White Noise vs. Pink Noise vs. Brown Noise
What noise annoys an oyster? A noisy noise annoys an oyster! Now we’ve established that, let’s turn our attention to another important question: what’s the difference between white, pink and brown noise? These different flavours of noise are separate and distinct concepts; yes, they’re all noisy and annoying, but they’re differently noisy and annoying […]
Perfectionism Is Not Your Friend
There is a phrase regularly uttered in the studio that is fast becoming one of the most irritating phrases I hear. The phrase is this: “One more take for luck?” I assure you, there is nothing lucky about doing seven takes of the same vocal part. If you didn’t get it right […]
Music and Mental Health
Last night I sat down rather begrudgingly to work on a new version of the studio website. I had been procrastinating over it for a while, but finally I freed up an evening to accumulate recordings from years past to showcase on the new site, accompanied by a suitably clickable image of each artist. As […]
Why I Love Recording
Yesterday, after some time feeling decidedly down in the dumps over the horrific year that has been 2020, I dusted myself down, pulled on my engineer’s boilersuit and donned the requisite veil of professionalism to undertake a drum recording session that had been booked, cancelled due to Covid, faffed over and subsequently rebooked. This year […]
How To Prepare For Your Session
If you have read the post “How long does it take to record a song?”, you will know that I consider a band’s readiness in preparation for their upcoming session to be one of the most defining aspects in determining the quality of the end result. To rock up unprepared with a perennially out of […]
What’s Involved In A Recording Session?
If you made it through the post “How Long Does It Take To Record A Song?” you will have found that I prattled on endlessly about the various complications common to recording sessions without actually answering the question. For this I can only apologise, and promise to take a more direct approach here, using a […]
How Long Does It Take To Record A Song?
The most common question I am asked by prospective clients upon enquiring about a session has to be some variation of “How long will it take to record x number of songs?”. Perhaps, “Can we record and mix a song in a day?”, or “Can we get our EP done in a weekend?”. The trouble […]
DI Boxes: A Distinction Without A Difference..?
A good friend of mine recently purchased a new DI box; an Orchid Electronics Direct Inject box – an active DI that retails for about 40 quid. It looks like this: He excitedly proclaimed that for the money the sound was fantastic, enjoying in particular how it interfaced with his bass guitar. I was intrigued. […]
How To Make A Guitar Sound Like… A Guitar!
It may be an unfamiliar premise to some, but I am fervently of the opinion that the goal of recording audio is to accurately capture and faithfully reproduce a particular sound. Not to fuck around with it, contorting it into something that only dimly represents what was originally going on, but to trust in the […]
MOTU??! Urrgh!
*Real* Sound Engineers Only Use Prism Converters, Dontcha Know? Hiffle, piffle, pibble and fwaf. Earlier this year I visited Steve Albini’s Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, with the goal of not only recording some drums with the man himself, but also scrutinising his mic techniques in order to learn more about how such an incredible drum […]
