And The Best DAW Is…
The best DAW for you might not be what you thought. I used to be a one-DAW man. When it came to Digital Audio Workstations, I fancied myself a bit of a contrarian. Back in the day, Pro Tools was even more dominant than it is now. If you were serious about studio work, if you wanted people to take you seriously, you used Pro Tools. Have Your Cake The trouble for me was, I just never clicked with it. I found it to be counterintuitive to the way I liked to work. So I became a Cakewalk Sonar to […]
How To Finish More Music When Time Is Limited
Surprisingly, one way to finish more music is to stop trying so hard to finish music. If you’re anything like me, you have a burning passion for making music. You are full of feelings and ideas just scratching from the inside to get out, and you want to bring them to life as fully as you can and share them with as many people as possible. When you’re not making music, you start to go a little crazy and feel like you’re not yourself. That drive to connect with others through music, to share some feeling or idea or mood […]
Revisiting Softube Console 1 (Already)
Softube Console 1 is proving even richer and deeper than I imagined. Whew. It’s been a minute! Covid sucks, is all I will say. Very glad to be back! So, before I got busy with work travel and sick and whatnot.. the good folks at Softube sent an email advertisement that said, “Did you know you can load our popular Tape and Harmonics plug-ins in the shape section of your Console 1 to distort before EQ?” No, as a matter of fact, I did not! But I was intrigued by the idea. And since their ad conveniently mentioned that both […]
My Top Three Master Bus Compressor Plugins Right Now (2022)
The dust has settled and the top three spots in my master bus compressor lineup have at long last begun to stabilize. Back in the old days I used to relentlessly hunt and search for that one magic master bus compressor plugin that would make my mixes sound professional. I even went so far as to buy an API 2500 for what was, for me at the time, and ungodly amount of money. This was way before I knew enough to understand that the “one magic piece” of hardware, or that one magic bus compressor plugin.. just doesn’t exist. I […]
Mixing Music from the Past – The ’22 Remix + Remaster Project
How much can you learn by remixing music you’ve mixed before? Years ago when I lived in San Diego, I was in a pretty great band called Humboldt Road – for a minute. We recorded a grand total of one album and only played a couple of shows before I decided to leave the band. (More on that later, maybe.) Recording was a DIY affair. I called upon a lifelong friend and musical buddy to help track the drums, and I recorded everything else at my house with my modest gear and decidedly substandard room. I’d been recording and mixing […]
Why I Went Back to Softube Console 1
I finally get what is so special about Softube Console 1. I’m a constant tinkerer when it comes to my mixing process and the tools I use. I think it comes from this never-ending feeling that my mixes could sound better, like there might be just one missing ingredient that pushes my work over the edge into world class, pro territory. But I’m also pretty hard on myself about getting songs done and not getting lost in the search for better tools. I generally keep up on new products and what’s going on in the audio production market, but I […]