Podcasts about eqing

“Part II of II! - Like I said with the previous mix this has been a really special show with a lot of great music put into it, and honestly a weirdly very different feel from the first half. A bit more sombre in parts. More subtle EQing. Less effects. Longer mixes. But still heavy on the sampling and Afro House… I hope you enjoy! (You can listen to the full 2 hour mix on Soundcloud - @totemxcii when it's uploaded next week and the full video on YouTube soon after) - TØTEM” ⚡️Like the Show? Click the [Repost] ↻ button so more people can hear it!

Created in response to disquiet0680: “Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year. This project has just one step: finish something you started last year, likely a piece of music you left unfinished.” I chose 2 tracks I had left to complete from January 2024… I noticed the tempo of each of the tracks were 24bpm & 48bpm, also one track was exactly half the length of the other… I decided to layer these : one track slowed to half speed to match the other longer track…with additional EQing and a little reverb, some sprinkles of dust and noise… A note attached to one of the tracks: “Imagine if a piece of flotsam could tell you the tale of its journey…” Thanks for listening! HQ version https://id23.bandcamp.com/track/reverseresolution-disquiet0680 More on the 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680/

Punk house and techno from a modern Midwest icon. Every DJ has their own genesis story: a pivotal sound, a formative scene, a defining philosophy. Kiernan Laveaux is no different, yet her philosophy, rooted in psychedelia and experimentation, stands completely apart from her peers. Inspired by Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and New Order, she came of age in Cleveland's acid house and queer party scenes, developing an ethos that constantly pushes dance music's limits. Her DJ style is scrambled (in the best way), with zany tricks like scratching, creative EQing and modulation. This approach reflects the Midwest's DIY tradition, where artists thrive in isolation and cultivate a radical disobedience, as seen in contemporaries like Eris Drew and ADAB. As Laveaux recounted in a 2023 interview with GROOVE Magazin, "Titonton Duvante once told me that being a Midwest DJ is about playing music from anywhere and making it sound like a piece of your spirit." Spanning two-and-a-half hours, Laveaux's RA Podcast showcases this spirit. It's a testament to her decade-long career, blending tracks from friends and cherished memories into a transcendent mix. It's "music to shake your hips to and decalcify your pineal gland." (For the curious, the pineal gland helps regulate your circadian rhythm.) RA.963 will make you dance and think in equal measure—a beautiful, restless and resolutely wicked journey through a singular imagination. @kiernan-laveaux Read more at ra.co/podcast/963

In this off the beaten path episode of Inside the Recording Studio, Chris and Jody explore alternative ways to EQ your tracks using advanced tools like iZotope's RX, Eventide's SplitEQ, and Soothe 2 by Oeksound. EQing isn't just about boosting and cutting frequencies; with these innovative tools, you can transform the way you shape your sound. Join us as we discuss: EQ with RX: Discover how iZotope's RX software, typically known for its audio repair features, can be used for precision EQ adjustments to target specific issues like harshness, resonances, or muddiness without affecting the whole mix. SplitEQ's unique approach: Learn how SplitEQ breaks down your audio into transient and tonal components, allowing for surgical EQ adjustments in a way that traditional EQs can't match. We discuss how to use this to tackle complex mix issues like separation and clarity. Soothe 2 for dynamic EQing: Soothe 2 is not your ordinary EQ; it dynamically reacts to problematic frequencies in real-time. We'll dive into how this plugin can smooth out harshness, tame resonance, and give your mixes that polished, professional feel with minimal effort. When to use these tools: We also chat about the specific scenarios in which these plugins excel and how you can use them creatively to add depth, clarity, and dimension to your tracks without the heavy-handedness of traditional EQ methods. Whether you're dealing with a problematic mix or looking to take your EQing skills to the next level, this episode has you covered. Tune in now to Inside the Recording Studio and revolutionize the way you approach EQ!     #EQTechniques, #iZotopeRX, #SplitEQ, #Soothe2, #AudioMixing, #MusicProduction, #SoundDesign, #AdvancedEQing

"This field recording had a lot to work with. I enjoyed the backstory, learning about Zubin Aroz's reflections as audience to these high-paced basketball matches. To me, the bouncing of the ball in this recording became a strong symbol of the sort of life that a migrant lives, when having a new home in another country. The feeling of being torn in between two geographical places is something that is in constant flux, and is heavily dependant on a lot of things. Being comfortable in a new environment can quickly be replaced to longing for familiarity, without any particular explanation. "The context to this recording provided by Zubin, and the clear excitement and joy that can be heard by the players involved in this game of basketball, made me think of the many beautiful moments that I've experienced myself when finding comfort and stability in new places. Therefore, the act of bouncing came to represent the pendulum between birth place, and a new home. I tried to capture the moments of excitement, the sun, and the joy of collective play in my piece that I based around the recording. "I based my composition entirely on the audio file of the field recording, but processed it in various way to create tonality - using resonators and heavy EQing to create clusters of tones mashed together with the texture of the soundscape of the game. I then used granular synthesis and time-stretching in various ways to create textural density, giving this final result." Dubai basketball game reimagined by Malte Leander. Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world's first collection of the sounds of human migration.  For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration

Chris and Jody delve into the intricate world of MIDI drum programming and editing, unlocking the secrets to crafting dynamic and expressive drum tracks in your productions.  

In dieser Episode begrüßen wir Audio Engineer Mirco Brendel, den Experten für Rap Vocals auf unserem Studiosofa. Mit ihm sprechen wir darüber, wie ihr euer Homestudio ideal für das Aufnehmen und Mischen von Rap Vocals einrichtet. Mirco teilt seine Insider-Tipps zu Einsteiger-Equipment, wie ihr die Recording-Umgebung perfektioniert, Vocals professionell bearbeitet, mischt und zu einem beeindruckenden Ergebnis führt. Freut euch auf eine Folge voller praktischer Ratschläge und inspirierender Einblicke. Viel Spaß beim Hören! ➡️ (00:00:00) - Mirco Brendel ➡️ (00:09:53) - Was ist Rap? ➡️ (00:16:03) - Anforderungen an einen guten Rap-Künstler ➡️ (00:19:00) - Mikrofon-Empfehlungen ➡️ (00:24:45) - Mikrofon-Position & Raumakustik ➡️ (00:32:07) - Umgang mit S- & P-Lauten ➡️ (00:40:53) - Audio-Interface-Empfehlungen ➡️ (00:44:52) - EQing ➡️ (00:48:33) - Kompression ➡️ (00:53:24) - Kreative Effekte ➡️ (00:58:23) - Balance zwischen Vocals und Beat finden ➡️ (01:04:12) - Typfragen

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Mixing Music Podcast Exclusive Archives!In this episode, Braeden and Dee Kei talk about EQing while you are recording.If you'd like to be a part of the exclusive episodes that we provide, please go to mixingmusicpodcast.com/exclusive.DOWNLOAD FREE STUFFFOLLOW DEE KEI ON TWITCH!Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast' Discord!HIRE DEE KEIHIRE BRAEDENFind Dee Kei and Braeden on Social Media:Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @flintmasteringTwitter: @DeeKeiMixes @flintmasteringCHECK OUT OUR OTHER RESOURCESJoin the ‘Mixing Music Podcast' Group:Discord & FacebookThe Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by Izotope, Antares (Auto Tune), Plugin Boutique, Lauten Audio, Spreaker, Filepass, & CanvaThe Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei and Lu are both professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Keyshia Cole, Trey Songz, Ray J, Smokepurrp, Benny the Butcher, Sueco the Child, Ari Lennox, G-Eazy, Phresher, Lucky Daye, DDG, Lil Xan, Masego, $SNOT, Kanye West, King Kanja, Dreamville, BET, Universal Music, Interscope Records, etc.This video podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed at IN THE MIX STUDIOS located in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at deekeimixes@gmail.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/mixing-music-music-production-audio-engineering-and-music/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. is a dual-guitar ensemble featuring Carlos O'Connell and Conor Curley. At first, the duo used similar guitars, amps, and settings in an effort to work as a symbiotic saw buzzing their way through songs. The indistinguishable incisions lacerated their earliest work with angsty piss and vinegar. But as the quintet's musicianship has evolved, they've embraced wider influences, adding different knives to their collection of cutlery. And more specifically, they've learned when to slice, when to dice, and how to work off each other.“I think we're trying to be more patient and more conscious of the texture,” Curley told PG in 2022, describing how he and O'Connell have worked together to refine their sound. “The first album was very much in a fighting mode,” he continues, “with the two guitars EQ'd the same and just smashing off each other. On the second one, we learned to play together a little better. We're still working on it, and sometimes we still try to become as one almost, when the song needs it, but I think now we've learned to fit in with how we're EQing everything. It feels really good.”Ahead of their opening slot priming crowds for the Arctic Monkeys, O'Connell and Curley invited PG's Chris Kies onstage at the Ascend Amphitheater in downtown Nashville. Carlos covered his favored Fender solidbodies, while Conor showed off his eclectic hollowbodies, and they both walked through their respective pedalboards.Brought to you by D'Addario Trigger Capo.

Ever scratched your head trying to figure out what is the best EQ setting for mastering? Or maybe you're stuck trying to figure out what is tonal balance. Then check out EP 108 of the Inside The Mix podcast.Ever wondered how to create a perfectly mastered track that sounds clear, warm, and pleasant? Dive into the beautiful complexity of mastering and tonal balance with us. We dissect the stark contrast between mastering and EQing and accentuate the pivotal role of the mid-range in music creation. We also delve into the interesting influence of music genres on the frequency content of a track. You'll learn how to skillfully balance different elements, and just why mastering should be audible from another room. As we lift the veil off mastering, you'll discover the delicate dance of frequency boosting and attenuating. Attune your ears to the impact of changes in one frequency range on others and the unique magic of EQ in reducing warmth. Unearth the secret to mimicking a five-kilohertz boost effect. As we round off the episode, we'll leave you equipped with cost-effective tips to produce professional-sounding masters - including an introduction to the powerful TDR Nova EQ. Get ready to train your ears and achieve tonal balance in your tracks. You don't want to miss out!✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸Download the 5 Essential Free Mastering Plugins guide and immediately take your music mastering to lofty new heights. Download for free at: https://www.synthmusicmastering.com/free-resourcesSupport the show► ► ► WAYS TO CONNECT ► ► ► Send a DM through IG @insidethemicpodcastEmail me at insidethemixpodcast@gmail.comBOOK your FREE Producer Potential Discovery Call! ✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸Are you READY to take your music production to the stratosphere? Book a call with me: https://calendly.com/synth_music_mastering/virtual-coffeeTHANK YOU to the Patreon Supporters✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸Join the exclusive Inside The Mix Patreon Community here: https://www.patreon.com/InsideTheMixPodcastThanks for listening & happy producing!

Are you ready to step into the vibrant world of DJing but don't know where to begin? Look no further! In this exhilarating episode, we're diving deep into the realm of DJing, sharing the best tips and insights to help you kickstart your journey on the decks.Join us as we sit down with seasoned DJs, music producers, and industry experts who have mastered the art of mixing and live performance. Whether you're a complete novice or have some musical background, this episode is tailored to equip you with the knowledge and confidence to take your first steps towards becoming a skilled DJ.Discover the essential gear and equipment you need to get started, from turntables and controllers to headphones and software. Our guests break down the differences between vinyl and digital setups, helping you choose the right path for your style.Learn the fundamental techniques that every aspiring DJ should know, including beatmatching, phrasing, and EQing. Our experts share their personal tips for creating seamless transitions between tracks and keeping the energy flowing on the dancefloor.But it's not just about the technical aspects—this episode delves into the creative side of DJing too. Explore how to curate an unforgettable setlist, read the crowd's vibe, and infuse your unique musical identity into your mixes. Uncover the secrets of building a connection with your audience and leaving a lasting impression.We also address the business side of DJing, offering insights into promoting yourself, networking with other artists, and landing your first gigs. Whether you aspire to spin at clubs, events, or private parties, our experts share their strategies for getting noticed in a competitive industry.Tune in to "Unleash Your Inner DJ" and embark on an exciting journey that's sure to ignite your passion for music, unleash your creativity, and set you on the path to becoming a stellar DJ. No matter your musical genre, background, or experience level, this episode provides a comprehensive guide to help you step confidently into the world of DJing. Get ready to drop the beat and make your mark on the dancefloor!Episode Highlights:Essential DJing equipment and gear for beginners.Mastering beatmatching, phrasing, and EQing techniques.Crafting a captivating and personalized setlist.Navigating the business side of the DJing industry.Insights from seasoned DJs and industry professionals.Don't miss out on this electrifying episode that will have you itching to hit the decks and create sonic experiences that move the masses.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we-create-the-vibes-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

