Tutorial: Pitch Correction in Adobe Audtion

Check out Transit of Venus to learn about pitch correction in adobe audion and get tips. Included are audio examples.

A link to how to do pitch correction on her blog.

She has a great voice! (if thats really her singing).
And that may have been the first time using a smiley on this blog.

Updated: Yes its really her!

Crack iTunes Protected Music

This instructable will show you how to remove the DRM from music bought from iTunes store.

Music was a huge part of society in the past, but with technology it is bigger than ever! The fastest, and easiest way to get music these days is via the Internet

Apple should not be selling copy-protected music or movies anymore. Leaving them in the dust is Amazon. The best thing you can do is boycott DRM technologies. They are pointless, obtrusive, and crazy in the computer world. Companies need to embrace the fact that the user has all the power over their content.

Link to the Instructable to learn how to get DRM-less songs.

The Declining Quality of Apple, Synthmania 4 Year Anniversary

Many laptop-based Mac OS X users are experiencing significant audio issues on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. On Tiger, the culprit appears to be the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-001 released earlier this spring. One workaround on Tiger is to simply turn off AirPort.

From CDM

Do you think that Apple’s software and hardware quality have gone way down?? Every update they release seems untested nowadays. Programs also seem to crash more often, even with an increased overall stability of the system. Airport giving audio problems is insane, and evidence that they aren’t paying attention.

Link From Emusic

Beat Bearing!!!

Controlling a TR-808 with ball bearings! Looks like alot of people saw this one already. Eh, I’m slow.

Keytars and Controllerism From Lx7

Come Celebrate Synthmania’s 4 year anniversary with a Visit to their page on the Electrix Filter Factory!!
Mp3 Demo

Do you need a kick start in your garden?

Features 5 encoders (with button), an additional button and a display. Software is customizable (by me, hahahaha)…..But I use it to command my machinedrum effects over sysex

RuinWesen Midi Command Link @ EM411

Resources: Making a Living Online as a Musician

There are some people who probably wish they could make a living online as a musician. Here are some resources to look at to get some ideas. Alot of people don’t take the steps to put their music out there.

Sometimes its as simple as putting a shopping cart on your site, or taking better myspace pictures.

Links:

Online Musicians
Making a Living online as a Musician

Selling your Music Online
A Comparison of Online Music Stores to Sell at
Online Store Guide
Mega List

Marketing:
A nice article about myspace from
Stephan Spencer Article******

Attracting Labels (popups):
http://public-relations.bestmanagementarticles.com/Article.aspx?id=9897

Check out EndPop for an example. Link

Subwoofer Calibration HowTo

The purpose of a subwoofer is to fill in the bottom octaves below the capabilities of the mains speakers. So, most subwoofers provide methods for calibrating their output in order to tune them to blend perfectly with the main speakers. These controls often include a level control, a crossover frequency control and a phase switch.

Link on how to calibrate your subwoofer from sound and vision magazine forum

5 ways to Warm up Your Mix

1. Add More Sub Bass

Specifically sub-bass below 100hz. This can be done with a bass instrument, like a synth, or a guitar. Its extremely effective, and sometimes you can get away with adding more than you think you should. Small speakers can’t replicate these frequencies, but it will still sound “Warm.”

2. Double the Tracks and performances

Just doubling, tripling, or quadding the number of voices of a pre-recorded performance (or synth track), can widen out your sound. Panning to the left and right, and lowering the volumes of each can give you a fullness that one lead can’t. A great way to do it is track each performance separately and save them. The differences between each (un-quantinized) performance can be combined uniquely. mainstream music does this all the time by doubling the voice track. You can do it with a synth or anything else!

3. Mic the audio coming from a speaker, and record it back in.

This is a good trick if you have a decent mic. This will add reverb and odd harmonics to your mix that can make it sound more real. Its also a good way to get wicked drum n bass sounds.

4. Stereo Reverb

Using Plenty of Stereo reverb can make your mix sound warmer, and create subtle dynamics that weren’t there in the first place. Adding compression on top of this will bring out these dynamics. Don’t be afraid of reverb!! Used properly and tastefully it won’t ruin anything.

5. Chorus

The chorus filter is a popular way to widen, and warm your signal. It works great on cold synths and samples.

Mixing Tip of the Day: Fat Snares

What makes a snare sound fat?

Compression? Sometimes. Thats good for an overall level boost, if you don’t have gain, but keep Reading…

The main frequencies it resonates at.



If you run your snare sample or live drum through a frequency analyser you may see more than one spike. One may be significantly taller than the other.

