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 »

A short series of articles on collaborating with other people to make your music better, make it heard or to help them move their music forwards.

1. Recording

1a Engineer  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 »

I've taken a detour from writing about timing for a few articles and there are a couple of points still to say about that (but for another article). I'm also planning some articles on creative uses of processors and effectsbut that's a short while away, while I prepare the audio samples so I can explain it better.  read more »

Following on from the previous article on emulating bass, this article is about emulating drums and mainly about emulating drummers.

I'm of two minds when I emulate drums. I'm either:  read more »

Ever wondered how a certain drum track was recorded? Well there are several sites that will get you a lot further than just using your favourite search engine.

GearSlutz Expert Q&A has many interviews with professional mixers, producers, engineers, etc. These have a vast amount of knowledge and between them a bewildering array of hit records.  read more »

I'm generally against just posting a link to a site without some useful commentary (i.e. add more than just "check this out"), but in this case the site http://www.filmsound.org is so good that it warrants a link on its own. More so, it warrants a permanent banner on the site. No matter how experienced you are (or how good you think you are), you will find something new to you on the site. Before asking questions on any site about how a sound effect was made or how the overall sound was designed for a blockbuster movie, read the articles on http://www.filmsound.org

Memory is the first production for Spinneyhead Presents. It's a low budget, practically zero budget series of 5 short episodes. Current spend has been about £35 for some props. That's excluding travelling expenses, bear in mind that everyone lives within about 40 miles of the 3 locations used.  read more »