When you leave your bedroom and start playing in public, you've honed your basic talents and preferably mastered them. Many DJs will not seek to improve their performance by studying more advanced DJ techniques. They've honed their craft, are performing in front of large crowds, and are now content.But what if you want to stand out from the crowd of DJs you're playing with? What can you do to make your DJ sets more unique?Whatever you require, these top DJ tips and tricks will set you apart from the competition!Let's look at some ways to improve your mixes and add a few features that many DJs lack. We'll also point out some common DJ mistakes made by both beginner and professional ones.1. Preparing your DJ setYou should start preparing as soon as you know where you're going to play. Make a list of everything you'll need for this particular set. Also, make it a habit to completely prepare for each upcoming set.You should be aware of the audience's expectations as well as the time period for which you are performing. Take the appropriate music as well as several backups in case you encounter a difficult crowd.Sort your music into folders to make it simple to find what you want to listen to. You could even create a playlist just for that performance. You won't have to guess as much on the night if you have a playlist of songs that go well together.2. Keep an eye out for red lights on your mixerI'm frequently greeted by red lights clipping on the mixer when I take over from another DJ to play my time slot. Many DJs still ignore the lights, However, leaving them in the red results in poor sound quality and causes your audience to become tired of the music you are playing. They may quit your dance floor for no apparent reason.Speakers and headphones will also be distorted. This makes your set sound bad and puts your speakers at risk of blowing up. If this happens, crank down your gains, EQ, or master volume until you see green.Gains and EQ should be kept at 12 o'clock throughout your set as a general rule. 3. Learn harmonic mixing, or mixing in keyThis is something that few DJs take into consideration. However, it is something that has the potential to completely change the sound of your mixes.If you are mixing with lapto, keep in mind that the majority of DJ mixing software has a tool that analyzes each of your tracks. The key of the track in your music collection will then be listed. Some dj softwares, such as Recordbox, can even display the corresponding keys in your playlist. Make sure you plan out your track flow ahead of time and don't try to do it on the fly.It's still crucial to know your tunes even if you're utilizing software. Just because two tracks are in the same key does not guarantee that they will sound nice together in the mix.It takes more practice to do it by ear. The majority of DJs will toss any music into the mix without even considering how it would sound. They don't mind if it's beatmatched as long as it's beatmatched. Some mixes, though, will simply not sound right.Try matching sounds like kick-drums if you want to take it a step further. Certain kick drums or kick drum patterns will not work well together. Others blend in so smoothly that it's difficult to tell the two songs apart.You'll know you've got it down when you can flawlessly blend two tracks and no one can tell the tracks have changed!4. Don't fiddle with the faders too much.Playing with the up faders and constantly pushing them up and down in time with the beat. And then cutting to the next track while the vocals are still playing. Why would you remove the vocal and replace it with a handful of hollow kick drums?When listening to a recorded mix, this has to be one of the worst things you can hear. It's not much better to hear it out in a club. It's acceptable if it's done correctly and serves to tease the next track. However, when it's done for no reason, it can come across as amateurish.Try recording your mix to hear how it sounds to others and see if you appreciate it.5. Learn how to work with FXFX can be a lot of fun to incorporate into your settings. It can also provide a wonderful touch to your mixes. However, you may need to devote some time to mastering the use of the FX. Add them as needed, but don't go overboard and bother the audience.Too many DJs play with flanger, delay, reverb, and other effects during their set, which can come out as unprofessional and frustrating to your audience.Some people utilize FX to hide bad beatmatching, while others use them to transition from one mix to the next. This can help you get out of a jam, but you shouldn't rely on it. It's preferable to polish your beatmatching, EQing, and other techniques.6. Learn to play a variety of genresThis is the most effective technique to begin getting gigs. Mixing only one kind of music may limit your booking opportunities. At the other hand, It can also stifle your creativity and hinder your progress. It's wonderful if you enjoy playing your one favorite genre. Every genre, however, has something unique to offer and will bring a fresh challenge.Do you think you could pull off a disco set at the club on Saturday night if you only mix Techno and have never mixed anything else? It's unlikely.Try to blend as many genres as possible; they may not be your favorites, but they will improve your mixing and skill level. Plus, as your genre list grows, you'll be able to take on more employment.7.Learn How To Use The EQ In Your MixerThe three-band EQ on a mixer can be the most critical feature to use during a mix. DJs mixing without even touching the EQs is still quite normal to witness and hear. You'll probably hear basslines clashing, speakers distorting, and a sloppy mix if you mix without utilizing the EQ. I would say that blending your track with the EQ is crutial!This is a basic tip that should be practiced all the time.8. Make music on your own.Another wonderful method to give yourself an advantage is to produce your own music to perform in your DJ sets. There's a probability you'll be into producing if you enjoy DJing and music and have a creative side.Production software has gone a long way and is becoming better all the time. You won't have to spend thousands of pounds on constructing or even hiring a studio. With tools like FL Studio, Ableton live, and the bet of all for me, Cubase, you can create an entire track on your PC, Mac, or laptop.These softwares allow you to create whole tracks in just a few days. All you have to do now is include the tune into your DJ performances. You'll be able to judge how well you're doing by the crowd's reaction.9. Understand how to read a crowdThe ability to read your crowd is something that many DJs overlook.You need to learn how to get the audience going and how to engage with the crowd as a DJ. You'll also learn about the crowd's body language. And what should you do if the crowd is illegible?Don't overlook this crucial DJ ability. It's equally as vital as mixing, and mastering it will help you gain a larger following. People will remember you more easily as well. And they'll want to watch you perform again.10. Keep LearningContinue to learn new dj skills. After the initial learning faze in the bedroom, many DJs don't take the time to increase their skill level. DJs that put forth the effort to continuously learning will be far more successful.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we-create-the-vibes-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this captivating episode, we explore the critical importance of audio knowledge for every DJ. Join us as we uncover the power of understanding sound and how it can transform your DJing journey. We dive deep into the technical aspects of audio, covering topics such as signal flow, EQing, mixing techniques, and sound system optimization. Beyond the technicalities, we also delve into the artistic side of sound, discussing how a nuanced understanding of audio can elevate your creativity and musical expression as a DJ. From mastering the art of blending tracks seamlessly to crafting immersive sonic experiences, we reveal how a comprehensive understanding of audio can set you apart and captivate your audience. We also address the practical implications of sound knowledge, such as troubleshooting audio issues during live performances and collaborating effectively with sound engineers. Whether you're a beginner DJ looking to build a strong foundation or an experienced professional seeking to deepen your understanding, this episode provides valuable insights and practical tips to help you harness the power of audio in your DJing journey. Tune in and discover why every DJ needs to embrace the transformative potential of sound.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we-create-the-vibes-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In each episode, we'll dive deep into the intricacies of sound and its impact on the DJing experience. From the fundamentals of sound waves and frequencies to advanced techniques in audio engineering, we'll provide you with the knowledge and insights to enhance your DJ skills and create unforgettable moments on the dance floor.Our expert guests, including renowned DJs, sound engineers, and industry professionals, will share their expertise and real-world experiences, shedding light on the importance of sound in crafting immersive and captivating DJ sets. We'll discuss topics such as speaker systems, acoustics, EQing, mixing techniques, and much more, uncovering the secrets behind exceptional sound quality and how it can transform your performances.Discover how mastering sound can enhance your ability to read the crowd, create seamless transitions, and evoke powerful emotions through music. We'll also explore the intersection of sound and technology, discussing the latest advancements in DJ equipment, software, and production tools that can help you achieve the perfect sonic experience.Whether you're a beginner DJ looking to lay a solid foundation in sound principles or an experienced professional seeking to refine your craft, this podcast will provide you with the essential knowledge and practical advice to take your DJing skills to the next level.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we-create-the-vibes-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Delete most of those damn tracks before you mix! Billy talked about narrowing the drum and guitar mics down to the essentials for mixing, his vocal chain, bass eq roll-off, designing the perfect mixing chain plugins, and how mixing mono can help you. Get access to FREE mixing mini-course: https://MixMasterBundle.com My guest today is Billy Decker aka The Deckerator is an award winning Nashville mixing engineer known for his efficient and effective mixing method.  He's mixed 16 Billboard #1”s to date such as Dustin Lynch's “Riding Roads” and notable artists as Sam Hunt, Chris Young, Rodney Atkins, Parmalee, Colt Ford, and the metal band Starset to name just a few. He also mixed George Jones's last album before he passed. Billy Decker made history in July of 2014 when Sam Hunt became the most added new artist of all time.  Decker works in a unique way. “I mix really fast. Most of my mixes are finished within an hour. To be able to do this, I use a lot of templates in pro tools. Instead of spending two hours EQing a kick drum I can do it in thirty seconds, because I have set up templates for the album that outline all the basic parameters for each instrument. I can then work on fine tuning - working on the entire mix, rather than focusing on individual adjustments. It's a good way to work. It's fast efficient and most importantly it's fun." He has been on the show recently for episode RSR281 and is also now a published author for his book “Template Mixing and Mastering: The Ultimate Guide to Achieving a Professional Sound” and has created a series of mixing plugins called the Bus Glue Billy Decker Bundle over at Joey Sturgis Tones.  THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS! https://UltimateMixingMasterclass.com https://www.Spectra1964.com https://MacSales.com/rockstars https://iZotope.com/Rockstars use code ROCK10 to get 10% off any individual plugin https://jzmic.com Use code ROCKSTAR to get 40% off the Vintage series mics plus get a FREE shock mount ($120 value) https://www.adam-audio.com https://RecordingStudioRockstars.com/Academy Use code ROCKSTAR to get 10% off https://www.thetoyboxstudio.com/ Listen to this guest's discography on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Q7FD8l2OjoOFqFKyPvLPo?si=accf05b90893406b If you love the podcast, then please leave a review: https://RSRockstars.com/Review CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE SHOW NOTES AT: https://RSRockstars.com/399

In dieser Episode ist Oskar Schrems, Beitreiber des Tonstudio Success zu Gast. Mit ihm sprechen wir darüber, wie man Gesang richtig aufnimmt und mischt, um das Beste aus der Gesangs-Performance herauszuholen. Oskar dokumentiert, wie er die Gesangsaufnahmen vorbereitet, wie seine Recording-Kette aussieht, und er erklärt, wie er im Mix vorgeht und Kompression, EQing oder auch Reverb einsetzt. Viel Spaß beim Hören! ➡️ (00:00:00) - Oskar Schrems ➡️ (00:12:30) - Vorbereitung auf Vocal-Aufnahme ➡️ (00:18:16) - Mikrofonauswahl ➡️ (00:21:35) - Aufnahmeraum ➡️ (00:23:37) - Vocal-Recording-Chain ➡️ (00:25:19) - Kommunikation mit Sänger ➡️ (00:30:30) - Nachbearbeitung & Editing ➡️ (00:34:25) - Umgang mit Störgeräuschen ➡️ (00:37:42) - Vocal-Mixing-Chain ➡️ (00:46:34) - Lautstärkebalance finden ➡️ (00:56:23) - Typfragen ➡️ (00:59:31) - Studioküche ➡️ (01:01:02) - Referenztrack-Empfehlungen ➡️ (01:11:26) - Gebrauchtwaren-Markt

Tips for DJs to improve their craft and avoid common mistakes:Failing to read the crowd: One of the biggest mistakes a DJ can make is not paying attention to the audience and playing music that doesn't match the vibe or energy of the crowd. It's important to understand the audience and adjust the music accordingly.Poor song selection: DJs need to choose songs that flow well together and keep the dance floor packed. It's essential to have a good selection of tracks that cater to different tastes and moods.Sloppy mixing: Smooth transitions between tracks are essential for maintaining the flow of the music and keeping the energy high. DJs need to work on their mixing skills and ensure they are beatmatching, phrasing, and EQing correctly.Overusing effects: Overusing effects like echo or reverb can be distracting and take away from the music's natural sound. DJs need to use effects sparingly and purposefully.Ignoring technical issues: Technical problems can happen during a DJ set, but it's important to address them quickly to minimize disruptions. DJs need to be prepared with backup equipment and troubleshoot issues as quickly as possible.Playing too loud: Playing music too loud can be uncomfortable for the audience and cause ear fatigue. DJs need to monitor the sound levels and ensure they are not exceeding safe limits.Not engaging with the audience: DJs should interact with the crowd and create a fun and engaging atmosphere. It's important to read the crowd and adjust the music accordingly.Overall, DJs need to be skilled in both music selection and technical ability while keeping the crowd engaged and energized. Avoiding these common mistakes can help DJs deliver a memorable performance.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/we-create-the-vibes-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Depending on who you ask, Yousuke Yukimatsu is the best DJ in the world. Or at least in Japan. The eccentric Osaka-born, Tokyo-based DJ has built up an arsenal of fans and disciples—most famously Tzusing—who revere his cross-genre approach and knack for out-of-this-world blends. Case in point: he recently released a mostly ambient mixtape that somehow felt more gripping and propulsive than many techno DJ sets. He also used that release, Midnight Is Comin, to highlight Japan's underrepresented experimental electronic music scene, another sign of his wide-ranging and unusual tastes. To go with his voracious hunger for all kinds of music, Yukimatsu can play alll different kinds of sets, from the meditative to the peak-time, all with the blending ingenuity and expert pacing we've come to expect. Just check his mind-blowing Boiler Room set from 2020. If that performance was nightclub madness and Midnight Is Comin was a slowly unfurling coil of downcast textures and moods, then Yukimatsu's RA Podcast is something in-between. Over two captivating hours, Yukimatsu brings in beats only to jettison them, returning several times to artists like Palmistry, Tzusing and Ryo Murakami. He anchors the mix with familiar tracks and voices before letting it drift out to sea again. It's also deeply personal, focusing on tracks from people he played with at his Zone Unknown parties in Osaka and Kobe, as well as his friends who participated in Midnight Is Comin. Some of these blends need to be heard to believed. But more important is the pacing: the mix moves at such a slow but intuitive speed that it's almost tantric, the work of someone who knows how to keep the party going at a simmer without giving into the temptation to go faster. (He even says that the mix was supposed to be longer.) With hooky tracks from Palmistry and Equiknoxx up against explosions of noise and heavy EQing, Yukimatsu's RA Podcast is like dipping your head above and below water, soaking in and appreciating the beauty of both realms at once. @yousukeyukimatsu Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/849

In this episode of the Mixing Music Podcast, Dee Kei and Lu talk about how to use subtractive EQ to help your next mix.SUBSCRIBE FOR 3X THE EPISODESDOWNLOAD FREE STUFFFOLLOW DEE KEI ON TWITCH!Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast' Discord!HIRE DEE KEIHIRE LUFind Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLuTwitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLuCHECK OUT OUR OTHER RESOURCESJoin the ‘Mixing Music Podcast' Group:Discord & FacebookThe Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by Izotope, Antares (Auto Tune), Plugin Boutique, Lauten Audio, Spreaker, Filepass, & CanvaThe Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei and Lu are both professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Keyshia Cole, Trey Songz, Ray J, Smokepurrp, Benny the Butcher, Sueco the Child, Ari Lennox, G-Eazy, Phresher, Lucky Daye, DDG, Lil Xan, Masego, $SNOT, Kanye West, King Kanja, Dreamville, BET, Universal Music, Interscope Records, etc.This video podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed at IN THE MIX STUDIOS located in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at deekeimixes@gmail.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/mixing-music-music-production-audio-engineering-and-music/exclusive-content

I suggest taking my How to Use a MIDI Keyboard as a Beatmaker course, or learning from my what to look for in a MIDI Keyboard article. Additionally, you can see my recommended MIDI Keyboards for FL Studio! As always, reach out any time by contacting me directly.Should you volume balance your songs? You've made the beat, and you love how it sounds nice and full, but you've seen tutorials tell you that you should now bring each instrument to the mixer, and try to re-mix the song. But.. think clearly for a second.. if you like the balance, should you try to “re-balance” your volumes and hope for that same balance? Getting the same balance is VERY HARD.. Adjust Instruments Where Needed.. With virtual instruments, like a ROMpler, we beatmakers ALREADY HAVE HIGH-QUALITY SOUNDS. The thing you must understand as a beatmaker is a lot of information is jumbled together with the recording world to us beatmakers, who just use MIDI and one-shot drum samples. When a recording engineer would record a musician, their recording levels would not ALWAYS be the same for each different instrument. This is where VOLUME BALANCING is important to bring up a BALANCE in the song. But for us beatmakers, if we play our melodies, we can quickly lower volume by one or two dB, and that's technically OUR volume balancing.. make sense? What about EQ and Compression? Well, the same idea applies. When you record an instrument or singer, the microphone is susceptible to many negative things like.. The Room Sound (if it's not acoustically treated). Distortion if Recorded TOO LOUD Inconsistency in Loudness (the singer or musician said some loud or quiet words).. As a beatmaker, all of these are easily remedied through MIDI. The room sound.. we can control this through adding/removing REVERB or DELAY! Distortion.. we can easily just turn down our Virtual Instrument! And inconsistency.. we can just adjust VELOCITY on an individual MIDI Note (learn more in my SAFE SPOTS Book). So when we are applying Equalization and Compression, the same concept doesn't fully apply for a recording to a virtual instrument melody. Yes, we want things to be clear, but we may not be EQing to FIX a bad recording.. we may just be EQing to MAKE an instrument sound better or more clear. How to Best Get Started Using MIDI? I suggest taking my How to Use a MIDI Keyboard as a Beatmaker course, or learning from my what to look for in a MIDI Keyboard article. Additionally, you can see my recommended MIDI Keyboards for FL Studio! As always, reach out any time by contacting me directly. =========================== GET THIS EPISODE'S RESOURCES: https://itsGratuiTous.com/podcast/s2e26-does-volume-balancing-wreck-your-song/ ===========================

Jack Hartley is an Australian producer and audio engineer who works from Interim Recording Studios in the heart of the Adelaide CBD.   With over 15 years of experience as a musician/songwriter, Jack's toured extensively throughout Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Japan. On the audio front, Jack's a chameleon of the many sub-genres of heavy music, having worked with a number of acts – including Truth Corroded, Hidden Intent, Relapse, Werewolves, Shatter Brain, and many more.   IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT:   - Getting started with finding clients - How to make your audio skills feel second-nature to you - Branding your studio - Should you use your name or make up a business name? - The power of having mentors - The difference between running your studio as a business vs a hobby - EQing low-tunes guitars - Mixing screaming vocals: How to use compression to control your dynamics - How to track vocals without burning out a singer - Jack's technique for tracking kick drums so that you end up with cleaner sounding room tracks and better sounding kicks - Using automation on drums - Dealing with egos in the studio   To learn more about Jack Hartley, visit: https://www.jackhartleyaudio.com/   To learn more tips on how to improve your mixes, visit https://masteryourmix.com/   Download your FREE copy of the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: https://masteryourmix.com/blueprint/   Get your copy of the #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Mixing Mindset – The Step-By-Step Formula For Creating Professional Rock Mixes From Your Home Studio: https://masteryourmix.com/mixingmindsetbook/   Join the FREE MasterYourMix Facebook community: https://links.masteryourmix.com/community   To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Android.   Have your questions answered on the show. Send them to questions@masteryourmix.com   Thanks for listening! Please leave a rating and review on iTunes!

