Mixing / Production

I'm about to do some mixing and I'd just like to find out if there are any right or wrong ways to pan my audio. I'm sure I'...

Imagine selling a million copies of your music in just over a week, with no video, no radio play and no touring. Impossible? Not if it's the soundtrack to one of the most successful computer games of all time...

Walter Taieb enjoyed worldwide success as a dance producer, before reinventing himself as a classical composer. Working with violin prodigy Vanessa-Mae tested both his orchestration skills and his music technology expertise.

As a musician, Al Kooper became Bob Dylan's sideman and went on to fuse soul and jazz. As a producer, he invented the supergroup, and as an A&R man he brought Southern rock to the world.

I recently tracked a female vocalist with a large dynamic range and horrible mic technique. After trying lots of compression and limiting schemes, I have finally resorted to going through each song and manually editing the volume profile...

The craze for mashing up wildly different records to create illicit bootleg mixes has moved into the mainstream, and underground producers such as Richard X and Mark Vidler now find their services in hot demand from artists and record labels.

Since emerging from the Liverpool music scene at the turn of the '80s, Ian Broudie has juggled parallel careers as an artist and a producer. He has a new solo disc in the shops, and with albums by the Coral and the Zutons riding high in the charts, his production services are in greater demand than ever.

My singing voice is a bit nasal, and I'd like to know if there is a 'classic' frequency or frequency range to apply some parametric EQ cut to?

Darren Tate is one of Britain's leading house and trance producers with nine top-40 hits under aliases including Jurgen Vries, Angelic and Citizen Caned, his latest success being the DT8 Project's summer anthem 'The Sun Is Shining (Down On Me)'. He reveals the personal production tricks which make his records stand out.

Fed up with being treated badly by spoilt divas, engineer Mark Nevers abandoned the country music establishment to start his own studio, and has made a name for himself on the 'other side' of Nashville.

From unlikely beginnings as a naval SONAR operator with no musical training, Bill Szymczyk became a legendary producer and engineer whose work with The Eagles would define the hi-fi sound of '70s rock.

Binaural recordings can sound amazing on headphones, but do not work very well on conventional stereo speakers. Can they be adapted more successfully for surround systems?

I am recording using a spaced-pair miking setup and I want to apply light compression to the signal. Where in the signal chain should I insert the compressor (pre- or post-fade), and will I have to buy a dedicated stereo compressor to do the job properly?

Nowadays, plenty of hit albums are recorded in bedroom studios — but Liam Howlett of the Prodigy has gone one better, by recording his latest in bed.

The Beach Boys' SMiLE album was to have been the pinnacle of Brian Wilson's groundbreaking recording and production achievements — but it was never completed. This year, in an extraordinary tale of emotional drama, tape-vault archaeology and recording technology, Brian finished it, debuted it live, and then re-recorded it in the studio. SOS brings you the full story...

Recent years have seen a revival in back-to-basics recording techniques, but few engineers or producers have taken things as far as Jim Sutherland did with Edinburgh folk-pop band Aberfeldy...

As a member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a composer for film and TV and a performer in his own right, Jan Hammer helped to define the role of the synthesizer player in rock and jazz.

I've been comparing two records, and both sound massive in the studio compared with our mixes but when you press the mono button, on one it disappears, and when you press it on the other it doesn't change one bit! How do they do it?

When using a compressor and an EQ as insert effects on a snare drum, is it better to use compression followed by EQ or EQ first then compression?

I am told that it is possible to remove the vocals from a CD track by reversing the phase of one of the stereo channels. Is this correct and, if so, how does it work? Also, is the reverse possible — can you remove the rest of the track to just leave the vocals?SOS Forum Post

Frank Zappa produced a vast amount of recorded material during his career, often pushing both his musicians and the technology of the day to extremes. The task of editing, mixing and archiving these recordings is being undertaken by his son Dweezil, with the help of some cutting-edge computing hardware.