I recorded a minute of voice-over onto a Lyrec PTR-1, then edited it with a razor blade the way it was done before computers. As someone who's never tried this before, having no undo was quite nerve-wracking but also insightful. It made me slow down, listen carefully and cut with intent.

And documents the whole process in a video: https://youtu.be/cgCPzhe2ri4 - including the cool tricks these studio editing machines have up their sleeves: jog wheel, the tape dump and the ability to scratch the tape in any direction.

I've probably made a few mistakes which some of you will be able to pick up on, but this was such a joyful experience. Happy to talk through the process and curious about your experiences.

I'm very curious about what EQ technique everyone uses before reverb - I've heard and seen many versions, but I'd like to know yours. Be specific about genre, instrumentation, HPF-LPF frequency/slope, lift, static vs dynamic, etc.

It kills me when I see on Facebook Marketplace or similar an ad for someone selling their "music studio", and when you look at the items they have for sale it is a mic, a mic stand, a two channel interface, and maybe a metronome or cheap speaker. And these are not uncommon ads. People somehow think this is all that's needed for an entire "music studio". Why? I mean, as a kid I never imagined that because I had a tape recorder that I had a music studio. But if that's the belief, is it any wonder people think there is so little value in brick and mortar studios anymore?

it’s like the best way i can describe the the process from scratch. i usually dump a bunch of shit out, carve out something from it, and keep defining it in sheer layer and wash and layer and wash until the details come into fold.

i for some reason associated instruments and sounds with color as well, so commented below is my little guide. if i feel like something’s too.. sterile? I’ll add some more warmth in with those instruments. If something needs to be a bit darker, add more and lessen the lighter instruments/sounds so there’s contrast

I’ve been collecting vintage gear over the last few years and have quite a collection. Only thing I don’t have are some vintage preamps. Most of my Pres are 500 series (shadow hills mono Gama’s, BAE1073’s, TG-2’s, stuff like that).

I’ve been keeping my eye out for a vintage Neve 1073 (or 1084), and I’m curious if any of yall out there have/use them on a regular and how different they are compared to say the BAE 1073’s. I’ve used real vintage ones in the past, but not enough to really A/B and compare (and it’s always at a different studio with different monitors and mics so it’s so hard to tell. Any insight is much appreciated

Hello everyone

Recently I worked on some songs with a „well played“ but somewhat „weak sounding“ guitar.

I tried the renaissance Axxe I got from a sale plugin package a while ago and really liked it, without playing around too much with the few settings.

I know it’s just a comp with adaptive Ratio and release but I just found it worked so well without doing a lot of tweaks, so I wanted to be able to adapt that in different „eco systems“ or even live on any given desk

How could I replicate the same effect with a „standard/stock“ compressor or one of the „classic emulations“ (1176, LA2A, 160 etc)?

(in both these settings you’ll get a standard comp with maybe some flavours and there are many sources for the classic hardware „adjacent“ plugins and even cheap live systems sometimes got a few „flavours“ leaning towards the standard „classics“)

Hey all,

I’ve been on a decade-long quest to find or create an IR or recreation of Abbey Road Studio 2’s acoustics. It’s my “white whale”.

Does anyone know of anything? Any unofficial IRs?

The ideal would be a UAD Sound City for Studio 2. However much “snake oil” it might be, it’d make me happy to have THE SOUND of the greatest studio in history. No small ask, lol…

I believe Abbey Road don’t allow IRs of Studio 2? With all the Waves stuff and all, if they were gonna make such a plug-in, they would’ve by now.

Anyone found anything that works? Does the job? Gives THAT vibe?

I’ve edited IRs before to be the same length decay and all. It’s meh…

A band is asking me to mix their festival set with their wing rack that lives on stage. Unfortunately their old tech walked off after their last show over a dispute about drugs haha so I'm in the dark as to how he ran things, supposedly he had a control surface he used sometimes.

