Tutorial: Getting You Parts To Sit In The Mix

Have you ever found yourself building an elaborate sampler or keyboard patch made up of layers upon layers only to be disappointed when bringing it into your mix? You find out that either it stands out over top of everything else, or else you need to bring it way down to a barely audible level, making you wonder, “dude, where’s my sound?”

This doesn’t only happen with synthesized sounds; you may have layered your drum hits, vocal takes, bass or guitar parts and come to the same conclusion.

This article will help you understand why this happens, and what you can do to avoid it, or if necessary, fix it in the mix. You will come to learn one of the central tenets of mixing: sounds that appear great in isolation don’t necessarily sound good in the mix. The most common reason for why this happens is as follows:

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Tutorial: How To Get Your Kick To Sound BIG

For this tutorial we are going to show you how to take a mediocre, boring, flat, or just plain wretched sounding kick drum, and magically engineer it into a bass-rattling behemoth. “But, why should I bother learning how to make my own kick drums?” you ask…Well, because, the kick drum is the corner-stone of almost all modern recordings. Check out any hip hop, rock, pop or dance track on the radio today. Front-and-center is a big, beefy kick. Since the kick drum has such high energy content, it goes a long way towards producing the perception of BIGNESS and LOUDNESS in a track. Often, you’ll have a kick drum in your track that you selected for its character… but then you realize its bass output is no good in the context of the rest of your mix. At any rate, you are unlikely to escape the need to take a kick, and pump it up to the next level at some point during your recording.

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Korg Gadget: New All-In-One App For iOS

Korg is back in the iPad app space again with an “all-in-one” box offering called “Gadget.” With a wide variety of percussion and instrument synthesizers coupled with a fairly robust sequencing engine Gadget eschews the in-app purchasing model in favor of giving you an entire mini-DAW workspace right out of the gate. Gadget is optimized for use with the iPad Air and newest Mini models. Check out the full hands-on with the guys from Sonic Touch in the video below.

Integrating iOS Apps Just Became a Reality With Audiobus

Like a lot of musicians today, you probably have an iPad filled with really cool apps in and of themselves, but struggle to find a way to bring them together into your recording workflow. You realize, for example, that Animoog sounds fantastic, but without a way to integrate it with your other iPad apps it’s on its own little island. Thankfully it appears that that is all changing with the introduction of AUDIOBUS.

Delivering the promised land of iOS app integration is no small feat but early reviews are showing that we may just have a winner. The app works by routing your individual apps as input and output busses to and from eachother. So you can, for instance, load up a drum machine like iELectribe and while you have that beat going, open up a synth app and compose a line and then bring them all together in a recording app like Multitrack DAW for a fully multitrack recordable session. You can then export those output busses to a mangler tool like Loop Twister or GlitchBreaks and then resend them back. Same goes for FX modules (finally, a practical way to make use of iKaossilator!)

This app has just became available as of Dec, 2012 but is already supported but many of the most popular apps on the AppStore. Time will tell, but it’s virtually certain that all of your favorite app developers will come aboard and issue updates to allow compatibility with AUDIOBUS.

Check out AUDIOBUS in the AppStore, or take a look at some videos below showing it in action.

The Reverse Drum Machine

Many of us have worked with drum machines, but Moritz Simon Geist’s latest effort brings new meaning to the term. Instead of sampling a live drum kit and sequencing patterns inside the computer, Geist had the brilliant (or, ridiculous?) idea of reversing the flow of information: starting digital and ending up analog. He accomplished this by setting up mechanical levers that strike each drum via midi messages output from his computer sequencer. It seems more of an art installation than a practical music-making setup. The effect is close to that of sampled live drums played via a sequencer (the traditional method of drum sequencing) but with a slightly more organic sound owing to slight variations in room reverb and mechanical randomness.

“Or we could just sample the drum hits and sequence it on my iPhone…Just a thought”