http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/audiopropellor-guide-to-audio/id497136216?mt=11
You can download the guide in iBook format to your iOS devices. The book gets you oriented in the world of software, plugins, microphones and monitors.
You can now watch all AudioPropellor videos on your iOS device! Yes, that is all.
Chances are, you know someone who is crazy about karaoke. Maybe they have a little karaoke setup. One speaker, a plug-in microphone and a little TV. Or you might know the more enthusiastic enthusiast, the guy with a full blown setup and a cadre of wireless microphone wielding cohorts. You can record them quite easily.
Normally the karaoke obsessed will approach you with their hardware which will have some cruddy output options – normally RCA. This will be consumer level line level, which should interface with your sound card with a pair of RCA to 1/4″ TS barrel adapters. Make sure you have a good length of cable for this purpose, positioning the karaoke player will be important. The singers will be controlling the playback of the songs and will be reading lyrics off the screen of this device.
All you do is record the playback from this device in stereo and give the singers some microphones that you’ve plugged into your audio interface. Make sure you’re getting a stereo signal from whatever adapters you are using.
Then you mix a monitor feed for them, consisting of the background tracks and their microphone signal. Having more than one singer makes this harder, but if your mixing software is up to snuff and you have the headphone amps or outputs it can be handled easily.
Now you’ve recorded the song and need to do some overdubs to touch up a mistake or two. During the overdubs, the words won’t be flying across the screen, so the singers will need to record in separate chunks they can remember, or they will need to write the lyrics down.
Mixing is pretty simple. Adjust the backing track up to a good level. Then mix the vocal to suit the singer’s tastes.
If you’re putting a collection of songs together then you’ll want to do a little ‘mastering’. This will involve getting the songs comparatively equal in volume and tone. Since these songs were all produced by different people, they will be drastically different – there is no way you will be able to match them perfectly, but I like to give it a short try. EQ, multiband compression and a limiter will do the trick. I normally need a little bass boost if anything. Out of 28 tracks I did this weekend, only one needed a bass reduction. We tore through these tracks in 13 hours from setup to burned disks.
Good luck recording karaoke!
On the hunt for some great free audio plugins for your Mac? If your DAW can use the AudioUnit format, also known as AU, you can take advantage of these tools. Some are totally free, some require an email address. Only a couple of them run installers – most just need to be unzipped to your Macintosh HD/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components to work. Some audio samples follow – they generally start out with an element dry and then introduce the effect half way through – usually on drums or vocal. While trying these plugins in Logic Pro 9, I didn’t experience a single crash – something which made me stay away from free plugins in the past. It can take a bit of time to wade through the mess of plugins out there, so hopefully this can either save you some time or get you on the trail for finding your own. Many of these were located on the KVR Audio site, using the search function. I tried to stay away from anything that required registration or lengthy installers or installation of demos, but a few of them do require an email to get access.
super destroyfx – bipolar plugin pack
http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com/audiounits.html
Crazy mangling and sound design plugins
KResearch Plug-ins
http://www.kresearch.com/download_freeseries.html
KResearch Reverb – Another quite useful and tweakable reverb. Looks great, sounds great – win!
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KResearch Delay – Wow! Somewhat innovative interface, interesting sounds, dual filters. Love this thing so far, will be returning to this one for sure.
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mVerb
http://martineastwood.com/wordpress/?p=164
This fellow, Martin Eastwood (cool name!) has released the reverb code behind this effect.
Digital reverb has always been something of a dark art as there is very little information publicly available and most of the big companies releasing reverbs are very vague about the techniques they use. The only real example is Freeverb so I though I would share some code for a reverb that sounds pretty nice and is very low on CPU usage. It is based on the figure-of-eight reverb structure suggested by Dattarro, which uses a bank of allpass filters to smear the phase followed by a loop of multi tap delay lines that feedback into themselves to create echoes. I have also added another delay and a mutitap delay to act as predelay and early reflections. The early reflections still need a bit of tweaking but they do the job for the moment.
