The 3-Stage Mixing Process
Recently I posted a video demonstrating a particular approach to mixing music that I often use. Not always, but often. It’s an evolution of my analogy for making music, detailed in my ebook (already available for free) “Cooking with Sound” and is going to be the title of my forthcoming video guide on recording your own, broadcast-quality music.

This approach helps me achieve my mixing goals, most of the time and I wanted to share it. It’s a not a “How to”. It assumes that you already understand the concept of mixing, but are looking for ways to get better at doing it!

I also put together a simple pdf guide to the mixing process and a direct link to download the video in full 1080HD.

Free Audio Tracks to Practice

For more details about this mixing process, the free video and pdf guide, along with details of how you can get hold of a wealth of audio tracks to practice the technique (all for free), just fill in the form at the top of this page.

These make tasty ingredients for you to put together a great mixing recipe, so get Cooking!

K-Sound is now offering a tuition service, tailored exactly to your specific requirements and interests. After having seen the benefit to our clients who wish to improve their own recordings.

Several people who we have been conversing with, explain that they wish to improve their recording skills, so their music is of the level of quality that better justifies the investment in a quality mix and master, like the one that K-Sound offers. People are happy to spend money on professional work if they are confident that the difference it makes is a big one and I’m really happy to say that the people who have contacted me personally, who are interested in using K-Sound services are switched on and savvy individuals!

They understand that a quality result starts with a quality source and they have asked me how they can create better source material for me to work on in order to create a better end result. I have had some great interactions with people already and have decided to offer the K-Sound recording consultation and tuition service.

What this will comprise of is a series of Skype video calls, in which you will receive tuition and advice about the specific areas of your recording and the specific details you are concerned about. It is a tailor made course of tutorials, but conducted more like an informal conversation. I’m still working out all the other details, like extras that can be included and other follow-on benefits, like return-customer deals etc.

Please check the Consultation page for details of the service and remember that what gets covered in these tutorials is your choice!

Mixing is regarded by many as some kind of dark art. A lot of recording musicians love the recording process and hearing their work captured to tape or disk, but don’t care for the mixing process. This is largely because of the attention to detail and time consuming nature of the process. It’s not an easy job to do and it’s even less easy to do it really well!

Complete Pre-Mix Processing – Special Deal

On the other hand, it’s not always easy to hand over your precious music for someone else to mix as a mix engineer’s time costs money and well, we don’t always find it easy to let go and trust somebody else to do it do we, unless that somebody happens to be a world-famous producer or mix engineer!

But the truth is that the mix is only the half of it. What that means is that the way the tracks are recorded – the tonal quality, the fidelity, the arrangement, the structure and the performance – largely determines how the final mix will sound and how much work is required to get it to sound finished.

What puts a lot of people off the mixing part of a self produced record is often the amount of work required to make it sound the way you want it to, so of course the better the recorded tracks are and, often overlooked, the quality of editing and post processing of the recorded tracks, the easier the mix task becomes and your final mix will have a chance to take shape more quickly and easily.

Part of the mixing process here at K-Sound is determining if your recorded tracks, sent to be mixed require any processing and if so, what kind and how much of it. This is the preparation for the final mix and is very important to a great sounding record. Of course, if you had your recorded tracks pre-prepared to be mix ready, you would probably be more confident in mixing your own material.

The audio-processing services at K-Sound are designed for just that. Included in the full mix service along with mastering, they are also available as a standalone service. We prepare your tracks for a final mix by applying a choice of different sonic character treatment, rendering audio from your programmed MIDI files using high quality virtual instruments and samples and make all of the tracks of your songs gel well together prior to mixing.

This is akin to having had your tracks recorded in the best possible way in the first place and sounding great together, even before you start mixing it properly. For some clients this is the best way for them to hand over a chunk of the work to somebody who has the expertise, experience and patience, whilst maintaining control over their final mix.

It can make a really big difference to the end result, especially when we are currently offering great deal on a complete pre-mix, audio file makeover – an interesting and unique service.

