September 6th, 2010 – I’ve had my M-Audio Firewire 410 for a long time. I picked it up in 2004 when I needed a mobile recording solution and I still use it. Lately though, I’ve been having audio drop outs. The software mixer will register audio output, and the card itself will light up its LEDs, but no audio will play. I can unplug and replug the interface back in, and it still won’t register.

What’s especially weird, is that it will be already working and cut out. For example, I’ll be listening to my iTunes library and all of the sudden a song will cut out and I won’t be able to get any audio back. I used to restart my computer, but that was also a crap shoot if the sound would work again.

Apparently, this problem is not localized to me; I’ve read a lot of complaints on the forums about it with others who are on Leopard. M-Audio hasn’t updated the drivers since November of last year and since it’s a discontinued product, I doubt they’re rushing to fix it. I’ve completely removed and re-installed the drivers several times to no avail.

In the meantime, the only way to bring the audio back consistently is to go into the M-Audio software and change the sample rate, and then change it back. Doing so allows you to get the audio back without rebooting, or hotswapping the interface. Are any of you running into the same problems in Snow Leopard?

September 5th, 2010 – Sometimes even your favorite songs become lodged into your head and it’s difficult to get them out. That’s the problem with catchy songs, sometimes they’re too successful. Unhearit is a website that uses brute force to dig that earworm out. By cycling through another catchy song in a random playlist, the idea is that another song will take hold, forcing out the song that’s been driving you crazy. Whether this new song will be better or not is a gamble you’ll have to consider. You also may want to watch out for rick-rolling. It didn’t happen to me, but I saw some tweets warning of the possibility.

Unhearit via Lifehacker

September 2nd, 2010 – Have you ever seen those sweet custom-molded earphones and actually looked up how much it costs to have them molded, on top of the price of earphones themselves? I don’t doubt that they’re worth the price, but I certainly can’t afford them. I do, however, have a pair of old Shure generic in ear monitors (IEM) that are in need of new sleeves.

Make Magazine has a tutorial on how to roll your own out of a 15 dollar custom molded ear plug kit. It’s a pretty cool project for an old set of earphones.

Custom Fit Earbuds via Gizmodo

September 1st, 2010 – You may not be able to live out your childhood dream of being aboard a spaceship (at least not for a few more years), but you can at least get your music played on a spaceship. It’s at least something right? NASA is holding a contest (only available to US citizens I’m afraid), to get your song played during the final missions of the Space Shuttle. Listeners vote up your original music and the top two songs will get played on the mission. It’s pretty steep odds of getting into the coveted 2 spots, maybe comparable to getting into the space program itself. Still, it would be pretty awesome to have that on your resume.

NASA’s Space Rock

August 29th, 2010 – Way back when first started this site in 2008, I talked briefly about how video games like Guitar Hero or Rockband, might inspire a whole new generation of musicians. Well I just wanted to share that I met one.

Today, I recorded a demo for a young man who is going to give Dave Mustaine (of Megadeth) a CD this Friday. He started playing Guitar Hero, mastered all the songs on Expert Mode, which got him interested in learning how to play the songs for real. He now knows half of Megadeth’s catalogue, and Metallica’s entire catalogue; every solo, every riff. Time from Guitar Hero to real guitarist? One and a half years. His age? 12.

When his dad told me that he was good, I held healthy skepticism; after all, all parents think their kids are awesome. However, when I started talking to the young chap, and he indeed would rip off note perfect songs as he discussed them, it became apparent that he was the real deal. He’s not just some mimicking robot either, 3 of the 4 songs we recorded today were written completely by him (the other was a Megadeth cover obviously). Did I mention that he’s also self-taught?

It looks like this is where our future musicians are going to come from. Unlike when I started piano lessons, learning music through video games introduces the world of musicianship through fun. I used to practice piano 4 hours a day, and longed to play outside every minute of it. This kid practices 4 hours a day because he wants to. He doesn’t even play video games anymore because it cuts into his practice time.

Anyways, I just wanted to share his amazing story because I think that there are tonnes of young people out there like him, and that we’re going to see a huge resurgence in musicians in a few years. Exciting times!

