This past Wednesday I tore a hole in my comfort zone and squeezed through it. It was like Jack Nicholson “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” mixed with the unimaginable pain of giving birth to bowling ball. I stood on stage in front of a room full of strangers and performed standup comedy for the very first time. It...
AJ writes grungy indie folk-rock songs in between his job as an arborist in southern Arizona. A laidback millennial hippie with a constant five o’clock scruff, he wears faded work t-shirts, flipflops and a trucker cap, his ginger manbun sticking out the back. Whenever he walks across the street to my studio, he brings a cup...
I hosted a 20-person workshop on mixing a song from start to finish yesterday at a local library. And I got an interesting question about keyboards and guitars. This person wanted to know where I would look in the frequency spectrum to make room in a mix that’s heavy in both rock guitars and keys....
I used to hate sushi. Cold, raw fish wrapped in seaweed and rice. Dipped into a black sauce with spicy green paste. Gross. This was really driving a wedge between me and my wife because she LOVES sushi. I can just see us screaming at each other in front of a couple’s counselor: “You said...
Back in my twenties, I chaperoned an underage indie rock group from Iceland to England while they were on tour. The town council owed the parents a favor, so they sent me to make sure certain members didn’t fall prey to liquor, vice, and sin. How well I did is a story for another day,...
I’m not sure if this is for you, but how would you feel if you knew exactly where to put the microphones on the drum kit to get the sound you hear in your head? Instead of wimpy drums that sound like a toddler playing pots and pans with a cardboard kick drum, you’d get thick...
Here’s one method for recording rock vocals I learned one year at the AES conference. The traditional method is recording the singer really close to the microphone to get an up-front sound. However, sometimes that doesn’t always work in the context of the genre you’re recording in. The Disadvantage of Recording Too Close For instance,...
Today is the day you start making your songs sound better during tracking than most people get their final mixes to sound! Jordan Valeriote’s Hardcore Tracking course is open, but only for a very limited time! Let me tell you why you should join the course today. Next 48 Hours Only: Get the Complete Audio Issues tutorial...
Hey friend, I’ve got two things for you today. Read this email all the way to the end for a special teaser on how you can get over $800 worth of free tutorials from Audio Issues. But first… Last Chance for the Free Hardcore Tracking Workshop Jordan is closing down his free tracking workshop soon...
I have to admit, my home studio is pretty small. When I have a full band in the studio it can get cramped fast, so it’s nice to have a backyard where the rest of the band can lounge around while we track specific members. If it were a real estate listing, it would be...