Here at K-Sound, we offer a policy of a preferential rate for all returning clients, but this is not just some kind of bait to reel in customers without much care for whether they return or not. It’s also not an attempt at a selling point, but as the guy who does the work here at our humble, but perfectly formed online studio I think it revolves around a very important factor of providing a service, especially a creative one like ours.

Satisfied Customers

Recently I was blessed with a customer who was so happy with the work I had done for him that I was touched by the amazing feedback he gave me and I’m sure that if and when he is in need of the same kind of service again (this was a mastering job), he’ll be in touch with K-Sound. This really cool chap informed me that I had gone the extra mile in providing a quality end-result that he was very happy with and I suddenly realized what the magic ingredient in creating satisfied customers is.

Obviously a client will return to you for more business if he or she is happy with the work you did for them before, maybe happy isn’t enough these days, but more than happy – expectations exceeded and I realize that for me as a service provider, there is something that makes it very easy for me to exceed customers’ expectations and create a loyal customer. That ingredient is my own engagement with the work. The more into it I am, the better the result is going to be – of course. In short, if I’m given an album to master or mix (or both) and I really like the music then I’m going to do a better job. I’ll be honest about that!

When Work Feels Like Play

The aforementioned mastering client who was very happy provided me with such an example of music. I really liked it. It was well written, performed, recorded and just well executed and the songs stuck in my head (in a good way) after I’d finished working on them. I believe that if it was just some music that didn’t really excite me much then the result may have been different. I don’t mean the quality would suffer, no. My policy is to rise above my musical tastes and provide high quality right across the board, but there would be something missing.

A connection with the music. If I get a mixing or mastering job that excites me then the whole relationship between me and the client grows into more of a partnership than just a business-client one. It’s just natural and I believe that is the only time that clients are likely to return. So clients are only likely to return when they’re "Blown away" by the service and they’re only likely to be blown away if I’m blown away by their music. There’s a kind of synergy to it.

So far 2012 has provided me with only work involving music that does make me feel something – something good of course. Let’s hope that continues.

Here is a quick rundown of what is working since upgrading to latest versions of OS, DAW, plugins and other software.

Protools 10

I’ve been running Protools 10 for a while now and it’s performing great. There’s not a big difference in performance from Protools 9 in my experience, but the new features are pretty cool. Clip gain makes things much quicker for me. It has helped speed up my workflow a lot. I’m used to this feature when I use Cubase and Nuendo at another studio, so it’s a welcome addition to my favourite DAW of choice!

MAC OSX Lion

I upgraded to this prior to installing Protools 10. Just around the time I was thinking of upgrading Protools, my audio drive started playing up and I was lucky to have it replaced under Apple Care before it completely failed on me. As a result I got my iMac back from the Apple Service Center and decided to do a clean install of everything and since I had cleared my work list and had time to research all that I would need to satisfactorily upgrade to OSX Lion I decided to upgrade everything too. Not after cloning my system drive with my entire previous studio configuration!

The upgrade went smoothly and I’m happy I made the step. I’ll probably not feel the need to update in such a major way for quite a while I hope!

Plugins etc.

The most crucial factor for me before committing to upgrade anything was plugin compatibility. There are certain plugins that I would not be prepared to leave behind or even wait for them to catch up compatibility wise, so I was extra careful to make sure that my favourite plugins would work.

Impressively nearly all of them were compatible with OSX Lion already, although not guaranteed officially at the time and some had even been updated to be officially supported by OSX Lion and Protools 10. Softube in particular impressed me with a very speedy update of all their plugins: Not only to be compatible with OSX Lion and Protools 10, but also supporting Avid’s new AAX format, right out of the starting blocks. The softube plugin I have is the Trident EQ and it is still one of the best I have and most stable too – always has been.

Another cool plugin, which comes in very handy sometimes is Waverider2 by Quiet Arts – a small plugin developer. That plugin provides automatic fader riding of channels and is an excellent tool. It was not 100% compatible with my new system and was hanging the launch of Protools, but after visiting their website I discovered an update which was compatible with OSX Lion and Protools 10. That fixed the issue. The Waverider website is not very user friendly in my experience, but the plugin itself is great.