Check out the Classic Trance Series here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music-category/classic-trance/ Welcome to the first episode of the “How To Make A Classic Trance Track” series where I will be creating a track in the style of a Classic Trance track without the use of hardware! In this episode, ill be making the Kick & Bass for the track from scratch! You will see exactly what type of kicks can be used for a more classic Trance sound as well as which ones may not be best. (This part can instantly make a track sound more modern if using certain style kicks!) I'll also be showing you how to create a thick bass sound from scratch using only stock plugins, and ill also be showing you how you can change the bass up for different tastes and styles that may suit you and the groove you want to achieve. The tutorial has nothing pre-planned so you get to see the full process from the ground up, along with all the mixing decisions and creative decisions! The Classic Trance Kick & Bass tutorial covers: ⬤ Kick selection and the characteristics of a kick to be looking for. ⬤ EQing your kick & learning when it's needed. ⬤ Creating your basses from scratch. ⬤ Creating bass grooves with your MIDI. ⬤ Bass splitting for more control. ⬤ Adding atmosphere to your bass. ⬤ Ducking techniques for that older sound. ⬤ Using filter mapping for different desired effects. ⬤ Mixing, EQ, Levelling, Effects, Saturation, Stereo Field Positioning. ⬤ Using velocity mapping. ⬤ My full thought process behind everything I'm doing and why. + Much more! Grab your copy here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/classic-trance-kick-bass-tutorial-001/

We get a review of the Anthem AVM 70 AV Processor from Steve, Phil updates us on the TV reviews coming soon and Ed gives us the latest Hi-Fi news. Plus, we discuss room EQ and how to apply this to your dedicated Home Cinema build.

Welcome to this new Trance Kick & Bass tutorial! Grab your copy here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/trance-kick-bass-tutorial/ Getting a solid Kick & Bass foundation for your Trance tracks can be difficult when you are not sure how each of the elements are put together to make a thick, warm, driving, creative and nicely balanced sound. The problem is that the Kick and Bass is one of the most important parts of your track, and if this is falling short, everything else follows. A solid kick and bass will allow you to mix your other elements around them much easier with better results. So in this tutorial ill be showing you in real time the full process of creating a Trance Kick & Bass that will sit nicely in your mix. Ill be going through each step such as your Kick, Sub Bass, Mid Bass, Acid Bass, Reverse Bass, Bass Hits & More so that you feel confident creating solid kick and bass lines that sound professional. The Trance Kick & Bass tutorial covers: ⬤ Kick selection, Kick Key, and the characteristics of a kick you should be looking for. ⬤ EQing your kick & learning when it's needed. ⬤ Creating your sub-bass from scratch & knowing what is needed from a sub for this sound. ⬤ Creating bass grooves with your MIDI for Sub Mid, Stabs & Acid Bass. ⬤ A deep understanding of layering your basses & the purpose for layering. ⬤ Creating your mid bass from scratch & knowing what is needed from a mid bass for this sound. ⬤ Making your mid bass sounds more unique with modulation, filtering and mapping techniques. ⬤ Techniques for getting good levels between each element. ⬤ Phase Cancellation, Polarity & Shifting Bass Phase. ⬤ EQ, Levelling, Effects, Stereo Field Positioning. ⬤ How to create an acid style Trance Bass using the arp. ⬤ Using the matrix for movement in your basses. ⬤ Creative reverse bass stabs & responses. ⬤ Kick Key & Bass Key. ⬤ Using velocity mapping. ⬤ Creating groove with bass stabs. ⬤ Bass hit positioning. ⬤ Automation to create variation in your bass. ⬤ Parallel compression for a thicker low end. + Much more! Grab your copy here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/trance-kick-bass-tutorial/

Kick drum and bass are two of the most important elements in any mix. If they don't sit right, the whole mix doesn't sit right. So what can you do to ensure they have maximum impact when mixing or producing? Justin Colletti shares the most important frequency ranges to know for EQing kick and bass, and for getting the to sit right in the mix. ►See free audio tutorial videos with Justin here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3yghKGBjggTkBYyc-1_larMT6K4rGwmr ►Get Mixing Breakthroughs here: https://miingbreakthroughs.com ►Get Mastering Demystified here: https://Mastering Demystified.com ►Get the free mastering workshop: https://sonicscoop.com/Mastering101 ►Get the free mixing workshop: https://sonicscoop.com/MixHabits ►Win free stuff at https://sonicscoop.com/contest

Ep. 069 - [How to Make Your Drums Sound Right] This week's episode comes from a comment left by Juzix, one of our humans watching on Youtube. They said “as someone who does hip hop my weakness is drums... I would love to see a dedicated episode all about writing, sampling, synthesizing, layering, compressing, EQing, or otherwise making the drums feel “right.” Song of the Week: Sam Shoemaker - Too Much prod Trap Jesus x D. Professor https://open.spotify.com/track/11nr3JR0FOfnZv5l0Fmgjs?autoplay=true https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxFIHwr7y8 https://music.apple.com/be/album/too-much-single/1568905434 Support Our Sponsors: Dojo TV: Free producer live stream classes from the Producer Dojo Senseis https://www.thehumanmusicpodcast.com/producerdojo The Weekly Download: Learn from ill.Gates in his private weekly group lessons and get access to over 230 more episodes in the archive for only $20 per month! https://www.thehumanmusicpodcast.com/producerdojo Guest Practices: Learn from Seth Drake at the Approach Institute, the BEST engineer we know. First class is free! https://www.thehumanmusicpodcast.com/theapproach More Episodes, Socials and Free Sound Packs: https://thehumanmusicpodcast.com

In this episode, I talk about why you need a website and the benefits. There's some valuable information in this one, my dude. Sorry about the peaking. I'm new to EQing myself. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/musichustlers/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/musichustlers/support

Tips and tricks for EQing an ukulele to sound better and how to understand different types of pickups and their implications.Support the show (https://liveukulele.com/store/)

Join me as I give quick-fire answers to questions posted in the 52 Cues Facebook group from a wide range of topics about the production music industry including copyright, income, NFTs, productivity, royalties, loudness, IMDb, landing your first library, EQing and more! I also unpack a happy ukulele cue which features ukulele percussion effects!Watch this episode on YouTube!https://youtu.be/x9CPbibpH_803:47 - Do you have to copyright your own cues?04:25 - How do you musically communicate emotion?06:23 - Can you Tap Tempo in Logic Pro?07:30 - What's up with NFTs?08:36 - How many tracks do you have in libraries?09:25 - How doable is it to make 100k or even 50k in income?11:50 - How many tracks do you need for full-time income?13:05 - Do you layer drums?13:25 - How do you start each song?14:09 - How do you find your first library to submit cues?16:08 - Is it essential to have an IMDb profile?17:28 - When will royalties go away?19:09 - What loudness levels should you shoot for when mastering?20:01 - What was your path to the industry?22:05 - It it more important to find 1-2 libraries or should you diversify more?25:03 - What is your approach to EQing?27:11 - Cue BreakdownJoin the 52 Cues Community!http://52cues.comSupport the channel on Patreon and get access to my weekly music production live streams.https://www.patreon.com/davekropfGet critiques on your cues and book online lessons with Dave:https://davekropf.square.site#productionmusic #podcastJoin our 12-week Mastermind with built-in private lessons, small group accountability and feedback sessions that give you focused, personalized mentorship. So If you're seriously ready to supercharge you career in production music, then head over to 52cues.com/mastermind22 and sign up today! Registration ends September 29, and seats are limited!Support the show

Joe & Mike talk with legend Phill Brown! Recording Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" + Jimi Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower"! Topics include: “Stairway To Heaven” recording details mics… etc… + studio tension with Jimmy Page + Peter Grant, micing sources with mics back a bit, printing guitars + the reverb to one track, the art of not EQing and moving mics, why he wants to hear music not see it on a computer screen, bouncing tracks on Hendrix's “All Along The Watchtower” + More! "From The West Barn" is a weekly podcast hosted by Joe West & Mike Shimshack shot at The West Barn in Nashville, TN. It's available anywhere podcasts are available.  West/Shimshack are both music industry veterans that have seen the peaks and valleys of the business over the past 30 years. Their careers have been punctuated with Grammy wins, hit songs, platinum records, tens of millions of units sold and more than their share of failure.  Tune into "From The West Barn" for their take on the lifestyle and engaging conversations with some of the industries most interesting people! Nothing is off the table ~ FTWB   FROM THE WEST BARN --} Website: http://fromthewestbarn.com iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-the-west-barn-with-joe-west-mike-shimshack/id1505829573 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1POtkbPLqZGL3U85nrRaue?si=sJHpJbzYT7a9hmc9-AjsyQ    PHILL BROWN ---}  Digital Download: “Are We Still Rolling?”  Phill's autobiography is available as Paperback and Talking Book from Amazon.  philltape@btinternet.com with Paypal   MIKE SHIMSHACK ---}  Instagram: @shackjonz    JOE WEST ---}  Website: https://joe-west.com  School: https://www.apprenticeacademy.net  Instagram: @west_joe  Facebook: https://facebook.com/westjoe    SPONSORS ---}  HERCULES STANDS:  http://herculesstands.com/us/  SLINGSTUDIO:  https://www.myslingstudio.com/  APPRENTICE ACADEMY:  http://www.apprenticeacademy.net    FROM THE WEST BARN copyright 2020

Is there a better way to EQ? Justin Colletti thinks so. This easy to implement approach beats aimlessly sweeping through your EQ any day of the week. You can get better sounds with this simple 3-step trick immediately....and take a lifetime to master all the potential it has to offer.

In Episode 15, Noel discusses holiday happenings, some vinyl news, and a fantastic movie about jazz that he watched. The Record Spinner's topic explores some of Jazz music's key figures who helped usher in the Hip Hop genre for the younger generation of black artists. Noel discusses the impact of jazz giants such as Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, and Weldon Irvine (and a few others). Hit play and tell us if we forgot to mention any interesting jazz acts or jazz/hip-hop collabs. Lastly, while recording and EQing this ep, the news of the death of underground hip hop legend and pioneer MF DOOM broke. Noel has mentioned countless times the importance of DOOM to Noel's musical journey. We at the Record Spinner Podcast love the metal face villain, and our hearts and thoughts are with the family of DOOM and all in the black music community, who are grieving this sudden and tragic loss. Do believe Noel will have words on what DOOM meant to black music shortly. Peace family, and Happy 2021!!! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/therecordguy/message

Canadian Producer and Educator Mat Gendreau shares his top 5 tips on processing reverbs to fit with your song tempo and to avoid overpowering a mix. See the Show Notes for further details.

Check out the full video here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/ableton-live-trance-plucks-tutorial-005/ Ableton Live – Trance Pluck Tutorial [005] Welcome to the next episode in the Ableton Live series were ill be making a Trance track from scratch! In this episode, ill be going over the intro Trance plucks, Tension plucks, Call & Response & more! Intro plucks are a great way to keep your intros from sounding repetitive and stagnant. They create tension, movement and uniqueness to your track, and can be used to help build the track. In this tutorial, I’m going to be going over every element and the reasoning behind all of my decisions, so that you have a full understanding of what I am doing and why. I’ll also be showing you some great tips for speeding up your workflow and showing you how to sit your sounds nicely in the mix! “Creating call and response plucks will keep your intros interesting while creating emotion and harmony.” The Trance Plucks Tutorial covers: Creating your main drive pluck. Call & response plucks for a unique sound. Tension Plucks. Creating unique sounding intro plucks. Testing & Audition plucks to see what works. Tips and Tricks for faster workflow. Creating movement with delays & other effects. Understanding what sounds will work & why. Getting a groove that fits the rest of your track. Mixing, Fine-tuning, EQing and levelling. Getting your plucks to work together. Adding contrast with your plucks to create depth. + much more! What makes AM Studios tutorials different from the rest? There is no set way to produce music, and you are always going to come up against issues and creative blocks. In these tutorials, there are no pre-planned sounds, and everything is done in real-time so that you get to see any problems that come up and how to overcome them. This is a much better way to learn than watching sounds that already fit, fall right in to place. We all know that is not how producing music works in the real world! Watching in real-time will equip you with the skills and understanding of how to overcome any particular issues that arise. It will show you different ways to tackle it so you don’t quit and instead come out of the studio with completed projects. Video Duration: 120 Minutes Your Tutor: Allan Morrow – International Trance DJ/Producer. Tracks signed to labels such as Armada, Blackhole Recordings, Discover Records, FSOE, Kearnage Recordings, Mental Asylum Records, Pure Trance, Outburst Records & Many more! I don’t use Ableton Live I use a different DAW. Can I still use this video? Yes, all the technique you will learn in these videos can be implemented into your own DAW using your own unique DAWs plugins. What software synths or plugins are used in this video? Ableton Live 10 Suite plugins. Sylenth1 LFO Tool Voxengo Span (FREE Plugin) ***Please note the above plugins or DAW are not essential as you can use any of your preferred plugins or samples to re-create your own unique sounds. Get inspired with the Trance Pluck MIDI & Trance Plucks for Sylenth1 Check out the other videos in the Ableton series - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music-category/ableton/

Check out the full tutorial here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/ableton-live-trance-percussion-tutorial-004/ Ableton Live – Trance Percussion Tutorial [004] Struggle with getting clean and crisp Trance percussion? Not sure what effects to use to make your Trance Percussion sound pro? Want to know what sounds to look out for when choosing your percussion sounds? Struggle to get a nice groove in your tracks? Frustrated because your percussion doesn’t suit your style of Trance track? Can’t get your tracks signed due to poor percussion? Ableton Live – Trance Percussion Tutorial [004] Welcome to the first AM Studios Ableton Live series! In this series, Allan will be going through every step in detail to show you how to make a Trance track from start to finish. This fourth video will cover the Trance Percussion! Getting your percussion to sit nice and tight with the rest of your track can sometimes be very difficult when you don’t know what you are looking for in terms of the right sounds, and how to fit them properly in your mix. In this tutorial, Allan will be explaining in a great deal of depth what sounds are needed for this particular style of track and why. Choosing the right sounds is very important to get that pro sound, especially with percussion as if you use the wrong sounds, they can stick out like a sore thumb! Allan will be going over Trance percussion elements such as your clap, hi-hats, ride, percussion effect hits & percussion loops. He will be showing you the effects used and why he uses them to create that pro-sound, and he will also be showing you how he balances out percussion not to have an unbalanced mix + much more tips and tricks! All of this will be done in real-time with no pre-planned sounds so you can see the full process as though you were doing it in your studio! The Trance Percussion video covers: Choosing the right samples for your track. Using Drum racks to speed up your process. Understanding what characteristics make a suitable sample. How to use FX on your Trance percussion. Creating a groove through different methods. Adding movement with delays & other effects. EQing your reverb for a better sound. Understanding levels of your percussion. How to separate percussion sounds that sit in the same place. Mixing, Fine-tuning, EQing and levelling. Balancing the frequency range on your percussion. Creating unique textures through percussion effect hits. + much more! Video Duration: 100 Minutes Your Tutor Allan Morrow – International Trance DJ/Producer. Tracks signed to labels such as Armada, Blackhole Recordings, Discover Records, FSOE, Kearnage Recordings, Mental Asylum Records, Pure Trance, Outburst Records & Many more! "I don’t use Ableton Live I use a different DAW. Can I still use this video?" Yes, all the technique you will learn in these videos can be implemented into your own DAW using your own unique DAWs plugins. "What software synths or plugins are used in this video?" Ableton Live 10 Suite plugins. Voxengo SPAN (Free Plugin) LFO Tool Samples ***Please note the above plugins and samples are not essential as you can use any of your preferred plugins or samples to re-create your own unique sounds. For more tutorials check them out at - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/shop/ Check out the other videos in the Ableton series here -https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music-category/ableton/

Learn some good general guidelines for EQing drums!!!

