Last weekend was the AES convention. I had a blast, meeting up with people, listening to Grammy winning engineers talk about their craft and partying in legendary studios. In a word, fun. AES, to me, is less about the gear and more about the people and the best practices they teach you. Walking the trade-show...
I’ve been toying around with the idea of mixing vocals a little differently. I want to go back to a few of my mixes with a new technique. In my eBook Mixing Strategies(www.MixingStrategies.com) I have a whole chapter about taking your mix to the next level. Automation is one of the steps to taking it...
You might ) Some you might have tried before, some you might have never heard of. I bet you’ve never heard of my acoustic super double-track recording technique. That one just creates a WALL of strumminess. Anyways, here are some additional recording techniques that you can use for your next session. Some might be typical, but...
My name is Björgvin and I’m an 80’s addict. [Everyone:] Hi! Björgvin! I think it has something to do with the fact that I was born smack in the middle of the 80’s rock era. There’s just something about the hugeness of the 80’s power ballads that make want to travel back in time and...
I’m a big salsa fan. Mexican food is definitely one of my favorite foods and I can’t get enough of the different types of salsas you can get with it. But it’s also easy to screw up a good salsa recipe if you want to make on your own. The simplest mistake is to simply...
The other day I got hit with this amazing realization. I was rearranging the living room and reconnecting my TV to the internet. I don’t watch network TV. I just watch what I want through Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus and Netflix. I hate commercials and bad network TV programming so the freedom to choose what you...
Last Friday’s email got quite the reaction from readers. Some people wrote in telling me that something similar had happened to them, or their friends. Others questioned the usefulness of my Soundcloud idea. Because after all, if you can listen to it over the internet you can just pull up Audacity or something and record...
Recently this audio engineer I know got burned by a complete @-hole musician. This musician(who shall remain nameless because I’m not sending any traffic his way) had his song edited, vocal-tuned and mixed by the engineer. And then when it was time to pay, he said he wasn’t using his mix and had no obligation...
I made this massive idiot mistake the other day. I still cringe just thinking about it, especially since it happened during class. Not only did I say something stupid, but I did so in front of a class full of people. I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you but it’s a times worse...
I got a quick question from a reader recently. It underlies a fundamental issue with audio production. Here it is: “Is it a good idea to sidechain compression vocal with a kick to get those pumping vocal effect (like normally we sidechain bass with a kick )?” Now, there are a ton of great tutorials...