The only thing left that was still not officially supported under wither Protools 10 or OSX Lion was the FXPansion VST to RTAS wrapper software, but here on my system it works just as it did before, so no problems there for me. This was a particular relief because the plugins that I simply I cannot live without – SSL Duende Native plugins relied on this wrapper technology at the time of upgrading. I decided to upgrade despite the uncertainty because SSL were close to releasing RTAS versions of the Duende Native plugins anyway, but I didn’t have to wait before I could use them on Protools 10. I do now have the RTAS versions and it makes the workflow smoother because stereo presets are compatible with mono instances of the plugins under RTAS, which they were not under wrapped VST to RTAS conditions.

Native Instruments

Much of the Native Instruments software I use has been updated too. I only use some NI "Powered by Kontakt" Libraries and their free offerings, so now I am running Kontakt 5 Player and have completed all updates to the Kontakt Libraries I have, where available. I have to say there is one thing about Kontakt 5 that I hate. When using it in multi-channel mode within Protools, the channel outputs in version 4 were named the same as I had defined them within Kontakt 4 Player, so for my drum outputs I could select the input on my Protools track to, say "Kick" for the kick drum. In Kontakt 5 player, the channel inputs on the Protools tracks show up as the buss numbers in Kontakt, which looks really messy and takes a lot longer to set up because I have to double check the correct numbers displayed against the channel I had defined within Kontakt.

I hope this is a bug that will be fixed. I suppose I should mention it on their support forum!

So that was a quick report on how the latest and greatest (that I have anyway) versions are performing. If you look at the K-Sound Equipment page, all those listed plugins are working fine under the new system configuration and sound as good as ever.

Much of the work that K-Sound did in 2011 was in partnership with Gary Crause at Legend Music Studios in Phuket and here some highlights of what came our way over the year. 2011 went so fast I still feel like I am yet to start it, but on reflection it has been a successful and fulfilling year. At some point in the year we chose the name 2Transient as the banner under which we work as a production team.

First of all I want to say a huge thank you to Gary, Debbie and Blaze for their support and friendship over the last 12 months.

December 2010

It started to get busy about this time. We had a guy come in to do a voiceover for an HBO documentary, which was interesting because the session was set up via Source Connect software to provide a link for direction and monitoring in a studio in New York all in realtime. When the voiceover guy arrived, he looked familiar – it was Liev Schreiber! Cool, a session with a Hollywood actor was pretty good for my first freelance job with Legend Music!

Then we wrote some songs with a very talented 13-year-old singer/songwriter called Teisha Jones and recorded some tracks for her. It was her first foray into songwriting – she didn’t even know if she could do it, but I’d say she’s got the gift. Shortly after returning to her native Australia, just days after completing her recordings at Legend she landed a record deal. I’m pretty proud of our contribution to a potential, future star.

We had the backing band for Donna Summer come to Legend Music for rehearsals before they played a private (and very up-market) show in Phuket. They were a great bunch of musicians and the backing vocalists were seriously good too. What was amazing is that they arrived 2 days before their gig with an entire truck full of gear. They set up the entire live rig, including 2 full-size consoles for in-ear monitoring and for the front-of-house mix. They cut no corners and this was for one performance at the weekend. That must have been some private party!

January 2011

What a great start to the year. Again with Legend Music, we recorded some jams for a terrific New York band called "The London Souls". They recorded their debut album at Abbey Road with Ethan Johns. I wish I’d been on those sessions! The London Souls are a 3-piece old-school rock band, which to hear them you’d think stepped straight out of 1968 and live, they are mind-blowingly good!

February 2011

The month began with an interesting corporate project. A Phuket based resort company called Twin Palms wanted 2 original CDs produced. One for their swanky beach club bar and restaurant and one for their spa and resort. The 2 CDs were very different from each other, one being a dance/pop type album and the other a collection of ambient, relaxing tracks, but with more rhythmic/percussion elements than typical ambient music. We worked with a wide variety of different artists and musicians on the island as well as another local composer who contributed some ambient pieces. It was great to work with so many talented people for the project and get to meet musicians that I didn’t even know lived here until then. This project continued until some time in April.

