Home Studio Tips

Editors Keys makes some really cool and innovative products. They recently contacted me to do a review of the Portable Vocal Booth Home Version. What a treat, this product is so cool, I was very excited to give it a try.

First of all it is very sturdy and easy to setup. I had it put together and on my mic stand in less than five minutes. Basically what it does is surrounds your mic with soundproof foam. This is a great way to create clean vocals without reverb as well as keeping out computer noise, barking dogs, crying babies and screaming wives.

The specially moulded foam has been shaped and processed in a way which not only helps to create dry vocals, but to also prevent exterior noise such as traffic noise or air conditioning entering into your mic.

I did a few tests with and without the vocal booth, and yes it was quite a bit clearer with the portable vocal booth than without. I record in a concrete basement, so there are tons of sound reflections as well as noises that bleed onto vocals, the portable vocal booth did reduce the outside noise quite a bit. I was extremely happy with the way my vocals sounded with the portable vocal booth. My next test is to try it out with my 12 string acoustic, I'm sure it will work wonders there as well.

The Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition goes for $144 and comes with 110% money back guarantee. Go to Editors Keys to get more information.

I would recommend the Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition to anyone who's looking to improve their vocal sounds without creating a real booth. This is an excellent and inexpensive solution to all of your home recording vocal issues. Check it out!

http://www.editorskeys.com/Recording_Equipment.html

How many times have you been sitting behind a drum kit or at the organ laying down a track and oops, you screw up. Now I have to walk over to the computer, reset the track, hit record and quickly run back over and sit down again. Very frustrating when you are recording alone.

There may be a solution to this dilema. X-Tempo Zone created an awesome product called the Pok. It is a wireless foot controller that controls your DAW (as well as other things).

X-Tempo Zone was cool enough to send me a Pok Wireless controller for review. I was instantly in love with this controller. It was built very sturdy and looked awesome too. I noticed immediately how much more effecient the Pok makes the recording process. No more getting up and resetting takes, no more tripping over cables, no more missing the first bar of the song.

The Pok allows you to free up your hands and use your feet to control your DAW. The Pok wireless signal will reach up to 100 feet. I would imagine there would also be some really awesome live applications for the Pok as well, but I rarely play live these days. Imagine triggering drums, loops, sequences and backing tracks without your hands ever touching the laptop. You could be your own one man band!

The Pok can be customized and will support over 20 commands. The Pok has 8 pedals and each pedal can have three functions.The Pok comes programmed for Pro Tools but can be used with all other leading DAWs such as Ableton Live, Acid Pro, Audacity, Ardour, Audition, Cubase, Digital Performer, FL Studio, GarageBand, Logic, n-Track, Nuendo, Reaper, Record, Sonar, and Sound Forge. It comes with editing software so you can easily customize everything to your specific needs.  Read More »

Lately, I've been using MIDI drum loops in all of my songs. For several reasons; I prefer to have full control over my drum beats, I like to work alone, and last but not least, I hate trying to program drums from scratch. Using loops, I can easily drop in my beats and then fine tune them as needed later on. This provides a way to make human sounding drums with spot on timing without dealing with some drummer guy and his giant kit. Plus, having a brand new baby means most of my recording these days requires less noise.

The awesome people at Groove Monkee hooked me up with a few packages of MIDI drum loops. I got the Studio Pack, Rock 2: Alternative/Soft, Rock 3: Contemporary, Punk and Twisted Beats. These libraries really help to complete my MIDI drum collection, this is all I should ever need as far as drum loops go. I'm good.

Groove Monkee has provided MIDI content to Cakewalk, FXpansion, Propellerhead, LinPlug, Music Tech Magazine, Computer Music Magazine and is considered an industry leader in MIDI drum loops.   Read More »

I recently got the MIDI Drum Loops Complete library from Smart loops. Very impressive collection of MIDI drum loops. I'm taking down my "Drummer Wanted" ad.

Seriously, I can see myself using Smart Loops as my go to for beats on future recordings. MIDI Drum Loops Complete includes a wide variety of beats, fills and patterns. I was impressed with the fact that each groove includes a ton of variation. For instance, if you need a double kick fill, there are 10 different patterns to choose from. Making it very easy to find the fill that would perfectly fit your particular part. Some of the grooves have as many as twenty different variations, now that's awesome.

These loops are versatile and sound great in different tempos. Most of the loops are in 4/4 or 6/8 with some double-time and half-time feels. All of the beats, fills and patterns have a great natural human feel to them. They are very well played and can be placed quickly and easily into a song. You can listen to loop samples on the Smart Loops website.

I attached a short techno-metal track to the bottom of this post that I created using only Smart Loops MIDI patterns. It was done in Reason so the drum kit could sound better, but the Smart Loops patterns are awesome. The loops required very little editing and tweaking to get them to fit into my parts. I'm looking forward to trying these loops with something like a BFD2 or Superior Drummer kit and Pro Tools.

According to Smart Loops:  Read More »

The people at Toontrack were cool enough to send me a copy of Superior Drummer 2.0 for review. I've heard a ton about it by reading on the web and I've watched lots of videos and heard demo songs created using Superior Drummer 2.0. Needless, to say I was pretty excited to get my mits on it and try it out.

Superior Drummer 2.0 comes on 5 DVD's. Install was relatively painless and authorizing the program wasn't too bad either. There are four different modes of custom installation, from the 4Gb basic install up to the full 20Gb sound bank. I had used EZdrummer in the past and Superior Drummer 2.0 seems like a huge step up from that. There are a ton of settings in this puppy. Actually, the interface seemed a bit daunting at first. Took me a while to figure out what was going on.

