Audiotuts+ in November
While the year is starting to wind down, November has been a busy month for Audiotuts+. The site has had an increase of 26% of visitors this month, there has been fantastic involvement in the Open Mic posts and great feedback given in our workshops, and we have given away some great resources in our competitions. Thanks for your involvement and support.
November’s Most Popular Posts
It’s interesting to see which topics on Audiotuts+ are receiving the most attention. It gives an indication of what our readers are interested in, and which topics are hot at the moment. When choosing the Top 5 we take into consideration the number of page views, number of comments, and number of Twitter clicks.
Top 5 For November
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How to Use Pitch Correction for Vocal Effects
Auto-tuned vocals are a cool effect have become a standard technique in popular music. The sound can be heard all over pop and electronica from the last decade. A variety of artists use it, from T-Pain to Cher, and even the J-Pop band Perfume from West’s Polyrhythm tutorial. Even President Obama has gotten in on it (well, sort of…).
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How to Use Gate Plug-ins Creatively
This tutorial will help you to stop looking at your gate plug-ins as boring noise removal tools and get you using them as creative tools and effects.
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How to Create a Finished CD with Apple’s Waveburner
Although there isn’t as much use for CD’s in the production process as there used to be, many of us still like to have our finished album or mix on a professionally presented disc.
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Equalization Tricks That Everyone Should Know – Audio Plus
In this week’s Audio Plus content, Bobby Owsinski covers some tricks, methods and principles that will help you EQ your tracks like a pro.
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47 Sites Every Recording Musician Should Visit
In a recent “Open Mic” we asked you, “Which music-related sites do you visit regularly?” This article is a summary of the great suggestions given in the comments to that article. You can make the list even longer by commenting on this article.
The Marathon Award for the month goes to Toby Pitman, whose screencasts on How to Create a Song Sheet in Logic’s Score Editor amount to over an hour of instructive video.
3 Most Popular Posts of All Time
Some of our tutorials keep drawing people back for more – month after month. Here are the Top 3:
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How to Master a Track in 15 Minutes or Less
Mastering your tracks can be a bit of a minefield and is often seen as the domain of the professional. However, if your tracks are just for demo purposes, a DJ set or even use on the net, you may want to tackle the job yourself. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to master a track quickly and easily. Mo Volans shows you how…
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How to Process Vocals for an Amazing Professional Sound
Persuading a problematic vocal recording to play nicely with the rest of your mix can seem like a futile task. Well-recorded vocals and poorly-recorded vocals both need to be correctly prepared, and the processes we’re going through today will help you turn your untreated vocal take into a polished and commercial sound.
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How to Autotune Your Vocals Like T-Pain, Cher or Daft Punk
Ever heard a song by T-Pain on the radio and wondered how the robotic vocal effect is achieved? By the end of this tutorial, you will own the autotuning sound that is used on so many pop records right now.
Audio Plus
The number and quality of comments to our Open Mic sessions continues to increase. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, experience and insight. Our writers are already taking notice of your suggestions for tutorial ideas. Thanks!
Our Plus Program offers tutorials that go into even more detail than our freebies, spilling the beans on the techniques used by professionals in the field. We also give subscribers exclusively commissioned sample and loop packs which you can use freely in your commercial compositions.
Subscribing to Audio Plus you’ll also get access to exclusive Plus content from all other participating Tuts+ sites, now including Ae Plus. $19 will unlock the doors to high-end video training, tutorials, source files and sample, brush and vector packs worth hundreds of dollars.
Interested in winning yourself a Plus subscription? Stay tuned for an announcement in the near future.
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Understanding Your Mixer: The Channel Strip – Audio Plus
In this week’s Audio Plus content, Joel Falconer takes us through the workings of the channel strip of your mixer.
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12 Ambient Field Sounds Pack 1 – Audio Plus
This week in Audio Plus we have 12 ambient samples from Audiotuts+ author West Latta. The pack comes to a huge 300 MB of uncompressed audio – some of the samples are over a minute long.
