Studio & Recording

Sometimes, you might wonder how some tracks sound like the band is standing in your living room. The singer is right in front of you, the bassist and drummer seem to be set up just behind them and the guitar and synthesizer seem to be coming at you from the sides. How does a mixing engineer manage to create so much depth via just two speakers? In this blog, we explain how you can make your own stereo mixes feel more three-dimensional using nothing more than the tools that came with your DAW, including panning, a chorus, doubler, reverb and some EQ. In other words, you can learn to pack your mixes with the illusion of space.

While I write this, I’m browsing Spotify for different drum sounds. Take the new Lamb of God album, You Got Me from The Roots and Get Lucky by Daft Punk. All of them feature incredible drum mixes and all of them have a completely different sound. This alone makes it pretty clear that this blog could never provide a one-size-fits-all manual to mixing drums. What it can do is offer a few tips and techniques to help you lay down a good and solid drum sound that can work as a foundation for your unique mix.

The shorter the distance between the source and the microphone, the more low frequencies are registered at the cost of high frequencies. This is what’s known as the proximity effect, and it applies to a lot of microphones. In practice, this usually means that the closer you close-mike your voice or instrument, the fuller it’ll sound. Read on and learn how to take advantage of it.

Mixing is a lot like baking. Just throwing stuff into a bowl and hoping for the best will never give you the best results. In this blog, we seek to explain what a mix bus actually is and how you can best prepare your instrument groups before sending them all through the master bus of your mixer or DAW. In other words: we explain how to bring structure to audio mixing.

You already know the feeling: you stay up into the wee hours of the morning working on what feels like the best thing you’ve ever made then get up the next day to find that your carefully crafted mix actually sounds like a complete shambles. Or you’ve put those finishing touches on the final mix and stuck it on the car on the way home, only to be greeted by a sonic horrorshow that sounds dead and lifeless. Here, Guestblogger Melvin Rijlaarsdam lists the most common mistakes you can make during the mixing process so you can avoid them all and get the best results.

If you’ve been flipping through our range of microphones, you’ve probably come across the terms ‘electret’ and ‘true condenser’. But what’s the difference? And are ‘real’ condenser microphones always better than electret microphones, like the name suggests? In this blog, we’ll explain it all.

If you’ve just started producing music, then you’ve probably already heard of them: plugins. But what are they, how do you use them and what can you use them for? In this blog, we explain what DAW plugins are what you can do with them.

The first ever synthesizer was actually developed way back in 1876, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that this future-thinking instrument got its big commercial break. Now, it’s impossible to imagine pop music or, in fact, any genre without synthesizers. In this blog, we’ll flip through the history of what would become the grandmother of electronic music, the role it plays in modern bands and offer a few tips to help curious musicians learn the ropes.

Back in the eighties, the first cajons started to appear in western pop music, causing an entire generation of sound engineers to scratch their heads in confusion. In the time since, plenty of proven methods have been developed to amplify and record the cajon, and here, we explain them all – so both sound engineers and percussionists can get the best out of this versatile beat-maker.

There are so many hardware and software-based effects that you might be wondering which ones are actually useful. To help laypersons in the world of music production and mixing make sense of it all, we’ve started a blog series on audio effects. Today, we’re taking a close look at the delay effect.

Here, you’ll learn how to digitise and edit your record collection, and commit those rare cuts to MP3s that can be slapped on your phone and taken for a walk. First, we’ll show you how to connect a turntable to a Windows or Mac computer (and it won’t matter if you’ve got a normal turntable or a USB turntable). Then we’ll start recording and converting the warm sound of your vinyl into a digital file, before doing a little bit of editing and polishing and saving it as a track-by-track MP3, WAV, or Flac album.

Thanks to social media, it’s never been easier for bands to reach a huge audience by dropping studio-polished tracks on online platforms. That said, sounding good in the studio is one thing – sounding just as good or even better on stage is another. Stunning live performances are exactly what sets good bands apart from the rest, which raises the question: how do you make the perfect live recording of a gig? Well, read on and learn!