Author: zed

  • Review – the UAD Apollo Duo

    UAD Apollo under laptop with heaps of UAD plug-ins showing It’s no secret I’ve been a fan of UAD since I purchased the little UAD-2 Solo/Laptop card. Since the Solo has only one of the SHARC plug-in processing chips in it, my plug-in demands quickly overloaded it. This was usually accompanied by the fiddly and…

  • 8 Top Logic Pro 9 Features

    Bounce Track in Place Here’s 8 of my top features in Logic pro 9. If you have any others – feel free to comment!Click on the pictures for larger versions.   8 Bounce-in-place, for either track or region. Bounces down either your audio instrument MIDI regions or your audio regions – with or without plugins…

  • Zed’s Digital Audio Top 10 of 2011

    Uploaded with Skitch! This list is made up of those plug-ins and digital apps I used the most this year and/or made me the most excited. Most are available for both PC and Mac, and only a few are still stuck in 32-bit mode – hopefully that will change soon. 10) Izotope Ozone 5. Link…

  • The Lucky 13 Song Mixing Tips

    Before I get started I just want to reinforce something I’ve mentioned in earlier posts – sometimes a reduction in parameters actually generates more creativity. Being aware of a set of limitations, or guidelines, can actually allow you much more creative control over your final mix.This could mean limiting the amount of effects that you…

  • Relieving Threshold Shift (Temporary Hearing Loss) with Acupressure

    This is a handy tip for those moments when you’ve gone to see a loud band and forgotten to take earplugs, and one that I’ve used numerous times to “reset” my ears after a gig. I was shown this trick about 20 years ago by a friend and have been using it since then, but…

  • The Apogee GIO and Mainstage Experiment Part 2

    Well, I got through my solo gig in one piece and with reasonable success, but some things became immediately apparent that I will definitely change for next time. My Setup: 17″ Apple MacBook Pro (mine’s an older one) running MainStage 2 PreSonus Firestudio audio interface. It uses a FireWire connection, so has lower latency than…

  • The Apogee Gio and Mainstage Experiment

    I have a solo gig coming up and have decided that being yet another singer-songwriter is boring as hell. Especially as I haven’t been blessed with one of those voices that could make singing the shopping list sound awesome. So I need to use everything in my power to add value and variety to the…

  • Digital Recording Levels – a rule of thumb

    Okay, I mentioned this as one of my tips in a previous post, but there’s confusion and many heated debates out there about the ideal level to record into your digital audio workstation. I’m just summing up the information readily available elsewhere (if you are willing to wade through endless online debates and the numerous…

  • Transferring MIDI and Audio sessions from Logic to Pro Tools in about 5 minutes.

    It’s pretty common to have to transfer a song written in Logic into Pro Tools for a client to mix (or remix). Here’s how to do it as fast as possible with the least amount of hassle. Audio Files Only If all you need to supply is audio files for transferring to Pro Tools (usually…

  • Logic 9 – using Pedalboard in parallel mode for fat Bass and Guitar sounds

    Click on the photo to enlarge. A little while back I wrote a blog article about cool things to do with multi-band compressors One of the things I discussed was how to use the crossovers built into one of these plug-ins to separate the lows and high frequencies of, for example, a Bass track, so…