Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I joined a few FB groups a while back, thinking that maybe I can share some of my knowledge with young aspiring producers/engineers. Unfortunately, it seems that a large number of questions asked by "newbies" is "What's the best _____?". Here are some actual questions posted: Yo […]

A common thing to talk about among aspiring recording/mixing engineers is how well they can hear. There often seems to be a bit of a contest to see who can hear the highest frequency, as if somehow being able to hear higher frequencies makes you a better recording or mixing engineer. I avoid these types […]

Revised & Updated! This is an old article I wrote in the early 90s. Quite a bit has changed since then, but most of the advice here still applies. With the reworking of my site in 2012, I have gone through this article and made some additions and revisions to make it more relevant. MAXIMIZING […]

Recently I had an artist ask me why the mixes he does in his home studio sound so much softer than the commercially released music he buys. I thought that everyone already knew about the whole "loudness wars" craze that has been going on since the late 1990s, but apparently there are still many people […]

My simple explanation of compressors, how they work, and how you can use them. A compressor is basically a variable gain device that is used to either try to smooth out the dynamic range of a signal, or is also sometimes used as an effect.  Different compressors have different types of characteristics and sounds that […]