For the neophyte, the studio can be a place of myth and legend. It’s complicated and takes many years of learning and hands-on experience to become a talented studio engineer or producer. It’s not at all helped by the amount of misinformation that has been distributed about studio recording, unfortunately; let’s clear up a few of these myths.

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Automation is a very convenient feature of most modern digital audio workstations. When the record industry ran on miles of tape, there was no such thing as automation; it was all about manual knob-turning. We have it pretty easy in contrast.

Automation allows you to draw in a set of events that will automatically occur when you play back the track. For instance, you can draw a set of volume changes along your guitar track to hear it creep in and out of the mix. You can also achieve that dynamic stereo panning effect, causing instruments to swoosh from speaker to speaker.

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The idea of rock star as rebel dates at least as far back as Elvis and his girl-baiting hips on the Ed Sullivan Show. As pervasive as the rock and roll badass is, even more prevalent is the rock star decline from badass to mild-mannered musician.

Today, we look back on five musicians who once typified everything that was dangerous and threatening about music but eventually went on to be a sad, soft, shell of their former selves. Hey hey, my my.

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Reason’s virtual synthesizers have a really great sound, but to get the most out of them, you will often need to use more than one. For total integration and fast recall of multi-instrument set ups there’s no better tool than the Combinator. Here’s one way you can use it when making a layered bass sound.

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Sometimes we spend hours, days, even months, struggling to find the perfect chord progression to suit the lyrics we’ve written. And then we find it, only to get bored sick of the same chords being repeated over, and over, and over again.

If you listen to some of the great songwriters, you’ll notice that the chorus progressions, if not all progressions in the song, are constantly being varied in both subtle and obvious ways. This tutorial will take you through a bunch of ways to vary up your chord progressions to retain not only your own interest, but your listeners’ interest as well.

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It can be hard to find a good synth plug-in, and there are plenty on the market that will have you wondering why you ever parted with your money. Fortunately, this list offers no such disappointments, because everything on it is totally free!

These are all VST synths—while some developers may offer ports for other plug-in architectures, most don’t, so if your workstation of choice doesn’t support VST you might have a hard time finding something you can use here. That said, flick through the list and to each developer’s website and see if they have something that’ll work for you.

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Livecut by Smartelectronix is a VST beatslicer effect. It rearranges the incoming audio in real-time and is a great tool for generating drum n’ bass-style drum fills from existing audio or VST drum loops.

However, the output can seem a little unpredictable. In this tutorial we’re going to look at using Livecut to generate some fills from an audio drum loop. We’ll edit the results to create something a little more subtle.

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With the possible exceptions of love, sex, and slaying mythical beasts, no topic has commanded the attention of song-writers throughout history more than death. From Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to The Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack” and even as far back as Beethoven’s “Deathstomp 9 in D minor”, the great beyond has been the inspiration for some of the most compelling songs ever written.

If you think I’m making up the title of that Beethoven number, by all means, go ahead and Google it, I’ll wait. Did you do it? Wow, you are a gullible one, aren’t you?

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Stereo miking is a great way to increase the sense of depth in your recording of an instrument. Here are six stereo miking techniques you can try out today. We’ll start with the basics and then move to some more exciting options.

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In the world of sound design and music for media, there are two basic classifications of sound: diegetic and non-diegetic. Diegitic sound or music occurs within the story, i.e. a piano being played on screen, a boom-box playing a hip-hop beat. Non-diegetic sound occurs outside of the world of the story, and is perceived only by the audience, rather than the story’s characters.

With this in mind, this tutorial will look at creating a transition sound-effect in Logic Audio. These sounds can assist in helping the audience change focus from one scene to another, from one virtual space to another, etc. These techniques can also be used in music, where one might want interesting transition between musical sections.

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