Tape Plugin Shootouts Don’t Make Sense Commonly asked questions in audio groups regarding the use of tape emulations include: “Which tape machine plugin is best?” “Which one should I reach for on my sources?” “I keep hearing that this one is better than that one, but that one always sounds best to me and I […]
Beginners Guide To Mastering Part 2 Effectively using your Mid/Side EQ: To effectively take advantage of your mid/side EQ, you are going to want to make sure you have some way to isolate the mid and side content for monitoring. Most Mid/Side (henceforth referred to as M/S since I am tired of typing that out […]
The Beginners Guide to Mastering – Part 1 Let’s be real. The vast majority of people who are artists, producers, or engineers have no idea what mastering really is, yet more often than not have their own false preconceptions. While it may be fine if you do not know what mastering is early in your […]
Making a Scene presents a first look at the Audio Assault RM-2 Analog Channel This one has me excited, and not just because that’s my voice on the walkthrough video. I’ve been getting in touch with developers for a while asking if anyone was interested in modelling my Ramsa. I looked into Acustica’s Nebula technology, […]
Plugins I’ve Been Using That I Recommend Brandon S Hire The Noise Floor It’s not the tool, it’s the user. But as a blogger and content creator, I get to play with a lot of cool tools. Here’s a few of them that I highly recommend checking out. 1. The Plugins From My Walkthroughs. Obviously […]
You wouldn’t think of a direct box as having a certain character, unless you’ve worked in a facility that has really good character DI’s. After all, in the age of Multi-I/O converters with DI inputs, it’s easy to forget the role that a quality DI box plays. High end DI boxes were used to help […]
Common advice is to “gain stage” your tracks by calibrating them to -18. People often leave out whether they mean -18 dBFS or -18 dBVU, both of which would yield vastly different levels depending on the source material. But why choose a calibration point to begin with? Here’s Matthew Weiss from The Pro Audio Files describing […]
As many of you may have noticed, the long awaited Paul Reed Smith amp models from Waves were released. From the moment I downloaded and plugged in a guitar (In this instance a cherry red 1998 Godin LGxT) I was completely hooked. Finally the holy grail of smooth satisfying clean tone was available at my fingertips, and […]
Do we REALLY need another EQ? We have stock eq’s, free eq’s, hardware eq’s, dynamic eq’s, analog modeled eq’s, digital eq’s that can do a zillion cool things… I find it hard to get excited about another eq these days, unless there’s something truly new and unique it brings to the table. More developers should […]
Reference tracks can be a valuable tool for keeping an objective viewpoint while mixing. When you listen to a reference track, you get a chance to reset your ears. If you’ve been listening to your mix for hours, your ears are getting used to the frequencies you’re hearing. Problem areas or frequency imbalances may not jump out […]
Mixing with headphones can be a challenge, and for a long time was generally accepted as something that should only be done if no other option were available. You had to contend with a skewed stereo perception, a skewed depth perception with reverbs, and a skewed frequency spectrum due to the natural low end rolloff […]
I see a lot of questions on various discussion groups asking how to best mic specific instruments. Many of the answers will be a mixed bag of various techniques, all of which are valid and should be absorbed into your bag of tricks. But they are all quite different from one another, and will yield […]
This is a question that comes up time and again in audio groups. “How hot should my final mix down be before sending off to mastering?” It depends on the format you’re mixing on. If you’re using analog tape, this is an important question to think about. Analog formats have limited headroom, and analog equipment […]
The above video is a quick demonstration of how your signal-to-noise ratio impacts the level of noise your analog modeled plugins will deliver. You may have seen this video floating around Facebook, which is where it was exclusively hosted until now. I thought it was high time to add it to the blog to make […]
Top 5 Audio Assault Plugins Brandon Shire We all have our favorites, and in this post I want to share my top 5 from Audio Assault! Let’s countdown, starting from number 5. FREAKQ 305 5. FreakQ 305 It’s hard to see what’s so special about FreakQ 305 on the surface, because it looks like a typical […]
Top 5 IK Multimedia Plugins Brandon Shire We all have our favorites, and in this post I want to share my top 5 from IK Multimedia! Let’s countdown, starting from number 5. MASTER EQ 432 5. Master EQ 432 The right amount of the right eq on the master bus can really bring your mix […]
Top 5 Waves Plugins! Brandon Shire We all have our favorites, and in this post I want to share my top 5 from Waves Audio! Let’s countdown, starting from number 5. MY DEFAULT HLS SETTINGS 5. Kramer HLS Channel This thing is just meaty. I use it as a low end enhancer more than anything, […]
Amp sims, like their real world counterparts, are non-linear processes. As you increase the input level, they saturate and distort more. As you decrease the input signal, they clean up more. It’s important to remember this characteristic, as you can drastically change the response of the amp sim by adjusting the input level. Let’s start […]
A four part series on creating realistic strings with MIDI ..
Why you shouldn’t sleep on Nomad Factory Brandon Shire [I realize this entire post reads like a giant advertisement, but I assure you that it’s my honest opinion about a product line that I am personally passionate about. Nomad Factory have never given me a plugin to review, I have no NFR’s from them, and […]
Recently Boz Digital Labs released Transgressor, which is a transient designer that allows you to eq the transient and the sustain separately. This plugin seems like it was created with my workflow in mind, so when I got the chance to get a review copy I was stoked! Let me explain. I tend to […]
MELDAPRODUCTION MMULTIANALYZER NOISE FLOOR ANALYSIS WITH EXPANDER ENGAGED In the first picture, you’ll see 4 colored bands on the analyzer. The red band is the noise floor of my interface, and it’s reading down around -110dbfs. The dark orange band at the very bottom is where the expander is pushing that noise floor to, down […]
Gain Staging: What to know, & why you shouldn’t stress too much about it! By Brandon S Hire Noise Floor (This is a script to a video that will be included in an upcoming series on post production. I decided to make the script its own post because of the amount of confusion there is […]
Understanding Drum Sample Libraries From bedroom producers, to the top brass mixing engineers with multiple grammies, there are a lot of people who use drum samples in their mixes. Joey Sturgis is famous for using Kick 10 from Steven Slate Drums in many of his productions (although now Joey Sturgis has his own sample library […]
Drum triggers. What they are, and how they work. A drum trigger is a microphone. Nothing more. It picks up the sound of the drum and sends the audio to the source. The source usually is an audio to midi converter either in the box or outside of the box, but that doesn’t have to […]
Plugin manufacturers are on a never ending quest to develop the holy grail of plugins…the perfect digital model of a classic analog piece that everyone in the industry embraces as the most accurate, bar none. This is admirable in that it pushes the technology further and further, and now we have top tier mix engineers […]
Back in the day, we had hardware. Since then, we started using software. Over the years, we’ve become better and better at developing this software so that it fools the trained ear into thinking it’s hardware. We make it move, overload, have noise, and try to recreate the exact sonic imprint of the hardware. We’ve […]
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