How To Choose Your DAW Track Colors!

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Quick tip for organizing your sessions, ESPECIALLY if you’re the type like me who uses visual elements to quickly dissect information. Muted and neutral colors. Bold colors draw my eye to them too much, and I don’t want my eye pulled to one color every time I look at my mixer window. Instead, by using more muted and neutral tones, … Read More

Gain Staging And The Master Fader…

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Master faders can come in two varieties, Pre-fader or Post-fader. This indicates where in the signal chain the insert effects are in relation to the master fader output. Let’s dive in to learn more about the two types, and why one might want to use one over the other. “Pre-fader” means the sound coming into the master fader will go … Read More

Understanding Drum Sample Libraries.

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From bedroom producers, to the top brass mixing engineers with multiple grammies, there are a lot of people who use drum samples in their mixes. Joey Sturgis is famous for using Kick 10 from Steven Slate Drums in many of his productions (although now Joey Sturgis has his own sample library on the market called Drumforge), and Randy Staub used … Read More

Why I use Expanders on DI’s.

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Picture 1. In the first picture, you’ll see 4 colored bands on the analyzer. The red band is the noise floor of my interface, and it’s reading down around -110dbfs. The dark orange band at the very bottom is where the expander is pushing that noise floor to, down around -170dbfs. I usually use HoRNet Track Utility to bring the … 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

Under Construction

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This blog is undergoing a massive overhaul. Be patient, as there may be untested links. We’re working through every page, line by line, to make sure this blog represents the best information possible.