Mixing / Production

All of the main MIDI + Audio sequencers now have a bewildering array of compression and limiting plug-ins built in, but many home musicians are unclear about what all those controls and options do. And with so many varieties of each plug-in available, which one should you choose for the job in hand?

Jack Wall is a leading light in the video game soundtrack industry, where his credits include the latest chapter in the best-selling Myst series of computer games.

Film tie-in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets will be one of the most sophisticated video games ever created, and the soundtrack alone has taken the designers from Surrey to Seattle — by way of a school toilet...

All modern sequencers make it easy to enhance your arrangements with subtle tempo variations, but these facilities are often ignored.

Nashville is still a place of legend when it comes to music. Although overall sales of the city's flagship genre, country music, have dipped somewhat from their mid-'90s peak, Nashville still has a recording legacy matched by few cities in the world.

Not content with reviving and staging a 1920s avant-garde work for the first time, Paul D. Lehrman also worked out a way to reunite the piece with its contemporary film, which was never used due to technical problems. This is how...

With a software sampler such as Emagic's EXS24, creating multisampled instruments from your favourite patches on your hardware sound modules needen't be a chore.

Multi-band compression is one of the most powerful processing techniques available to the recording engineer. However, if you don't know how to apply it effectively it can just as easily ruin the sound of your entire production.

A PC with CD burner and soundcard provides the ideal means to preserve old tape recordings or transfer your vinyl collection to CD.

Groove Control loop libraries allow you much more flexibility than traditional sample CD-ROMs, if you know how to get the most out of them.

The Wavestation can prove extremely frustrating to use, but can produce sounds that are almost impossible to recreate on any other instrument. So here's some hands-on advice for getting the best from Korg's Wavestation series of synthesizers.

In this final part of our series, we look at how the major project studio-oriented MIDI + Audio sequencers (DAWs) currently handle surround.

Abbey Road's famous Studio One has played host to innumerable big-budget orchestral recordings for film, but the final session before its refurbishment in 2001 saw it being used for a new purpose: to record the soundtrack for a video game.

We hear from more surround producers working at very different ends of the music business to see how they've created working surround systems, and how they make use of 5.1 at the mixing stage.

The flexibility of the effects assignment in modern MIDI + Audio sequencers (DAWs) can be daunting, so here's some advice on how to sort out the routing and order of your plug-ins for common recording and mixing tasks.

Try these tips and techniques for creating more convincing programmed rhythm parts in your sequencer.

Our series turns to the practicalities of setting up your own surround-capable recording system, and we talk to two radically different surround studios to see how they've coped — one at project- and one at pro-studio level.

We explain how to get the best practical results from equalisation by understanding the true frequency ranges of most instruments and voices.

Paul White shows you how to get that massive dance sound. Additional material by Mike Senior.

Gates are far more than just problem-solvers for reducing spill and noise. They can be used to add punch to drum sounds, put rhythmic interest into sustained parts or even as mixing automation.

Paul White reveals that there's much more to gating than you might think.