We spent the rest of the time we had left in February tracking a couple of blues bands in the studio and this was particularly fun because it was predominantly live recording with all the musicians scattered around the control room and an opportunity for me to get into one of my favourite activities: Mic’ing a drumkit! Those sessions went well and the guys we recorded also played at the Phuket International Blues Festival which happened at the end of the month.

March 2011

We wrote "Shine a Loving Light" a charity song to help raise funds for the devastating tsunami that hit Japan and at the same time, severe flooding that had affected people in our part of the world – Southern Thailand. It was a really fulfilling project. In about 2 or 3 days we had gone from an idea to a finished record with all the best musicians in Phuket and the most talented singers from one of the biggest school choirs all included. About 30 people ended up on that record, in true "Band Aid" style and it was a great achievement by everybody. Well done!

April 2011

Right at the end of 2010, Gary and I decided to start an album project with, who I can only describe as the best singer I have ever worked with – BB Queen. In between all our other work we were busy writing songs for what would end up as "FIBRATE" by Dark Fiber, but it was now when it all started to take shape and the tracks we had recorded were starting to shine.

We also had a pop star from the UK in to record some radio stings for a Polish radio station. His name: Simon Toulson Clark from the band Red Box, who had a string of hits in the mid 1980s. The thing I like about working here in Phuket is that you never know who or what is going to come through those doors on any given day. Absolutely anything is possible here!

May 2011

A film maker based in Phuket came to Legend Music to record dialog for a locally filmed movie and to also record some ADR dialog, which my Protools rig came in handy for. Another surprise was to find that we were recording another movie star: Patrick Bergin.

The British International School located in Phuket came to record an album of songs sung by the school choir as part of their summer, end-of-year show. They came by for a number of recording sessions over the month. It was a lot of work, but really great to see so many youngsters with such talent.

June 2011

Live Sound! Gary and I provided the live sound for the music show at the British International School. They had a great auditorium, pretty well equipped and a big stage. Gary did a sterling job on the stage and behind the scenes, making sure everything was working properly and sounding good down there, while I manned the console and the backing tracks up in the control room. Waiting for that curtain to raise I think I was more nervous than the performers. It was a packed house and a great success. The kids sang and danced beutifully and I viewed my job as a performance too, which helped me get the job done well. I was so focused I even surprised myself.

I did hear comments from the audience after the show that they were really impressed with the sound. Another sign that the Legend Music/K-Sound partnership is an effective one!

July 2011

METAL! Kilgora, a hard-rock, metal band came to Legend Music to track drums. I’m always keen on mic’ing drums and this drumkit posed a little more of a challenge to what I normall get to mic up. It was a really nice drumkit – a Pearl Vision and had quite a lot of cymbals, double kick drum pedal and the snare positioned more toward the middle of the kit with the rack toms on their own individual stands either side of the snare. What posed the challenge mainly was finding the space to get the microphones in where I wanted to put them.

This is definitely a kit made for those tiny clip-on mics, but I didn’t have any of those, so it was quite amusing trying to get a Telefunken M80 (great for snare) into the tiniest of spaces at the most strangest of angles. The M80 is a pretty big mic! We’ll be recording them again in January 2012 and I’m looking forward to that because I have a couple of ideas about alternative mic placements for that kit, so I want to try them out. The drums came out sounding great. Gary mixed some of their tracks at Legend.

August 2011

A very intense month! The movie project that we had worked on in May had reached the post production stage and the movie’s creator wanted us to do it at Legend, so that is what pretty-much took up the month of August. It was an 80-minute feature film and there was a lot to be done including composing music for sections fo the film, foley, spot effects and a lot of audio restoration of dialog and location shots. I didn’t have a great deal of post-production experience before, but I have a lot more of it now! I didn’t really sleep in August!

We also had a guy who is based in Dubai come in to create an original piece of music, which was required as a potential new branding piece for a large airline company. He came in to write and record this piece while he was on holiday in Phuket. That happens a lot too. Professionals like musicians, composers, TV people and voice-over artists are often here on holiday when they are asked to do some important work on a deadline, so they end up finding or being guided to Gary’s studio. This guy was a wonderful pianist.