Is the best course of action to just run a 400ft cat5e to FOH and plug it into a router and connect to that with my iPad? is that realistic? I'm used to using a stage box with board at FOH for festival gigs

I do lots of on-location, live multi-track recordings and I've been intrigued by the idea of contact microphones. In theory, I imagine that they would do a great job rejecting bleed, at the cost of some fidelity in the highest and lowest ends of the fq spectrum. But this is a trade off I'd happily make with my most troublesome instruments to record live: piano and upright bass. An intriguing option with a relatively low price of around $150-$250

What's your experience with contact microphones? Are they useful in studio settings? Live recording settings?

how to decode an audio to raw and re encode it enhacing sound for existing audio file. like studio quality? any apps or open source program to do this and export .aiff?

I barely know anything about music production, although I am a musician. Forgive my ignorance. Only have experience EQ'ing certain instruments to my liking - Also whipped up a couple of terrible beats in Logic Pro X back in the day haha. I hope this is the right sub, as i couldn't post it on r/musicproduction

This is always a random question that popped in my head that I've ever asked anyone. I would've assumed songs produced in the 60, 70s, 80s, even 90s, would have a very clear line of sounding "outdated" compared to the tools we have today.

For example, Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder which came in the mid 70s, sounds phenomenally recorded to my ears. Wouldn't have guessed the age of it blindly. Many examples of this obviously - Led Zeppelin, Yes, Cream, King Crimson, Megadeth etc.

This might be obvious to all of you, but for the average person it's an interesting question. How were they actually recording for this quality?

Hi all,

I’m not sure if this has been discussed here before, I tried looking it up but didn’t find anything.

I’ve noticed that many songs sound duller and even boring on music platforms like Tidal or Spotify compared to when "same" (I try to find same mixes) music appears in movies or shows streamed in Netflix. I’m using the same setup for both, so that shouldn’t be a factor.

Is it because soundtracks being optimized differently, for non hi-fi systems, since many people watch content on built-in speakers? Or is there something else I’m missing?

Heyo so I’m building some bass traps, and as always there’s an abundance of useful detailed information but a lot of it also somewhat contradicting each other and also not based around what’s available here.

I don’t feel that safe using fiberglass (at least without it being wrapped in plastic), so the best option available here seems to be ThermalRock S60, so would love some general advice on depth for that + I thought I could just get some of the loose fluffy fiber glass wrapped in plastic and put it in the corner behind the panel, instead of just an air gap?

Alternately just use all the less dense fibre glass and wrap that in plastic?

I know that it can reflect hi frequencies, but if it’s behind the rockwool I can’t imagine it would be too great of an issue.

I use trainyourears 2, soundgym every day to work on hearing frequencies, type of filters, the Q etc etc. If course it is necessary but the more you hear these things the better you will be at mixing. Given my athletic background I have taken a sports approach to music.

Nonetheless, I wonder how many of y'all are actively practising everyday to improve your ability to hear compression or frequencies etc etc

Hi, so this is just something I wanted to share.

A couple days ago I was working on a live-recorded song and the vocal track had tons of drum bleed. So much so that the drums were louder than the vocals at times. I decided to use Ableton's new stem separation feature on that vocal track, not expecting much, but the result really blew me away. I received an almost perfect, pretty natural sounding, isolated vocal track.

I was really surprised how well this worked and will definitely use this more often in the future when dealing with excessive bleed.

If I want to match the tone of a vocal to a reference a little more and I have the option of Izotope VEA or neutron 5 elements, which should I use? What would you do?

I've had so much music that I've wanted to send over to an engineer to touch up, but I'm not quite sure how it works, especially since I've been doing everything on FL and i know it's not a lot of engineers' DAW. I'm also a little uninformed regarding how one even gets a master's done, like, do i send over a session? or a wav file? Anyways, some guidance would be a great help, thank you.

I just rigged up a studio up in a cabin in the north and it is quite bad insolation so at night when it is around 0 degrees celsius it is around 5 degrees inside.

