An often inevitable part of the production process is editing. The editing phase encompasses several things. This is where we comp together all of our takes, maybe move some audio segments around if needed, and try to fix up some mistakes in the recording. But a big part of editing is what I call “tightening”. […]
Networking. As home studio artists, we’re used to doing stuff by ourselves. We practice our instruments. We learn how to record and mix. We work on projects. But generally, we’re not that good at getting other people involved in the process. I’m no exception. I released an EP last year. All of the parts were recorded […]
If you’re like me, you might find the mastering process somewhat mysterious. I remember always thinking that mastering engineers had some sort of magic abilities that us “normal” people don’t. I figured that mastering should be left to them, and that I should just be content to slap a limiter on the master fader to make […]
When recording electric guitars, less is often more. For a typical rock song, we’re often aiming to get a nice big guitar sound. We want it to sound huge, and in-your-face. As a result, we’re tempted to double everything, layer a ton of parts together, and crank the gain way up to get a nice […]
Have you ever felt stuck thinking that everyone else is better? “His mix sounds better than mine.” “Her voice is fantastic, mine is only mediocre.” “His guitar tone is top-notch, mine is terrible.” It’s in our nature to get caught up in the comparison game sometimes. It’s easy to look at someone else’s possessions or […]
In various stages of the music production process, subtlety is key. This is especially true in mixing. Sometimes we make mixing moves that have drastic effects, but more often than not, mixing moves tend to be pretty subtle. Eventually, of course, these subtle moves add up to create drastic changes. This is the beauty of mixing. It’s […]
So I’m in the final stages of my new EP that I’ve been working on. And I’m super excited about it! I’ve finally finished recording, and I’m moving on to mixing. I haven’t done a lot of mixing for the last few months because I’ve been focusing my free time on recording. So it’s nice to […]
I’m just finishing up recording for my EP. The last thing that I like to record is vocals. I sing all the vocals myself, and I like having all the other instruments blaring in my headphones to give me a nice musical environment to sing in. There is a lot of information out there about […]
For a lot of us in home studios, recording real strings is not an option. It’s difficult because in order to get a nice, full, orchestral sound, you need to have a lot of people playing at the same time. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that many friends who play […]
In his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey introduces what he calls the “P/PC Balance”. “P” stands for “Production”, and “PC” stands for “Production Capability”. As an example to understand this balance, consider a large piece of machinery at a car factory. (I’m going to tie this back into creating music soon, […]
Indie Artist Lounge 