Tips: Try boosting the snare with a wide parametric EQ on smaller spikes that aren’t quite loud, but still show up. For example, you have a loud snare hit at 200hz, and you also see that it resonates at 350khz. Boost everything between 200 and 400khz (or so) with EQ as much as 18db+ decibels depending on your situation. Tune it using your ear. Your snare will sound alot fatter! It might sound crazy to boost ABOVE the snare’s main range, or use that much gain, but now it will get more attention and emphasis from the listener. Using this technique you can fill gaps in your music with the snare drum hit. Its especially good when your your main instrument (a guitar, or synth), doesn’t have alot of mid-range bass.

This is great for rock music, and you will instantly have a fatter mix.

Visual Audio Mastering In Logic Pro

Ever had a hard time mastering your final audio track?? Don’t know how to set EQ or Compression even if your listening to it? - Chances are that you don’t have the perfect environment for audio mastering. You may not be able to trust your ears, your speakers, or your room. Using this **VISUAL** method we will master a final audio track using only our eyes & Logic Pro!! You could even turn your speakers off and do it blind. Sound crazy? Its not.

Why this works: There is no perfect environment for listening to music in its purest form unless you have tons of money. The next best thing is learn to read the audio waveforms right off your computer. Inside the computer audio is a perfect representation. WYSIWYG. This is very important with regards to setting up EQ and Compression, which can always be tricky, even if your listening to the audio.

Lets get started!!

Step One: Have your master track recorded already. LOOP the most important sections of your music. Make sure its longer than a few bars. If you haven’t adjusted the levels of individual instruments before getting to this step then you need to. (Method: Crank up your music super loud and adjust each instrument level’s).

Step Two: Put on a Multipressor, Channel EQ, and Limiter In this order on your audio track. Put a MultiMeter on your main output. Turn OFF the Limiter & EQ for now. (Option-Click)

Step 3: Double Click Multi-Pressor to open it up. Find a Preset that matches the style of music your making. I chose Final Pop Compressor, because It had sounded “classy”. Turn OFF Autogain.

Step 4: With Multipressor still open, open up your Multi-Meter.

This is the visual part. We are checking the Multimeter’s EQ spectrum to help us guide where to set our Multipressor’s Crossovers! So you will have to have both on the screen at the same time.

I set the low end of my Multipressor’s crossover to 90HZ. As you can see on the Multimeter’s display there is a huge peak at 40hz which is the bass kick sound. Setting it at 90hz ecansulates this peak and seperates it from the snare which has a peak of 125hz (not shown). So we are putting it somewhere in the middle for clarity. Depending on your mix you will need to move your Multipressor Crossovers to where the most significant dips are in the EQ level spikes. These dips supposedly are where different instruments sit in your mix.

Do this step for all your Multipressor Crossovers! The low end is the most important to get just right.

Step 5: Set your Multipressor’s Threshold settings: The trick to do this (I think) is to keep the two I/O bars leveled off nicely most of the time. Bring the top triangle cursor down till its compressing the audio, but not too much. I/O bars should be balanced & level most of the time. Just use your eyes, bring it down till it looks okay, and stop. If one side peaks significantly higher *always*, then retry.

In this picture you can see that we brought the top threshold down to a nice sweet spot that will kill hard peaks most of the time.

Step 6: Turn on your Chan EQ. (Option-Click if it was Off). Open it up.

Turn On the Analyzer Lines. This graph (squiggly lines) are what will get your EQ set properly on your master track.

I believe in a mostly subtractive method when mixing digital audio. Everytime you boost the EQ, or adjust the audio level slider, your stretching a digital waveform. I keep this to a minimum. All EQ boosts will be kept to +3db maximum. Subtractive can be as much as -8.0db or more (if needed). I use alot of subtractive EQ on the low end bass. At first this might seem counter-intuitive, but it is not. Just look at the analyzer lines!! The entire mix is low end heavy. Most music mix is, and thats okay.

What we are going to do is reduce the peaks surgically and also adjust the total curve to make the analyzer lines fall off in a smoother manner.

Step 7: Set your bass curve crossover. Reduce your bass!!! I have mine at 85hz with a wide Q setting to grab most of the low end. Presumably the crossover will be close to what you had set your Multipressor’s crossovers. As you can see in the picture above, my bass is peaking to around +10 db. A huge part of the curve on the low end is just up too high. Before the adjustment of -8db it was hitting as high as +20db! Since the idea is to make the analyzer lines less steep & smoother we subtracted 8db of all that bass. We still have enough bass to get your woofer going, and now the end result is that our top end will sound immensely cleaner!!! Remember the subtractive bass method. You don’t always want heavy sounding bass. Sometimes it sounds unprofessional, or that you were mixing on crap speakers.

