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12 Tips for improving the quality of your recordings
1. When recording to digital – keep your levels a bit more conservative. Aim for -18dBFS when recording at 24-bit. And at 16-bit? Best to just stick to 24-bit. Don’t worry about levels looking low on the meters, and don’t worry about “having less bits available”. You’re still getting 21 bits, which is about the…
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Songwriting – can it be taught?
I just spent the weekend at a songwriting workshop by Jason Blume. It was awesome. This is the second one I’ve participated in, and to be honest because I’d helped organise my workplace to host the workshop, I got to go for free. I’d always been a bit hesitant about going along to workshops and…
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Getting creative with Multi-Band Compressors
What many people don’t realise is that conveniently bundled into each multi-band compressor is a multi-band crossover that splits the overall spectrum into two or more frequency bands – 4 or 5 bands are quite common nowadays. This gives us the ability to do some cool tricks in our digital audio workstation of choice. For…
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Making your own reverb Impulses
For those who aren’t in the know about Impulse or Convolution reverbs, they take a “snapshot” of the ambience of a room or other space (or even audio equipment) that can then be used within a specialised reverb plug-in. (eg Space Designer, Altiverb, Waves IR1, TL Space, Voxengo Pristine Space, SIR, Nebula) This gives a…
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Five Tips for increasing your Creativity
Creativity flourishes under arduous conditions It’s no secret that some of the most amazing ideas come out at the most stressful or restrictive times and places. History is full of amazing art and writings that came from the most desperate and depressing times. Even the most procrastinistic (is that even a word?) amongst us has…
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No bass out of your home stereo?
I don’t know how many times I visit friends’ places or go to parties and their stereo speakers are out of phase. Even worse – they don’t even seem notice how horrible they sound.They’re probably so used to it that they think that’s what the system’s MEANT to sound like. As an audio engineer, I…
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My Top 5 Essential Plugins
Everybody has their own favourites, and here’s mine right at the moment. (It may change next week!) Melodyne Plug-InBecause I write and produce completed demos so fast (up to a song a week for a quite a while), I’m often generating vocals from one pass. Or starting my song idea from a sung vocal.So Melodyne…