Getting Started guides & articles

The simple act of clearing certain technical and practical tasks in the earliest stages of the production of a song can have miraculous effects, not only in terms of efficiency, but also from a creat…

Today’s DAW software — not to mention a slew of third party plug-ins — offers you powerful processing options for manipulating the time and pitch of your audio. But did you know that you can fix a lo…

Today we'll deal with another element that is essential to sound synthesis: Filters. They are widely used in subtractive synthesis, which is the most widespread form of synthesis, making filters pret…

We'll devote this second installment of our mixing article series to a bit of advice that is worth its weight in gold: Whenever possible, let someone else mix your songs and/or recordings

Today we'll begin our exploration of the different elements that constitute a synthesizer. "It's about time!," I hear some of you say... And it's true, but it's important to have a theoretical backgr…

In the previous article, we explored sounds based on waveforms with more or less harmonics, but they all had one thing in common: They were periodic. As we saw, if you refer to periodic cycle, you re…

In the previous articles of this series, we explored sound at its core and discovered waves and what defines them. Today we'll look into the main waveforms that are usually adopted as the basic ingre…

Some people may just want to learn the basic guitar chords to impress girls (or boys) on the beach or to modestly accompany themselves when singing. Whatever your reasons, here are some basic chords …

Commonly used by electric guitar players, especially to liven things up, feedback is the worst enemy of acoustic musicians. In this series of articles we'll look into the solutions to play a relaxed …

In part 1, we discussed what licensing is, and described how music libraries work. In this second and final part, we’ll look at the different ways you can make money from a licensed piece of music, t…

As we saw in the previous article of this series, if a waveform is recurrent, it is called a periodic wave. From a theoretical point of view, for example, musical notes are all based on a periodic wa…

One of the few avenues left where you can still make money from selling your music is through licensing. Although the market has become saturated over the last several years, there are still opportun…

Between the proliferation of home studios, digital music technology, the Internet, and the development of music genres that are programmed rather than played, the amount of session work available, as…

In the previous article we saw that sound is made of waves. Like many things in life, they can be simple or complex. You can't find an absolutely "pure" sound in nature. The closest to that is the s…

With the right apps and accessories, an iPhone, an iPod touch and especially an iPad can be a real boon to your live performance setup. Your iDevice can function as a sound source, effects processo…

If you're a recording musician who doesn't play bass, creating realistic MIDI bass guitar parts can be a challenge. The tips and techniques offered in this article will help you put together authenti…

In part 1 we looked at different ways to setup your gear for an A/B comparison. This time, we’ll offer some suggestions for specific aspects to focus on during your referencing session.

Fans of alternate tunings (especially metalheads) will often find themselves with overcooked noodles instead of strings, compromising their sound. Here are a couple of recipes to make sure your strin…

Referencing your mix against an existing recording via the process known as “A/B-ing,” is a great way to check the quality of your work and help you overcome inaccurate studio acoustics. Here in part…

A well thought out setlist is critical to the success of your gig. Whether for a band or a solo singer, the order in which you play your songs could mean the difference between a good show and a grea…

This penultimate article in our series dedicated to mastering at home is surely the one you've all been waiting for. Indeed, today we will talk about a couple of tricks to get a really HUGE sound. Bu…

Here in the final part of this 3-part article, I’ll finish scoring the hypothetical commercial, working with variables like tempo, start time, and meter, while never losing sight of the original assi…

In this antepenultimate installment, we'll discuss several points that you need to bear in mind to get an optimal final result, depending on how your music will be distributed.

To finish with the helping tools for mastering, in this installment we'll talk about the oscilloscope — very often underestimated by home studio owners — and a utilitarian plug-in, which, even if not…

Today we'll talk about a delicate — but very useful — subject, namely the firewalls that can help you avoid being yet another victim of the loudness war.