Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Dave Conner October 28, 2010 - Sorry for the post hiatus, I was quite busy getting engaged (yay!). Today I want to talk a bit about songwriting with other songwriters. A couple nights ago, I had the opportunity to attend a small songwriting session with two likeminded individuals. As a guy who mostly sits in his studio, writing solo, it was inspiring. Joe Gilder has talked about just getting the song done, but I'm a super procrastinator and it's pretty ... 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 Oliver Chesler September 26th, 2010 - You may have noticed that I haven't written in a week. I probably should have posted up a "on vacation" notice...oh well. I just got back from San Francisco/LA and I picked up a Native Instruments Maschine so check back for a review on that soon. I also chose this week to install the Seagate Momentus XT I posted about a while back. I decided to do a clean install of my operating system which ... 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

August 29th, 2010 - Way back when first started this site in 2008, I talked briefly about how video games like Guitar Hero or Rockband, might inspire a whole new generation of musicians. Well I just wanted to share that I met one. Today, I recorded a demo for a young man who is going to give Dave Mustaine (of Megadeth) a CD this Friday. He started playing Guitar Hero, mastered all the songs on Expert Mode, which got him interested in learning ... Read More

August 26th, 2010 - I'm working on a track for my brother's upcoming album, and while I was working with the drum part, I thought of a tip that might help some of you out. In situations where we cannot record live drums (definitely the case for a lot of us home studio guys), it's pretty easy to pull up a great sounding drum plugin. Many producers I know use Addictive, BFD, or Superior drums, and I'm also partial to the Steve Slate ... Read More

August 20th, 2010 - Lately I've been working on fixing an old Powerbook. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'm thinking that it might be cool to build it into a dedicated live rig. I remember when I got it and installed Logic for the first time. I was super excited to try out my new production rig. Imagine my disappointment when within the first 5 minutes I experienced a core audio overload; my shiny new (at ... Read More