Audio & music gear guides & articles

Guitar amps are, no matter how you cut it, black boxes. You may think you have control over them, but when it gets down to it, you can’t really see inside the black box, and even if you could, there …

As the sun sets down on Summer NAMM 2012 in Nashville we decided to take a closer look at a short list of products that made some noise.

So the bad news is, it’s virtually impossible to tell what the distortion pedal sounds like without auditioning it personally.

The two most important effects in a guitarist’s signal chain are distortion and delay. And if you derive your tone strictly from the amp—whether it’s squeaky clean or buzzsaw nasty—then the digital d…

10. Musicians feel most comfortable and play best when they hear what they need to hear on the stage. Of course, the experienced monitor guys and recording guys already know this. But it’s something…

It occurred to me that for all the tweaking guitarists do with their tone — rolling tone controls up and down on both their guitars and amps — very few ever touch the pickups. Most guitarists I know …

Octave dividers aren’t just for guitar players: They also rock for bass, whether you’re getting mega-low sounds from the lower strings, or playing high up on the neck for very cool 8-string bass effe…

By now, everyone was going to be loading soft synths into their laptops, and taking them to the gig instead of keyboards. Oh, and we were also supposed to travel around with personal jet packs and of…

What makes a live recording sound live? The audience, of course. A live recording is all about the energy of the event, and that energy comes from the crowd, so some real thought has to be given as …

The attention to detail that takes place in preparing a rock show can be mind boggling. For example, I listed out the factors we account for in setting up the lead vocal mic for the Red Hot Chili Pe…

The 2012 edition of Musikmesse at Frankfurt closed its doors on Saturday. The Audiofanzine team, has rounded up for you the top 10 products that made their mark at the show, in no particular order.

About a year ago, we had you listen to 27 acoustic guitars and sent you on a trip through a 6-string jungle so you can pick your favorite guitar. AudioFanzine now repeats this experience, but this ti…

NAMM 2012 is over, and now it is time to make sense of what over 95,000 attendees experienced: the all-you-can-eat buffet of musical gear. Hence, without further ado, and in no particular order, her…

After having shared with us how he records drums, vocals, guitars and organ, now George Massenburg tells us how he deals with wind instruments.

Enjoy creating electronic music? For Octatrack users here is video trip into the guts of the machine- sampling tips and tricks to produce the grooves that you want.

Although some would ridicule that idea—wire is wire, right?—different cords can affect your sound, and in some cases, the difference can be drastic.

In the studio and on stage, DI boxes are indispensable to match impedances, make re-amping or avoid noises. However, it's not easy to choose a DI box from the multiple options available. So, when Fre…

A lot of guitar multieffects have a footpedal that can be assigned to various parameters. Volume and wa are no-brainer pedal assignments, but there are a whole lot of other parameters that are well-s…

Grand, colossal, gargantuan… Mammoth, immense, monumental… Promethean, towering, or just plain walloping huge - get out the thesaurus for more adjectives to adequately describe the size and scope of …

Live by these 7 rules if you want your budget to survive technological changes.

Ever play the perfect solo or riff except that one note was just a little bit early, or a little bit late? If you never have, then stop reading this article immediately, move to Los Angeles, New York…

There's nothing like the sound of real reverb, such as what you hear in a cathedral or symphonic hall. That's because reverb is made up of a virtually infinite number of waves bouncing around within …

Computers can be pretty smart, but when it comes to sound, they need a translator that can convert sound waves into the digital language of ones and zeroes. Audio interfaces provide this translation.

It wasn’t the promise of a performance by Lady Gaga that drew me in to watch the Grammys this year, but rather, some added motivation in having the opportunity to check out the live and broadcast sou…

Noise gates aren't as relevant as they were back in the analog days, when hiss was an uninvited intruder on anything you recorded. But noise gates can do some really cool special effects that have no…