Blogs
I have TONS of new merchandise, and more is in development! Very excited about this! You can check it all out at http://www.cafepress.com/thawindmills There is a TON of "Super Trashy" merch after the song of the same name, and a few 5lb Piranha items, and other cool stuff. Check it out. Makes for great Valentines's gifts!
The TrueVulgarians are pleased to announce the release of a new collaborative effort by us and the incomparable Scotswolfe entitled "How Come?" Words and music by Bill Thompson. Lead vocals and acoustic guitar - Bill Thompson Back-up vocals by Jacki Grapentine. Scotswolfe provided all other instrumentation and production work on this song. Certainly the most ambitious tune in our collection of songs. Hope you enjoy it!
The 2014 Mixposure Rock and Country Music Awards are underway and voting will begin soon! Everything has to have rules so here they are.
All Music must be posted on your artist page on Mixposure.com.
If you are not a member, please join. Mixposure.com is free.
Please change the genre to MCA2013 or MRA2013 for Country or Rock Genre
No Cover Tunes!
We would prefer the song be from 2013 or 2014 but we have no way to stop earlier songs so upload what you want
Voting will be from anyone signed up on Mixposure.com so yes, the people will vote!
The contest will end on Saturday March 30th
MixStream Radio will have all songs in continuous rotation
Winners will receive a Trophy and some other perks from Mixposure.com
Please let us know if you have any questions!
As a home studio owner, or soon to be one, you should be aware of how the professional studios operate and what techniques they employ. In the end we are all trying to do the same thing: get sound onto a recording device, spice it up, and mix it to a final product. We all want to get the best sound possible. The differences in techniques directly affect the quality of the final product.
Why Your Favorite Recordings Sound So Good
Cue up your favorite recording, one that you think is recorded well. Sit back and listen closely. Notice how all the instruments blend together well, how no instrument sticks out of the mix more than it should. Notice how you hear virtually no background noise. All the instruments sound present, the drums don't sound far away, and it sounds as if you're in the same room as the band. The recording has a smooth and polished sound to it, no harshness to your ears. These are all qualities of good engineering, good mixing, and good mastering.
When you listen to a professional recording, realize that you are listening to months, if not years, of hard work recording and mixing the music. Big studios also have access to the finest equipment, the best microphones, acoustically perfect rooms, and most important of all, experienced engineers to run the sessions. Does this mean that your home studio masterpiece will sound bad? No, not at all! With some basic equipment, a little knowledge, and your inspired music, you can make professional-sounding recordings. Recording sessions are broken up into three main components: preproduction, production and engineering, and postproduction.
Preproduction
Preproduction involves everything that comes before the actual recording session. This can include selecting the right material to record, rehearsing the band, and getting ready for the recording sessions. For the home studio owner, this involves working out your material so that you can record it. It also might include purchasing gear to facilitate a particular project, such as buying a second vocal microphone to record a vocal duet for a new song. Basically, anything that you can do in advance to make your recordings go more smoothly is preproduction.
Production and Engineering
Production involves the actual recording sessions. At the sessions, the engineer runs the recording show. It's up to the engineer and any assistants he or she might have to set up all the microphones, place the microphones for optimum sound, get proper recording levels, run the mixing board, operate the recording device, and make sure everything sounds good. The engineer is the most important link in the chain (besides the musicians themselves) in getting a great-sounding recording. Engineering, like any other skill, requires a certain level of artistry and practice for proficiency to improve. An experienced engineer will be able to identify problems and quickly find solutions.
Editing and overdubbing might take place in subsequent sessions, but it's still considered production. In your studio, you will most likely be wearing all of the various hats needed to make a recording. It will be up to you to properly set up your equipment and the microphones, run the recording device, and engineer the recording. This can be a tall order to do all at once, but the chapters to follow will show you how to get started easily. With a little practice you'll be off and running!
Postproduction
Postproduction includes anything that happens after the recording sessions. Most often, postproduction involves mixing the tracks to a polished uniform sound. Mixing involves several key elements:
Track levels: Loudness of each track
Panning: Side-to-side placement in the mix
Equalization: Boosting or cutting certain frequencies in the mix
Effects: Adding signal processing such as reverb, delay, and compression in order to achieve a polished sound
Mix down: Mixing all the tracks into a single stereo pair suitable for distribution or mastering
Even the most basic studio has the capabilities to do all these things. Remember that the basic sequence of events is always the same: sound capture, recording, and playback. Now that we explained a little about the history of the recording process and got you thinking about some concepts, it's time to shift gears and move into your home studio to find out what you need to get started.
We live in the digital age. Everywhere around us technology is changing the way we work, play, and communicate. The computer has become a fixture in the home, and it's hard to imagine life without one. The need to create coupled with advancements in technology are allowing even the average hobbyist the chance to create and share quality music without going into considerable debt.
The Advancement of Technology
Analog multitrack recorders capable of recording twenty-four or more tracks can cost a lot of money. Even now, though they are less popular, it is easy to spend $30,000 to $50,000 on a good one. Their prohibitive cost meant that for a while, home studios were available only to rich, successful musicians. Digital technology has brought the cost down considerably. Digital tape machines such as the ADAT, while not cheap, are nowhere near as expensive as multitrack analog tape machines. When they were introduced in 1992, Alesis ADATs went for around $3,500. These modular tape machines started showing up in professional studios, and more and more home studios were getting equipped with digital recorders.
