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Doing the sessions in PT and then hitting the tape is the winning strategy. I suggest you arrange a test session with your artist doing blind takes into both, then you audition the cassette>PT takes against the PT>cassette>PT takes and ask your artist to point out the difference. Technically there m...

Although minor miracles are sometimes worked, mastering engineers do not bridge the gulf between demo and "real album", and while some may be happy to discuss sequencing, they exist primarily to take care of frequencies, dynamics and continuity. Real albums sound like real albums long before they re...

Whether they're getting it mastered by Bernie Grundman, or the bass player's dog, or not getting it mastered at all, just do what you would have done otherwise: give them the best mix you can. You have no control over what they do with it after it leaves your studio. +1 Some mixes get next to no tr...

If the project can be accessed without a total crash i.e. opened but perhaps not played, then I would suggest removing all plugs to see if one has developed a rogue plug problem. Happened to me once or twice where a plug was hanging and hence crashing the session. Things usually worked out fine once...

Drones! Get a backing track of some tambura sounds tuned to a root. So long as you drop a few notes from the harmonic minor scale every few minutes, that (unfortunately) equals "asian" to most western ears, especially if you throw in a few tabla hits, wind chimes and similar. I actually love many ty...

Thanks - that's a great idea. Just out of curiosity, how simple can the make up stage get before a sonic trade-off is made ? Let's say the output from the summing stage was -30db, what's the minimum design required to recover that loss while remaining transparent, and without introducing anything un...

So...between this thread, this one, and however many more were spawned, was there any consensus reached on adding a simple internal makeup stage ?

http://equinoxejmjarre.free.fr/concerts/images/rdv_houston/Rendez-Vous_Houston_007.jpg Excuse my cynical rant, but having used Ableton's Live since the start, I can't help seeing the Monomes and Tenori-ons as mainly just eye candy. There's a huge void between the things that can be controlled and t...

Amicable is always best, but if you do reach the point of no return - tell them that you now legally own the recordings with all associated rights by default, and are about to hawk the lot to an ad agency on a buy-out deal. You tried to get them some publishing and residuals but that didn't happen. ...

Because I seriously own THREE Apple CD burners, and they have all been nothing but a hassle- they randomly reject certain brands of CDs. Aren't all Apple burners third party once you look inside ? Anyway, certain burners rejecting or finding errors with certain batches of brand CR-r has been going ...

Ladies and gentlemen...in the red corner its OS9 with Masterlist and Jam, don't let those clunky graphics fool you because this contender has been spittings out perfect red book CDs in its sleep for the past ten years. Seriously, I still keep this rig on the go because about one quarter of the comme...

By far the most amazing Avant/Reich/Concrete effect I've ever used is the Minimal Music Plug by Polyfractus. AFAIK, it may not have evolved past OS9 (only a few days ago I was posting about the joys of keeping old systems on the go!) and it generates some really astounding hypnotic shifted-loop effe...

If you use a DAW, I would first of all put a master mix on a channel and draw a little volume automation on just to see how that works. Perhaps bounce a separate vocal and instrumental, then try a little side chain with the vocals triggering a comp/limiter on the rest of the mix, this sometimes help...

Call me crazy but what about mixing the quiet bits louder ? Automation, bussing or lots of fingers should get you close enough to decide if it works. And yes, many MEs have mutliple parallel options to treat different sections of a song, as well as volume knobs. Seriously, you can and should take ca...

Z-Plane, do you have any experience with this topic, or are you merely trying to be clever? The physics are relatively simple - whatever material you put between the mic and source will have a similar effect to when placed between your ear and source, enough to get a feel for what its doing. Most o...