August 26th, 2010 – I’m working on a track for my brother’s upcoming album, and while I was working with the drum part, I thought of a tip that might help some of you out. In situations where we cannot record live drums (definitely the case for a lot of us home studio guys), it’s pretty easy to pull up a great sounding drum plugin.

Many producers I know use Addictive, BFD, or Superior drums, and I’m also partial to the Steve Slate Drums I got for super cheap. While software instruments of this quality sound fantastic, it’s easy to forget that while the plugin is one “instrument”, each part of a drum kit is a separate sound source.

What I mean is that inserting an instance of Kontakt on a stereo track allows you to load a stereo kit that you can independently adjust levels for, and some other basic effects depending on what software you’re using. However, you will find that you have more flexibility if you route each drum and cymbal to a separate track in your DAW. This allows you to leverage all the effect and dynamic plugins that your DAW has instead of being limited to the few that are in the drum plugin. If you don’t route each drum and cymbal to its own track and add an effects plugin from your DAW (either as an insert or a send), you will be effecting the drum mix as a whole, not each piece of the kit.

Keep in mind that drums that sound great solo’d may not sound as good or impactful in a full mix. You cannot mix a set of drums with itself; it must be mixed in the context of all your instruments. Most high end drum software in combination with your DAW will allow you to have separate tracks for each drum and cymbal which is different from independently adjusting the level of each instrument within the drum plugin. While the simple mixer in a drum plugin will do in a pinch, it’s limiting in a full mix.

If you want to save processing power while mixing your drums, I’d suggest printing each drum to its own track as audio. This will reduce the strain of the real-time processing your drum software takes up. Hope this helps those of you who aren’t already doing this. Happy mixing!

August 24th, 2010 – Gizmodo has a pretty damning article on the state of cheap earbuds. In the article, it outlines how all the companies making fashion earbuds likely use the same manufacturer and don’t even have inhouse designers or engineers. Companies in China offer a-la-carte choices, and all you have to do is order a few thousand to sell, and you can have whatever you want made.

I’m sure you all know that this kind of stuff happens with cheap consumer gear, but what you may not know is that some companies that offer full catalogues of entry-level audio equipment are doing the same thing. There are a lot of cheap guitar pedals, and even audio interfaces floating around. I’m not going to call out any companies, but be careful and do your research.

The Secret Scam of Cheap Earbuds

August 20th, 2010 – Lately I’ve been working on fixing an old Powerbook. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m thinking that it might be cool to build it into a dedicated live rig. I remember when I got it and installed Logic for the first time. I was super excited to try out my new production rig. Imagine my disappointment when within the first 5 minutes I experienced a core audio overload; my shiny new (at the time) Powerbook just couldn’t handle the plugins and software instruments I used.

When I was recording on magnetic tape reels, we didn’t have to worry about processing power. We could put as many effects as we had on a track as we recorded. The downside was that the effects were “printed” onto the audio permanently, so if we wanted to change it, we’d have to re-record it and hopefully we kept the original audio.

Freezing tracks in a DAW is the modern equivalent of printing effects. In Logic, you simply insert the plugins and effects to a track, and when you’re happy with the result, you freeze the track. What Logic does in the background is basically re-record the audio for the track with the effects on it, and then disables the live rendering of the same track. What you’re left with is just plain audio that doesn’t take up extra processing power because the effects are recorded directly into the audio. If you want to change your plugin settings, you un-freeze the track, make your changes and freeze it again. The original frozen audio will be deleted and replaced with a recording of the new settings.

Track freezing is available in some other DAWs but if you don’t have that option, you can manually perform the same steps. Create a new track, and feed the track you want to freeze into its input. Then arm the new track and press record. The new track you just created will record the output of the original track with all its effects, into a standard audio file. Next, disable your original track (in Protools this will both mute the original, and disable the plugins so that you conserve processing power), and you will be left with the same audio as if the plugins were being processed live, but at a huge processing power savings.

For engineers that have a slow system, freezing tracks is necessary to do any work at all but even if you have a powerful computer, you can utilize freezing to save your processing power. You might use the extra power for crazy routing, or to handle additional tracks. It’s always good to have some processing headroom.