This week we're talking about EQ, specifically for spoken vocal tracks. Listen to learn some the basics of equalisation, some key terminology to help you navigate the topic and how it can improve the listenability of your recordings. Visit www.thepodfarm.com to check out more of what we do and check out our other resources. www.instagram.com/thepodfarm www.facebook.com/thepodfarm www.youtube.com/thepodfarm www.twitter.com/thepodfarm Music: Sunshower - LATASHÁ

Allan Morrow – Techno Kick & Bass Tutorial Grab your copy - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/trance-music/allan-morrow-techno-kick-bass-tutorial-55-minutes/ Looking to create a banging Techno Kick & Bass? Watch as Allan shows you exactly how to create a few professional sounding Techno Kick & Bass lines with ease, using only a few plugins and some samples. The video covers: Picking the right Kick samples. Using Kick samples as bass lines. Fx chains for each individual layer. Picking a groove for your bass line. Creating reverb Kicks. EQing bass lines. Creating movement in your Techno Kick & Bass. Creating mid bass lines. Working with different reverbs for different textures Manipulating samples. + Much more! Video Duration: 55 Minutes Your Tutor: Allan Morrow – International DJ/Producer. Tracks signed to labels such as Armada, Blackhole Recordings, Discover Records, Kearnage Recordings, Mental Asylum Records, Pure Trance, Outburst Records & Many more! I don’t use Logic Pro X I use a different DAW. Can I still use this video? Yes, all the technique you will learn in these videos you can be implemented into your own DAW using your own unique DAWs plugins. What software synths or plugins are used in this video? Logic Pro X plugins LFO tool Sylenth1 ***Please note the above plugins are not essential as you can use any of your preferred plugins to re-create your own unique sounds. For more tutorials check them out at https://allanmorrowstudios.com/shop/

Non-special, non-Christmas episode. Our intrepid plugin-hounds sniff out Arturia's new synth, play dead for a wall-mounted speech synth, and roll over for Spitfire Audio's free LABS instruments. Oh, and there's twenty minutes EQing a tambourine to enjoy! ********* SHOW NOTES AND LINKS AT www.a4ppodcast.com FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/a4ppodcast TWITTER https://twitter.com/a4ppodcast

Grab your HD video here - https://allanmorrowstudios.com/shop/ ***This sample has a limiter to bring up the volume of the track*** Both videos [87 minutes & 105 minutes] cover everything from: Referencing, EQing, Leveling, Phasing, Bouncing, Creating Space, Mixing, Sidechaining, Panning, Using Metres, Plugins, Fixing Peaks, Fixing sub change issues, Making sure volumes of builds etc are correct, Making sure drops have the right impact & much, much More! The tutorial is done using only Logic Pro X plugins, LFO TOOL & other free plugins. ***All of the techniques used can be used in any DAW of your choice!*** For more in-depth tutorials - https://www.allanmorrow.com/trance-production-video-tutorials-templates/

Working Class Audio #167 with Billy Decker!!! Billy Decker was born on August 28th, 1967 and raised in Nebraska.  He got a BS in criminal justice at the University of Nebraska and then went on to be Salutatorian at Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts in 1992. In 1994, Decker moved to Nashville where he’s been working ever since. He was the first engineer in Music City to mix a Billboard Country Chart #1 exclusively in Pro Tools. He’s mixed 8 #1s to date - most recently, Parmalee’s "Carolina".Billy Decker has mixed for Kenny Chesney, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean. Jaime Lynne Spears, and Sam Hunt. Decker also mixed George Jones’s last album before he died. Billy Decker made history in July of 2014 when Sam Hunt became the most added new artist of all time. Decker works in a unique way. “I mix really fast. Most of my mixes are finished in between two and three-and-a-half hours. To be able to do this, I use a lot of templates in Pro Tools. Instead of spending two hours EQing a kick drum, I can do it in 30 seconds, because I’ve set up templates for the album that outline all the basic parameters for each instrument. Then, I can focus on fine-tuning and bringing levels up and down—working on the entire mix, rather than focusing on individual adjustments. It’s a good way to work. It’s real fast, efficient, and, most importantly, it’s fun." About this Interview: Billy Decker joins me to talk about mixing hit songs in two to three hours, beating cancer and keeping it under wraps, the yearly slump, Facebook networking, endless revisions and mixing in the box. -EnjoyMatt Show notes and links: Billy Decker's Site: http://www.billydecker.com/ MTM Wood: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWBTyvNhUXq0ofu6ta1EAaQ Prosperworks CRM : https://goo.gl/ca2wyg Close.IO CRM: https://close.io/ Billy on Bobby Owsinski's Show: http://bobbyoinnercircle.com/tag/billy-decker/ Billy on The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast: https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/social-skills-helped-billy-decker-dominate-nashville-mixing-scene/

Ever wonder what you can do to set YOUR mix apart from everyone else's? If you answered YES, then pay attention to Episode 119! David, Trip, Tony, and Mo touch on several ways to bring something unique to a set or studio mix: Create a diagram or story arc, while utilizing a design, such as a Ramp, Hill, Smile, or Waves to keep the listener interested. Mix harmonically! You don't have to be a music theory genius, but mixing within compatible harmonics is an easy way to pull off a lot of things that would be harder to do, otherwise. (Check out Mixed In Key for a leading example of key detection software). Use more subtle transitions for a more cohesive listening experience. (Great for mashups) Push and Pull: Use restraint and patience… but then deliver! Being able to control energy levels to convey a desired meaning, message, or feeling in a studio mix is just as crucial as reading a live crowd! Changing up your genres is a guaranteed way to get everyone's attention. Just BE CAREFUL when doing this, as it can also be a quick way to kill a vibe, if not done correctly. Spontaneity and Mixing Under Pressure (ie, throw yourself under the bus). Among the many ways to do this, tagging/B2B is one of the best ways to push your comfort zone, which then allows you to learn new techniques from someone else. Mix for yourself (without a plan). Record it, and examine for what you like and don't like, and pay that forward in to the next mix you put out for public consumption. Mind your technical details, such as EQing and gain staging (Check out Platinum Notes for another piece of great software by Mixed In Key that normalizes the gains of your audio library). Put some effort in to the packaging & attractive album art (Check out Canva to get started, if you're not super-handy with graphics and Photoshop) Give the listener some context to relate to the message you are trying to convey. Think of creative ways to share rather than add to the noise! All of this, and MORE to listen to, as we bash on the last of our turkey leftovers, with eyes toward the upcoming holiday season!

Complete Show Notes: https://wp.me/p1sfi8-a05 Interview with Merlijn van Veen on how audio analyzers used in sound system tuning can easily be abused for micromanagement and over EQing and your questions on line array vs point source. Start supporting Sound Design Live on Patreon today for as little as $1: https://www.patreon.com/sounddesignlive

In today's episode, we discuss the ins and outs of using EQ.  You'll learn about the following topics: Boosting vs. cutting EQ The differences between coloration EQ and utility EQ How gain structure and gain staging effects EQ (and destroys your mix) Low end EQ problems High and Low pass filters to clean up a mix Understanding the EQ relationship between instruments in your mix EQ masking EQing in solo vs in the full mix Tools that will help you EQ Mixing mid range EQ in terms of stereo vs mono   For more information on gain staging, download Tom's book The Gain Changer here.

In Episode 94, we take a detailed look at the EQ, starting with some basics, then getting in to some more complex concepts, all while giving some tips and tricks, as well as audio examples along the way. Learn how the guys approach all manner of EQing, from how to correct audio inconsistencies and adjusting for desired audio mixing effects. Gain an understanding of the audio spectrum and how to avoid clashing frequencies and phase cancellation. Learn the difference between quickly swapping out bands for a dramatic mix, or longer, surgical blending for a seamless mix. Understand the difference between filter and EQ, and how to use a filter as a mixing tool, rather than an effect. All of this, and more, in Episode 94!

With St. Patrick's Day right around the corner, I thought it was a good time to share some Irish style music I've recorded. A little back, I was asked to write some music for a video game. The maker of the game described the different scenes to me and I tried to match the mood the best I could to each of those scenes (without seeing any visuals). The project ended up not happening but at least I got some experience writing music in a different style. In each of these three pieces, I play an instrument called a melodica, which is sort of like an accordion and harmonica mashed together. In The Pub This music is intended for when one of the characters enters a pub where there is dancing and partying happening. I recorded this is my bathroom because I liked the particular echo sound it had. I started with the “drone-like” sound of the melodica, in an attempt to imitate bagpipes. The melodica also plays the melody and harmony. The majority of the percussion consists of myself hitting a suitcase in various ways with drum sticks and EQing the mix so that I had a spectrum of high, mid and low frequencies. I also recorded about 20 tracks of myself doing handclaps in order to get the crowd sound I was looking for. Lastly, I recorded a couple of low key violin parts (I haven’t played in several years, so I kept it simple). Missing My Bride This music goes along with a scene in the game where one of character's house burns down. The mood is sorrowful and is timed in a sad 6/8 waltz. I came up with the melody on the melodica, accompanied by a acoustic guitar played in a classical style. The tamborine part is inspired by gypsy folk music and intended sound a bit like a person dragging chains (to symbolize the emotional chains they carry). Marching Into Battle As the title implies, this music going along with a battle scene. As with the one of the other pieces, I used a melodica drone to imitate the sound of bagpipes. I recorded a doubled mandolin part for the melody. I also used my trusty suitcase for percussion: one track to imitate a snare drum sound, another heavy reverbed track to give a big, boomy kick drum (or war drum) sound. Visit jakehaws.com for more songs.