September 2011

After having to completely leave it alone for over a month, production for the album I was working on of my own: "Standing in the Sky", under my musical name of Boy@Heart was able to recommence. I had intended a release date of October 1st (already delayed by 1 month) and this time I was definitely going to meet that deadline because I had pre-orders of the album already and I didn’t want to disappoint those who’d already handed over money to hear my album!

I spent the rest of September mixing and mastering the Boy@Heart album and also made time to spend at the studio with my mate Gary. When the studio isn’t hectic and busy, we often catch up then at the studio, write some songs and just talk music, recording gear and all sorts of other stuff.

We did have time to pen a new indie-rock song for a video about the Beeches Brooke Horse Trials in the UK. The track is called "Understand Me" and is released under the Boy@Heart name. Crazily enough this was released less than 24 hours before the release of my album!

October 2011

Mastering of a new biker/rock album by Pat Savage called "Wind & Fire" took place and it came out great. The album was produced, recorded and mixed by Gary Crause at Legend Music. It’s also published by Legend Music publishing. I also mastered a hip-hop track for a company called Jupiter Entertainment – another track that was mixed at Legend Music. I tend to get all the mastering work from mixes that come through Legend these days, so that’s a good sign that the service delivers and people keep coming back!

November 2011

Gary and I wrote some new songs for Asia’s biggest pop sensation Tata Young. Well, we wrote the songs and recorded them and handed them to her manager, so we have offered them to her if she’s looking for new songs. She played at the Hard Rock Cafe in Phuket in November and we were invited to the show, where we got to meet her. That’s another photo for the archives! She’s a sweet lady and I hope she does want to record our songs!

There was also another celebrity arrival at Legend in the form of an Australian legend himself – Molly Meldrum. He came to do a voiceover for a video for the ARIA music awards. The video was dedicated to Kylie Minogue for her induction into the Australian Music Hall of Fame. He was a really cool guy and after hearing that only days ago he suffered a bad fall and is in intensive care I’m praying for his recovery and would like to wish him and his loved ones my best wishes.

December 2011

A local film maker offered to do a promotional video on Gary and Legend Music Studios. It also coincided with Kilgora being in the studio to track some new songs, so it was a perfect opportunity to capture the studio in full flight. We got a lot of footage from that day of filming, which we’ll be using as part of our 3 Minute Masterclass – a Music Production Tips & Tricks Video Series.

I’m hoping to get the chance to put a lot more energy into that in 2012. It started a year ago, but we’ve just been too busy to get to it since. Now we’re planning to make it what it was intended to be originally – a great resource for all those who want to improve their music production skills.

Have a great Christmas and a very, very happy new year!

If you are sending your pre-mastered mix to somebody else to master then please DO NOT treat it with Waves L2 or Izotope Ozone or whatever else you like to use for temporary mixes. The point of mastering is to make the music sound the same (as much as possible) no matter what playback system you hear it on. It should just "work" on a club PA, a home hifi, a car stereo and an iPod for example. It’s not about just making it loud and compressed. The biggest myth is that slapping a peak limiter on the mix and bringing up the gain will make the track louder, but after a point (and not very far either) that just stops being the case. Of all the most hard-hitting, punchy tracks you’ve heard I bet the ones you love the best are the least limited and technically not the loudest in terms of RMS level. A massively limited (and apparently loud) record will have less impact on the radio when it is massively compressed again, just making it sound smaller and noisy. There can be no loud without any soft, so the dynamics are what gives a song it’s impact, not volume.

These days though a quiet record is louder than what would have been considered a loud record in the days of vinyl and in my opinion the best years for recording sound quality, so the K-Sound mastering process will still give you a record that is comparable with a commercial release, except it won’t be smashed to S**t and devoid of life, tone or dynamics, but please make sure your mixes are full of life, dynamics (not loads of compression on everything). Put stuff on the master fader of your mix by all means (I always do, a tiny bit of buss compression for example), but leave the gain makeup and limiting (if any) to the mastering house!

… and why they’re important to the sound quality of your record.

