Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of John Bell February 23rd, 2011 - Lately, I've been working on mixing a small musical that will debut this Friday. It's definitely a step outside of my comfort zone as mixing live is very different from mixing in a studio, and mixing a musical is very different from mixing a band. Here’s a compilation of some of the things I’ve learned and things that are different from studio work. For one, there's a lot of waiting around, but when the ... Read More

December 19th, 2010 - With the amount of cool apps coming out for iOS, there hasn't been a whole lot of good hardware solutions for getting great sound in and out of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sure there are some for plugging in a guitar, but they aren't exactly the highest quality. New Signal Process, a boutique shop out of Portland Oregon, has released the NSP BreakOut to remedy that situation. The BreakOut has an input to get your audio into whatever music apps ... Read More

November 11, 2010 - When I first started working with Logic, I immediately maxed out its processing power on my laptop within the first 5 minutes. In the time since then, I've done full 36 track mixes with effects, and mixed my own complete productions; all of this involved eking out as much processing and hard drive performance as I could from my laptop. One of the problems with Apple is that upgrading your machine (in terms of processors) just doesn't happen. ... Read More

November 3rd, 2010 - I'm sure you've all heard that Protools, along with going native, now has an SE version that ships with either a USB microphone, an interface similar to the Mbox mini, or a MIDI keyboard. You may also have heard that you don't have to go to your local Guitar Center to buy one either; you can get them at Best Buy. Power users may scoff at the baby Protools (after all it has a maximum of 16 tracks) however ... Read More

October 17th, 2010 - Imagine you're a mix engineer and you get a song to mix recorded by another engineer. Unfortunately, it has a lot of noise: hissing, pops, background noise. When there's something playing on that track, for example the vocalist is singing, you can barely hear the noise, but if the singer isn't singing constantly, you can hear it. Perhaps it will be hidden by other instruments that play during those gaps, but when you're trying to do the best ... Read More

October 4th, 2010 - As I slowly install all the music software back onto my hard drive, it occured to me that some of you may not know that it's a good idea to put all your samples and project files onto a second hard drive. Not only will you save space on your main drive, but offloading some of the reading and writing of audio onto another drive will prevent clicks and pops, or even writing errors when recording. Spreading the ... Read More

October 1st, 2010 - Today I want to talk a bit about when to make edits, and when to warp audio tracks. While there are some artists that are vehemently opposed to any editing of their performance, most want you as an engineer to make them sound as good as possible. In many cases, this will include fixing little timing issues. Sometimes you won't be able to re-record a performance (time is money after all), so you will need to make changes ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Sebastien Chorney September 18th, 2010 - The NS10, NS10, NS10; to a beginner it must seem that audio engineers have an infatuation with it. Indeed, the signature white cone on black cabinet is so recognizable, people who aren't audio geeks might think all studio speakers look like that. Earlier this week, I linked a Gizmodo article on the Yammies through Twitter (btw, add me here!). Later I figured that I might go a step further and provide a succinct review of ... Read More

September 15th, 2010 - I am not a professional skateboader, snowboarder, or mountain biker, however living in Vancouver, I come to know and hang out with a few athletes. I have never been in contention for pro-level status but even I can tell when an athlete has good flow. Have you ever watched videos of athletes that seem really smooth and link everything they do into one continuous stream of talent? It's pretty obvious when watching a snowboarder ride powder, but even ... Read More

September 6th, 2010 - I've had my M-Audio Firewire 410 for a long time. I picked it up in 2004 when I needed a mobile recording solution and I still use it. Lately though, I've been having audio drop outs. The software mixer will register audio output, and the card itself will light up its LEDs, but no audio will play. I can unplug and replug the interface back in, and it still won't register. What's especially weird, is that it will be ... Read More