Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

Compressors are regularly used to tame errant dynamics or to increase the perceived volume of a track. As well as squashing the audio, the compressor can be used to bring out some elements more than others.

Letting the attack through  read more »

I've talked about tremolo as a musical feature before, this time I want to go into more detail.

First things first, let's sort out the guitarists: I don't mean using the tremolo arm/whammy bar or whatever you want to call it ("handle" as my girlfriend called it - and no she won't be picking up my guitars for a while). The whammy bar creates a vibrato feature, not a tremolo. Vibrato alters pitch.

Amplitude  read more »

Create a random part and modify it until it becomes musical. I'll describe a few options for taking a random parts and the processes I use for making them more musical.

1. Creating the randomness

I set Logic on a 4 bar cycle and hit keys at random on my keyboard. I chose a clean electric piano sound since they highlight any dissonance. It's not truly random because it's difficult to unlearn how to play, but after cycling through the 4 bars a few times it did become a mess of notes.  read more »

Introduction

When I master tracks myself, I do it within Logic Pro. I do not delude myself into thinking that the results of my efforts will be better than that of a professional mastering engineer. My view is that that there are times when mastering tracks yourself is the pragmatic choice. In this article, I provide details of my mastering process. This builds on the article about why process mapping is relevant to music and audio.

Process Map  read more »

Following on from the article about using gates on drums. I want to describe the main reason I use gates and that's to lock the bass into another pattern such as the kick drum.

It's quite a common use for a gate and when set well, it's subtle and almost unnoticeable, but definitely noticeable when you turn the effect off.  read more »