Not something you think about – that not only the code, but the actual concepts to create much of what makes up audio effects are guarded secrets, unpublished and passed around in private.
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C3 Multi Band Compressor
http://www.apulsoft.ch/freeports/
Many more
MDSP Plugins
http://mdsp.smartelectronix.com/download/
AnalogDelay
Mdsp Compressor
Fire Multitap
http://mdsp.smartelectronix.com/product/fire/
This ones a tripper. Once you figure out what all the controls do, this thing can create some texture. Massive multitapping, almost sounds like granular synthesis.
Fire vocals:
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Fire drums:
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DestroyFx Freeverb
http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com/audiounits.html#freeverb
Freeverb – Nice little reverb unit. Simple, but quality. Freeze button for freezing the effect.
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Bram
Bram makes quite a few lovely plugins. Here are a few of my favorites.
SupaPhaser – Lovely phaser plugin with a very pretty interface.
http://bram.smartelectronix.com/plugins.php?id=1
SupaTrigga – Auto slicer, re-arranger and reverser. I’ve used this thing for years. It will automatically rearrange anything running through it – autoglitchyness is the name of the game. Unpredictable.
http://bram.smartelectronix.com/plugins.php?id=6
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Cyanide – A waveshaper plugin, which is a type of distortion. I was quite surprised by this plugin I’ve had sitting on my hard drive for quite some time. It made some really tasty and trashy sounds.
Cyanide vocals:
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Cyanide drums:
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Crazy Ivan – Press the randomize button, and make sure your speakers are turned down.
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Sonalksis freeG channel strip
http://www.sonalksis.com/software.htm
freeG channel strip – handy in GarageBand, where there is no phase invert button. When you’ve recorded a kick and a snare, you can flip the phase on the kick and it sometimes make a big difference in the low end. Try it!
Soundhack Plugins
http://www.soundhack.com/freeware.php
Compander compressor/expander, distortion and more.
Compander – adds a somewhat subtle compressing sound, it was a little hard to get big nasty drum sounds out of this one.
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Decimator – a bit reducer plugin, adding digital distortion for those special moments.
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Chebyshev – The knobs are a bit cryptic, but I like this plug quite a bit – a nice distortion. Keep your tweaking to just one or two or the sound will break up and then go silent.
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PitchDelay – Another interesting plugin from the soundhacks – produces some really strange sounds. Don’t know what I would use them for, but it was fun to play with.
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TAL Plugins
http://kunz.corrupt.ch/?Products:VST_TAL-Tube
TAL Tube – Who can’t use another distortion? This one looks great and sounds pretty swell as well.
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http://kunz.corrupt.ch/?Products:VST_TAL-Reverb
TAL Reverb
What a great plugin – sounds great and easy to use! The plate reverb sound is pretty trendy now.
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Molot Compressor
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21503686/MolotAU.mpkg.zip
from : http://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-product-alert/595727-molot-au-compressor-freeware.html
- sigma and alpha attack modes
- Neve 33609 like sound in sigma mode
- Fairchild 670 like sound in alpha mode
- very characterful sound
- dual mono, linked stereo, M, S and M/S modes
- up to 8x oversampling
- mid-scoop EQ for simple snare and guitars balance fix
- limiter for peaks suppressing
- almost zero latency (2 samples)
Molot AU Compressor – Placed on drums, this unit can add a bit of room to the sound, but it doesn’t have a GUI on OSX at the moment.
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Gsi Watkat
http://www.genuinesoundware.com/?a=showproduct&b=36
WatKat is a digital “clone” of a Wem Watkins “Custom” Copicat. It sounds very lo-fi, noisy, irregular. When you turn it off and leave the tape loaded, the tape bends in proximity of the capstan, and this turns into a periodic pitch fall during echo playback; plus, it gets hot and the background hum gets worse in time… you should turn it off every now and then; the tape is never completely erased, and the capstan motor flutters… and it gets worse if you touch it while it’s spinning; heads tend to get dirty very soon, infact you should clean them often. This is true for the actual hardware unit, and for the digital simulation as well!