Step 8: Put a surgical style EQ on your snare drum (if needed). Squash the peaks to a normal level.

In this picture you can see that besides the negative EQ curve we just set, there is a little dip around 200hz. This was to take the hard peak out of the snare drum a little bit. -3db was enough for my mix. Now the bass & snare hit are both hitting the same levels of +10db or so. Before this surgical adjustment on the snare, it was going up a bit too high, and higher than our bass kick.

So we set the EQ crossover to 192hz, set the gain to -3.0b, and the Q to a really tight 1.10.

Reminders:
Its important to have the Q setting really small when getting surgical on your snare levels (and other tight peaks)
Have snare & bass kick peaks will both hit at about the same levels, since they are both in the bass spectrum.
Get the low end smooth looking overall. Set the Q to match the size of the dips.
It may never look smooth, but what we are looking at is PEAK levels and making them all relative to eachother.

Step 9: High end dips. Give it a EQ Boost!!!

In the high end of your mixes you might see a section of the Analyzer line that often has a dip in it. Since we are working in the high end of the audio spectrum now we can take care of these dips with more surgical style EQ. Since we are going to be boosting, we don’t want to use more than +3db to our master mix.

Get surgical on the largest dips you see in your high end.
Use +3b gain on them.
Set the Q to match the size of these dips.
Let the curve fall off naturally, but in a mathematical looking fashion (Like the half life of nuclear waste, or a sine wave algorithm). It just looks like its rolling off nice!

Step 10: Set the very high end EQ curve & boost it.

Since there is such a huge fall off of the entire mix, we boosted the very top end as much as we could without increasing the amount of noise & other distortions. +3db, again is a good idea. You might want to go up to +5db and set your crossover high or low, depending.

Tip: Go back to the Multimeter. Its another way to look at your EQ. If any section is peaking higher than everything else and its doing it often, then you can go back through these any of these steps. Peaks are normal, but not huge ones.

Everything rolling off nicely on your curve (most of the time)?? GOOD!

Step 11: The limiter.

Turn on your Limiter. Boost it up +2db or leave it at ZERO. Hopefully you got your song to the right amount of overall loudness **while** you were recording it into your computer! The limiter will account for any quick peaking in your mix. It also protects people’s speakers during playback to a certain degree.

Tip: Don’t boost your mix hard up into the top range during any part of the recording process. Slight peaking is okay during your initial setup, and song construction/recording, because you are taking care of it later with the limiter!!!

Now turn on your speakers and see what comes out!!! You can turn off your plugins with Option-Click to notice the difference. With the plugins all turned on, chances are that you will have a clearer, less irritating, professional mix that sounds good on any speaker system!

There I just saved some of you a ton of money on professional monitors. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. This is my personal mastering method, and I’m sure there are other ways to do it, but this is a very fast, tweaky method, that seems to work every time! Later!

Check out songs I just mastered using this method: Night Explorer (2.2MB) and Road Warriors (3.6MB)
The end result is a song that you can crank up really loud with none of the annoying frequencies.

-Allan of Chip Collection.

Sing a Song in Midi - Vocal To Midi Convert & Utils

Want to sing your music into the computer instead of spending hours creating songs from scratch?
It looks like there are no commercial hardware to do this, but there are a few companies providing software. The best looks like Widisoft, who actually has both PC & Mac versions.

Your voice becomes a midi controller

WIDI Audio to MIDI is a realtime Audio to MIDI conversion plugin. The plugin receives input from an audio channel and performs realtime music recognition.

WIDISOFT

A “complete” list of Pitch to Midi Convertors can be found Here
Fun:

Midi makes Pictures with MSMidiPix.

Tutorials:
How to record vocals from MixBus

MV-8800 / 8000 Tutorials & Demos

Got some rips and raps tonight with some MV Tutorials for the Roland MV-8800. The Mv-8800 is a sampling production studio. The nice thing about this one is it comes with video out! Its like a computer thats been customized solely for audio production. Keep in mind you can make any type of music with any machine, especially one based on sampling.

———-MV Tutorial

Mike Acosta - Turbo Start MV-8800

———-MV Demo

Jay Jimaii Tears up the MV 8000

here is a link to part 1: LINK

—————-Music Production

Ski Beatz - Making of Dead Presidents for Jay-Z

This guy is really talented.

He gives you quite a few good production tips if your listening in on him.

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