At some stage or another, anyone who records in a humble home studio might want to move beyond the sound of an economy microphone and audio interface.
Tag Archives: free plugins
Outside of EQ there isn’t an audio effect I reach for more often than the trusty compressor. Coming in all different flavours, shapes and sizes, no two compressors are the same and it’s one effect I find I can never have too many of.
Queen of the Stone Age is the brainchild of guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer Josh Homme. Few bands have left such a lasting impression on the rock idiom since the 90s as Queens of the Stone Age, and it could be argued a lot of that is down to this man and the musicians and producers he surrounds himself with.
Spending years in bands self producing and releasing material, it was always clear to me that one part of the process stuck out and that’s drums.
Reverb is by far one of the most useful and interesting effects in modern production. From a mixing point of view it can be necessary to place dry recordings in an imagined space, from drum mics, lead vocals, guitars, percussion etc.
Something that regularly crops up is questions about demystifying mastering, and whilst I’m not the person to go into detail about exactly how to master your own music, there is a case for shining some light on the subject.
Equalisation, more commonly refereed to as EQ, is the process of balancing frequencies to give a more pleasing overall sound to an individual track, group of tracks or master.
Since the switch to 64-bit, I’ve had my plugin library halved and had to re-evaluate what I can and can’t use on a daily basis when producing.
Vocoders and Talkboxes are often confused in that both sound like synthetic voices and are often created using synths; they also require pretty much zero singing ability to use, which is great if you want to add lyrics to your track without being able to hold a tune.
Sampling is such a given in modern music that we probably don’t give it much thought these days – lifting a musical loop, breakbeat or even spoken word sample from someone else’s record is almost second nature to producers and has been commonplace since the explosion of sampling in the early 1980s.