Music Technology Posts from November, 2007



EQ, Copyright and Music Promotion

Friday, November 30th, 2007

It’s a three-in-one Friday post today, which includes some tips on using your equaliser more effectively, copyright information for webmasters and a highly convenient eBook-format download of selected PodPosts on the subject of music promotion and sales…
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Time To Get In The Loop

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

For many music producers, the quickest and easiest way to create great-sounding tunes is to use pre-recorded loops and samples. There are a number of places to get your hands on such material, but it’s important to ensure that what you’re using is fully licensed. If a track you create from samples suddenly becomes a huge hit, you don’t want someone to come knocking at your door looking for their cut of the royalties…
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Laptop Guitar Hybrid – Notebook Embedded In Guitar Body

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Guitar modder Ben Lowry had an old laptop lying around, so he decided to take the obvious route and embed it into the body of an electric guitar. He then hooked the machine into a visualisation program which produces some nifty psychedelia as he strums his hi-tech axe, which he calls the LCDetar…
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Free Reason Release As Radiohead Reap Rewards

Monday, November 26th, 2007

Two unrelated points to relate here; the first being that Propellerhead Software have released their educational package ‘Teaching Music With Reason’ as a free download. The ‘reason’ they have decided to set it free is because it was originally designed as a classroom guide for version 2.5 of Reason Adapted, and they are not updating it to encompass the new features of versions three and four…
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Music Technology – From The 40s To The Present

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

One of the latest and most visually appealing music controllers is the Tenori-On, a tablet-like live sequencing device that musicians can use to create both musical and visual patterns via its illuminated grid interface. American artist Norman Fairbanks has now released what is billed as the first album composed entirely with the Tenori-On…
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Should You Mix For Your Listeners?

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

This is something of a leading question, and the obvious answer seems to be ‘of course you should’. Accepted best practise in professional audio mixing/mastering is to work with specialised flat-response monitors in a specially designed room – providing the cleanest sound possible without interference patterns or emphasising/attenuating any particular frequency range. However, considering that your audience will be listening to your product on vastly inferior equipment, should you take that into consideration too?
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A Quick Fix For Music Mixers

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Anyone who makes or produces a lot of music will inevitably develop a preferred way of doing things, and they will tend to apply the same workflow processes to every mixing project. For example, I tend to automatically slap a compressor on the bass track before even listening to it – which works fine most of the time, as I can then tweak the various settings – such as attack, release and threshold – to suit the particular track. However, there are times when it might be better to take a step back, dump all the insert habits and build up a very basic mix without any effects or panning. This can be a particularly useful approach when you’re having a bad mix day and nothing seems to sound right…

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Music Scales – Making Scalable Music

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

Everybody has heard of musical scales, and most people have some idea of what they are. For many, they are only remembered as one of the pointless homework exercises inflicted upon them in the enforced piano lessons of their childhood. But what exactly is a music scale, and how do we go about creating them?

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How Can Music Blogs Pay The Piper?

Monday, November 12th, 2007

A lot of people love music, and some of them love it so much that they blog about it every day. Sometimes, there’s no other way to illustrate your love of a particular tune and you just have to link to an mp3 so that your audience can hear for themselves what it is you’re trying to communicate. But is this piracy, as many observers seem to suggest, or is it something else entirely?

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Design Your Own Computer Sounds For Free

Friday, November 9th, 2007

Free samples have always been a popular retail marketing ploy, but Vember Audio are now taking that tactic into the software sound creation arena. Vember are the makers of such sonic manipulation engines as the Surge synthesiser and the Shortcircuit sampler, which have tended to cater to sound designers who want to create their own sounds from scratch rather than providing banks and banks of factory preset sounds. The good news is that the Shortcircuit sampler has now been released to the general public – for free!

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