Mixing / Production

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...

Can you advise on the powering and positioning of Behringer's Truth monitors? How can I control proximity effect? Why do speaker stands have spikes? Will Steinberg's Virtual Guitarist run on my PC? Will replacing my carpet with laminate affect the acoustics? Can you recommend a second-hand sampler with a floppy drive? How can I get broadcast masters to sound louder?

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...

How can I use my external effects units with my Akai DPS16 hard disk recorder? How can I convert my mono recordings into stereo? Are there any cheap multi-band compression plug-ins? How can I reverse the effects of performing Windows XP tweaks?

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.

Is it safe to switch all my gear off using one power switch? How can I get a vocal sound that's dry, but fits in the mix? How can I measure my soundcard's background noise level? Can I connect my keyboard's output to a mic input on my desk? How can I calculate the frequency of individual pitches? Will silica gel have a limited lifespan in my mic box? 

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.

How can I produce aggressive female vocals? Mac Or Windows? How do I eliminate flanging MIDI notes? Can I use Virtual Guitarist with Logic on a Mac? Should I record at a 24-bit resolution?

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.