Tag: home recording

  • The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Recording Interfaces

    The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Recording Interfaces

    Audio interfaces are pieces of hardware that can act as both sound inputs for recording into your computer, like a mixing desk in a studio and as your sound output when performing and processing digital sounds live. For the purposes of this article, we’re only going to be dealing with their recording function since anybody recording…

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  • Motivation: What I Learned from Writing a Song a Day for 120 Days

    Motivation: What I Learned from Writing a Song a Day for 120 Days

    For the past 120 days, I composed and recorded an original, studio-quality song, every day. Now, everything I am about to say is only credible if you believe the songs are great. Listen to a few of them so you have an idea of what was made. Thus, the primary focus of this article is to…

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  • Using Velocity to Improve the “Humanness” of Your MIDI Strings

    Using Velocity to Improve the “Humanness” of Your MIDI Strings

    If you’re always looking for ways to make your MIDI strings sound more real, tweaking the velocity could be just the thing you’re missing.

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  • A Quick Introduction to Common Mic Placement Techniques

    A Quick Introduction to Common Mic Placement Techniques

    This article is courtesy of Soundfly’s free course series Any Sound Will Do, which features essential tips and strategies on creating music from found sounds and sampled sources by YouTube star Andrew Huang and Ableton Certified Trainer Brian Jackson. Where you place the microphone when recording sounds to sample is potentially more important than what microphone you’re actually…

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  • How to Build an Acoustic Diffuser — And Why You Need Diffusion

    How to Build an Acoustic Diffuser — And Why You Need Diffusion

    I’m going to try and simplify this article as much as I can. Partly due to the fact that I’m not a physicist and partly for the reader’s sanity. Firstly, let’s talk about acoustic treatment types in general. Types of Acoustic Treatment Absorption There are several different types of acoustic treatment that all have their…

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  • The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Choosing the Right Monitors

    The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Home Studio: Choosing the Right Monitors

    + Learning to record and mix at home? Check out Soundfly’s acclaimed online courses on mixing, production, and beat making — Subscribe for unlimited access. If you’ve ever tried mixing something you recorded at home on computer speakers, your stereo speakers, or even headphones, you know that it’s nearly impossible to get a great, objective sense…

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  • Unsung: In Praise of Rap’s Studio Musicians

    Rappers used to say, “The real backbone of hip-hop is disc jocks.” Nowadays, though, the real backbone of hip-hop is ostensibly the virtuosic studio musicians dominating the most heralded releases of the past few years. In leaving their indelible marks on records by award-winning artists like Chance The Rapper and Kendrick Lamar, instrumentalists like Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet), Robert…

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  • These 10 Super Helpful Key Commands in Ableton Live Will Change Your Life

    These 10 Super Helpful Key Commands in Ableton Live Will Change Your Life

    + Master the tools and techniques of producing pro-level electronic music and audio in Ableton Live with Soundfly’s course, Intro to Music Production in Ableton Live. There’s no other way to put it: computers have become a central component of all recorded music, as well as most composed music. Especially when taking on more projects with tighter deadlines,…

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  • 14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    Once upon a time, remixing a song meant actually redoing the mix. Many vintage consoles (some Neve 80-series, for example) have a button labeled “remix” that changes a few functions on the desk to optimize it for mixing rather than recording. But sometime in the late 20th century, the word “remix” began to take on a new meaning:…

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  • Essential Tips for Recording Pro-Quality Lead Vocals

    Essential Tips for Recording Pro-Quality Lead Vocals

    + Recording and mixing your songs at home? Preview Soundfly’s online course, Modern Pop Vocal Production for free, and subscribe here to get unlimited access. Every production and every song is unique, but the lead vocal is typically the part that most directly engages the average listener. The human voice, with all of its frailty, power, and expressive nuances, is…

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Ryan Lott: Designing Sample-Based Instruments