One of the worst aspects of running a studio on a computer is the lack of a console.

I really miss being able to just reach out and grab a knob and turn. And I'm not alone. The recent drop in DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) prices means that lots of people are taking the home studio plunge. Musicians and engineers alike are investing a few thousand dollars in a home recording studio that runs entirely on their computers.

They are lured by the storage and editing power of the computer. With today's software the potential is incredible: limitless digital editing and effecting can be had for under a thousand dollars.

The announcement ofYamaha's DSP factory drives this point home. When this thing is released it will support up to 16 input channels and 32 output channels using two cards and four expansion units. This combination is up to 32-bits thru and will include 208 ... Read More »

One of the most exciting products to make headlines recently is the Yamaha DSP Factory DS2416.

The Yamaha DS2416 offers the mixing power of the Yamaha 02R digital mixer, complete with 24 channels of digital mixing, on-board digital effects and dynamics processors -- along with everything else professionals need - plus 16 tracks of hard disk recording with up to 32 bit resolution.

Unlike most other audio cards, the DS2416 relies on its own processing power and not the computer's CPU. This arrangement makes much better use of your existing hardware.

DSP Factory equipped with 2 expansion bays

I've been using the Behringer Composer for a few weeks and so far I'm very happy with it. The cost is low ($250) yet the unit is very transparent, with fast gate response.

The Composer is a dual-channel compressor / expander, noise gate, and peak limiter. It has the basic control you would expect on a compressor (threshold, attack, decay, ratio, etc) as well as an Automatic setting. It also includes less-than typical 8-segment LED meters to indicate gain reduction and signal level.

The Composer features -10 / +4 inputs to match to any of your pro audio gear. It also includes a sidechain, which will allow you to compress only certain bands. This is a great feature on such an inexpensive compressor.

Behringer Composer

Recording audio on a computer places demands on the computer never anticipated by the computer's creators or operating system manufacturers.

For example, if you record on a large disk formatted with FAT32 in Windows 95, Windows will format the disk with small block sizes. This is an attempt to avoid wasting space, since the entire block is consumed even if it only contains a single byte. With "normal" sized files, small block sizes mean less wasted space. With audio, however, small block sizes mean excessive reads and poor disk throughput.

In a future article I will discuss the proper techniques for setting the right block sizes. For the moment I want to discuss Virtual Memory.

Windows' default Virtual Memory settings are usually not good for audio. First of all, Windows likes to maintain a flexible swapfile size. This is good for typical usage because it allows Windows to increase the size of the swapfile as you load more and more programs into memory.

With a ... Read More »

Part 1: eQs and As

As the competent and conscientious recording engineer that you surely are, you've taken great care to record your (or your client's) latest opus. You've gotten your greasy little fingers on some mics and placed them more or less in the general vicinity of the instruments being played. You've taken care to insure that these instruments were tuned to a scale somewhat resembling those normally heard in modern Western music. You even carefully placed some cool crash cymbals on that dodgy part where the overly-enthusiastic vocalist overloaded your A/D converters.

You've soloed every track and listened. The bass sounds fat. The guitar is punchy and open. The kick is round and snappy. The snare is... well, it's very "snarey" sounding.

So, how come your mix sounds like oatmeal?

I was once asked, "If you could only use a single effect to mix a record, what would it be?" In real life, my first reaction wou ... Read More »

I got into this year's NAMM convention courtesy of Celia Biggs, who works at SONY up here in Eugene. Celia's an attractive, middle-aged woman who lives a couple of houses down from me. She gave me a pass to this NAMM thing, saying how she thought it might help to expand my horizons. In-fucking-deed!! Here's a woman . . . works eight hours a day, stamping out CDs in a sterile environment, telling me that MY horizons needed to expand. I felt like telling her that I had something besides "horizons" that needed expanding . . . but I didn't. I simply accepted her gift with as much graciousness as I could muster, tucked the pass in my pocket and trucked on off, with the intention of tossing it in the trash when I got home.

ED FURILLO! The pass was made out to this guy, Furillo, who was, evidently, going to be too busy getting his "horizons" expanded by the succulent Celia to be representing his Japanese masters in the City of Angels that weekend. Probably told the wife that he was going and, instead, boo ... Read More »

It's Friday afternoon. You're home by yourself . . . as usual. The UPS guy has just dropped off a three by five foot box of God-knows-what. The return address on the shipping label reads "SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment." You scratch your foggy noggin, trying to remember what you might have ordered that could possibly be so big. You drag the box out of the front hall into the middle of the living room and hastily slit the taped parcel open. Voila! IT'S SIX MILLION PLASTIC CHEETOS! You begin to wonder, why on earth SteinWalk would be sending you all these plastic morsels when, deep down in the sub-oceanic trenches of your brain, a little light goes on . . . and, slowly, its message reaches the surface of your consciousness: Ass hole! Look in the Cheetos . . . Ass hole! It's buried under all those Cheetos . . .

And so, you begin doing a tentative breast stroke through a sea of white, plastic bits, being careful not to get them all over the living room, but the little fuckers stick to ... Read More »