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42 Glitch and FX Samples – Audio Plus
To make up for last month’s lack of sample packs, we bring you a great pack of 42 glitch and FX samples from Audiotuts+ author Toby Pitman.
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Equalization Tricks That Everyone Should Know – Audio Plus
In this week’s Audio Plus content, Bobby Owsinski covers some tricks, methods and principles that will help you EQ your tracks like a pro.
Tutorials and Articles
Sample Packs
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SmashingMusic DrumKit Pack
This is a pack of drum samples that I use during the production. There are 20 kicks, claps, snares and hats samples, and its no more than 1Mb. I compiled this pack when mainly producing rap/hip-hop/r&b beats. These are mainstream drum sounds that you hear in the songs on the radio. High quality, professional sounding sounds.
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12 Ambient Field Sounds Pack 1 – Audio Plus
This week in Audio Plus we have 12 ambient samples from Audiotuts+ author West Latta. The pack comes to a huge 300 MB of uncompressed audio – some of the samples are over a minute long.
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42 Glitch and FX Samples – Audio Plus
To make up for last month’s lack of sample packs, we bring you a great pack of 42 glitch and FX samples from Audiotuts+ author Toby Pitman.
Mixing and Mastering
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Understanding Your Mixer: The Channel Strip – Audio Plus
In this week’s Audio Plus content, Joel Falconer takes us through the workings of the channel strip of your mixer.
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How to Use the Pioneer SVM-1000 Audio-Video Mixer Part 2
In this video tutorial Johnathan Lewis gives us a basic demonstration of audio/video mixing on the Pioneer SVM-1000 mixer.
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3 Differences Between Live and Studio Mixing
Live sound mixing varies greatly from
studio mixing. The fast paced adrenaline rush of the concert venue
versus the calmer and quieter work area of the recording studio.
Studio mixers can take their time while the live sound tech has to
think quickly and react in real time so the difference can be
significant, even though some might say they are doing the exact same
thing. Besides this, there is also a difference in their
workstations. Mixing desks in a live situation can be very different
than the one used in a big recording studio. Let’s go through some of
the main differences between both the mixing desks and their
respective users.
FX and Features
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How to Use Gate Plug-ins Creatively
This tutorial will help you to stop looking at your gate plug-ins as boring noise removal tools and get you using them as creative tools and effects.
-
How to Use Pitch Correction for Vocal Effects
Auto-tuned vocals are a cool effect have become a standard technique in popular music. The sound can be heard all over pop and electronica from the last decade. A variety of artists use it, from T-Pain to Cher, and even the J-Pop band Perfume from West’s Polyrhythm tutorial. Even President Obama has gotten in on it (well, sort of…).
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Using Logic Pro 9’s Varispeed to Tempo-Shift Entire Projects
One of the many excellent new features of Logic Pro 9 is Varispeed. Varispeed gives you the ability to speed up and slow down your projects — not just a single instrument, but the entire project can be instantly tempo-shifted. Let’s look at how it’s done.
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How to Edit All Your Takes At Once in Logic Pro 9
Let’s say you’ve just finished a day of tracking and you have a whole bunch of takes for one vocal part thanks to Logic’s comping feature. But at the last minute it’s decided that two lines should be switched around for creative reasons, or a certain word should be sung closer to the beat. It would be a waste of time and money to go back to the tracking phase, but it’s going to be hard to choose the best comp without being able to preview the changes. How do you edit them all at once so you can judge each take? Logic Pro 9 allows you to do so.
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How to Create a Multi-Instrument in Logic’s Environment
When producing, it is often desirable to stack different instruments to create more unique and textured sounds. The process of editing the MIDI data that controls those instruments can become tiresome and interrupt creative work flow as you are forced to update all corresponding MIDI regions before even the smallest of MIDI edits can be previewed. There are a few ways around this in Logic, one of which provides us with the opportunity to take a look into Logic’s Environment.
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How to Use Selective Track Import in Logic Pro 9
Logic Pro 9 introduced Selective Track Import, a feature that gives you the ability to import entire tracks from your other projects — or just the audio, or just the settings on the track. It may not be the most exciting feature introduction next to the pedal board or new amp designer but it’s sure proven to be more useful. Let’s take a look.
