protools

Mellencamp mourns the death of the record biz

Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).

With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how … Read more

Metallica's Kirk Hammett speaks about Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero: Metallica, which lets gamers play along with the band and its influences, comes out in the U.S. on March 29. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett spoke to me this afternoon at the South by Southwest music festival about the game and other issues related to music and technology.

Q: With the Guitar Hero game, do you think you'll be reaching longtime fans, or is this mainly a way to reach younger fans who might know a song or two but don't really know Metallica? Hammett: We'll be reaching fans across the board, longtime fans, … Read more

Free trial version of Sonar 8

A digital-audio workstation is probably the most important purchase an audio engineer has to make--it's the command and control center for your entire computer-based recording rig, and you'll be spending most of your time in it.

Unfortunately, pro-level DAWs are complicated pieces of software, and everybody's got their own opinion about what's best--ProTools is widely considered the industry standard, but I know several experienced engineers who don't like it at all.

Because of its complexity and importance, choosing a DAW is not the kind of decision you can make from reading reviews alone, or … Read more

The audio engineer's most important tool? Restraint

Last night, my audio production class took a field trip to local studio Glenn Sound for a brief introduction to miking technique: which microhpones to use for a particular sound, where and how to place them, and so on. It wasn't completely foreign to me--I've recorded in probably a dozen studios, but always on the clock and paying by the hour, and audio engineers tend to shrug off poorly-phrased technical questions in favor of showing you the end result.

One of the demonstrations showed us how different distances between microphone and source can give you different sounds. Most … Read more