There was a question about de-essing going inside one of the Facebook communities I’m a member of a few days ago. A good friend of mine, Sigurdór Guðmundsson, master audio engineer and awesome musician, had some great thoughts on de-essing that I thought I’d share with you. The question was: “As far as de-essers go, where would...
GET YOUR FREE VOCAL PRODUCTION CHECKLIST: 47 THINGS YOU NEED TO DO WHEN YOU PRODUCE VOCALS The easiest way to make your vocals stand out in a song is the clever use of vocal effects to make the singer jump out the speakers. Whether you’re looking for parallel processing tricks for larger vocals, cool slapback...
It’s the best feeling. You send the band their final mixes, mastered together in a nice playlist that plays seamlessly from one song to the next. Even though we did the songs throughout the course of the year, they all sounded nicely balanced from one to the other. And man do they sound aggressive! The...
When you’re mixing, it’s easy to jump from one thing to another. You’ll EQ the kick drum, add compression to the rhythm guitar, jump over to the keyboard reverb etc… However much you love jumping around your mix, there’s one thing you absolutely must focus on. It’s the one element that will make or break your...
Do you ever wonder what an over the top infomercial for a piece of audio gear would sound like? Of course not, that’s ridiculous. Luckily for you, I like thinking about ludicrous things so I came up with my own infomercial script for a laugh. Imagine a pristine TV studio kitchen and behind the counter,...
When people ask me questions about mixing, they’re often worried about whether they’re doing something wrong. They’ll ask whether they “should” be doing this, or if that is the “correct” thing to do. I completely understand the reasoning for these questions, because if you’re not experienced and confident with mixing you’ll second-guess yourself. At that...
If you want to mix a song from start to finish, here are the nine steps you must take. But first, let’s talk about the beginning and what it means to “start mixing.” You might struggle with knowing where to start. What do you do after you’re done recording? Where does everything belong in the...
Let me make you a big promise. This guide will be the end-all article of compression tips you’ll ever need to make better mixes from your home studio. Using compression correctly is the second most important thing to do after EQ when you need to manipulate audio. However, although compression is a bit more complicated,...
This last week I’ve been working on a few different mixes. One was a hard-hitting stoner-punk song like QOTSA meets Rancid. The second was a spacious country ballad like old-school country meets Norah Jones. You wouldn’t believe how differently I processed these mixes, especially when it came to the drums. For the stoner-punk song: Drum...
I had the awesome opportunity to record Andrew Bird yesterday. We recorded him at the local community radio station I do occasional broadcast engineering for. We don’t usually use the radio studio in the typical recording studio fashion. Everything is live, straight to radio, so there’s no chance for the band to listen back, edit takes together...