Award Sounds

So you've got Kontakt to work with Logic and now one of the instruments is a bit too loud in one section so you want to automate.

Great, reduce the volume (using track automation in arranger) for that instrument. Only thing is, one of two things happens:

1. All of Kontakt's instruments change volume
2. None of Kontakt's instruments change volume

There is a way to control each instrument separately. It takes a bit of setup, but once it's done, it will soon become second nature.

Templates

also known as "Is it wrong to apply effects to an accurate recording of a guitar amp?"

I like it when something just works, but I always feel a bit ambivalent when I can't really notice it working.

The Kit

In this case, I've just been using the Radial Engineering Reamping Kit. It consists of two main components (the J48 active phantom DI and the X-Amp amp driver) plus a power supply for the X-amp and a plastic box to hold it all in.

Plugging In for Re-Amping

Compressors are regularly used to tame errant dynamics or to increase the perceived volume of a track. As well as squashing the audio, the compressor can be used to bring out some elements more than others.

Letting the attack through

I've talked about tremolo as a musical feature before, this time I want to go into more detail.

First things first, let's sort out the guitarists: I don't mean using the tremolo arm/whammy bar or whatever you want to call it ("handle" as my girlfriend called it - and no she won't be picking up my guitars for a while). The whammy bar creates a vibrato feature, not a tremolo. Vibrato alters pitch.

Amplitude

A short series of articles on collaborating with other people to make your music better, make it heard or to help them move their music forwards.

1. Recording

1a Engineer

As well as composing and recording, I play guitar in a band, playing a mixture of covers and our own originals. We don't stick too closely to the originals when we cover them, realising that we only have four members (guitar, bass, drums and vocals) so many songs have to be stripped down to work.

Going from a song that has many parts to a cover version with only four instruments can leave you feeling a bit naked when playing live. It doesn't help that as guitarist, I often have to play several parts at the same time.

I wrote the bulk of this text a couple of months ago after a day of not producing as much as I'd liked to. There are no real suggestions of how to improve or learn, but I thought I'd describe my thought processes so others may learn from my experiences.

Yesterday

I've taken a detour from writing about timing for a few articles and there are a couple of points still to say about that (but for another article). I'm also planning some articles on creative uses of processors and effectsbut that's a short while away, while I prepare the audio samples so I can explain it better.

Following on from the previous article on emulating bass, this article is about emulating drums and mainly about emulating drummers.

I'm of two minds when I emulate drums. I'm either: