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I have always thought it was important to choose your first vocal mic carefully. After you build your home studio mic collection you may find a number of mics in your cabinet which could all work wonders on a vocal recording. Once you have the luxury of multiple mics at your disposal it can be quite a bit of fun selecting the mic that most complements your vocalist’s voice. This article will show you an effective way to quickly make a mic selection. Show me more about vocal mics

I’m not a regular Cakewalk user but if I had to find a new DAW as a home, that DAW would be SONAR 7. It is not version 7.0 specifically, I have been a fan of Cakewalk’s workflow since Pro Audio 9.0 (prior versions were just too wonky). Cakewalk are doing a great thing by including the new Boost 11 plugin with the PE bundle. Boost 11 is probably not going to replace the Waves Ultra- and Multi- Maximizer plugins for me, but if you don’t have the scratch to drop on those plugins (more…)

Having grown up in the era when compact discs were becoming popular, the sound of digital albums from the late ’80s is the sound of my youth. It was a time when I was discovering the musical artist within myself and developing my opinions on which music sounded good. To me, this period of the CD had a very distinct sound. There was not nearly as much emphasis on getting the albums as loud as possible or advanced processors to remove the sterility from the digital domain. A disc from those days has a very open sound with a lot of dynamic range and a very clear sound. I was recently mastering some bluegrass music and decided to go for this clear and open sound in the mastering rather than try for a gimmicky thirties type of gritty analog master. You can read about how I achieved the ’80s sound in the new article, Getting The Late ’80s CD Sound

Several years ago I wrote a basic mastering tutorial to help my fellows at an internet forum for guitarists. I was happy to help out some of my musical family. Soon the article was forgotten until the reminders started coming in. People who I had never known (or visited forums with) had turned up my article on a search engine and used it to master their own albums. The stories of success gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling. A few people even sent me a copy of their album. A few days ago I checked the traffic stats for my old web site and noticed that tutorial is still getting a fair number of hits. A quick search of the web revealed several other sites which had copied the tutorials exact steps and even used similar screen shots. They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery so I was actually pleased to make this discovery. After some thought I had the realization that if people are still clamoring for a five year old article, there must be a demand for this type of knowledge. A few short brain cycles later and this site was born. Modern technology has made it much easier to maintain a collection of knowledge and articles on the web. Today I cleaned up the old mastering tutorial and it has become the first article for this site. It has been renamed Modern Mastering. It is included in the site navigation where more articles are soon to follow. Enjoy!