Anyone can throw a limiter on a track, crush the source audio and get a crispy, aggressive sound out of it. It takes a handful of small tweaks around most limiters to get the most out of them – here are a few of our favorite ways to supercharge our limiters for optimal performance:
When building up a lead vocal track, we spend so much time focusing on dialing in the right settings that it’s easy to forget how boring a static vocal can be.
How often do you hear other engineers tell each other they’re doing something wrong or “that’s not the way I’d treat that”? For as much good information getting shared between your peers, there is plenty more toxic information that gets spread.
It’s time you started focusing on adding power, punch & low-end to your kick drum. We’re feeling a bit rebellious though, so instead of the traditional compression or EQ trick, why don’t we expand our toolkit (and skill set) a bit?
If you’re looking to find out how and why you should be clipping your drums, vocals, and more, you’ve come to the right place. The fundamentals of clipping are enough for any engineer, novice to expert, to dive into and start using immediately. Much like good compression technique, clipping takes time and experimentation to perfect.
I hope that anyone with more than a few days worth of musical experience knows not to plug an electric bass into a guitar amplifier without risking damage. If you don’t, I’m here to tell you now: Don’t do it.
When mixing harmonically dense music with higher track counts (as we often do when working on rock and metal), it’s far too common to lose a decent sounding element in the mix.
Do you use busses/aux tracks when mixing? Busses are a great way to group elements of your mix before the master fader, and can make it easy to turn elements of your mix up or down after you’ve already applied processing to individual tracks.
For a lot of us, there are certain elements of a mix that we always find ourselves fixing, especially when the tracks are coming from other engineers. For some of us, one of the most common problems is an overabundance of low end in kick drums.
How many recent performances have you seen of guitarists without an amp in sight? Chances are, even the guys with a “wall of amps” in the background aren’t playing through them. Guitar tone plugins are making their way into live sound, and there are plenty of reasons why.