Could you image your home studio competing at the same level as a commercial studio? Well there is a very interesting article that i found in the Tennessean that asks this very question. With the amount of people in the Nashville area that have home studios, the entire industry has been flooded, and the value of a home studio has dropped dramatically. But with that dropped the value of commercial studios as well. In this article Robin Crow owner and founder of Dark Horse Recording and Dark Horse Institute shares his wise words on how his commercial studio has been able to keep its doors open for two decades and continues to keep going strong. This is a great article and i think it brings up some great things to think about. The music industry is always changing, and finding ways to evolve with it, will keep you alive.

So what if you don’t have the budget to book a large studio to record and you have a 4 or 5 piece band? A lot have bands have moved to recording their records at home, in their living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. So how can you record live band in their living room and still get the same amount of isolation you would get in the studio? There are a few different tips and tricks that Apogee has in their blog that I think are great ideas. When working with a band it is important to remember that they will feel more comfortable and play better if they are all in the same room and able to jam together. So if they are all in the same room how would you isolate the guitars, bass, and drums? One good trick is to DI the guitars, keys, and bass, use a plugin to simulate an amp if needed, put everyone on headphones, and now you can have them all play together with the drummer and still get clean drum tracks.READ MORE

A lot of the time we can get a good mix the first time but because of our insecurity or our want to experiment we end up spending more time over mixing than we should. More often than not if you over mix something the best thing to do is to backtrack to what your first instinct was and start over. It can be hard to marry the first ideas you have when mixing but you should be more confident and instead of second guessing yourself, take time to live with the idea for a while. By committing to your first mixes you will not only save yourself many painful hours of backtracking, but you will also build more confidence in your skills. READ MORE

This is a great trick that can help you get those tricky stereo tracks perfectly balanced in you mix. So if record a anything from an acoustic guitar to a 50 person choir using a stereo miking technic and you get them into the mix and they sound a little left o right heavy, what should you do to balance them. You could play he guessing game and just start turning up one side till it starts to feel even or you could use this phase trick. Take you stereo track and solo it up with something that is dead center like the vocal. Then flip on side of your entire mix out of phase. This should cancel out your centered track. No start turn up the louder side of your stereo track untile you get them most phase cancelation. Flip the phase back and now you have a perfectly balanced stereo track.READ MORE

The acoustic guitar has played a huge role in american music history. There isn’t a music genre today that hasn’t incorporated the acoustic guitar in someway or another. So as an audio engineer, it is pretty important to know as much as you can about acoustic guitar; like style, size, material, and brand. There are five main style of acoustic guitar; Dreadnought, jumbo, parlor, classical, elector-acoustic, and bowlbacks. Each style has there own unique characteristics. Each style of guitar has its own standard size but there are some that are different sizes. There are many different kinds of materials that can be used to build acoustic guitars from different kinds of wood, plastic, and even carbon fiber. So next time you have to record an acoustic guitar do some research and see what you find out. READ MORE

If you haven’t heard of the Bonnaroo Music And Art Festival then you are missing out on some of the best shows of the year. Bonnaroo is a four day festival here in Tennessee that is packed full of some of live shows, art, comedy, and much more! With over 80,000 campers attending and over 150 live shows Bonnaroo is sure to have something that can rock anyone’s socks. They have announced the lineup for 2013 and the list is impressive. Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney will be headlining the whole festival, not to mention there will be performances by; Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, ZZ Top, Mumford & Sons, Passion Pit, Billy Idol, and many more. If you are looking for a way to amp up your summer, Bonnaroo is the place to be, because Bonnaroo isn’t just a festival, its a way of life! READ MORE

Recording a brass or woodwind section can be quit a challenge. Were does everyone sit? In what order? What mic’s should you use? Were should you place the mic’s? The first thing that is needed is an general understanding of how brass and woodwind instruments produce sound. Brass instruments have a metal mouth piece that the player blows into. While blowing in to the mouth piece the player then makes a buzzing sound with there lips, called embouchure. The tighter a player makes the embouchure the high the note produced, the loser the embouchure, the lower the note produced. Woodwinds work in a similare mannor, but instead of the players lips creating the sound, the player vibrates a thin wooden reed. Once we have a solid grap on how brass and woodwind instruments create sound, we then can better understand how to capture that sound.READ MORE

In the studio many engineers and assistants are afraid of hooking up a ribbon microphone fearing that they may damage it. So is there truth to ribbon microphones being damaged by phantom power? Yes, you can damage a ribbon microphone with phantom power, but not in the way that you think. If you have a ribbon microphone hooked up to a preamp and you accidentally hit phantom power, you aren’t going to hurt it. If you are using good cables and nothing is shorted, you can send phantom power to a ribbon mic all day and it won’t hurt it. So what causes phantom power to hurt a ribbon mic? The patch bay. If you already have phantom power on and you plugin or patch a ribbon mic, you run the risk of sending that 48vdc to parts of the microphone that aren’t suppose to receive it and you will most definitely damage you microphone. So how do you prevent this? READ MORE

It has been a common assumption that if you mount a tube microphone upside down it will sound better and will keep the heat of the tube from damaging your microphones capsule. Almost every vocal session i see has the microphone upside down, and most people assume that that is the correct way to do it. So is there any truth to the studio myth? Or are we just folding into the pressures of tradition and conformity? Recording Hacks has an amazing article on just this subject were they actually set up a microphone both ways and measure how it affects the microphone. So what is your guess on the results? Does hanging a tube microphone upside down really affect how sound? I think the result may surprise you.READ MORE