There are many myths and fables regarding the subject of recording levels and what is happening to your audio signal in the digital domain. Most of these myths come from a complete lack of understanding of how digital audio works and most misunderstanding of digital audio stems from a lack of understanding of analog audio (which happens to be very different from digital in terms of workflow and how it is measured).

Here are a few things to help clear some of that up, so you can be best equipped to prepare your mixes for mastering or prepare your audio tracks ready for mixing.

The confusion stems from the fact that many people equate 0VU on an analog VU meter with 0 on a digital peak level meter. They are NOT the same!

Digital is precise. It’s all numbers and there are rules that cannot be broken. For example – 0dBFS (deciBels – Full Scale) is the ceiling and there can be no signal above it. There just isn’t any value to represent it and the result is very audible clipping (and not very pleasing to the ear).

Analog is based on voltages going through copper cables and circuit tracks of which there is theoretically no ceiling. The reason why analog equipment sounds more pleasing to most people is that our ears like (or are familiar with) the distortion that is introduced by the analog equipment as it reaches the limits of what it was designed to sound best at. It’s the reason why most guitarists favour tube guitar amps and why many music lovers still love vinyl records more than CDs. Analog gear will just keep on working over and above it’s designed "zero point" or maximum level until it goes up in smoke, getting more distorted the further it gets. Somewhere above the optimum working range, but before it gets too messed up, the nature of the distortion in the analog circuit sounds very musical and pleasing to most people and is the reason why analog equipment is still very much in demand in the pro-audio world.

Many people who record music on a digital system are still under the impression that the signals should be as close to zero (0dBFS) as possible – a throwback form the analog days, where 0VU was the optimum level for the gear with the best signal to noise ratio combined with minimal distortion and also early 16bit recording gear that had a limited dynamic range (and therefore higher noise floor) than current digital recording systems.

In 24 bit systems this practice is totally unnecessary and in fact can be detrimental to the quality of your record. The key word here is "Headroom". Analog equipment, especially high end stuff like SSL or Neve consoles for example have their optimum performing level. This is where the details get left out because this will go on forever otherwise. Basically this optimum level is 0VU on a VU meter (the one with the needle bouncing about). Above 0VU there is a red area, which if your signal moves the needle into that region during the peaks you won’t hear any distortion, it’ll just seem louder and fatter the higher the peak the higher the voltage of the signal during that peak. The amount over zero that can be tolerated by the equipment before audible (and undesired) distortion occurs is called the headroom and can be as much 20 or 30dB. I.E. quite a lot! But at that point, even if it sounds cool, there will be a lot more noise in the signal created by the electrons in the circuit.

That 0VU level is always calibrated to a specific reference voltage (remember the details are not important in this explanation) and it is this voltage (and always this voltage) that is also used to calibrate the optimum operating level of the analog circuitry in a digital to analog and an analog to digital converter. Therefore, when you record your vocal or guitar or whatever into your mic preamp (analog), into your A/D converter and into your computer you would be best served by using a VU meter as your recording level reference rather than a peak level meter.

All converters are calibrated to reference 0VU to a level below 0dBFS (digital) in order to provide headroom between that level and 0dBFS to avoid clipping your converters and subsequently your plugins and output fader within your recording software. It’s a recreation of the conditions of the analog world, but many people just don’t adhere to that. Many people have no idea about it and record everything so hot that their final mix has all their channel faders pulled right down in order to avoid going into the red on their master fader (another can of worms there).

Lets assume we have a digital system calibrated so that 0VU = -18dBFS.

The best practice is to always leave headroom at every stage of making your record and only bring the level up close to full scale at the mastering stage. DO NOT NORMALIZE – EVER! It is a total waste of time. It is better to spend a little more energy on correct gain staging through your signal chain. Record you sources at the mic preamp’s sweet spot, so as to introduce minimal noise form the preamp. Keep all your audio files at an average level of about -18dBFS, which means they will likely reach peaks (but not consistently) at around -12dBFS. If it sounds quiet, TURN UP THE VOLUME on the speakers! If you take the care to do this, you will be amazed at the clarity of your final mix, the depth and dimension, the stereo separation. You will be running the system the way it was designed (and the way all those plugin manufacturers painstakingly designed) to sound its best.

