Emily's sound

I’d like to share some of my favorite audio engineering and music production books.

Recording unhinged by Sylvia Massy

Modern Recording Techniques by David Miles Huber

Al Schmitt on the record

The recording engineer’s handbook by Bobby Owsinsky

Microphone book by Ray E. Rayburn

PreSonus StudioLive32

My patchbay is a mess, Can I avoid it?

Try using cables that fit the length on the patchbay inputs.

Talking about compressors: FET

They use a type of transistor Field Effect Transistor to measure the input level and perform the gain reduction. The use of this transistors allows the compressor to have almost instantaneous response times but a limited dynamic range. The FET compressors have an attack time and are super fast.

When to use it?

This compressor is very useful when mixing drums, voices, bass and any other element that needs a certain degree of thrust. The distortion that this compressor can give is quite warm and rich harmonically, so it produces a pleasant sound when applied and to which different creative purposes can be given

When not to use it?

When mixing, always try to have as many references as you might need: Headphones, monitors or even comercial speakers.

Recording Hacks

1- What are you looking for?

Every Decision we make when we want to record something has its consequences in the quality by itself. To do everything right we have to experiment a little bit with our sound and listen a lot of music to know what are we looking for.

2- Tuning

We’re all agree that when we have a session, the first we are use to doing is the editing process, the tuning is the part of the editing stage where many instruments have a pitch and tone correction, to develop an editing skill all we can do is practice, like most engineering skills. Above this process to avoid it, or at least reduce it a little, kinda, we can do an exhaustive tuning of our instruments to keep it in harmony while we’re in the live room.

3- Miking 

It’s true that the gear only represent only the 10% of our entire job, but when we have the chance to experiment with a big catalog, why not to research about it before we take a decision over our job, maybe we’ll have bette results. Also, a good miking technique will help us to complete our choices.

4- Spatiality 

Take care of How much my mics are open it’s also a way to avoid phase cancelation, and to have an over- splitted stereo image, take care how many elements are in the same room and the space inside your room.

5- Room dynamics