My guest this week is professional audio engineer Ryan Monette. Ryan graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Music Production & Engineering. For the last 4.5 years he's been the Post-Production Audio Engineer on staff at Elevation Church, in Charlotte, NC, where he mixes their global TV show, and has many other responsibilities (boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, etc.). You may have heard some of his work, as he sound-designed and mixed the opener video for the Circles conference for the past two years. He even had his own podcast for a short while (TheQueuecast.com). I asked Ryan to come on the show to share his journey towards becoming a professional audio engineer (a job that I've always wanted), and to get him to share some tips for anyone interested in working in audio/video professionally. Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins: Think long term and dream big. If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone. Take advantage of free online courses to learn more about audio engineering. Get started with whatever you have. Your mix may sound completely different in a different environment, so listen with different headphones/speakers in different locations. Master the basics and keep going back to them. If you're mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent. When mixing, always use a reference track. Show Notes Aaron: You graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in music production and engineering. For the last five years, you've been the post production audio engineer for Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. You have a lot of jobs there: boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, and you mix their global TV show. Do you mix that live? Ryan: Not necessarily. We can get into that later. There's a process for that. Aaron: Some of the creative people here might have heard of some of your work. You sound designed and mixed the opening videos for the past two years of Circles Conference, which I was at. Have you been there for the past two years? Ryan: I haven't been personally, no. I have wanted to go. I love it from afar, and I want to go in person. Aaron: I wanted you to come on this show because when I first got started, I had dreams of being a professional audio engineer. I thought, “How cool would it be to work in audio and get paid for it? That'd be awesome!” I fell backwards into it by doing podcast editing as a hobby first, then for money, then I met Sean McCabe and ended up working for him full time. I edit podcasts and help out with a ton of other stuff. I asked you to come on the show to share your advice for anyone who's interested in working in audio/video professionally, and to talk about how you got there yourself. So tell me a little bit about how you got into audio. When did you first realize that this was something you wanted to do? Ryan's Journey to Becoming a Professional Audio Engineer Ryan: I love listening to your podcast, Aaron, and what I love about it is I feel like you and I have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds. You're a musician, a drummer, and I'm also a musician. I play several things. My primary instrument is bass, but along with that, I started on piano. I picked up bass, and with the bass I picked up guitar. I took some drum lessons here and there as well. I sing as well. I dabbled in a little bit of everything. I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. I'm okay at a lot of things, but I'm not superb at one thing. Anyway, right around junior high or high school, I started playing the bass. I started playing in little bands here and there. When it came time for college, I had no clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I loved music. Aaron: Same here! Ryan: I was living in Las Vegas at the time, so I decided, well, everyone has to have that college experience, and I didn't want to go to college in the same city, so I decided that I needed that “being away from home” experience. I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. I took your basic, general classes, not knowing what I wanted to do. At this time, for my high school graduation, I had received a graduation present of a Macbook Pro. With that, of course, you get the wonderful iLife suite, including Garageband. As a musician, a whole new world was opened up to me. When I was in a band in high school, I was the gear head—I loved the PA and putting cables together. I was drawn to that. Once I had this Macbook Pro with Garageband and I had my bass and my guitar in my dorm, I was like, “I can create music!” I figured out how to work it and record myself. I bought a USB microphone, and that world was opened up. When I was there, I had a friend, and her brother went to this school where all they learned about was music. I was like, “Wait, you can do that? You can go to school for just music?” That's how I found out about Berklee School of Music. I applied, and you have to audition as well. I applied and auditioned, and the first time I tried, I actually didn't get into the music school I wanted to go to. Aaron: This sparks something in my mind. I feel like I might have read an article about Berklee or looked into it and thought, “No, they're really strict on who they accept, based on your performance.” That was intimidating to me at the time, because I never felt like I was that good of a drummer. Ryan: It was intimidating for me, too. Clearly, I wasn't up to par. Aaron: Yet you went for it. That's more than a lot of people would do. Ryan: Yeah. After I finished my first year at UNR, I moved back to Vegas and went to UNLV, the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I took all music classes, forgetting the general ed stuff you need to get a degree. I took all music classes—music theory, because I had never had actual music theory classes, so I thought I needed that. With that, there were some audio classes that I took as well. I was like, “Hey, I like this audio thing.” At the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I had my first exposure to a formal audio class, where I learned all the proper techniques. Later on that year, I applied and auditioned again for Berklee. I got accepted, and the next year, I moved to Boston and went to Berklee for about three and a half years. Then I graduated. When I went to Berklee, the only thing that drew me as a major was Music Production and Engineering. I naturally loved the gear side of things. I fell in love with recording. I was like, “This is what I want to do.” Aaron: You got to spend three and a half years there, studying and learning? Ryan: It is non-stop, 24/7, music, audio, and to be honest, I miss being in that environment so much. Aaron: That sounds fantastic. I always love setting aside time to take online classes, read books, and listen to interviews about audio. Think Long-Term Aaron: You were drawn to the audio engineering stuff, and then you graduated. Ryan: I can remember a specific time in my life, and I'm pretty sure it was my last semester at Berklee. They went by semesters instead of years. It was in one of my capstone classes. Our instructor asked us the typical, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question. Aaron: I love that question now. I hated it when I was 22. ** Think long term and dream big** Aaron: Plan out where you want to be, because if you can envision it, then you can figure out how to get there. But you have to start by saying, “I want to do this thing someday.” For me, it was, “I want to do work from a laptop. How do I get there?” Now I'm there. So you were 22 and someone asked you, “Ryan, where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in five years?” Ryan: At that moment, I was trying to figure that out, naturally, as you do when you're approaching the end of college. While I was at Berklee, I loved music. I loved recording music, but my absolute favorite class—they only had one of them, but it was the class I yearned for, that I wanted to take and put in all these extra hours for—was audio for visual media, audio for video. By far, that was my favorite class. The whole class, we were working toward our final project. You choose a five to seven minute clip from a well known movie, and all the audio is completely stripped. You have to recreate everything. That's all the dialogue, all the foley, all the ambient background, all the hard effects, and so on. You have to connect with a film scoring student there at Berklee, and they have to provide the score. I absolutely loved every aspect of that project and the process. When it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life, it was between audio engineering at a recording studio, working at Disney as an Imagineer, or doing audio at a church. I have always been involved with church, playing on worship teams and whatnot, so I also saw myself doing audio for a church. Long story short, I was really privileged to dip my feet in all of those things after college. After I graduated, I moved back to Las Vegas. Eventually, I found an incredible recording studio, probably one of the top two recording studios in Las Vegas, and I landed an internship. First Audio Engineering Jobs Ryan: I say “internship” loosely, because your typical studio internship is all the stereotypical grunt work—taking out the trash, doing the coffee, and whatnot. I showed up, and they were like, “You went to Berklee? Berklee guys are cool. Here, hop in this session and help us out.” It was open to me, thrown at me, and next thing I knew, I was assisting on sessions with huge clients, I won't name drop. Aaron: You can drop a couple of names if you want. Ryan: I had a pretty fun time helping out with a session with the famous engineer Eddie Kramer, who is engineering for Carlos Santana. Aaron: Dang, man! That's awesome. Ryan: That was pretty incredible. But while I was there, I had this gut feeling inside of me saying, “This isn't it.” Aaron: It's fine, but it's not quite right? Ryan: I could see myself staying there and working my way up, but it didn't feel right. A few months after I realized that I didn't want to stay at the studio, I applied and was offered a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I packed my bags, moved to Orlando, and I was working as a stage technician at the Epcot park. There, they found out that I was an audio guy, so they pushed me toward the live audio side of things. I was mixing shows and bands at Epcot and what was at the time Downtown Disney, now Disney Springs, area. Same thing. Almost as soon as I got there, the same gut feeling came in. I was like, “This isn't it. I'm more of a studio engineer. I definitely don't want to do live stuff.” Although I love Disney, it just wasn't sitting right. I was only there three months before the next great opportunity came up, which is where I am right now. One of my friends told me about a job opening for this church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Elevation Church. I had actually been following them because of their podcast. At the time, I was kind of like, “I've got a job, whatever.” For some reason, I ended up on their website, looking at the job. I was reading, and I was like, “Wait a minute, they're looking for someone to do audio for video. That's what I really want to do!” On a whim, I threw out my resume. Next thing you know, I've been here going on five years. Aaron: Did you mention that you were a podcast listener when you sent in your resume? Ryan: Yeah. Aaron: The connections you can make through podcasting is really incredible. Ryan: It is. And I've been working there for 5 years now. How to Get Into Audio Engineering Aaron: I want to jump into what you do at your job at Elevation, but let's pause and do a section on what advice you would tell someone who's wanting to get started. I wrote a couple of things down here. I think it's hilarious that you got a Macbook and your first microphone was a USB microphone. Ryan: Which was the Blue Snowball, by the way. Aaron: That's the worst microphone! Ryan: I had no idea how to use it, either. If I find some of the earliest recordings I did, there are times I'm clipping to the max, square waves. Aaron: Probably bad mic technique, too. But hey; it got you started! If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone. Any USB mics will work for getting started. I like the Blue Yeti, but it's like $100. The ATR-2100 is fine, too. You just have to get something that can record some audio and start playing with it. Start playing with Garageband. Start playing with the free programs. Learn how to enable recording on a track, how to set your input device to the microphone, how to set your output device to wherever your headphones are plugged into, whether that's your mic or your computer. It took me so long to figure that stuff out. I was like, “Why can't I hear the audio in my headphones? What is going on?” Ryan: Same here. Aaron: You have to set input and output, then you have to record enable or do the input monitoring, all that stuff. But start with the USB microphone. Take some basic classes. There are so many great online classes. If you don't have any money at all, if you're super broke like I was when I started, watch some free YouTube videos. Read a book. Ryan: If you go to Coursera.org, they're a website where you can pay to take online courses and get certifications and whatnot, but they also offer free online courses. They even offer free online courses from Berklee. I've seen a music production class there. I've taken a free online song writing class. Check out free online courses, because they can be a pool of incredible knowledge. I took a photography class on there. Coursera is a great place. They're great if you want to take free online courses. Aaron: There are places where you can learn all this stuff. You just have to invest some time. You really just have to start: Don't wait until you have $500 for an interface and $200 for some professional headphones and microphone. Whether you want to start a podcast, start recording audio for a video, or record and mix a demo for a band, start doing something. Stop spending all your time thinking about how you can't do anything because you don't have certain gear or you're not in the right place. You'll learn as you do, especially in audio. You're going to make a ton of mistakes. Ryan: That's how you learn, though! That's one of the most valuable things I've learned in life. You learn from your mistakes. Aaron: You don't really learn when everything goes well. Just Start Aaron: Any other advice you would give somebody, thinking back on how you got to where you are right now? Ryan: Honestly, you hit the nail on the head with “just start.” It's as simple and cliche as Nike, “Just do it.” There is always going to be the next latest craze, the gear, and we've all been susceptible to that. We say, “Oh, well, I could do this if I had X.” It starts with the drive and determination, wanting to do it. There's knowledge out there everywhere. You just have to dig for it. Chances are, you have at least something you can start with. Record something on your phone. Aaron: I have a friend who makes some awesome music on his iPhone. Ryan: Oh, totally. It's as simple as getting an adapter. You can plug your guitar or whatever into your phone. Aaron: Kids these days have it so easy! Ryan: You have Garageband on your phone. I remember when I was figuring this out in high school, and we actually had a four track tape recorder. That was my first start. Get started with whatever you have. Aaron: What kind of stuff do you do at the church? What's your day to day life like? Are you there every day, or is it just a couple of days a week? Ryan: Oh no, I'm definitely there every day. It has been a whirlwind for sure. In the past five years, I have probably played every audio role that there is to be played here. My main thing now is audio for broadcasts, pretty much anything that leaves the church. Our biggest output is the sermon, which goes to a lot of places. It also goes in the TV episode, which we talked about, which goes locally, nationally, and, I believe, globally as well. That's a lot of what I've done. We also create a lot of films, short films, for our worship experiences, anything you can imagine that's video and audio related. Audio post production, like we talk about. I'm constantly on video shoots using field recorders, the boom op, anything you can think of. Audio for video, I've done it. The Gear Ryan Uses Aaron: Let's talk about your gear a little bit. What kind of stuff are you using most in everyday life? I'll do a quick recap: I have the Shure Beta 87A Mic as my main podcasting microphone. It's attached to a Scarlett 18i20 USB Interface (update: I'm now using my Zoom H6 exclusively), which is plugged into a quadcore iMac that's a couple years old. Nothing super fancy, but I'm really happy with where I am. I remember wanting all this stuff back in 2011, thinking how awesome it would be to have it. I have a Zoom H6 portable recorder and a couple of SM58 microphones. I've been pairing down my gear collection because I'm planning on moving in the spring. What kind of stuff are you working with? I use Logic Pro X for editing, and then Izotope iZotope RX 5 for cleaning up background noise or fixing clipping. What about you? What's your day to day favorite gear? Ryan: We use a lot. There's a bunch of gear for field recording and then in my office, which is where I'm at right now. I'll start with my office. Right now, I'm talking into my personal mic, which is a Rode NT1A. It's very affordable. The Rode NT1A is a nice beginner mic which works and sounds great, and I use it for a lot of voiceover projects. Aaron: I like those mics. Ryan: I'm talking into that right now. We also use the Shure SM7B. We have a nice Neumann that we'll use for bigger projects. We like to use Universal Audio Interfaces, so I've got one of those. They're great. They're rock solid. You really can't beat them. At our main recording/editing audio work station, we use Pro Tools. That's very standard, and I've been using that for years and years. I use a lot of plugins. I use a lot of the Waves Plugins. I do use RX as well, and that's the bulk of it. I do a lot of processing, depending on the project. I have a really huge sound library for if I'm doing narrative pieces that involve sound design, sound effects. I have a great app called Audio Finder, which a lot of electronic musicians use to help them find sounds. I use it to help me find sounds. It's a nice way to catalogue sounds if you're a sound designer or anything like that. You can basically tag all these audio files with meta data, and you can search for sounds by their title. Or, if you type in a word in the search bar, it can pull up things based off the the metadata. If you have notes on something, it can find it. Audio Finder is a great way to find sounds. I have some other things in here. I have the Artist Mix Controller made by Avid. I use those if I'm automating stuff. I use those a lot, actually, when I'm mixing the sermons. I do a lot of automation for that. If I'm mixing a piece with a music bed or something, I like to automate the music by hand. It feels more natural, as opposed to clicking and making little dots. That's the bulk of it here in the office. All of our audio engineers have a nice pair of Focal monitors. I also have another set of monitors I built myself. When I mix TV episodes, I have an output routed to a TV here in my office so I can hear how it translates on TV speakers. Recording Audio for Video Ryan: On the front end of things, if we're doing shoots for videos, we use Sound Devices field recorders. We have three different models: the Sound Devices 788T 8 Channel Recorder, a 702 2 Channel Recorder, and then a 633 6 Channel Recorder. That last one is one of their newer models, which is great. Sound Devices are steep in price, but they are rock solid. One of the most trustworthy, well known field recorder brands on the market. That's what you'll see on pretty much every big budget shoot in some way. I do a lot of freelance on the side, which gives me the opportunity EPK shoots or BTS shoots for, recently, a show on HBO called Outcast. Aaron: Outcast? I've been seeing that (I watch Westworld). Ryan: I'm pretty sure it's the same writers or producers or something. I know it's the same writer as The Walking Dead. They shoot here in North Carolina, so with a local production company, we've done some interviews with some of the cast and crew. It's been really neat to be on set and see what they're using. It's cool to see how similar their world is to what we're doing day to day, just with more money and more resources. It's the same thing. Most of their audio guys have some sort of Sound Devices. A lot of them use the 788 as a backup recording rig, and they've got larger multitrack recorders as well, that are also made by Sound Devices. Sound Devices is a great brand. They're crazy expensive, but when you buy that, you know you've basically got it for life. Aaron: Yeah, I'm looking at the Sound Devices 788T SSD 8 Channel Portable Solid State Audio Recorder. It's almost $7,000. I love that! So fancy. Ryan: That SSD does have an internal hard drive. Ours has a hard drive as well, so it's great, because it has the internal hard drive, but you can also use CF cards. You can record on two different mediums. In case something runs out of space, you have it in two places. Aaron: This is super professional stuff. Ryan: Yeah. It is. It's top of the line. Aaron: Fantastic. For all the rest of you, just go with the Zoom H4N or the H6. Ryan: Hey, we do have a Zoom H4N, and we do use that every now and then. Before I came on staff, our first field recorder was the Zoom H4N. Aaron: If I could start over and go back to before I had any kind of interface at all, I think I would buy myself an H4N or an H6. Not only are they portable field recorders so you can walk around with them—they have little stereo condensor mics on them—but they work as audio interfaces, too. You can plug it into your computer with a USB cable and record straight to your computer if you do any kind of podcasting or stuff like that. It's good for the price. Otherwise, the little two channel interfaces are great. They're about $100 for a good one, but they aren't portable. You can't take them to a show or out to a video shoot the way you can an H4N or an H6 or something. Ryan: Speaking of Zoom, they've recently come into the more professional field recording market. About a year ago, they releases the F8, I believe, which is an 8 channel field recorder with 8 mic pres. It's $999 for something very comparable to a Sound Device. It's not quite as high-fidelity, but for anyone starting out, you're really not going to notice the difference. Mixing On Expensive Headphones or Monitors Aaron: I was going to ask you this earlier. You mentioned that you had Focal monitors. Did you listen to the episode I did a few episodes back where I talked about mixing on headphones (Episode 69: Do You Need Expensive Headphones to Mix a Podcast?)? Ryan: Yes, I did. Aaron: I mix on $10 Panasonics. What do you think about that? You can be totally honest with me. You can tell me that it's a stupid idea or that it's okay. Ryan: I agree to a certain extent. I agree that you should be listening to what you're making on whatever the majority of people are going to be listening to it on. For a lot of audio engineers mixing music, that's iPod earbuds, those standard earbuds you get. Something like that. When I mix TV, I have an output routed to a TV in my office, so I can hear it on TV speakers. I do also believe in mixing on something with some sort of higher fidelity type of monitoring environment, whether that's nicer speakers or nicer headphones. Naturally, you're going to hear things differently. The main thing to take away is how things translate. If you're listening to something on one source and you make it sound good there, that's great, but in a different environment, it may sound completely different. iPhone earbuds may not have the bass that a car stereo has. You want to hear how it translates from one thing to another. That's why it's good to at least listen to it on two different sources and not just narrow yourself down to one cruddy thing. That's good in theory, but again, the key takeaway is translation. Aaron: Maybe it's a little bit different for me and I can get away with it because of the consistency of the microphones and the recording environment set we use. Ryan: Yeah, totally. Aaron: I think if I was doing more stuff like you are, with videos and clients and all that kind of stuff, I would absolutely be using my higher fidelity headphones. Ryan: Very true. The bulk of your work is dialogue, podcasts. Aaron: Yeah, that's really it. Just dudes talking into a microphone. Ryan: Yeah. I have done a lot of work here where I'm working in a small studio, but a lot of my mixes have played in auditoriums and arenas. If you're working on projects like music or film that have different audio frequencies and spectrums, remember that sound will be perceived differently in different places. Aaron: How do you even test for that? Ryan: Here, I at least have a sense of how our auditorium sounds, so I've trained my ear to hear in advance and understand how it's going to translate. For something like when we did a live recording in the biggest arena here in Charlotte, we had a video opener piece. I was on point for mixing that, so basically, I had to work with tech and production to find a time after setup where I can bring my session, copy it onto a laptop, and play it through the PA. Then I can make any final mix tweaks there in the auditorium or the arena. I perfected it in my studio, and any small tweaks I was able to do in that actual environment. Granted, a lot of the times, we may not have that luxury. There are also great plugins you can buy that simulate different monitoring environments, like Sonarworks. If you have certain pairs of headphones, you can tell the program, “I have these headphones, now make my mix sound like it's coming through these headphones or these speakers,” so you can hear how it might translate. In that program, they have a final output like the Beats headphones. You can hear how it might sound on there, super bass heavy. Aaron: I hear they're getting better, but I still have never bought any Beats headphones. I probably should (just for testing purposes). Ryan: There are definitely programs out there to help you see how things translate to different monitors. On Location Gear Ryan: We were talking about the gear we use for on location recording. Sound Devices would be our main recorders. For our mics, we use Schoeps. It's a shotgun microphone, so it's a narrow polar pattern with good off axis rejection. Schoeps is a great brand. Again, you'll see this on professional movie sets. That's the mic we use. We have some Sennheiser shotguns as well, the ME66, we have a couple of those, which is more their entry shotgun mics. Recently, I rented some of the MKH416. Aaron: I would like one of those. The Sennheiser 416 is well known as the classic TV shotgun mic, right? Ryan: Exactly. I rented those out because I wanted to try it out for that reason. The Schoeps is very good and very well known on set as well, but so is the 416. I rented it to try it out. It's a trusted mic that a lot of people use for these professional things, and it doesn't really break the bank for what it is. Aaron: They're like $1,000, I think. Ryan: Yeah, and it sounded great. Aaron: The next mic I get is either going to be that or the Rode NTG 3. Ryan: I've heard a lot of great things about that. I haven't tried one myself. Aaron: That's the shotgun mics we shot my podcasting courses with. Ryan: Yeah, I know that Sean uses that for all of his videos. Aaron: I'm excited about getting to go work with those (I'm moving to San Antonio in March or April). Master the Basics Aaron: That's a pretty good run through of your gear. I'm sure you could keep going and discuss a lot more, but I don't think we need to go into that. It seems like you guys are at a super professional, high quality. You have made big investments in professional gear, which is fantastic. I encourage everyone to strive for that, to aim for that, but like we said earlier, use what you have right now. I don't have anything close to what you guys have, but I'm still doing my podcast. I'm doing the best I can with what I have. Ryan: It still sounds great. Aaron: Thanks! It's mostly just knowing how to set gain levels and not having a noisy room. It's crazy how far the basics will get you— everything else is just icing on the cake. I've been watching this video course called Zen and the Art of Work, which I really recommend to everybody. It's mindfulness training mixed with productivity training, which is such a great combination. In this course, he says, “So many of the masters continually revisit the basics.” Mastery is staying on a path. It's not reaching some final goal, it's more about being with the work and investing in getting better, but also revisiting the basics. He was talking about playing piano. He was like, “A lot of times, I just start by touching the keys, pressing the keys, and then doing basic scales over and over again.” It's true. When you get so good at the basics that you don't have to think about it, that's when you start to expand and get to that level where people say, “Wow, you're so good at that. How did you get so good?” You're like, “That was just doing the basics. It's not anything fancy.” It's so important to master the basics and keep going back to them. Learning More Aaron: What's next for you? How do you invest in yourself and improve? Or are you working so much that you always have more learning opportunities? Do you buy books or courses or follow any websites to learn more about this audio stuff? Ryan: Honestly? We had a shift at work to where my role has shifted to mainly just broadcasts. That has enabled me to have a little bit more flexibility and free time, so I've been doing a lot more freelance work. That's great, because it energizes me and keeps me engaged. It keeps me from routine. Routine is great. I love routine, that's very much my personality, but freelance work keeps things interesting. For me, it's all about where and how I can get inspired and constantly feeding that. It's about feeding my desire for creativity. We're all creatives. We like to create. We were designed to be creators, really. Everything I try to do is about how I can become a better creator and what I can create next. It's about finding things that inspire me, really. We touched lightly on a few of the resources that I like, things I've learned and places I've picked things up. If you're interested in audio for post production, there are a couple of great books by Ric Viers. I have two books by him that are really great. The first one is The Sound Effects Bible, and it's not just sound effects in there. He talks about everything from gear to microphones, basics, setting proper gains, compression, some mixing techniques, etc. He also has The Location Sound Bible. There are a lot of similarities, but there's also a lot of talk about gear, shotgun mics, lop mics, recorders, and then he also dives into some of the basics when it comes to mixing, proper gain staging, and so on. Those are a really great pool of knowledge in book form. There are a lot of other books out there, but I have found those two to be really helpful. Other than that, when it comes to audio for video, it's a very small, niche field. There isn't a crazy amount of stuff out there, like there might be for mixing music. For that, you've got tons. You've got Pensado's Place, all these people on YouTube putting out channels on mixing, mixing from home, mixing on a budget, etc. There's plenty of that. Aaron: Graham Cochrane and Joe Gilder are pretty awesome resources for anyone who wants to start a home studio. Ryan: YouTube can be a pool of knowledge for anything and everything, too. You have to dig a little bit and do some searching. On the inspiration side, for me, since I love audio for video, Sound Works Collection is a great place. They'll do mini videos interviewing the sound people that did sound for X movie. Whether it was the last Harry Potter or anything and everything, big budget films, they'll sit down with the recording people, the sound designers, the mixers… It's really cool, because they'll show footage of them doing stuff on location or the foley artists. It's cool to see their process. For me, that helps me stay inspired. It gives me ideas to do other things. They have a podcast as well, and that's great. The videos can be kind of short, maybe 10 minutes or so, but the podcast will go on at length, talking to the audio guys who have made sound for videos possible. It will also be music composers for movies as well. That's really great. I found that great not only as inspiration, but to know what and how audio professionals for big budget films get inside their minds, how they're thinking, and what their process looks like. It's neat to see stuff about sound engineers for big movies and realize that we're not so different. Dealing With a Broad Loudness Spectrum (Dynamics) Aaron: I have a nerdy question here. This is about normalizing and compression, I think. Aiya had asked, “I'm so torn about normalizing sound clips. If I'm working on a longer project in segments, would it be better to adjust my peaks manually for the sake of consistency? It's for a video project.” I'm hearing that there are differences in video volumes. How do you deal with that? Do you do compression? Do you do automation for the different parts? How do you deal with dynamics? Ryan: It depends on the project. I'll talk about how I would mix a sermon, because that's very dynamic. Our pastor will go from whispering, holding his handheld mic close to his stomach, to screaming, holding the microphone, cupping the capsule. Power and respect to him, because it creates a certain atmosphere, which has a powerful effect. That's what I'm dealing with on a weekly basis. That dynamic range is tremendous. Keep in mind, this is going to TV eventually. TV has very strict restrictions. It's not so much on level, but on perceived level. There's a difference between what you see meter and what you're hearing. I can talk at length about that, too. Aaron: Could you give us a super short version? I'm kind of aware of that, but since I just mix in Logic, I'm not sure how to measure it. Is there a way to measure it in Logic? Do you know? Is there a plugin you use? Ryan: I use a plugin from Waves. It's a loudness meter, and its just that. It has a lot of presets, so I'll use the TV standard preset. I'll use it for ATSE85, and I'll use it for a dialogue bus. They've also got one for a master bus. The standard right there is your average level around -24 dB LUFS, so that's full scale. If you have a classic meters, your peak would be zero, so that would average metering right around -10. At least for TV, I've got a hard limiter at -10 dB, to where nothing can go above that. The difference between levels on a meter vs. perceived loudness is the differences between what we hear and the actual energy. In our TV program, we'll have the sermon, but we'll also have a talking heads segments, which is dialogue and a music bed. We'll also go into segments where they'll go into worship from our live album, which had been mixed and mastered as an album. That thing is slammed. If you look at the wave form, it's a sausage. If I'm setting all that by the meters alone and they're all hitting -10, it may look right, but if I look at my loudness meter, that worship segment is going to be off the charts. There's so much more content in there. There's so much going on with all the different frequency ranges as opposed to a dialogue track, which is a narrow field in the frequency spectrum. That's the gist of it. When it comes to my technique for controlling dynamics, for something like mixing a sermon, if I'm going down my plugin chain, the first thing I naturally have is a high pass filter. I'm rolling off those unnecessary lows that are hogging energy. The next thing I'll do is use a compressor, and I'll set the attack to right in the middle, so not fast or slow, and I'll have the release time at fast. We don't want to hear it pumping, letting go. That's catching my peaks. It's not doing a crazy amount, but it kind of is. That's helping do a lot of the bulk compression. Before anything really hits the compressor, I will go through, and as I work my way through the mix, I will clip gain the wave form, so that, say, if he's whispering somewhere, I might keep that, depending on how I have my compressor set. Then, if we go up to a part where he's screaming and my wave form is huge, I will take that down and create those nodes, those dots in the wave form, and drag the actual clip volume down, that gain down. That way, it's not going into the compressor at this high gain level. It's hitting the compressor evenly as the rest of it would. That way, it's not driving the compressor crazy. Then I'll go through and do some EQ and DSing and whatnot. I might add some more compressors in there, just to grab some of those little things coming through. After that, it's subtle, just smoothing it out. Aaron: It is a little bit of both. If she has access to an audio editing program—I don't know what she's using for editing. If you can put a compressor on the track, do that. It's not exactly the same, but I did a YouTube video about how I process podcast vocals, and it's very similar. For podcast vocals, I start with a Logic noise removal plugin. Ryan: I actually have my noise suppressor, and I'll use that later on down in my signal chain. My way of thinking is that if I've got all this compression going on, the compression is narrowing that dynamic range, so it's bringing up that noise floor. I tend to do my noise suppression after the bulk of that compression, because the noise floor is higher and it's easier to work on a supressor. If that makes sense. Aaron: I've thought a lot about whether you should do the noise removal before or after you add a bunch of gain with a compressor or something, and I can't think of a good reason that it matters. You can take out the noise before you add a bunch of gain, or you can add a bunch of gain and take out the noise afterwards. Which is better? I don't know. Anyways, after the noise removal plugin, I put an EQ with a high pass filter, a peak compressor, an RMS or an average level compressor, and then a limiter. Ryan: Like I mentioned earlier, before I had my long-winded answer, it also depends on what it is you're mixing—whether it's music, or a podcast, or something for film. When it comes to dialogue for film, you want it to sound as natural as possible, but you also want to be able to hear if someone is whispering. When it comes to that, I'll still use a compressor, but it will be very, very light. If there's anything I need to do to meet loudness, that I will automate the volume on my dialogue bus. I'll bring that up. That way, it sounds a little bit more natural, instead of solely relying on a compressor to do all the work for you. Aaron: That makes sense. For podcasts, if I notice that there's a section where someone was talking much quieter, like if a guest backed away and talked like that for four or five minutes and then went back to the normal distance from the microphone, in Logic, I'll turn that into its own clip. I make a cut on either side of the quiet part, and then, in Logic, you can double click on it and change gain by hitting Control G. Then you can add 3, 4, or 5 dB to it. That works out pretty well. If it's every five seconds or I have to do it more than five or six times in an episode, I won't do the clip gain changes, I'll just use a compressor. Look at the overall audio file and see if there are long stretches where you can use automation to change the gain, or change the clip gain. Common Audio Mistakes Podcasters Make Ryan: You asked a question that I think would be good to talk about in regards to podcasting. You had asked, “What do you like about podcasts? What common mistakes do you hear people make?” Initially, I read this and thought, “I don't know,” but I spent some time thinking about it. This is great, because it piggybacks off the loudness thing. A lot of the mistakes that I hear when it comes to podcasts in regards to audio is the levels and loudness aspect. I'll listen to some podcasts that sound great, and I'll put on another podcast where the whole thing is super quiet. Then they start laughing, and it's really loud. There are some, like mine, where they have a music bed underneath the entire thing, and then sometimes the music bed is so quiet that you hardly know it's there. You're like, “What the heck is that noise in the background?” Sometimes, it's the opposite. Sometimes, the music bed is way too loud. That's a few of the things I've noticed. A lot of the fixes relate to what we just talked about. It helps to have knowledge of levels and perceived loudness. If you're mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent. One of the biggest things I can recommend for anyone mixing anything, whether it's music, movies, a podcast, is the importance of having a reference track. Aaron: Yeah, I don't talk about that enough. Ryan: That is huge. Professional audio engineers who mix platinum records still do this. They will pull in a track from a different song that is mixed well and is mixed how they want theirs to sound, and they'll have it muted in their session. When they want to have a reference to listen to or train their ear, they'll un-mute it, and they'll go, “Oh, okay.” I'm sure you've done the same thing as me, where you'll be so involved in a mix, you're in it, and you think it sounds great, and then maybe you go away. You go home, sleep, and maybe you come back, and you open it up and you go, “Woah! What was I thinking!” You can get so involved in it that the blinders go up. You get tunnel vision, and you're not aware to some things. It's good to have a reference track or get an outsider's opinion on a mix. The main takeaway here is the reference track. That would help with anything, whether it's the timbre, how you're EQing, or the loudness. You pull in their track and it's far louder than yours, and you automatically know that you need to do something about it. Aaron: That's a great idea. You can kind of do this before or after. You go through and you edit your whole podcast, get everything set up the way you want, create an extra track, and then find a podcast that sounds really good—This American Life or pretty much anything by NPR—download an episode, drop it into your editing program, and play it, mute it, and see what the difference is. Maybe you need to add some gain with an adaptive limiter or with a compressor, or maybe you can tell that your track sounds way sharper or harsher. Are there are too many high frequencies or too much bass compared to your reference track? You can adjust those things. I'm so glad you mentioned that. I've never thought of that before, and that's such a good idea. Ryan: It's one of those things you don't think of much, but once you do it, you're like, “Oh my gosh!” It's really eye opening and really helpful. You can find Ryan online at ryanmonette.com, and follow him on Twitter @RyanMonette.