A lot of what contributes to what people call a harsh, "digital" sound is the fact that most people record in digital in a less than optimum way. A lot of the harshness is in fact their mic preamp being run way too hard, which in the old world of analog using a VU meter on the input, would never be done because it would already be screaming at the engineer (Too HOT!).

Leave the mastering engineer to bring up the level at the end where he/she can do it with quality equipment and experienced ears. Thanks for reading!

On March 24th 2011, following the Japanese earthquake & tsunami, musicians gathered at Legend Music Studios in Phuket to record "Shine a Loving Light" A benefit song to raise funds for Japan. This was part of the Love Aid Phuket project, set up by a committee of charitable people in Phuket with the support of the Rotary club.

I felt extremely privileged to be invited to write a song for the cause along with my songwriting partner Gary, who runs a fantastic studio in Phuket called Legend Music. We sat down to write on Thursday 16th March and by the end of the afternoon, we had our song pretty much recorded and a scratch vocal laid down. Then we put the word out across the island of Phuket for musicians and artists who wanted to be a part of this amazing creation to show up at the studio on Thursday 24th, which was the next available session date at the studio.

It was a day I’ll never forget. We had a super talented school choir arrive in the morning and they sounded like they were really well rehearsed, thanks to their great teacher Claire. It didn’t take too long for them to get all their parts and harmonies done and already the song was starting to sound like it had taken on a life of it’s own. Once the choir had left to go back to school the other musicians started to show up. Some of them I already knew and some new faces too. I never realized their were that many talented people on the island and today, there were a group of them all in the same place, singing and playing on our song.

I am very proud of it. I sang on the record and I played the guitars. Listen out for the slide! Thanks to everyone who took part, now I’m looking forward to the Love Aid Phuket concert, which is set to go ahead in May (date still yet to be confirmed).

Since organisation for the concert began, Southern Thailand has suffered some catastrophic damage from flooding due to freak rainfall. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes and hundreds died. Phuket was fortunate enough to have avoided any severe damage. Love Aid Phuket is now also focused on contributing funds to help the people of Southern Thailand too.

It is pretty common knowledge these days that a great way of capturing electric guitar sounds is to record the DI’d signal at the tracking stage and then feed that unprocessed DI back through a guitar amp or guitar processor aftwerwards for the ultimate in flexibility and control over the sound. A process called re-amping.

What is not so common knowledge is that re-amping has been used, pretty much ever since multitrack recording first began. I suspect there are more famous records than we realize that have been created using a re-amping technique to get the best recorded guitar sound possible and after spending countless hours re-amping guitars myself in many different applications I know why. It sounds great!

With careful re-amping, it is possible to finish up with a guitar track that is not overrun with hiss from the amplifier, it is also possible to vastly reduce the amount of unitentional mains hum/buzz that may have been picked up during the tracking of the guitar, even with a high gain or heavily compressed setting.

Here is one reason I believe many classic tracks have been re-amped to some degree
I have heard many guitar recordings with pretty high gain guitar sounds that contain a very low amount of hiss, hum and other unwanted noises. Of course, to some extent this is due to great engineering to capture the best quality sound at the source, but part of being a good engineer is knowing and employing some clever techniques, including one like re-amping!

Re-amping also gives you the option to turn what was tracked as a heavily distorted solo, for example into one with a cleaner sound. Something not so easy to play with such a sound in the first place. There is lots of room for creating new tones that are about more than just setting the dials on the amplifier.

Since discovering re-amping years ago and spending countless hours honing the technique of cleaning up the DI’d guitar signal to eliminate noise thus bring out more even more of the nuances of the players performance I am glad to be able to offer this service to those that find the process too complicated, confusing or just plain tedious! Re-amping makes a world of difference to how "expensive" your record sounds. Even if you want to make a raw-sounding record.

Now you can focus on getting your performance spot on with a useable sound and then get your guitar tracks prepared, so they will be easier to mix and sound superb too!

If you take the time to record your DI signal when you track your guitars you are preparing your recording for greatness. You never know who may end up mixing your track and if they have the source material to be able to re-amp your guitars then the sky is the limit as to how good they can make it sound!