Category Archives for "Workflow"

Hiring amazing session musicians can take your productions to the next level or even save sessions that would otherwise lead to very poor results.  

 Also, as a self-recording musician you might be in a perfect position to offer playing on other people's records! If you're a great player AND a skilled recording engineer, maybe a session musician career might be a path you'd want to explore.

I get it. You've heard countless times that you should "use your ears", and "not mix with your eyes". 

All that matters is what comes out of the speakers.

But are you aware that this well-intended advice might actually be slowing down your progress?

Reason number one for doing this series of episodes: 

Malcom wanted to say "SUPER HACKS" on the show. 🤷

Reason number two: 

There are a couple of tricks that we've discovered and learned over the years, which we would actually call "super hacks", because they are really useful, speed up our workflow, solve problems for us and increase the quality of our work. Of course we wanted to share those with you!

Part 2 is about mixing "hacks". If you find these helpful and are a sucker for hacks and tricks like we are, we might even do a third one. We'll see. (Hint: Your feedback, reviews, etc. are helpful here. ;-))

Listen now, take notes and use these super hacks in your next session!

Reason number one for doing this episode: 

Malcom wanted to say "SUPER HACKS" on the show. 🤷

Reason number two for doing this episode: 

There are a couple of tricks that we've discovered and learned over the years, which we would actually call "super hacks", because they are really useful, sped up our workflow, solved problems for us and increased the quality of our work. Of course we wanted to share those with you!

Let's start with recording hacks in this episode. If you find these helpful and are a sucker for hacks and tricks like we are, we'll do another one on mixing. And maybe another one. We'll see.

Listen now, take notes and use these super hacks in your next session!

What does your typical project layout look like? 

• Which colors do you use on which tracks? 
• What about the routing and your bus structure?
• How do you make sure you never lose any takes?
• How do you keep track of all the magic moments happening in a session, so that you can move on quickly and then reliably come back to find them?
• How do you navigate your session quickly and switch between tasks?
• What about going back to previous stages of the session, archiving files and accessing mixes, stems, masters, demos etc quickly and everywhere?

If you don't have a good answer to any of these questions, this episode is for you.

Listen now and learn to set up your session and workflow like a pro!

Are your mixes static? Chances are, things are not moving enough. 

And by "moving" we mean automatic changes in volume, pan, or plugin settings throughout your song.

This is called "automation" and it is a technique that is absolutely essential for creating exciting mixes.

And even if you don't mix, understanding this concept will definitely help you make better engineering decisions and communicate better, because you will understand what is (hopefully) going to happen in the mixing stage.

Using automation, you basically tell your DAW (or desk with built-in automation) to make automatic real-time changes in order to bring certain parts up or down, highlight or hide things and create or enhance the dynamics from part to part, as well as within a part.

With automation you can guide a listener through your song, put the focus on the most important element at any time and turn a static mix into an emotional, dynamic experience of an artistic performance.

As always, there are best practices and common methods but there are no rules. Automation opens up wonderful creative opportunities and we're talking about all of that on this episode to help you make more exciting, less static mixes.

Let's dive in!

The vocal sells the song, right?

For whatever reason people overcook their vocals all the time, using huge vocal chains without really knowing why.

Or they don't do enough because they are afraid of messing things up and what they end up with is a flat, amateur sounding vocal.

We've been there. And over time we've built vocal chains that work for us and help us deal with all kinds of different vocalists and situations now.

Our chains are different from session to session, of course. But they are still consistent enough for us to talk about them and share them with you.

The why behind what we do is consistent and knowing the reasons why we use certain things in our chains over an over again is more valuable than the actual settings.

In this episode we talk about what we are using to record and mix vocals, why we use these specific plugins and pieces of gear and how we use it in different situations.

Let's dive in!

Almost every DAW lets you create MIDI data from audio files. And if not, there are plenty of plugins that can do it.

But why would you want to create MIDI notes when you have a "real" performance? What are the benefits and typical use cases? And how do you do it properly, so that the MIDI actually represents the original audio accurately?

Let's discuss!

Mixing yourself is hard enough, right? So should you even try to learn mastering? Is it worth it? Can home studio mastering lead to great results at all?

Daily Blog - July 23rd 2021

I don't have much time these days, as I'm mixing record after record while working on new things to help you make better records. So I decided to let others speak on the blog for a couple of days. After the community Q&A posts that I just published, I want to share some quotes from amazing engineers and producers that hopefully inspire, educate and/or entertain you!