My guest this week is professional audio engineer Ryan Monette. Ryan graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Music Production & Engineering. For the last 4.5 years he's been the Post-Production Audio Engineer on staff at Elevation Church, in Charlotte, NC, where he mixes their global TV show, and has many other responsibilities (boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, etc.). You may have heard some of his work, as he sound-designed and mixed the opener video for the Circles conference for the past two years. He even had his own podcast for a short while (TheQueuecast.com). I asked Ryan to come on the show to share his journey towards becoming a professional audio engineer (a job that I've always wanted), and to get him to share some tips for anyone interested in working in audio/video professionally.Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:Think long term and dream big.If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone.Take advantage of free online courses to learn more about audio engineering.Get started with whatever you have.Your mix may sound completely different in a different environment, so listen with different headphones/speakers in different locations.Master the basics and keep going back to them.If you’re mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent.When mixing, always use a reference track.Show NotesAaron: You graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in music production and engineering. For the last five years, you’ve been the post production audio engineer for Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. You have a lot of jobs there: boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, and you mix their global TV show. Do you mix that live?Ryan: Not necessarily. We can get into that later. There’s a process for that.Aaron: Some of the creative people here might have heard of some of your work. You sound designed and mixed the opening videos for the past two years of Circles Conference, which I was at. Have you been there for the past two years?Ryan: I haven’t been personally, no. I have wanted to go. I love it from afar, and I want to go in person.Aaron: I wanted you to come on this show because when I first got started, I had dreams of being a professional audio engineer. I thought, “How cool would it be to work in audio and get paid for it? That’d be awesome!”I fell backwards into it by doing podcast editing as a hobby first, then for money, then I met Sean McCabe and ended up working for him full time. I edit podcasts and help out with a ton of other stuff. I asked you to come on the show to share your advice for anyone who’s interested in working in audio/video professionally, and to talk about how you got there yourself. So tell me a little bit about how you got into audio. When did you first realize that this was something you wanted to do?Ryan’s Journey to Becoming a Professional Audio EngineerRyan: I love listening to your podcast, Aaron, and what I love about it is I feel like you and I have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds. You’re a musician, a drummer, and I’m also a musician. I play several things. My primary instrument is bass, but along with that, I started on piano. I picked up bass, and with the bass I picked up guitar. I took some drum lessons here and there as well.I sing as well. I dabbled in a little bit of everything. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. I’m okay at a lot of things, but I’m not superb at one thing. Anyway, right around junior high or high school, I started playing the bass. I started playing in little bands here and there. When it came time for college, I had no clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I loved music.Aaron: Same here!Ryan: I was living in Las Vegas at the time, so I decided, well, everyone has to have that college experience, and I didn’t want to go to college in the same city, so I decided that I needed that “being away from home” experience. I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. I took your basic, general classes, not knowing what I wanted to do. At this time, for my high school graduation, I had received a graduation present of a Macbook Pro.With that, of course, you get the wonderful iLife suite, including Garageband. As a musician, a whole new world was opened up to me. When I was in a band in high school, I was the gear head—I loved the PA and putting cables together.I was drawn to that. Once I had this Macbook Pro with Garageband and I had my bass and my guitar in my dorm, I was like, “I can create music!” I figured out how to work it and record myself. I bought a USB microphone, and that world was opened up. When I was there, I had a friend, and her brother went to this school where all they learned about was music. I was like, “Wait, you can do that? You can go to school for just music?”That’s how I found out about Berklee School of Music. I applied, and you have to audition as well. I applied and auditioned, and the first time I tried, I actually didn’t get into the music school I wanted to go to.Aaron: This sparks something in my mind. I feel like I might have read an article about Berklee or looked into it and thought, “No, they’re really strict on who they accept, based on your performance.” That was intimidating to me at the time, because I never felt like I was that good of a drummer.Ryan: It was intimidating for me, too. Clearly, I wasn’t up to par.Aaron: Yet you went for it. That’s more than a lot of people would do.Ryan: Yeah. After I finished my first year at UNR, I moved back to Vegas and went to UNLV, the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I took all music classes, forgetting the general ed stuff you need to get a degree. I took all music classes—music theory, because I had never had actual music theory classes, so I thought I needed that. With that, there were some audio classes that I took as well. I was like, “Hey, I like this audio thing.”At the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I had my first exposure to a formal audio class, where I learned all the proper techniques. Later on that year, I applied and auditioned again for Berklee. I got accepted, and the next year, I moved to Boston and went to Berklee for about three and a half years. Then I graduated. When I went to Berklee, the only thing that drew me as a major was Music Production and Engineering. I naturally loved the gear side of things. I fell in love with recording. I was like, “This is what I want to do.”Aaron: You got to spend three and a half years there, studying and learning?Ryan: It is non-stop, 24/7, music, audio, and to be honest, I miss being in that environment so much.Aaron: That sounds fantastic. I always love setting aside time to take online classes, read books, and listen to interviews about audio.Think Long-TermAaron: You were drawn to the audio engineering stuff, and then you graduated.Ryan: I can remember a specific time in my life, and I’m pretty sure it was my last semester at Berklee. They went by semesters instead of years. It was in one of my capstone classes. Our instructor asked us the typical, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question.Aaron: I love that question now. I hated it when I was 22.** Think long term and dream big**Aaron: Plan out where you want to be, because if you can envision it, then you can figure out how to get there. But you have to start by saying, “I want to do this thing someday.” For me, it was, “I want to do work from a laptop. How do I get there?” Now I’m there. So you were 22 and someone asked you, “Ryan, where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in five years?”Ryan: At that moment, I was trying to figure that out, naturally, as you do when you’re approaching the end of college. While I was at Berklee, I loved music. I loved recording music, but my absolute favorite class—they only had one of them, but it was the class I yearned for, that I wanted to take and put in all these extra hours for—was audio for visual media, audio for video.By far, that was my favorite class. The whole class, we were working toward our final project. You choose a five to seven minute clip from a well known movie, and all the audio is completely stripped. You have to recreate everything. That’s all the dialogue, all the foley, all the ambient background, all the hard effects, and so on. You have to connect with a film scoring student there at Berklee, and they have to provide the score. I absolutely loved every aspect of that project and the process. When it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life, it was between audio engineering at a recording studio, working at Disney as an Imagineer, or doing audio at a church.I have always been involved with church, playing on worship teams and whatnot, so I also saw myself doing audio for a church. Long story short, I was really privileged to dip my feet in all of those things after college. After I graduated, I moved back to Las Vegas. Eventually, I found an incredible recording studio, probably one of the top two recording studios in Las Vegas, and I landed an internship.First Audio Engineering JobsRyan: I say “internship” loosely, because your typical studio internship is all the stereotypical grunt work—taking out the trash, doing the coffee, and whatnot. I showed up, and they were like, “You went to Berklee? Berklee guys are cool. Here, hop in this session and help us out.” It was open to me, thrown at me, and next thing I knew, I was assisting on sessions with huge clients, I won’t name drop.Aaron: You can drop a couple of names if you want.Ryan: I had a pretty fun time helping out with a session with the famous engineer Eddie Kramer, who is engineering for Carlos Santana.Aaron: Dang, man! That’s awesome.Ryan: That was pretty incredible. But while I was there, I had this gut feeling inside of me saying, “This isn’t it.”Aaron: It’s fine, but it’s not quite right?Ryan: I could see myself staying there and working my way up, but it didn’t feel right. A few months after I realized that I didn’t want to stay at the studio, I applied and was offered a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.I packed my bags, moved to Orlando, and I was working as a stage technician at the Epcot park. There, they found out that I was an audio guy, so they pushed me toward the live audio side of things. I was mixing shows and bands at Epcot and what was at the time Downtown Disney, now Disney Springs, area. Same thing. Almost as soon as I got there, the same gut feeling came in.I was like, “This isn’t it. I’m more of a studio engineer. I definitely don’t want to do live stuff.” Although I love Disney, it just wasn’t sitting right. I was only there three months before the next great opportunity came up, which is where I am right now. One of my friends told me about a job opening for this church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Elevation Church. I had actually been following them because of their podcast.At the time, I was kind of like, “I’ve got a job, whatever.” For some reason, I ended up on their website, looking at the job. I was reading, and I was like, “Wait a minute, they’re looking for someone to do audio for video. That’s what I really want to do!” On a whim, I threw out my resume. Next thing you know, I’ve been here going on five years.Aaron: Did you mention that you were a podcast listener when you sent in your resume?Ryan: Yeah.Aaron: The connections you can make through podcasting is really incredible.Ryan: It is. And I’ve been working there for 5 years now.How to Get Into Audio EngineeringAaron: I want to jump into what you do at your job at Elevation, but let’s pause and do a section on what advice you would tell someone who’s wanting to get started. I wrote a couple of things down here. I think it’s hilarious that you got a Macbook and your first microphone was a USB microphone.Ryan: Which was the Blue Snowball, by the way.Aaron: That’s the worst microphone!Ryan: I had no idea how to use it, either. If I find some of the earliest recordings I did, there are times I’m clipping to the max, square waves.Aaron: Probably bad mic technique, too. But hey; it got you started!If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone.Any USB mics will work for getting started. I like the Blue Yeti, but it’s like $100. The ATR-2100 is fine, too. You just have to get something that can record some audio and start playing with it.Start playing with Garageband. Start playing with the free programs. Learn how to enable recording on a track, how to set your input device to the microphone, how to set your output device to wherever your headphones are plugged into, whether that’s your mic or your computer. It took me so long to figure that stuff out. I was like, “Why can’t I hear the audio in my headphones? What is going on?”Ryan: Same here.Aaron: You have to set input and output, then you have to record enable or do the input monitoring, all that stuff. But start with the USB microphone. Take some basic classes. There are so many great online classes. If you don’t have any money at all, if you’re super broke like I was when I started, watch some free YouTube videos. Read a book.Ryan: If you go to Coursera.org, they’re a website where you can pay to take online courses and get certifications and whatnot, but they also offer free online courses. They even offer free online courses from Berklee. I’ve seen a music production class there. I’ve taken a free online song writing class.Check out free online courses, because they can be a pool of incredible knowledge.I took a photography class on there. Coursera is a great place. They’re great if you want to take free online courses.Aaron: There are places where you can learn all this stuff. You just have to invest some time. You really just have to start: Don’t wait until you have $500 for an interface and $200 for some professional headphones and microphone. Whether you want to start a podcast, start recording audio for a video, or record and mix a demo for a band, start doing something.Stop spending all your time thinking about how you can’t do anything because you don’t have certain gear or you’re not in the right place. You’ll learn as you do, especially in audio. You’re going to make a ton of mistakes.Ryan: That’s how you learn, though! That’s one of the most valuable things I’ve learned in life. You learn from your mistakes.Aaron: You don’t really learn when everything goes well.Just StartAaron: Any other advice you would give somebody, thinking back on how you got to where you are right now?Ryan: Honestly, you hit the nail on the head with “just start.” It’s as simple and cliche as Nike, “Just do it.” There is always going to be the next latest craze, the gear, and we’ve all been susceptible to that. We say, “Oh, well, I could do this if I had X.” It starts with the drive and determination, wanting to do it. There’s knowledge out there everywhere. You just have to dig for it.Chances are, you have at least something you can start with. Record something on your phone.Aaron: I have a friend who makes some awesome music on his iPhone.Ryan: Oh, totally. It’s as simple as getting an adapter. You can plug your guitar or whatever into your phone.Aaron: Kids these days have it so easy!Ryan: You have Garageband on your phone. I remember when I was figuring this out in high school, and we actually had a four track tape recorder. That was my first start. Get started with whatever you have.Aaron: What kind of stuff do you do at the church? What’s your day to day life like? Are you there every day, or is it just a couple of days a week?Ryan: Oh no, I’m definitely there every day. It has been a whirlwind for sure. In the past five years, I have probably played every audio role that there is to be played here. My main thing now is audio for broadcasts, pretty much anything that leaves the church. Our biggest output is the sermon, which goes to a lot of places.It also goes in the TV episode, which we talked about, which goes locally, nationally, and, I believe, globally as well. That’s a lot of what I’ve done. We also create a lot of films, short films, for our worship experiences, anything you can imagine that’s video and audio related. Audio post production, like we talk about. I’m constantly on video shoots using field recorders, the boom op, anything you can think of. Audio for video, I’ve done it.The Gear Ryan UsesAaron: Let’s talk about your gear a little bit. What kind of stuff are you using most in everyday life? I’ll do a quick recap: I have the Shure Beta 87A Mic as my main podcasting microphone. It’s attached to a Scarlett 18i20 USB Interface (update: I’m now using my Zoom H6 exclusively), which is plugged into a quadcore iMac that’s a couple years old.Nothing super fancy, but I’m really happy with where I am. I remember wanting all this stuff back in 2011, thinking how awesome it would be to have it. I have a Zoom H6 portable recorder and a couple of SM58 microphones. I’ve been pairing down my gear collection because I’m planning on moving in the spring.What kind of stuff are you working with? I use Logic Pro X for editing, and then Izotope iZotope RX 5 for cleaning up background noise or fixing clipping. What about you? What’s your day to day favorite gear?Ryan: We use a lot. There’s a bunch of gear for field recording and then in my office, which is where I’m at right now. I’ll start with my office. Right now, I’m talking into my personal mic, which is a Rode NT1A. It’s very affordable.The Rode NT1A is a nice beginner mic which works and sounds great, and I use it for a lot of voiceover projects.Aaron: I like those mics.Ryan: I’m talking into that right now. We also use the Shure SM7B. We have a nice Neumann that we’ll use for bigger projects. We like to use Universal Audio Interfaces, so I’ve got one of those. They’re great. They’re rock solid. You really can’t beat them.At our main recording/editing audio work station, we use Pro Tools. That’s very standard, and I’ve been using that for years and years. I use a lot of plugins. I use a lot of the Waves Plugins. I do use RX as well, and that’s the bulk of it. I do a lot of processing, depending on the project.I have a really huge sound library for if I’m doing narrative pieces that involve sound design, sound effects. I have a great app called Audio Finder, which a lot of electronic musicians use to help them find sounds. I use it to help me find sounds. It’s a nice way to catalogue sounds if you’re a sound designer or anything like that.You can basically tag all these audio files with meta data, and you can search for sounds by their title. Or, if you type in a word in the search bar, it can pull up things based off the the metadata. If you have notes on something, it can find it. Audio Finder is a great way to find sounds.I have some other things in here. I have the Artist Mix Controller made by Avid. I use those if I’m automating stuff. I use those a lot, actually, when I’m mixing the sermons. I do a lot of automation for that. If I’m mixing a piece with a music bed or something, I like to automate the music by hand.It feels more natural, as opposed to clicking and making little dots. That’s the bulk of it here in the office. All of our audio engineers have a nice pair of Focal monitors. I also have another set of monitors I built myself. When I mix TV episodes, I have an output routed to a TV here in my office so I can hear how it translates on TV speakers.Recording Audio for VideoRyan: On the front end of things, if we’re doing shoots for videos, we use Sound Devices field recorders. We have three different models: the Sound Devices 788T 8 Channel Recorder, a 702 2 Channel Recorder, and then a 633 6 Channel Recorder. That last one is one of their newer models, which is great.Sound Devices are steep in price, but they are rock solid.One of the most trustworthy, well known field recorder brands on the market. That’s what you’ll see on pretty much every big budget shoot in some way. I do a lot of freelance on the side, which gives me the opportunity EPK shoots or BTS shoots for, recently, a show on HBO called Outcast.Aaron: Outcast? I’ve been seeing that (I watch Westworld).Ryan: I’m pretty sure it’s the same writers or producers or something. I know it’s the same writer as The Walking Dead. They shoot here in North Carolina, so with a local production company, we’ve done some interviews with some of the cast and crew. It’s been really neat to be on set and see what they’re using. It’s cool to see how similar their world is to what we’re doing day to day, just with more money and more resources.It’s the same thing. Most of their audio guys have some sort of Sound Devices. A lot of them use the 788 as a backup recording rig, and they’ve got larger multitrack recorders as well, that are also made by Sound Devices. Sound Devices is a great brand. They’re crazy expensive, but when you buy that, you know you’ve basically got it for life.Aaron: Yeah, I’m looking at the Sound Devices 788T SSD 8 Channel Portable Solid State Audio Recorder. It’s almost $7,000. I love that! So fancy.Ryan: That SSD does have an internal hard drive. Ours has a hard drive as well, so it’s great, because it has the internal hard drive, but you can also use CF cards. You can record on two different mediums. In case something runs out of space, you have it in two places.Aaron: This is super professional stuff.Ryan: Yeah. It is. It’s top of the line.Aaron: Fantastic. For all the rest of you, just go with the Zoom H4N or the H6.Ryan: Hey, we do have a Zoom H4N, and we do use that every now and then. Before I came on staff, our first field recorder was the Zoom H4N.Aaron: If I could start over and go back to before I had any kind of interface at all, I think I would buy myself an H4N or an H6. Not only are they portable field recorders so you can walk around with them—they have little stereo condensor mics on them—but they work as audio interfaces, too. You can plug it into your computer with a USB cable and record straight to your computer if you do any kind of podcasting or stuff like that.It’s good for the price. Otherwise, the little two channel interfaces are great. They’re about $100 for a good one, but they aren’t portable. You can’t take them to a show or out to a video shoot the way you can an H4N or an H6 or something.Ryan: Speaking of Zoom, they’ve recently come into the more professional field recording market. About a year ago, they releases the F8, I believe, which is an 8 channel field recorder with 8 mic pres. It’s $999 for something very comparable to a Sound Device. It’s not quite as high-fidelity, but for anyone starting out, you’re really not going to notice the difference.Mixing On Expensive Headphones or MonitorsAaron: I was going to ask you this earlier. You mentioned that you had Focal monitors. Did you listen to the episode I did a few episodes back where I talked about mixing on headphones (Episode 69: Do You Need Expensive Headphones to Mix a Podcast?)