August 16th, 2010 – I’m a big fan of Native Instruments. I like their FM8 and Absynth instruments, and I have a fairly large Kontakt library. One of my next purchases will be Maschine, and I like Traktor Pro quite a bit. Well, today brings exciting news because they’ve finally released their own standalone controller, the Traktor S4 system.

It’s a hardware controller with a built in audio card (no doubt using their line of very well regarded audio cards), containing an effects section mirroring the Kontrol X1, high-resolution platters (using some fancy pants magnetic tracking system), and a special version of the Traktor software. Not only that, but while the hardware runs off of an AC connection, it is able to run in emergency mode off bus power, with lowered headphone output, and dim LEDs. Pretty snazzy! You’ll also be able to connect your Traktor control vinyl (for those who will use the S4 with a traditional turntable setup) in a forthcoming update.

The software has some new features, like replacing decks C and D with 8 loop decks with volume, filter, and syncing for each. That brings me to an interesting side-note about the S4: it was designed in concert with Ean Golden of DJ TechTools. Ean and the community at DJ TT have been extending the mappings of Traktor Pro for years, making gear like the Vestax VCI-100 a force to be reckoned with.

With Ean Golden and Native Instruments, the Traktor S4 must be something special. Of course, awesomeness doesn’t come cheap; the Traktor S4 system will be available this winter for a grand. It’s already got me salivating. I must review one!

Traktor S4 via DJ TechTools

August 12, 2010 – Have you ever seen the send fader (usually it’s a rotary pot) and wondered what it was for? Why send the signal somewhere else for effects? After all, in DAWs, you can insert an effect directly on the channel strip without having to send the signal elsewhere.

You can think of a send like running parallel processing. While inserting an effect directly on a channel strip sends the signal in a linear flow (audio > effect > out), the send allows the signal to be sent to two places at the same time. You might have your channel routing the audio to a stereo bus, and also send the same audio to an auxiliary channel simultaneously. On that auxiliary channel, you may any number of effects. By using a send, your audio will be output twice.

Ok, now that we know that a send acts like a splitter, why would you want that? The simple answer is that it gives us more options. I’m sure you’ve seen tutorials on parallel processing on instruments like drums or bass. It involves copying the track twice, and putting different effects on each, with a blended final product. Using a send, you can achieve the same effect.

If this all sounds overly complicated, it’s really not. Here’s a common way to use sends that will allow you to save a lot of processing power and help you glue your mix together. Create an auxiliary channel that feeds your master. Right now there’s nothing going into the track, but there will be. Insert an EQ on the auxiliary channel and roll off the low end. Insert a reverb unit after the EQ. Choose a setting that emulates a room with a lot of space.

Next, solo the auxiliary channel and start turning up the sends from all your tracks. It’s like you’re creating a really reverb-y and treble-y mix. Now un-solo the auxiliary channel and listen to the overall mix. What you’ll notice is that everything starts to sound more natural; like the instruments are playing in the same room. By sending a little of every track to the auxiliary, it glued the mix together (this is only one of many ways to make a mix blend well) when it was all combined. Consider how this is different from adding a reverb unit on every instrument separately and attempting to mix the separately reverbed tracks together.

The big advantage of using sends in the manner above, is that you can get the snap and impact of the original track (which can be separately effected), combined with the washy sound of the reverb. Normally when you insert an effect, you don’t get this option (unless your plugin has a wet/dry setting). Back in high school when I was mixing on super old 4-track tape reels and a very basic mixer, if I sent a guitar to a reverb unit, I got reverb or nothing. With sends, you can have your cake and eat it too.

The first time I tried Logic on a Mac, when Powerbooks were still around, I immediately suffered from a core audio overload when it couldn’t handle the multiple reverb units I was greedily adding. I quickly learned that putting one Space Designer plugin on an auxiliary channel got me the sound I was looking for, at a significant processing power savings.

So here are the top reasons for using auxiliary sends:

3. Save processing power.

2. You can glue a mix together by combining the sends from multiple tracks to one auxiliary.

1. You get to put effects on the same audio in two different ways, and then can mix them independently of each other.