Balling On A Budget: Getting the Most Out Of Your Home Studio
Balling On A Budget: Getting the Most Out Of Your Home Studio As modern music producers, we are blessed with many options for our creative tools and we all have gear we dream of being able to work with. While higher quality gear gives you higher quality sounds right out of the gate, it is not the missing ingredient of your music creation. YOU are the most important ingredient! An intimate knowledge of your setup and the sounds it gives you will take you further than an expensive piece of gear. Knowing your setup will also translate to understanding any other setup, and implementing expensive gear whenever you’re able will be the icing on the cake. Below we’ll cover some budget options to get your home studio up and running, as well as what to understand about the gear to get the most out of it. Whether you have …
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10 Ableton Live Packs Now Available for Lite Users
10 Ableton Live Packs Now Available for Intro Users For our beginners out there this is huge news. With Ableton Intro, users now have access to thousands of samples, sounds, and effects; all of which can provide inspiration for all types of music making – from searching for synths, to writing a film score, or exploring genre specific styles. These Ableton packs deliver some really high-quality material to work with and were previously only available with Standard and Suite. Below we’ll give a quick overview of each pack. Even if you’ve had access to these packs before but haven’t used them check this out. You might find some inspiration. 1. Urban Cookbook 1 by Goldbaby We love Goldbaby (their drums in particular). Their loops, samples, and racks are sounds we always consider for our tracks. With Urban Cookbook you get 3000+ kits, hits, chords, bass and more production tools …
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PreSonus Quantum: Their Fastest and Best Sounding Audio/MIDI Interface
PreSonus Quantum: Their Fastest and Best Sounding Audio/MIDI Interface PreSonus recently unveiled Quantum, the new audio interface they’re calling “our fastest and best sounding audio/MIDI interface” to date. Early reviews from Superbooth have been positive, and the specs for the machine are incredibly impressive. This has potential to really be their “fastest and best”, so let’s take a closer look. PreSonus wants the Quantum to be the central hub of your recording studio. Offering 26 inputs X 32 outputs with a high-speed Thunderbolt 2 bus, and a direct-to-DAW signal path with no DSP creates extremely low latency. Incredible 24-bit, 192 kHz converters with 120 dB of dynamic range and PreSonus’ recallable XMAX microphone preamps combine to create superb audio-quality. If you need more I/O channels than the already 26X32 Quantum offers, simply stack up to 4 Quantum interfaces via Thunderbolt to create a 96X96 system. For studio use, two main …
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TC Electronic’s Incredible Mixing and Mastering Tool
TC Electronic’s Incredible Mixing and Mastering Tool A common theme in music production is “ultimately, use your ears”. You’ve probably read that in more than a few of our blog posts, on everything from mixing to recording to sound design. However, as technology keeps advancing at an exponential rate it would be foolish not to use the tools available to our advantage. We recently came across TC Electronic’s Clarity M, a desktop mix and master audio meter with serious precision. From everything we’ve seen so far this piece of hardware is a great complimentary decision maker to your ears, and could save you time in those long sessions when you’ve heard a mix so much you really have no idea exactly what you’re listening to anymore. Out of the gate, the Clarity M comes with stereo and 5.1 audio metering for mixing, mastering, and post production in music …
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4 Digital DJ Applications to Bring Down the House
4 Digital DJ Applications to Bring Down the House Magix Digital DJ 2 Geared more towards beginner DJ’s but with capabilities for the more advanced, Magix Digital DJ 2 is an amazing piece of software. The application offers all of the standard mixing tools and effects to get more creative with your set, but what’s impressive about this is the capability to mix seamlessly and creatively without an external controller. Auto-beat matching is a standard function, coupled with the ability to click the cross-fade button that will then automatically fade into the next track. You then have your cursor free to mix frequency bands or add effects while your track seamlessly transitions into the next. You can even highlight specific frequency bands on both decks and they will automatically mix in and out smoothly with the flow of your cross-fade. Digital DJ 2 also allows users to create loops …
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Getting to Know Your Different Reverbs
Getting to Know Your Different Reverbs Reverb is one of your most important tools for sound design and mixing as a music producer. The perfect reverb type with the right settings (dry/wet, decay time, size, etc.) can make a sound or mix come alive, and the wrong type and settings can kill a mix for a variety of reasons. Your most important tool for the right reverb is your ears and while it is a relatively simple concept, like everything in music production, reverb becomes a deep rabbit hole once you start getting into all of its possibilities. Ask Audio recently did a nice overview of the different reverb types and we thought we’d do our own to provide our community with what we found to be some very useful tips and guidelines. Below we’ll go over a few of the major types of reverb and their common usage. divider style=”clear” …
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