?Ryan: Yes, I did.Aaron: I mix on $10 Panasonics. What do you think about that? You can be totally honest with me. You can tell me that it’s a stupid idea or that it’s okay.Ryan: I agree to a certain extent. I agree that you should be listening to what you’re making on whatever the majority of people are going to be listening to it on. For a lot of audio engineers mixing music, that’s iPod earbuds, those standard earbuds you get. Something like that. When I mix TV, I have an output routed to a TV in my office, so I can hear it on TV speakers.I do also believe in mixing on something with some sort of higher fidelity type of monitoring environment, whether that’s nicer speakers or nicer headphones. Naturally, you’re going to hear things differently. The main thing to take away is how things translate.If you’re listening to something on one source and you make it sound good there, that’s great, but in a different environment, it may sound completely different.iPhone earbuds may not have the bass that a car stereo has. You want to hear how it translates from one thing to another. That’s why it’s good to at least listen to it on two different sources and not just narrow yourself down to one cruddy thing. That’s good in theory, but again, the key takeaway is translation.Aaron: Maybe it’s a little bit different for me and I can get away with it because of the consistency of the microphones and the recording environment set we use.Ryan: Yeah, totally.Aaron: I think if I was doing more stuff like you are, with videos and clients and all that kind of stuff, I would absolutely be using my higher fidelity headphones.Ryan: Very true. The bulk of your work is dialogue, podcasts.Aaron: Yeah, that’s really it. Just dudes talking into a microphone.Ryan: Yeah. I have done a lot of work here where I’m working in a small studio, but a lot of my mixes have played in auditoriums and arenas.If you’re working on projects like music or film that have different audio frequencies and spectrums, remember that sound will be perceived differently in different places.Aaron: How do you even test for that?Ryan: Here, I at least have a sense of how our auditorium sounds, so I’ve trained my ear to hear in advance and understand how it’s going to translate. For something like when we did a live recording in the biggest arena here in Charlotte, we had a video opener piece. I was on point for mixing that, so basically, I had to work with tech and production to find a time after setup where I can bring my session, copy it onto a laptop, and play it through the PA.Then I can make any final mix tweaks there in the auditorium or the arena. I perfected it in my studio, and any small tweaks I was able to do in that actual environment. Granted, a lot of the times, we may not have that luxury. There are also great plugins you can buy that simulate different monitoring environments, like Sonarworks.If you have certain pairs of headphones, you can tell the program, “I have these headphones, now make my mix sound like it’s coming through these headphones or these speakers,” so you can hear how it might translate. In that program, they have a final output like the Beats headphones. You can hear how it might sound on there, super bass heavy.Aaron: I hear they’re getting better, but I still have never bought any Beats headphones. I probably should (just for testing purposes).Ryan: There are definitely programs out there to help you see how things translate to different monitors.On Location GearRyan: We were talking about the gear we use for on location recording. Sound Devices would be our main recorders. For our mics, we use Schoeps. It’s a shotgun microphone, so it’s a narrow polar pattern with good off axis rejection. Schoeps is a great brand. Again, you’ll see this on professional movie sets.That’s the mic we use. We have some Sennheiser shotguns as well, the ME66, we have a couple of those, which is more their entry shotgun mics. Recently, I rented some of the MKH416.Aaron: I would like one of those. The Sennheiser 416 is well known as the classic TV shotgun mic, right?Ryan: Exactly. I rented those out because I wanted to try it out for that reason. The Schoeps is very good and very well known on set as well, but so is the 416. I rented it to try it out. It’s a trusted mic that a lot of people use for these professional things, and it doesn’t really break the bank for what it is.Aaron: They’re like $1,000, I think.Ryan: Yeah, and it sounded great.Aaron: The next mic I get is either going to be that or the Rode NTG 3.Ryan: I’ve heard a lot of great things about that. I haven’t tried one myself.Aaron: That’s the shotgun mics we shot my podcasting courses with.Ryan: Yeah, I know that Sean uses that for all of his videos.Aaron: I’m excited about getting to go work with those (I’m moving to San Antonio in March or April).Master the BasicsAaron: That’s a pretty good run through of your gear. I’m sure you could keep going and discuss a lot more, but I don’t think we need to go into that. It seems like you guys are at a super professional, high quality. You have made big investments in professional gear, which is fantastic. I encourage everyone to strive for that, to aim for that, but like we said earlier, use what you have right now. I don’t have anything close to what you guys have, but I’m still doing my podcast. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.Ryan: It still sounds great.Aaron: Thanks! It’s mostly just knowing how to set gain levels and not having a noisy room. It’s crazy how far the basics will get you— everything else is just icing on the cake.I’ve been watching this video course called Zen and the Art of Work, which I really recommend to everybody. It’s mindfulness training mixed with productivity training, which is such a great combination.In this course, he says, “So many of the masters continually revisit the basics.” Mastery is staying on a path. It’s not reaching some final goal, it’s more about being with the work and investing in getting better, but also revisiting the basics. He was talking about playing piano. He was like, “A lot of times, I just start by touching the keys, pressing the keys, and then doing basic scales over and over again.”It’s true. When you get so good at the basics that you don’t have to think about it, that’s when you start to expand and get to that level where people say, “Wow, you’re so good at that. How did you get so good?” You’re like, “That was just doing the basics. It’s not anything fancy.”It’s so important to master the basics and keep going back to them.Learning MoreAaron: What’s next for you? How do you invest in yourself and improve? Or are you working so much that you always have more learning opportunities? Do you buy books or courses or follow any websites to learn more about this audio stuff?Ryan: Honestly? We had a shift at work to where my role has shifted to mainly just broadcasts. That has enabled me to have a little bit more flexibility and free time, so I’ve been doing a lot more freelance work. That’s great, because it energizes me and keeps me engaged. It keeps me from routine. Routine is great.I love routine, that’s very much my personality, but freelance work keeps things interesting.For me, it’s all about where and how I can get inspired and constantly feeding that. It’s about feeding my desire for creativity. We’re all creatives. We like to create. We were designed to be creators, really. Everything I try to do is about how I can become a better creator and what I can create next. It’s about finding things that inspire me, really. We touched lightly on a few of the resources that I like, things I’ve learned and places I’ve picked things up.If you’re interested in audio for post production, there are a couple of great books by Ric Viers. I have two books by him that are really great. The first one is The Sound Effects Bible, and it’s not just sound effects in there. He talks about everything from gear to microphones, basics, setting proper gains, compression, some mixing techniques, etc. He also has The Location Sound Bible.There are a lot of similarities, but there’s also a lot of talk about gear, shotgun mics, lop mics, recorders, and then he also dives into some of the basics when it comes to mixing, proper gain staging, and so on. Those are a really great pool of knowledge in book form. There are a lot of other books out there, but I have found those two to be really helpful.Other than that, when it comes to audio for video, it’s a very small, niche field. There isn’t a crazy amount of stuff out there, like there might be for mixing music. For that, you’ve got tons. You’ve got Pensado’s Place, all these people on YouTube putting out channels on mixing, mixing from home, mixing on a budget, etc. There’s plenty of that.Aaron: Graham Cochrane and Joe Gilder are pretty awesome resources for anyone who wants to start a home studio.Ryan: YouTube can be a pool of knowledge for anything and everything, too. You have to dig a little bit and do some searching. On the inspiration side, for me, since I love audio for video, Sound Works Collection is a great place. They’ll do mini videos interviewing the sound people that did sound for X movie. Whether it was the last Harry Potter or anything and everything, big budget films, they’ll sit down with the recording people, the sound designers, the mixers…It’s really cool, because they’ll show footage of them doing stuff on location or the foley artists. It’s cool to see their process. For me, that helps me stay inspired. It gives me ideas to do other things. They have a podcast as well, and that’s great. The videos can be kind of short, maybe 10 minutes or so, but the podcast will go on at length, talking to the audio guys who have made sound for videos possible.It will also be music composers for movies as well. That’s really great. I found that great not only as inspiration, but to know what and how audio professionals for big budget films get inside their minds, how they’re thinking, and what their process looks like.It’s neat to see stuff about sound engineers for big movies and realize that we’re not so different.Dealing With a Broad Loudness Spectrum (Dynamics)Aaron: I have a nerdy question here. This is about normalizing and compression, I think. Aiya had asked, “I’m so torn about normalizing sound clips. If I’m working on a longer project in segments, would it be better to adjust my peaks manually for the sake of consistency? It’s for a video project.” I’m hearing that there are differences in video volumes. How do you deal with that? Do you do compression? Do you do automation for the different parts? How do you deal with dynamics?Ryan: It depends on the project. I’ll talk about how I would mix a sermon, because that’s very dynamic. Our pastor will go from whispering, holding his handheld mic close to his stomach, to screaming, holding the microphone, cupping the capsule. Power and respect to him, because it creates a certain atmosphere, which has a powerful effect. That’s what I’m dealing with on a weekly basis.That dynamic range is tremendous. Keep in mind, this is going to TV eventually. TV has very strict restrictions. It’s not so much on level, but on perceived level. There’s a difference between what you see meter and what you’re hearing. I can talk at length about that, too.Aaron: Could you give us a super short version? I’m kind of aware of that, but since I just mix in Logic, I’m not sure how to measure it. Is there a way to measure it in Logic? Do you know? Is there a plugin you use?Ryan: I use a plugin from Waves. It’s a loudness meter, and its just that. It has a lot of presets, so I’ll use the TV standard preset. I’ll use it for ATSE85, and I’ll use it for a dialogue bus. They’ve also got one for a master bus. The standard right there is your average level around -24 dB LUFS, so that’s full scale. If you have a classic meters, your peak would be zero, so that would average metering right around -10. At least for TV, I’ve got a hard limiter at -10 dB, to where nothing can go above that.The difference between levels on a meter vs. perceived loudness is the differences between what we hear and the actual energy.In our TV program, we’ll have the sermon, but we’ll also have a talking heads segments, which is dialogue and a music bed. We’ll also go into segments where they’ll go into worship from our live album, which had been mixed and mastered as an album. That thing is slammed. If you look at the wave form, it’s a sausage. If I’m setting all that by the meters alone and they’re all hitting -10, it may look right, but if I look at my loudness meter, that worship segment is going to be off the charts.There’s so much more content in there. There’s so much going on with all the different frequency ranges as opposed to a dialogue track, which is a narrow field in the frequency spectrum. That’s the gist of it. When it comes to my technique for controlling dynamics, for something like mixing a sermon, if I’m going down my plugin chain, the first thing I naturally have is a high pass filter. I’m rolling off those unnecessary lows that are hogging energy.The next thing I’ll do is use a compressor, and I’ll set the attack to right in the middle, so not fast or slow, and I’ll have the release time at fast. We don’t want to hear it pumping, letting go. That’s catching my peaks. It’s not doing a crazy amount, but it kind of is. That’s helping do a lot of the bulk compression. Before anything really hits the compressor, I will go through, and as I work my way through the mix, I will clip gain the wave form, so that, say, if he’s whispering somewhere, I might keep that, depending on how I have my compressor set.Then, if we go up to a part where he’s screaming and my wave form is huge, I will take that down and create those nodes, those dots in the wave form, and drag the actual clip volume down, that gain down. That way, it’s not going into the compressor at this high gain level. It’s hitting the compressor evenly as the rest of it would. That way, it’s not driving the compressor crazy. Then I’ll go through and do some EQ and DSing and whatnot. I might add some more compressors in there, just to grab some of those little things coming through. After that, it’s subtle, just smoothing it out.Aaron: It is a little bit of both. If she has access to an audio editing program—I don’t know what she’s using for editing. If you can put a compressor on the track, do that. It’s not exactly the same, but I did a YouTube video about how I process podcast vocals, and it’s very similar. For podcast vocals, I start with a Logic noise removal plugin.Ryan: I actually have my noise suppressor, and I’ll use that later on down in my signal chain. My way of thinking is that if I’ve got all this compression going on, the compression is narrowing that dynamic range, so it’s bringing up that noise floor. I tend to do my noise suppression after the bulk of that compression, because the noise floor is higher and it’s easier to work on a supressor. If that makes sense.Aaron: I’ve thought a lot about whether you should do the noise removal before or after you add a bunch of gain with a compressor or something, and I can’t think of a good reason that it matters. You can take out the noise before you add a bunch of gain, or you can add a bunch of gain and take out the noise afterwards. Which is better? I don’t know. Anyways, after the noise removal plugin, I put an EQ with a high pass filter, a peak compressor, an RMS or an average level compressor, and then a limiter.Ryan: Like I mentioned earlier, before I had my long-winded answer, it also depends on what it is you’re mixing—whether it’s music, or a podcast, or something for film.When it comes to dialogue for film, you want it to sound as natural as possible, but you also want to be able to hear if someone is whispering.When it comes to that, I’ll still use a compressor, but it will be very, very light. If there’s anything I need to do to meet loudness, that I will automate the volume on my dialogue bus. I’ll bring that up. That way, it sounds a little bit more natural, instead of solely relying on a compressor to do all the work for you.Aaron: That makes sense. For podcasts, if I notice that there’s a section where someone was talking much quieter, like if a guest backed away and talked like that for four or five minutes and then went back to the normal distance from the microphone, in Logic, I’ll turn that into its own clip. I make a cut on either side of the quiet part, and then, in Logic, you can double click on it and change gain by hitting Control G. Then you can add 3, 4, or 5 dB to it.That works out pretty well. If it’s every five seconds or I have to do it more than five or six times in an episode, I won’t do the clip gain changes, I’ll just use a compressor.Look at the overall audio file and see if there are long stretches where you can use automation to change the gain, or change the clip gain.Common Audio Mistakes Podcasters MakeRyan: You asked a question that I think would be good to talk about in regards to podcasting. You had asked, “What do you like about podcasts? What common mistakes do you hear people make?” Initially, I read this and thought, “I don’t know,” but I spent some time thinking about it. This is great, because it piggybacks off the loudness thing.A lot of the mistakes that I hear when it comes to podcasts in regards to audio is the levels and loudness aspect. I’ll listen to some podcasts that sound great, and I’ll put on another podcast where the whole thing is super quiet. Then they start laughing, and it’s really loud. There are some, like mine, where they have a music bed underneath the entire thing, and then sometimes the music bed is so quiet that you hardly know it’s there.You’re like, “What the heck is that noise in the background?” Sometimes, it’s the opposite. Sometimes, the music bed is way too loud. That’s a few of the things I’ve noticed. A lot of the fixes relate to what we just talked about. It helps to have knowledge of levels and perceived loudness.If you’re mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent.One of the biggest things I can recommend for anyone mixing anything, whether it’s music, movies, a podcast, is the importance of having a reference track.Aaron: Yeah, I don’t talk about that enough.Ryan: That is huge. Professional audio engineers who mix platinum records still do this. They will pull in a track from a different song that is mixed well and is mixed how they want theirs to sound, and they’ll have it muted in their session. When they want to have a reference to listen to or train their ear, they’ll un-mute it, and they’ll go, “Oh, okay.”I’m sure you’ve done the same thing as me, where you’ll be so involved in a mix, you’re in it, and you think it sounds great, and then maybe you go away. You go home, sleep, and maybe you come back, and you open it up and you go, “Woah! What was I thinking!” You can get so involved in it that the blinders go up. You get tunnel vision, and you’re not aware to some things.It’s good to have a reference track or get an outsider’s opinion on a mix.The main takeaway here is the reference track. That would help with anything, whether it’s the timbre, how you’re EQing, or the loudness. You pull in their track and it’s far louder than yours, and you automatically know that you need to do something about it.Aaron: That’s a great idea. You can kind of do this before or after. You go through and you edit your whole podcast, get everything set up the way you want, create an extra track, and then find a podcast that sounds really good—This American Life or pretty much anything by NPR—download an episode, drop it into your editing program, and play it, mute it, and see what the difference is. Maybe you need to add some gain with an adaptive limiter or with a compressor, or maybe you can tell that your track sounds way sharper or harsher.Are there are too many high frequencies or too much bass compared to your reference track? You can adjust those things. I’m so glad you mentioned that. I’ve never thought of that before, and that’s such a good idea.Ryan: It’s one of those things you don’t think of much, but once you do it, you’re like, “Oh my gosh!” It’s really eye opening and really helpful.You can find Ryan online at ryanmonette.com, and follow him on Twitter @RyanMonette.

