I'm back!

I've been gone for a week, my trusty old Macbook's broken. It took a while, but it seems I finally have my old laptop working, so I can blog again. To make up for my absence, I found this awesome link: AudioFree v3. This is a blog that basically links you to tons of free samples and other downloads. It's good to be back, hope you missed me, I missed you!

Links!

Every now and then I will round up some links to tutorials, reviews, discussions and just generally any kind of article I suspect may be of some use to all y'all. Welcome to our first instalment!

Choosing Your Audio Software

I've been getting a lot of questions about what software I recommend for audio manipulation, so I've decided to write up a guide to choosing your software, or DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) as it is called.

Note

I haven't updated in a few days, because these weekends are for partying and that's just what I did. Expect a new post later today!

Computer Music's Pro Remixing Tips Discussion Part 2

Tips 10-18, in this second and final part of Computer Music's remixing tips.

Computer Music's Pro Remixing Tips Discussion Part 1

Computer Music, the UK-based magazine about computer music, has released a comprehensive article on how remixes are done. I don't receive CM at my current address so I haven't been able to read the full article yet, but luckily MusicRadar has digested the essentials for us.

Where to find your free music software

Short on money? Luckily, there are many excellent free plug-ins available, either made by small, amateur developers, or bigger ones that think it's good advertisement to release some stuff for free. All in all, you can now have a huge top-quality plug-in collection for free, without any of the guilt associated with piracy.

Native Instruments Komplete 7

What was the last time €500 was worth €3000? Native Instruments Komplete offers you 24 essential production tools for the price of a microphone.

LennarDigital Sylenth1

If you ask most pro's about LennarDigital's Sylenth1 they'll tell you that it has less features than almost any other soft synth available. They'll tell you that it's terribly difficult to program. They'll tell you that it has no very few distinguishing qualities.
Sylenth1 has little that other synths don't. You could say it's only merit is the ease with which you can make oscillators sing in unison. And you'd be dead wrong.

2C-Audio Aether

Finding a good reverb plugin can be very tough. They range in prices from free to a £2500, and in quality from horrifying to great. Aether is at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of price, costing a good £350. You might think this is still a lot for an unknown developer with yet another reverb plugin, but once you listen to it you'll realise you're getting awesome value for your money.

Essential Plug-In Rundown

I will spend the next couple of days covering some plug-ins that I think are essential for any electronic music producer. By covering, I don't mean reviewing, I mean describing what they do, telling you why I consider them essential and why you're gonna want to take a look at them.

Thoughts on the Cockos Reaper demo

If you follow the world of computer music and audio, it's hard not to have noticed the stir Cockos Reaper has been causing. Where software DAW's (Digital Audio Workstation, your piece of music creation software of choice) are almost exclusively bulky, bloated applications, that have one useful feature for every 100 that you never use (but you do see reflected in the price!), there now is Cockos Reaper. The creators and fans of Cockos seem to have conspired to make sure everybody hears about how their new DAW can do anything the big ones can, while being smaller, more stable and, best of all, cheaper.

Ableton Live Tutorial: Setting up a Clicktrack

This tutorial will show you how you can set up multiple audio channels so that one will play a click-track.

More Sampling in Ableton

If you want some inspiration regarding sampling, check out these two amazing videos that show recreations of two classic Prodigy songs in Ableton Live:

Smack My Bitch Up (Youtube)

Voodoo People (Youtube)

Ableton Live Tutorial: Sampling a Drum Beat

This will be my first tutorial on using Ableton Live. What I am going to teach is how to sample the world famous drum break from the song Amen Brother by The Winstons. It will cover the basics of warping and sampling.

Gear

This is a list of the gear that I am currently using for my home productions. Text will become links if I decide to write an extensive review for that piece of gear.

Introduction

Hello Everyone,


My name is Derek, and I am an amateur audio producer from the UK, currently living and working in the Netherlands. I made this blog in order to share some of the things that I do, post some tutorials and other articles, and hopefully learn some things myself from your guys' input. My plan for now is to post a couple of reviews on the products that I am currently using, post some links to resources that I found helpful, and we'll see how it goes from there.

Cheers,

Derek