New (To Me) Plugins I’ve Been Using That I Recommend

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It’s not the tool, it’s the user. But as a blogger and content creator, I get to play with a lot of cool tools. Here’s a few of them that I highly recommend checking out. 1. The Plugins From My Walkthroughs. Obviously anything from my recent product videos, and not just because I did the product walkthrough. Boz Digital Labs’s … Read More

What Happens At The -18 “Sweet Spot”?

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Common advice is to “gain stage” your tracks by calibrating them to -18. People often leave out whether they mean -18 dBFS or -18 dBVU, both of which would yield vastly different levels depending on the source material. But why choose a calibration point to begin with? Here’s Matthew Weiss from The Pro Audio Files describing the differences between VU … Read More

Why I Don’t Care About Accurate Analog Modeling.

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Plugin manufacturers are on a never ending quest to develop the holy grail of plugins…the perfect digital model of a classic analog piece that everyone in the industry embraces as the most accurate, bar none. This is admirable in that it pushes the technology further and further, and now we have top tier mix engineers like Andrew Scheps and Jack … Read More

Do we really need more 1176 plugin models?

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Back in the day, we had hardware. Since then, we started using software. Over the years, we’ve become better and better at developing this software so that it fools the trained ear into thinking it’s hardware. We make it move, overload, have noise, and try to recreate the exact sonic imprint of the hardware. We’ve put a ton of time … Read More

How To Add Q-Clone To A Toolbar In REAPER

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So a while back, when I first got Q-Clone, I was trying to wrap my head around how it worked. Bear in mind that Waves wouldn’t touch REAPER with a 10 foot pole at the time, and I was worried that I’d bought a plugin that I wouldn’t be able to use in REAPER (like Sound Shifter). I hit up … Read More

Dancing Angels – From idea to finished mix!

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One of my latest mixes, which you may have heard by now, is “Danging Angels” from Project DIVIDE! It’s not been officially released yet on iTunes, but you can check it out on our youtube page here. This one was fun as hell! I wrote the music on my iPhone using NanoStudio one day while waiting outside of a doctors … Read More

Looking back at my progress, My Advice To Newer Engineers:

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Recently, my band Project DIVIDE recorded the song that I’m thus far the proudest of in our career. It represents a new milestone for us as songwriters, and the production represents a new milestone for me as a producer and engineer. But I’m sure in 2 years I’ll totally hate it. Two years ago, we set yet another such milestone, … Read More

Mix Breakdown: “Blue” by Patric Talbot

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Today, I decided to push into new territory and mix a bluesy jazzy number. This was done purely for mix practice, not for a client. The song was “Blue” by Patrick Talbot, which you can download and mix yourself from the Cambridge Site. In this post, I wanna walk through my process on this mix. We’ll start with mix prep. … Read More