A few years ago musician greats Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock wrote an open letter to the next generation of artists for NestHQ. The letter is a beautiful piece sharing some key points of their philosophy including awakening to your humanity, embracing the road less travelled, and several others. It can be inspirational for artists. … Read more Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock Letter to Artists
Tape Op magazine have published a handy article titled “Studio Etiquette: Everything Your Engineer Wants You To Know But Is Afraid To Say”, which covers pretty much what it says in the title. There might be one or two things that I would add or cover slightly differently, but in general I agree with what … Read more Studio Etiquette
The Visualist Capitalist website has posted a great graph showing music industry sales in the USA in $ (adjusted for inflation) over the past 40 years. It shows that music sales revenue peaked in the late 90’s, with CDs making up over 95% of the market in 2002, before MP3s and streaming services came online … Read more Music Industry Sales
A friend recommended I check out a video of one of the talks from GDC 2017 from Australian composer and sound designer Mick Gordon about his work on the Doom game soundtrack from a year or two ago. It provides some interesting insight into his approach and creativity in general. Check out the full talk … Read more Behind the Music of Doom
I was recently having a play around with a stereo widener plug-in on a track and noticed that it was having some issues with causing level drops when monoing the mix, so I decided to have a play around with a few different stereo width plug-ins to see how differently they might treat things. I … Read more Stereo Widener Plug-in Testing
Ian Shepherd does plenty of great work on educating people about dynamics and loudness for music, and he has collaborated with MeterPlugs on a website called Loudness Penalty that analyses your music’s loudness to see how much it might get turned down when normalised by the various online platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, etc. Ian … Read more Loudness Penalty
Everyone has had a meal in a noisy restaurant and struggled to hear the conversation at their table right? Well that is one very good reason to consider the acoustics in restaurants, but another one just might be that sound affects taste! SevenFiftyDaily have published an interesting article discussing “How Sound Affects Taste—and How to … Read more Sonic degustation anyone?
I find myself often answering the same sort of questions from musicians about the recording process so I thought it would make sense to jot down an overview of some things as a reference that I can direct people to… The Process So you’ve written some songs that you’d like to record and release, but … Read more For Those About to (Record) Rock
I recently came across a video of a person going by the name wikisinger singing in different places to show the effect of the acoustics and associated reverberation. The video is similar in style to another I had previously seen of a drummer playing in various places, and you can check them both out along … Read more The Same Song Sung in 15 Places
The other day I was checking out some of the resources on the BBC R&D website with regards to good standards/specifications for studios. I have compiled references to some of the papers that I found to be most useful. The following considerations make reference to various papers produced by BBC R&D, as examples of industry … Read more Some considerations for studio builds