A wacked out tape delay unit. Click around to find what does what – there’s not much to it.
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It’s on! The first eBook is now available for free! Read about it here: http://www.audiopropellor.com/audiopropellor-guide-to-audio-gear/
Also comes with two swank videos explaining audio interfaces and microphone polar patterns in a rad way.
There is also a checklist on what to not forget when you are dropping cash on some gear.
I’ve got a few things cooking in the AudioPropellor studios.
The majority of an eBook titled: An AudioPropellor guide to setting up your computer for audio production.
It’s a beginner level guide covering audio interfaces, software, computers, microphones, plugins – a nice overview to get someone started out on the right foot with a nice helping of knowledge in one place. It will also have a few videos to go along with it. Supplementary content for supping at your leisure. Any beginners out there? Anyone confused as hell trying to find an audio interface? Hopefully this will help you. Leave me a comment and I’ll zip a copy out to you when it’s edited next week. Got an editor to tidy things up a bit – and I’m very excited about that!
Soon after that, I’ll be releasing a video tutorial series on a certain ubiquitous audio software, before moving on to the big boys – Logic, more MainStage and Ableton.
I’ve still got a long list of freebies to produce for members and the general unregistered public! So stay tuned if GarageBand isn’t your thing.
Let me know what you’d like to see – I’m all ears.
I’ll leave you with most ridiculous screen captures for the first video shoot.
So some big changes here – you can now become a member of the site. Totally free. You have the full content of AudioPropellor at your fingertips and eyeballs – video, samples and other little tasty bits. Registering is easy and there’s no email confirmation for the time being. We’ll zip a email list confirmation out to you – that will get you updates once a month. You can also decline that and you will still be a member.
So onwards and upwards, brave AudioPropellors, we’ll be venturing into unknown territory. Pack a lunch.
This wasn’t obvious to me, so I thought I’d post a tip. When you are browsing through your songs, just tap the name of the song and you can change the name. Presto.
If you’re enjoying GarageBand on the iPad, you might like to check out these links:
There are other instructions on the web on how to install samples in GarageBand – what a mess. I have found a way to add instruments to GarageBand – but these instructions are purely informational – I wouldn’t advise you to mess around in these directories if you don’t know what you are doing. Also, they only work with our drum kits.
First you would need to have downloaded and unzipped the drumsets.
http://www.audiopropellor.com/room-boom-free-drum-kit/
http://www.audiopropellor.com/free-drum-samples-for-logic-garageband-and-ableton/
Then you need to get these .exs and .cst files.
You will need to put those files in two directories, where <Your Name> is your user account and <New Folder> is a new folder you create – not sure if it matters, but I’d probably use the same name for both folders, perhaps CustomSamples. I used AudioPropellor to jazz things up a bit.
Then you need to put the .exs files in:
/User/<Your Name>/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Instrument Library/Sampler/Sampler Instruments/<New Folder>
Put the .cst files in:
/User/<yourname>/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Track Settings/Software/<New Folder>
Voici:
Start up garageband and you should be able to create a sampler and then navigate to a <New Folder> folder in the right pane – the instruments will be in there. The only thing I’m not sure about is if GarageBand will find the audio files. If it’s not finding them wherever you have them (and if you haven’t put them in any other directories where you store samples), you could move them to the “Sampler/Sampler Files” directory.
So there you are – let me know how this went for you in the comments.
Unzip the archive into ~/Library/Logic/Sampler Instruments and it should show up. (~ means your user directory, with the house icon)
Refresh the instrument list in the dropdown of EXS24 if logic is open and you should see the instrument. Our presets normally take advantage of multiple outputs, with the snare, kick and hihats going to discrete outputs for your processing needs.
Make sure to select the multi-output EXS24 to take advantage of this feature. Press the little plus (+) button at the bottom of your EXS24 channel strip to add the additional outputs to your mixer. Some sounds will continue to come out of the main EXS24, so you may want to route it and all the additional outputs to a bus for compression…or not, your call.