Instead of trying get a great sound with five different plugins I’m going to start using Ozone on vocals in my mixes. It has it all – eq, reverb, compressor, limiter, exciter, imaging, etc. Makes sense to me.

It’s so simple (meaning complete) it just might work!

But what do you think? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks on using Ozone in your mixes.

If you have a special way you use Ozone please leave it a comment in the box below.

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 “Plosives”  can make or break the recording. Even with a pop filter, they still have a tendency to sneak their way in! There’s a letter in the alphabet that puts fear in the hearts of home recording engineers …P! The other is B to a lesser extent. 

In this article, I’ll show you two ways to remove them without simply stripping away the lows with a high pass filter. I’ve included a vocal sample so you can experiment with it, or just load up a track you know that has them. If you’ll be listening to these samples through an iPad or mobile phone speaker, you most likely will not hear the difference between the samples. Plosives are almost always in the low frequency range, and most of these devices built-in speakers can’t replicate frequencies low enough. Use headphones.

Darren uses these two methods to clean up loud pops.

Step 1. Start with a Multipressor setting band 1 to 2oohz to cut a majority of the of the P or B and then adjust the other settings so as not to remove anything else. Here are the final settings.

Step 1, use a Multipressor. You only want to reduce the plosives.

Step 2. Next use the Sample Editor to reduce the plosive even more.

Now use the pencil tool to reduce the problem even more.

Here’s a tip from Darren.

If you haven’t zoomed in far enough, the Pencil Tool acts as the Zoom Tool. Once you’ve zoomed in far enough though, you’ll literally be able to draw out the plosive. Try to follow the natural curve of the waveform before and after the plosive for the best result.

Per Darren, Try to follow the natural curve of the signal…

This is a great tutorial for anyone doing VO editing or a mixer who has to deal with a poorly recorded vocal.

Purging Plosives with Logic Pro – Logic Pro – macProVideo.com Hub.

“When I’m producing, I’ll often pull from a small library of shapes I’ve made and saved into a Logic Project. I can easily copy these pre-made patterns into my existing songs because they’ve been saved inside a standard region. This also makes it easy to stretch or compress the automation …but we’ll cover that in just a bit!”

Here are the steps involved. You can read the entire article/instructions here.

Step 1 – Copy The Automation

Open the Automation Shape Logic Template and copy the region of your choice with Command-C, then click back into the song you’ll be adding the automation to.

Step 2 – Create A Clone Of The Track

Step 3 – Paste The Automation

Step 4 – Repeat The Automation

Step 5 – Convert Automation To Track Based

Step 6 – Toggle To View The Automation

Step 7 – Convert Automation To Another Parameter

Step 8 – Time Stretch The Automation

Now drag the region out while holding the Option key and the automation data will be time stretched to the length you choose.

 I can’t wait to try this out! Again, you can read the entire article/instructions here.

Google’s creative office space in Zurich, Switzerland seems very stimulating.

I pulled this list from an article on Fast Company online. It was written by Don Peppers, the author of Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage

In it Don writes:

“If you want to generate more innovative ideas, then you should purposely expose your mind to radically different facts and unusual, often conflicting concepts.”

This is great advice for musicians stuck in a creative rut. Try some of the Don’s ideas on the list and let me know if they worked for you by commenting below.

• Move to a different apartment, or a different office location, or a different job. Change your environment, for no reason other than to make the change.
• Drive a different route to work or school, or to church, or to the club. Take a long cut, on purpose.
• Spend 30 minutes a day for two or three weeks with a language course from Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone in order to learn how to ask directions and order food in a new language.
• Brainstorm different ways to use a common tool (like a hammer, or a Phillips screwdriver).
• Go on a physical-fitness campaign. Work out until you break a sweat at least one time every day. Seriously. Every single day.
• Memorize something useless but ambitious, like pi to 100 digits, or the names of all the major chess openings, or all the U.S. vice presidents and the presidents they served.
• Meet one new person a day for a whole month. Talk to them, converse with them, get to know them. Talk with each of them frequently in subsequent days. You can easily do this online.

You can read the entire article over at Fast Company magazine.