Musician’s insurance Q&A
Music is your passion, and your gear is among your most prized possessions. That’s why buying musician’s insurance may be well worth the investment. Read the post.
Studio Gear
Posts from the Disc Makers Blog that feature gear reviews and practical how-to advice in using gear in your home studio.
Make the most of your studio time (and space)
Excerpted from the 3rd edition of Disc Makers’ revised and expanded Home Studio Handbook, these basic recording tips will help you make the most of your studio time. Read the post.
Working with plug-ins: A beginner’s guide
If you’re new to home recording, or looking to expand your repertoire, using plug-ins might feel intimidating and complicated. It’s really not that hard to start using plug-ins and expand your sonic palette. Read the post.
Meet the Audio plug-in: Your start-up kit
An audio plug-in is specialized software for better music-making with your DAW, and plug-ins serve a variety of purposes to flavor, enhance, and add to the breadth of your home studio recordings. Read the post.
The essential studio gear for your home studio
If you’ve outfitted space in your home for the purpose of recording music, step two is amassing the gear for the task at hand. Here’s a checklist for things you might already have, need immediately, and can put off until later. Read the post.
The Amplifier ADSR Envelope: How to manipulate analog synth parameters
ADSR stands for Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release, and each one of these four parameters (or “stages”) of the envelope affects how loud your analog synth sound will play over time. Read More.
Creating and modifying sounds on analog synths
From throbbing bass lines to sinuous hip-hop leads, from effervescent dance atmospherics to grinding industrial riffs, the sounds of analog synths play a huge role across various musical genres. Read More.
The birth of the humbucking pickup
Excerpted from Chapter 3, “From the Flying V to the Jazzmaster” from the new book, Electric Guitars: Design and Invention (Backbeat Books), this post gives a brief history of the invention of the humbucking pickup. Read More.
Travel-friendly portable audio interfaces
These four portable audio interfaces will help you get audio in and out of your laptop quickly and easily and sound great doing it. Read More.
Recording vocals in a home studio
These simple tips will help you get the best results when you’re recording vocals in your home studio. Read More.
Six examples of the Talk Box done right
If you’re looking for inspiration on how to integrate this inventive effects pedal into your own work, check out the following performances of the Talk Box done right. Read More.
Meet the Talk Box: Shape sounds and open new creative doors
The Talk Box lets you use your mouth to shape sounds, in real time, in crazy and creative ways. Here are tips on how to use the effect to amplify your own creative efforts. Read More.
Choosing a signature vocal mic for your studio
We take a look at the University of the Pacific’s efforts to find a signature vocal mic for the campus recording studio. What they learned might help you choose your next great studio mic. Read More.
Why you can’t tune a guitar – and how to fix it
Tuning a guitar should be easy, but it’s not. In fact, the more you explore guitar tuning, the more you realize there is no one way to tune a guitar. Read the post.
Consider this when mixing with headphones
There are baseline truths you can fall back on to improve your mixes, whatever your sound source – whether mixing with headphones or studio monitors. Read More.