If you get an audio file from a friend or client that wasn’t recorded to a click track, you can proceed as usual after doing a few easy adjustments. Beatmap your tempo to the audio file (or midi) and you’re able to program beats along with that file now – you’re keeping the original feel of the audio, not conforming it to a rigid tempo.

You can also use tempo synced effects, quantize midi and loop your backing tracks once you have proper tempos set.

If you’re producing a podcast these days, your recording may have the words you’d like to eliminate to keep your show rated ‘G’. Keeping profanities out of your show has many benefits. Kids can listen in front of their parents, parents can listen in front of their kids and your show will get better listing position on most podcast listing services. Bleep audio using logic pro – it’s super easy and if you hook up the commands shown to key commands, you’ll be tearing through this editing business.

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!

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!

kr-reverbfs-vocal

KResearch Delay – Wow!  Somewhat innovative interface, interesting sounds, dual filters.  Love this thing so far, will be returning to this one for sure.

kr-delayfs-vocal

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.

mverb

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:

fire

Fire drums:

fire-drums

DestroyFx Freeverb

http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com/audiounits.html#freeverb

Freeverb – Nice little reverb unit.  Simple, but quality.  Freeze button for freezing the effect.

dreampoint-freeverb-vocals

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

bram-supatrigga-drums

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:

bram-cyanide-vocals

Cyanide drums:

bram-cyanide-drums

Crazy Ivan – Press the randomize button, and make sure your speakers are turned down.

bram-crazyivan-drums

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.

Compander-Drums

Decimator – a bit reducer plugin, adding digital distortion for those special moments.

Soundhack-Decimate-Drums

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.

Soundhack-chebyshev-Drums

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.

Soundhack-pitchdelay-Drums

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.

tal-tube-vocal

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.

tal-reverb-vocal

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.

Molot-Drums

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.

gsi-watkat-vocal

runtime: 62 min.

I take a song from beginning to end, aside from the final mix.  With a microphone, a guitar and a MIDI keyboard, we create a song using GarageBand.

You’ll learn some of the basics in GarageBand and we’ll discover some little quirks along the way.

Learn how to record a song in GarageBand with the first in the ‘Project’ series for GarageBand – Project: Songwriter.

(part 1) | (part 2) | (part 3)

More fun with MainStage.  It’s all the sounds of logic with some awesome looping capabilities, effects and toe super easy mapping.

Learn how-to:

Map a keyboard with floating splits – bam.

Add some drum pads for more triggering – zam.

Do you have an XY controller?  You can map your XY all over the place in MainStage!

Audio instruments, UltraBeat sequences controlled via pads, sustain pedal, UltraBeat parameter automation, set organization and mastery master class.

You will be subjected to a short musical ‘performance’ to whet your whistle for your new performance contraption.

Ever wondered what an audio interface is?  If you watch this video, you’ll have a good idea.  I’m no pro on camera, so hopefully it’s not too bad.   I don’t think I’ve ever said “anything to sneeze at”, in my life – so yeah, brings out some silly stuff.

Check out the other video as well – I use my cutting edge illustration and special efx skills to illustrate how different microphones work.

It’s from the first of several articles I have planned – the AudioPropellor Guide to Audio Gear For Your Computer.  When I say article, I mean more an an exposé – lots of information – 20 pages in PDF, 2 videos and a checklist/spreadsheet for your organization.  It’s aimed at the beginner, noob or wannabe when it comes to computer audio.  If you’ve been at this for a while, this will be old hat.

This could also be called: Things to know before you spend a gob of money on your new studio.

It’s a summary of all my knowledge, in written form, for you dear beginners. Eyes bright and hearts full of musical adventure – you’re in for a treat.  Not the guide, but your new music making experiences.  OK, now it just sounded like I said this guide is crap.  I’ll stop now.

You should read this to get yourself oriented in the sea of terminology and hype. Music isn’t that complicated, and computers can get in the way. Don’t lose sight of your goals and let the tools help you – they are amazing, but they are only tools.

Here is that one paragraph summary I mentioned:

First, figure out what you want to do on your computer with audio.  You may already know this.  You probably need an audio interface, but you can get by without one for a while.  If you are serious, get an interface with plenty of inputs so you can record all your friends or customers.  Make sure to consider a MIDI keyboard if you don’t want to spend hours clicking notes in with a mouse.  Get some software – make sure it works with your operating system.  Get some speakers – also called monitors.  Find some free or expensive plug-ins for effects.  Get a mic or two or eight, depending on your needs.

Now you have a studio.  How to use it is another story, or video, which we’ll be exploring together if you’re up for it.

Again you can read the guide at…

AudioPropellor Guide to Audio Gear For Your Computer

Polar patterns shows how much a microphone picks up from different angles – and I’ve tried to go about showing it in an interesting and easily understandable way in this video.

In this video from the AudioPropellor Guide to Audio Gear For Your Computer I show how the major microphone pickup patterns look and respond.

Knowing this stuff with let you pick the right microphone for the job at hand.

Here is the performance video I mentioned in the clip, concerning the bi-directional Fat Head Cascade Mic.

http://www.cascademicrophones.com/cascade_FAT%20HEAD.html

Mics Shown:

• Electro-Voice 635A
• Rode NT5
• Electro-Voice RE 16
• Cascade Fathead II

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.