Tutorials and support for producers, podcasters and audio engineers
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Getting your kick and your bass to sound full, punchy and sitting perfectly in the mix isn’t always easy. The first trick is to start with a great recording of the bass, but you’ve already got that right? The next step is to bring that recording in to your mix . . . Read more
When it comes to the sound of your snare, you can do almost anything with using just two plugins: A limiter; and an Expander. Using just these two plugins you can change the attack, body, decay and sustain of your snare. You can even remove background noise. The limiter – . . . Read more
If you’re in the middle of a tracking session or in the early stages of your mix and you want to add in some reverb, the last thing you want to be doing is auditioning each of your reverb plug-ins and messing around with pre-delay, room size, decay time, reflection etc . . . Read more
Lets say you want to give an electric guitar part a fuller sound or more “feel”. One way to achieve this is by recording a double of the electric guitar part on an acoustic guitar. On a new track, record a double of the electric guitar part on an acoustic . . . Read more
This is a great way to manage the volume or level of a pair of tracks for a single instrument. For example, the overheads, a guitar cabinet or the acoustic guitar. I almost always use two mics on my acoustic guitar, a Shure SM-57 somewhere around the 12th fret pointed . . . Read more
The JS plugin MIDI note constrain plus for Reaper by IXix is a fantastic tool that allows you to play, as the title of this article suggests, one finger chords. Not only can you select the Root note, but you can also set the Scale: Chromatic, Dorian, Harmonic minor, Locrian, Lydian . . . Read more
You’ve just finished processing your drums and they sound amazing… when they’re solo’d… but when you bring back the rest of the mix, the other elements take over and the drums seem to vanish into the background. If you’re happy with the sound of the processed drum tracks, you probably don’t . . . Read more
This largely depends on whether we’re talking about the odd peak here and there or a track with a lots of peaks scattered throughout. For just a few wild peaks, I’d recommend decreasing the volume of the track segment, but for a truly wild and peaky track, Layered Compression is going . . . Read more
The placement of your room mic can have a drastic effect on whether or not it’s useful later on in the mix. You can’t just drop it anywhere and hope for the best. You might get lucky, but chances are you won’t. If you’re going to go to the trouble . . . Read more
The possibilities are essentially endless. But these three techniques will take you less than a minute to try out. If they don’t add some warmth or body to your mix, you can easily delete them and try something else. It’s best to use parallel processing here. So create a double of . . . Read more