Some years ago while auditioning samples for compositions, I was listening to pieces of Martin Luther King's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech and was astonished to realize that that the speech is -- from start to finish and without variation -- 125 beats per minute for over 15 minutes. I have always thought that the"Dream" speech is one of the most passionate, important, lyric, and beautifully constructed stretches of oratory imaginable. The realization that it's also right on tempo caused me to start listening to it as a musical construction. It has a nearly symphonic structure, with distinct movements. And of course there's that astonishing finish. I wanted to compose something that would underscore the speech's musicality -- a simple piece that would act as a bed to illustrate the structure and lyric beauty of King's amazing words. I did absolutely no editing to the speech beyond some EQing for clarity and muting some of the applause. It runs in "MLK" exactly as it was recorded, from start to finish. The timing -- stops, breaks, emphases, etc. -- is exactly as Rev. King delivered it. After many listenings my appreciation for Rev. King's words (and passion, and hope) has only deepened, and the demonstration of their musicality fills me with a childlike wonder. I hope that you are as moved and astonished by the beauty and depth of this speech as I continue to be. ================ Music copyright the respective artists. All other material c2006, 2016 by Steve Boyett. For personal use only. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized copying editing, exhibition, sale, rental, exchange, public performance, or broadcast of this audio is strictly prohibited. Newsletter, donations, and merchandise: http://www.groovelectric.com

Post production can improve sound quality by EQing voices and reducing background noise, but it is much easier if the sound is recorded well in the first place.

delamar Guitar dreht sich heute um die Verwendung von Equalizern zur Bearbeitung der Klänge einer Gitarre – der hier vorliegende Teil 1 ist der Studioarbeit gewidmet. Nach einer kurzen Abgrenzung zur Livesituation geht es ans... Der Beitrag EQing I – Im Studio – DG075 erschien zuerst auf delamar.FM.

In this episode, I discuss the creative use of equalization to improve your mixes, adding character to digital delays and reverbs, and more.

Another great tune from the 70's. Bill is a great singer,songwriter and this is one of his best I think. I'm on comping banjo, guitar,baritone and tenor banjo parts and the lead banjo is played with bare fingers and a mute. Some reverbs, volume edits,panning and EQing. Done on Audition.

Another great tune from the 70's. Bill is a great singer,songwriter and this is one of his best I think. I'm on comping banjo, guitar,baritone and tenor banjo parts and the lead banjo is played with bare fingers and a mute. Some reverbs, volume edits,panning and EQing. Done on Audition.