editors and authors to agree on a list of winners is not trivial, the results are always exciting: it’s fun to see which of the hundreds of products released in a year make the final cut. ...

First Take: Surprise—It’s EM! 

By Gino Robair

You’ve probably noticed a few subtle tweaks to the look and feel of our magazine over the past few months (not to mention the increased presence of musicians on the cover)....

First Take: A Richer Experience 

By Gino Robair

The day after the 2008 Winter NAMM show ended, I participated in a direct-to-disc recording session at Infrasonic Sound in Los Angeles in preparation for writing the “Mastering Vinyl” feature (p. 54)....

Square One: Stereo Creativity 

By Dave Simons

One of the secrets to recording success is to avoid doing the usual thing, and rethinking your approach to stereo placement is a great place to start....

Sound Design Workshop: On the Bus 

By Eli Krantzberg

Here are some mix-altering sound-design techniques made possible by routing all tracks to a subgroup, which I'll call the master group, before they reach...

Fading Out Gracefully 

By David Battino

One of the secrets to making smooth audio edits is to cut on a zero-crossing, the point where the waveform crosses the centerline. Like many editors,...

Give Back 

By Tracy Katz

At a nickel or a dime apiece, blank CDs and DVDs are affordable enough to use and lose without much regret but not to the environment. Most of us already...

OverClocked ReMix 

By Tracy Katz

Do you live and breathe video games? If the answer is yes, put down that controller and head over to OverClocked ReMix (www.ocremix.org), a nonprofit,...

Pro/File: Live and Cinematic 

By Bill Murphy

Richard Linklater's 2006 film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly a jarring, rotoscope-animated view of the drug-addled future depicted by Philip K. Dick in...

Pro/File: Stark Lushness Illuminated 

By Diane Gershuny

Liz Pappademas's solo debut, 11 Songs, is gorgeous and lush in a sparse sort of way. The uncluttered arrangements and production allow her songwriting,...

Playing Concerts in Second Life 

By Jeff Klopmeyer

Picture this: you're at a gig, tuning up your guitar, when suddenly an 8-foot-tall, pointy-eared gothic elf flies into the room. He is greeted by a purple-skinned,...

Mastering Vinyl 

By Gino Robair

Nearly a quarter century after the CD was introduced, and kept alive in large part by club-based music, vinyl records are experiencing a resurgence in...

Making Tracks: Intelligent Harmonization 

By Michael Cooper

When trying to create a parallel diatonic harmony from a main melody, simple pitch transposition almost never works. That's because the transposition...

macProVideo.com Announces N.E.D. 2 

N.E.D. 2 is now available and fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)....

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) 

By Tracy Katz

In his lifetime, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen created hundreds of performable works in myriad musical genres, from serialism, point music, and...

Pro/File: No Barriers 

By Mike Levine

What do you get when you mix synthesizers, theremins, traditional folk instruments, and electronic drums with a multitalented, multicultural, classically...

Pro/File: Truly Hybrid 

By Diane Gershuny

White Williams is the alter ego of graphic designer Joe Williams, who recorded the CD Smoke (Tigerbeat6, 2007) over the past two years while living in...

Trade or Toss 

By Tracy Katz

The holiday season has come and gone, and if you're like most people, you're wondering what to do with that old piece of gear that you just replaced with...

Master Class: Scripting in Kontakt 3 

By Len Sasso

A brief spin through the factory instrument library reveals the power of the Kontakt Script Processor (KSP). All the factory instruments have performance...