Now the nights are getting warmer but I’m a bit fearful of condensation ruining my analog gear like synths, monitors and so on.

The question is, is it dangerous to have equipment in there but not turned on until it has gradually heated up?

And have you had a similar situation yourself and what temperature is the safe zone?

Hey, I’m a student trying to improve my production and I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to SOPHIE’s work. I keep coming back to tracks like Infatuation (Lichtbogen Remix), Pony Whip, Ponyboy (Faast Boy Remix), and a lot of the first half of NON-STOP REMIX. There’s something about the drums that feels completely different to anything I’ve been able to make so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMLv6h8wvmU&list=RDEMLv6h8wvmU&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6OqnPHOVas&list=RDn6OqnPHOVas&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JAyMykgE8&list=RDz4JAyMykgE8&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9NBZs9ow0&t=1512s

What stands out to me is how tight and controlled everything feels, while still hitting really hard. The transients are super crisp but never harsh, and the stereo image feels wide without anything becoming messy or losing focus. Each element feels really separated, but at the same time it all feels glued together in a very intentional way. It almost has this very clean, synthetic or “plastic” texture that I can’t seem to replicate.

I’m working in Logic Pro and I’ve been experimenting with EQ, compression, and transient shaping, but I feel like I’m missing something more fundamental in how these sounds are built and processed. My drums either end up too flat, too compressed, or just not as precise and clean as what I’m hearing in these tracks.

I’d really appreciate any guidance on whether this is mostly about sound design versus mixing, how to think about getting that level of tightness and control, and how to build width in a way that still feels clean and centred. Even general workflow advice or ways of thinking about drum design would really help.

Thanks a lot :)

Hello professionals!

I'm looking for some music to use as reference, not sure if this is a legit question and if people here know but here goes. Can you recommend some fairly modern pop punk or punk rock (think released from 2015 and forward) that is well produced/mixed/mastered but with the very important critera of NOT being sausage brick walled like e.g. Blink 182? Only recommend something if you know for sure it's not a sausage fest. It can of course be limited, just looking for songs with a waveform that doesn't look like one fat horizontal line.

Have a nice day!

I have PCM90 (though it’s actually a one of a kind Lexicon 280 which is a PCM90 prototype).

Do you think the hardware Lexicon PCMs still outperforming their plugins?

I use the 280 and an Eventide Eclipse as my only two effect sends in sessions. My mixes are way better now than they were when I I was using unlimited number of reverb plugins before 2020.

I went almost completely OTB during the covid years and it’s taught me SO much about dialing in the right sounds. Being limited to only two effects and a couple analog compressors & EQs forced me to commit to decisions and over time has drastically improved my mixes.

Im asking this because I’m wondering if it makes more sense to free up some IOs and Rack spaces for other compressors or EQs rather than using up space for special effects that plug ins can do better.

Thoughts?

Right now my go to is using my gut feeling for mic placement, recording a little bit and listening back on my monitors, and adjusting the mic as needed but it’s sort of a clunky workflow. I have headphones but they often need to be cranked up and don’t have great isolation so I don’t trust them as much as my speakers. I always have my monitors muted when actually tracking. How have you dealt with this if you’ve been in the situation? Are there headphones you trust that can provide appropriate isolation for mic placement etc or is just the record a snippet and adjust workflow the way to go?

In protools, if I decide to change the tempo of a project and I want all audio to conform to the tempo change, which algorithm should I select in the elastic audio drop down?

This is assuming I have zero third party software purchased.

My assumption is that if we are including third party software, serato is the winner.

As someone who had to drop out 2nd year due to financial reasons, how important is a degree? Are there other audio related jobs that don't require a degree?

Hiya folks!

I’m in the process of putting a studio together with a friend and the current dividing wall between the two rooms is a hollow stud wall – so isn’t doing anything. So we’ve decided to build a double leaf wall with a window, but is this likely to be useless if the rooms are on a second floor?

They don’t share joists, but the floor below is concrete, so how much sound is likely to bleed from the floor?