They've completely overhauled the dfh-Superior engine so it's optimized for use with electronic drum kits, makes even more effective use of sample layers, and loads much faster than before. Plus, the sounds are top notch. Toontrack created the brand new Superior Drummer 2.0 engine expressly to showcase the sounds, instead of just releasing them as an expansion pack.

You can get great sounds right out of the box or you can lift the hood and tweak almost every minute detail to your liking. Superior Drummer 2.0 is primarily a mic-centric program, so learning the mics and how to mix them is key to getting your sounds. In terms of mic's that can be accessed it's got overhead, close, mid, and far ambient mics, mono ambient and an ambient bullet mic that can all be tweaked in and out to tailor your sound. It's pretty amazing how many different sounds you can get out of one snare just by playing with the mics.  Read More »

I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of FXpansion BFD ECO. BFD ECO is the little brother of the beast BFD2. BFD2 requires it's own dedicated 60 gig hard drive to run, which is a dealbreaker for most people. BFD ECO only requires somewhere in the ballpark of 4 gigs which is much more economical, hence the name ECO.

In my book, FXpansion can do no wrong. Every product they create that I have had the pleasure to use, has been exactly that...a pleasure to use. They create top notch products that are well made as well as add dynamics and professionalism to any home studio.

BFD ECO was easy to install and was fairly easy to register and authorize. I'm still not a fan of any software authorization, I know it's necessary to combat piracy, etc. but it seems like authorization is always the most complicated part of any application install.

As I stated earlier, BFD ECO only took up about 4 gigs of space on my hard drive. This makes it an excellent product to run on a laptop or a modest DAW. In a perfect world, I'd recommend running the full version of BFD2 on your main DAW and throw BFD ECO on your laptop for making beats on the go, that way you'd have the best of both worlds.

Featuring the highlights of the expansive BFD2 library and fully compatible with all BFD2 expansions, BFD ECO provides a simpler way of bringing lifelike drum sounds to your DAW. BFD ECO will be released in April, 2010 and will sell for around $150. BFD ECO will be upgradable to BFD2 at any time for a special upgrade price. BFD ECO comes as RTAS, VST, AU or as a stand alone.

BFD ECO Features:  Read More »

Editors Keys now offers recording equipment in addition to their cool editors keys. They were nice enough to send me a Dual Layer Pop Filter. I was using a single layer pop filter before, and I still had some issues with some of my "P"s. Maybe it's my big lips?

Anyway, the new dual layer pop filter is awesome, way better than the single layer. I no longer get any annoying pops, it seems to catch everything so far.

The dual layer pop filter runs for around $30 and features:

• Two layers of high quality nylon filters
• Fits all mic stands
• Easy assembly
• Removable head
• Fully adjustable arm
• 100% greater efficiency compared to standard pop filters

Editors Keys surveyed producers and found:

"From a survery of 200 audio producers, 187 agreed that a dual layer pop filter is the most effective way of improving audio recordings and preventing pops and hisses."

I would recommend the dual layer pop filter, it's your second line of defense against unwanted pops and ssssss. Check it out.

The nice people at Fxpansion sent me a copy of BFD2 to review. After finally freeing up some space on my hard drive, I was able to give it the once over...and it was impressive!

Fxpansion BFD2 is an acoustic drum software that runs as a plug-in with your DAW. BFD2 provides full control over tuning, velocity, damping, ambience, response and more. With BFD2 you can configure the drums to sound like a custom drum kit.

BFD2 comes with a library of 55 gigs of sounds. Yep, you heard me right...55 gigs!! If you can't find a drum sound you like out of 55 gigs, you're in trouble. BFD2 also includes a mixing console which allows you to blend, route and submix channels as if each drum was mic'ed separately. There are also effects that you can add and adjust such as distortion, filters, flanger, compression, ring mod, delay as well as dynamics. There are also presets available to save you time.

There are plenty of high-quality instruments and sounds to choose from to create your perfect drum kit, from Zildjian and Sabian cymbals to Ludwig and Gretsch kicks and toms, Pearl and DW snares to an Oberheim DX Drum Machine and human group claps.  Read More »

IK Multimedia was cool enough to send me a copy of AmpliTube 3 for a test run. I'm already a huge fan of their products, but was really blown away by AmpliTube 3. AmpliTube 3 contains over 160 modeled vintage and modern amps and allows you to tweak everything to your liking and create your own effect combinations.

Some of the new features in AmpliTube 3 include:  Read More »

I've always thought that a good producer can use any software to make decent sounding recordings. I still think this is true, you don't need to spend $10,000 to make great recordings. I have the latest copy of Magix Music Maker 16 loaded on my pc, which lists for under $100 and proves my point. Geared more for novices, this software should be all you need to make great recordings.

It comes standard with some great help videos to help you get started. Magix Music Maker 16 includes thousands of sounds, realistic instruments, and great effects to create explosive drums, crunchy basses, and super melodies. MAGIX Music Maker 16 includes over 1,500 sounds and loops. Sounds and loops can be easily cut, edited, copied, and arranged into your own song.

Magix Music Maker 16 comes with awesome new sounds and effects. The guitar amplifier Vandal is the one of the coolest new features of the software. It also includes the option to play instruments on your pc keyboard, that way you don't have to buy a separate MIDI keyboard.

Magix Music Maker 16 features:

• Multitrack recorder
• Sounds and loops from all styles
• Professional sounding plug-in synthesizers
• Good selection of effects and plugins
• External plugins like synths or effects via directX
• Ability to draw effect curves on every track
• Powerful mastering suite with parametric eq and multiband compressor

Magix Music Maker seems more geared towards the novice than the exptert. So if you are just starting out in the world of digital recording, it is worth checking out. More experienced producers may want to look at more sophisticated products.  Read More »

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