Studio & Recording

Guestblogger, Sander is a professional voiceover artist. Every working day, you’ll find him sitting behind his microphone in his booth at home, recording voice overs for everything from web videos to commercials – including Bax Music ads. In fact, Sander has been the ‘voice’ of Bax Music for ten years already. In this blog, he shares his trade secrets when it comes to recording the perfect voiceover.

Finding the right chords for a new tune is never easy. Thankfully, guest-blogger Hens Zimmerman is here to help ease the process with Ableton Live, but first, let’s look at a little music theory.

These days, a lot of audio interfaces and MIDI controllers come with a free edition of Bitwig, but what is Bitwig exactly? Bitwig is a pretty young DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that manages to mix together all of the best bits of other well-known recording software like ProTools, Cubase and Ableton before throwing in a few new and unique functions of its own. Here, we take a tour through the software to see what’s what.

These days, it’s almost standard practice to record every member of the band separately, whether you’ve booked some time in a recording studio or you’re doing everything at home. But, for a lot of reasons, more and more bands are longing to make a return to full band recording, where every member of the band is recorded at the same time, while playing together – in the same room – but preferably not in a hyper-expensive recording studio.The problem is, the two channels of your audio interface just won’t cut it. Even with eight channels, you’re going to fall short. So what’s possible? Can you even get massive multi-channel audio interfaces? Or will you need to kit out the band with a specialised recorder or mixer?

Effects: what are they and what do musicians actually do with them? When it comes to music, effects are everywhere, so if you’re struggling to see the wood for the trees, this blog has been written to offer a guide for anyone taking their first steps into the more technology-based side of music. Here, we’ll cover chorus and what you can do with it, but we’ll also look at concepts related to creating ensembles.

As soon as the first electric guitars and guitar amplifiers popped up in the 1950s, distorted sound went from being a nuisance to being an enrichment. What’s more, without distortion, styles like rock, punk and metal probably never would’ve existed, and in styles like EDM and hip-hop, using the effect has practically turned into an art form in its own right. That said, distortion isn’t always desirable. Read on for the hows and whys.

When it comes to mixing music, mix automation refers to track settings that can be automated, like volume, pan, send and mute. By automating these settings via DAW software, their values be varied throughout the song. Take a volume fader assigned to a guitar track for example – by automating it, you can set it to automatically boost the volume by a few decibels when the solo starts.

Recording a solo singer-songwriter? How hard can it be? All you need to do is set up one or two microphones and hit record, right? Unfortunately, it’s not actually that simple. If you’re only using one microphone, you have next-to-no control over the balance. And, even though using two microphones is the smarter option, how do you deal with any phase issues? Of course, your singer-songwriter could be playing any instrument, but in this blog we’ll focus on recording vocals and an acoustic guitar at the same time.

Whether you’re making pure electronic music, indie-rock or pop, the humble synthesizer is near-indivisible from the modern music landscape. Since synths are only getting cheaper, it’s likely that you’re already busy twiddling knobs and pushing faders, but what if you want to actually record the sound of your synth? Here, our Guestblogger Melvin Rijlaarsdam explains what’s involved and how to get the best out of your synth in the studio.

Mic bleed is the bane of many-a recording engineer’s existence and can easily throw a spanner in the works for mixing engineers and producers. After all, hearing the hi-hats on a snare take or having guitars inadvertently mixed in with the vocals are issues that require a lot of time to fix. Want to know how to avoid, remove or even use mic bleed to your advantage? Then read on!

In the world of studio controllers, synthesizers and drum machines, the terms ‘x0x’ and ‘MPC’ are all over the place and refer to different interfaces for creating note sequences. In the revolutionary case of MPC, there’s one brand that started it all: AKAI. Read on to find out how it all began and ultimately resulted in the brand-new MPC X SE Special Edition.

Maybe you’ve already picked through our Synthesizer Buyer’s Guide and been left wondering what exactly FM synthesis is. If so, you’re in the right place. Basically, FM synthesis is a sound-creating method that, according to a lot of people, isn’t the easiest of methods to work with and is best avoided. But anyone who does avoid it, is really missing out. Despite its tricky reputation, FM synthesis is well worth getting to know, and the more you know it, the more you’re likely to love it.