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,...
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...
Got this question about mix bus compression from a justifiably confused reader: “You state that you should clear your master bus of any bus compressors before mastering – but..you…advise that we should ‘mix’ into the master bus compressor as early as possible when mixing and this is what I’ve been trying to do. It surely...
As a metrosexual European obsessed with men’s fashion, I’m smack dab in the middle of the demographic for Queer Eye. I loved the original show from 2003 so much I even bought their book from the show. The show was so popular in Iceland the book was translated into Icelandic! If you’re living in a cave...
On Friday I told you my story of how I overcomplicated my guitar recording process when I first started out. A great guitar sound is crucial for making a rock song sound huge. Turns out, making it big during tracking goes A LONG WAY, and you’ll get bigger and more bad-ass guitar sounds if you just don’t...
One of my least favorite memories from recording school was when I became the stereotype that pro engineers would later talk shit about. I was an over-zealous beginner that thought More was Better. So naturally, when you’re recording guitar, you have to use as many mics as possible on the amp to get the best...
I was sitting on the toilet in my studio last week, doing what people do when they sit on the toilet in a recording studio, reading a music magazine. And all of a sudden a tiny little mouse scurries under the door, darts across the room and pops under the bathroom sink. Sure enough, when...
If you approach the kitchen with the same fear that you would approach a radioactive gas chamber filled with atomic bombs, I’ve got a treat for you. It’s my new favorite cookbook called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. It doesn’t teach you how to follow recipes – although there are...