Audio Recording

I received an email requesting a review. If you are a beginner in home recording and music production producing your own songs; I would strongly encourage you to read this review. You will learn a lot of things. The details are shown below:

I am a committed follower of your website, and this site made me to start my own home studio. Attached is the song and your honest comments will be appreciated. What should be done to make it sound more professional? It was done at my home studio.

-Mixed down using Adobe Audition 1.5
-drums/percussions were done using FL studio 10.0.8
-Pc used was P4 Ram 512mb, running on Windows Xp sp2.
-Behringer 502 Mixer was used,
-Shure Sm58 was used for recording
-the room/studio is not acoustically treated

Regards,

My reply:

Thanks for following my blog and I appreciate your interest in music production. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a lot of debate whether analog summing mixes sound better than the digital summing. This tutorial would serve as an introductory tutorial for beginners in knowing what an analog summing mixer is. This will not prove whether analog summing mixes sound better than digital or recommend that you switch to analog summing for all of your mixes.

How does it differ from Digital Summing?

Let’s start with a more familiar digital summing. This is done inside your computer and using your DAW software such as Reaper, Protools, Cubase, etc.

In digital summing, binary bits (0’s and 1’s) also known as digital data of every track in your mix are added to produce a stereo “mixdown”. These processes are done “mathematically” inside your DAW that employs complex binary arithmetic or floating point calculation to carry out the operation.

Older DAW uses 32-bit floating point while modern DAW are adopting to 64-bit floating point calculation that improves the “accuracy” of the calculation. The computation that is going on inside your DAW during the stereo mix down process is a complicated one as it also involves a lot plug-in calculations such as reverb, EQ, compression, etc.

In this article on advantages of 64-bit DAW over 32-bit float digital audio workstation, it reveals that even a 64-bit DAW involves rounding off and estimation of calculation results. These errors however are extremely small compared to using a 32-bit bit floating point calculation.

Based on the above diagram, the factors that can affect the digital summing quality are as follows:
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a tutorial for musicians that are using Notion3 to notate and mix classical symphonies. One problem of most musicians notating music is that they do not know how to mix audio or make their mix sound great using their music notation software like Notion3.

The objective of doing this mix is to make your work realistically sounding as possible. As if it was being performed by real orchestra musicians inside the concert hall.

In Notion3, there is a mixer console feature that you can use to enhance the sound of your mix. This is usually found in the upper left, see screenshot below:

At the end of this tutorial, you will know how to mix a simple symphony orchestra and actually apply effects settings particularly reverb and panning. This tutorial assumes that you have completely notated your symphony or musical piece. Notating can take a lot of time and patience. This is usually done by music degree students or music professionals. In this tutorial, it will be using Mozart Symphony No.25 First movement in G Minor as an illustration.

How to mix symphony orchestra music in Notion3

If you click the Notion3 mixing console. You would immediately see all the instruments in the orchestra used in Symphony No.25 by Mozart. For example, Symphony#25 has one oboe, two horns, two violin section, one viola and one cello sections. To begin with, you need to concentrate on the most important settings which are the following:

a.) Reverb
b.) Panning Read the rest of this entry »