Having gone over the super nerdy essentials of how a variety of compressors work and the differences between the four basic types (FET, VCA, Optical, and Variable-Mu) last month, I thought I would share with you a half-dozen or so favorites from the multitude in my current arsenal. For the sake of brevity, I will […]
Having first beheld, awe-stricken by the majestic splendor of an actual shoe closet filled with entries from Prada to Puma, stilettos to flats, and Ugg boots to sassy boots, I believe my verbal reaction lay somewhere betwixt “Wow” and “Whoa.” I currently have five sets of footwear (not including socks and barefoot, my preferred indoor […]
Old dogs, new tricks…and vice versa. I mean, I’ve been writing about recording tools, tips, and techniques for almost 21 years now, based upon nearly 40 years of experience. Even before that, I was filling boxes and boxes with cassette mix tapes in endless iterations, searching to find the song orders that flowed effortlessly into […]
Last month, I mused upon the early adult days of my life and how my journey toward musical self-edification centered around the plethora of musical sources I uncovered via crate digging and the deep immersion into the select cream that rose to the top of my respect and curiosity. Through the ’80s, this expedition expanded […]
In the autumn of 1980, I was 18 and living in an apartment by myself for the first time. Looking back, there have actually been very few instances over the ensuing 40 years where that has been the case, but one thing all of those abodes shared in common was their (ahem) compactness. It has […]
Well…hmm. I don’t think I need to add my voice onto the heap-pile of mid-pandemic, end-of-the-year, holy crap, “can you believe what a year it’s been and it’s still going on?” pontifications, so I just won’t. Sure did spend a lot of time at home in the studio though. A lot of it trolling through […]
Over the nearly 17 years that I’ve been reviewing music recording-related products in the pages of this magazine, there have been literally hundreds of different manufacturers’ wares profiled. Each piece of merchandise—be it software or hardware—was thoroughly pushed, prodded, probed, and put through its proverbial paces in an effort to provide the most painstakingly accurate […]
OUCH!! Mo@*#$F -%?&er! The force of my shin making contact (yet again) with the edge of the titular living room furniture presses down on sensory receptors in my skin, which detect that excruciating pain and convert it into an electrical signal called an action potential. It is then carried along the axon of the sensory […]
For literally centuries, the metronome has ruled the world of music with the iron-fisted persistence of time itself; unyielding, constant and when its passing is given the fullest of attention, well…boring. This is not to suggest that strict adherence to tempo is a bad thing, quite to the contrary. Keeping within the confines of a […]