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Getting to Grips with Digital Delay
Sometimes it is good to go back to basics, and I thought it would be helpful if I were to cover the essential building blocks of music production. Digital delay is an effect that is used time and time again in mixes and it can create all sorts of useful results.
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Equalization Tricks That Everyone Should Know – Audio Plus
In this week’s Audio Plus content, Bobby Owsinski covers some tricks, methods and principles that will help you EQ your tracks like a pro.
And More
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Improvization Basics: The Pentatonic Scale
When I was thirteen years old, I decided to teach myself guitar because I loved the way that modern-day guitar heroes (by which I do not mean your chubby ten year old playing with a fake guitar and an Xbox) improvised what seemed like complicated lead pieces on the spot. After hearing the guitar solo Slash played in Sweet Child O’ Mine, I all but forgot to practice chords in search of the ability to play like that.
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How to Create Acid Synth Sequences
There seems to have been somewhat of a resurgence in acid style synth programming of late. So … I thought I would do a tutorial on how to create that classic acid sound with a standard subtractive soft synth, a heavy dose of glide and some distortion.
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15 Videos Showcasing Drum Kit Alternatives
Miking an acoustic drum kit is rarely the best way to capture a drum track in a home studio. It’s expensive and time consuming, and requires a lot of space and microphones. But there is a lot more options than clicking a pattern into a grid on your DAW. This article explores some of the alternatives.
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20 Flash Audio Resources for Musicians
To have your music noticed today, you need an online presence. While you may opt to show off your tracks on Myspace, there are certain advantages to having your own website. Our sister site, ActiveDen, has some fantastic and affordable Flash resources that will make you stand out from the crowd. We feature 20 of their best site templates and audio players.
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How to Create a Song Sheet in Logic’s Score Editor
Logic Pro has some very advanced tools when it comes to scoring. In this tutorial I’m going to show you the basics of getting started with the Score Editor by building a basic song sheet. Don’t worry, you don’t even need to be able to read music!
Open Mic
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Open Mic: Tell Us How Much Time You Spend Producing Music
Making music can be very time consuming. How much time do you spend?
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Open Mic: Tell Us About Your Favorite Microphone
Microphones come in all shapes and sizes, a variety of designs, and come as cheap or expensive as you like? What is your favorite mic?
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Open Mic: Tell Us About the Tutorials You’d Like to See on Audiotuts
Here’s your chance to let us know what you want: What tutorials would you like to see here on Audiotuts?
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Open Mic: Tell Us About Which Operating System You Prefer for Music Production
Open Mic: Tell Us About Which Operating System You Prefer for Music Production
Workshops
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Workshop #10: Guetta Who Mastered by BARKMATTER
BARKMATTER describes the track: “A simple song but something different from the typical dance/trance and pop communities.”
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Workshop #11: Kisapada by Milica Paranosic
Milica describes the track: “Three vocal tracks and some sound FX. A simple track. A Serbian folk tune.”
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Workshop #12: Maybe by David White
David describes the track: “Built as excuse to play my bass, rhythm guitars are logic samples tweaked, cut and pitch shifted, synth solo was a ‘happy accident’… stumbling on how to patch an arpeggiator in the environment window. Solo played with no regard to key – voicing only, arpeggiator took care of timing. Each note hand pitched to create solo in post production. Titled to evoke ‘Yes’. I know it’s produced ‘loud’, but i was excited…”
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Workshop #13: Deranged by Justin Waters
Justin describes the track: “This is a bangin’ tech-trance track with a lot of energy.”
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I agree that november has been a great month!
However i would love to see more articles on other DAW’s than Logic. Not that Logic isnt good, cause i think its the best! Its just that i dont have a Mac, and dont have the money for one, so im using Ableton Live.
That being said; great articles, great month and of course awesome site! KEEP IT UP!
Also agree that some of us are not Mac users, but great tuts, keep up!
+2 on Ableton Live tuts
Could I vote for more articles on creating music on FL Studio?
Looking back at your output in this way … I’m really grateful for your site …. keep it up y’all …