Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

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 »

I said in the previous article that I'd provide details of my most common composing workflows.

Sync to video Soundtrack  read more »

As well as composing and recording, I play guitar in a band, playing a mixture of covers and our own originals. We don't stick too closely to the originals when we cover them, realising that we only have four members (guitar, bass, drums and vocals) so many songs have to be stripped down to work.

Going from a song that has many parts to a cover version with only four instruments can leave you feeling a bit naked when playing live. It doesn't help that as guitarist, I often have to play several parts at the same time.  read more »

I wrote the bulk of this text a couple of months ago after a day of not producing as much as I'd liked to. There are no real suggestions of how to improve or learn, but I thought I'd describe my thought processes so others may learn from my experiences.

Yesterday  read more »

Budget or not

I subscribe to the view that you almost always get what you pay for at the lower end of the market. So it's nice to come across something cheap that works well.

The compressor

I bought a compressor the other day, but not for use as a studio compressor. I bought it as an effect for my guitar rig.
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The main function of a compressor is to reduce dynamic range. They're not just used to increase perceived volume so you can achieve the loudest CD on the planet. That's in itself is worth remembering.

Most have a make-up gain/volume knob. The most common setting is to have the compressor set to reduce the volume above the threshold, resulting in the peaks being levelled out. That reduces the overall volume of the signal, so the make-up gain is increased to "make-up" the difference.  read more »

Which is louder, the hard-struck ringing chord or the palm-mute?

I answer both to that question. Let's look in some more detail.
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How to be musically creative - 1
Send a guitar through a parallel bus and put a noise gate followed by effects on the bus.
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