As the technology and time advanced, recording studios turned to the personal computer. Digital audio can be stored on its internal hard drives, and the monitor and mouse take editing to a whole new level. Software provides an interface for laying out tracks and editing them visually in ways that were never possible in the analog or digital tape world. As we discuss in later chapters, digital audio uses nonlinear technology. This means that the audio is free to be placed anywhere in time, unlike a tape-based machine on which you record at a specific point in the tape. Unless you cut out that section of tape and splice it somewhere else, you can't move things around with analog tape. But with digital audio, moving audio is as easy as pointing and clicking.
Using computers in studios came with its own problems: The computers themselves were not able to handle the tremendous strain that digital audio required. To a computer's brain (the central processing unit, or CPU), digital audio is very complex to work with. The addition of signal processing was too much for the computers of the late 1980s and early 1990s to handle. The solution was to use add-on cards inside the computer to help process the digital audio signal. One of the most successful products is Digidesign's Pro Tools. Pro Tools uses a combination of hardware to perform digital signal processing (DSP) and software to arrange music. Professional Pro Tools and other systems like it are still very expensive. It's easy to spend $30,000 to $50,000 on a nice Pro Tools rig. Pro Tools was one of the first proprietary systems available, a combination of software and hardware for recording music in a computer. Today Pro Tools is the standard in recording studios around the world. Other systems exist today, but none with the popularity and compatibility of Pro Tools.
How Technology Made the Home Studio Possible
The home studio has followed a path similar to that of professional recording studios. In 1979, Tascam invented the Portastudio, a 4-track recorder that used standard audiotapes. It was priced around $1,000, which was very inexpensive for a unit of its type. It caused a revolution, and in one step created the home studio market. The unit was small and compact and could be taken anywhere. Four tracks could be recorded and mixed separately in the unit and later mixed down to a final stereo cassette. Musicians quickly began using the Portastudio for creating their own music and making demos. The Portastudio line by Tascam is still popular today and comes in many shapes and sizes, both digital and analog.
In the digital world, in the 1990s, the hard disk began showing up as part of standalone recorders, greatly increasing the quality of recorded sound. Because hard disks were able to hold more data, they became a viable solution to storing digital audio. Digital audio is very large: each monophonic track takes 5 megabytes of memory per minute. A typical ten-minute song consisting of eight tracks requires 400 megabytes of storage space. By today's standards that's not very much, but in the early 1990s most home computers shipped with 500-megabyte drives, total! As the computer grew in popularity and power, it became feasible for a computer with a simple audio interface to handle the demands of digital audio without the need for additional DSP cards. Computer recording software such as Cubase, Digital Performer, Sonar and Logic answered the call by providing MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) and digital audio in one package. Computer recording software is immensely popular because of its ease of use, relatively low cost, and the power of what you can achieve with just your home computer.
What does all this history mean for you and your home studio? Being able to layer track upon track is a critical part of the home studio experience, especially if you work alone. Many bands record albums one layer at a time for greater control.
When tape recording was first becoming prominent, all recordings were done live. All the sources converged onto one track of a magnetic tape. Because there was only one track, there was no way to adjust the individual levels of the recorded instruments after the initial recording. If you didn't get the balance right the first time, you had to record the entire track again. Overdubbing, the process of adding live tracks after the initial recording, was impossible because of the mechanics of early tape recorders. As time went on, tape recorders split the width of the tape up into smaller tracks, allowing for multiple tracks. In time, recording and playing back four or eight tracks became possible.
Les Paul's Innovations
Before jazz guitarist Les Paul came on the scene, overdubbing was virtually impossible. To understand the difficulty in overdubbing at that time, you first need to understand how the analog tape machine works. In an analog tape machine, three electric heads — the record head, playback head, and erase head — handle the recording process. The record head magnetizes the tape that flows beneath it; the playback head picks up the information from the tape and sends it out to the speakers; and the erase head erases the tape when necessary. The three heads are set up one after another, so that as the record head writes, the playback head picks up tape farther along in the recording. Because each head is reading a different part of the tape, they aren't synchronized. For overdubbing to work (such as layering guitar sounds one on top of another), the artist would need to listen to the previously recorded track to know when to start, when to pick up the tempo, etc…. Unfortunately, since the playback head is in a different spot than the record head, the recorded signal is out of sync; it plays back later than the artist played it.
Les Paul was a very innovative man. Not only did he invent the solid body electric guitar as we know it today, he also made overdubbing and multitrack recording possible. Paul had the idea to combine the record head and the playback head into one unit, allowing artists to overdub in real time with no delay.
Les Paul's records were revolutionary; no one had ever heard such a thick, lush sound. Based on Paul's discovery, the company Ampex released a 4-track recorder with Sel-Sync (Selective Synchronization) in 1955. However, while this innovation made overdubs possible, most bands still recorded live and used overdubs to add solos, harmony parts, or additional vocals.
How Multitrack Changed the World
Multitrack recording was the single most important innovation in audio recording. The ability to record instruments on individual tracks, have control of separate volume levels, and add other parts after the original recording, changed the recording process forever. No longer did you have to settle for a live take. If the singer was off, you could go back and re-record individual parts. Guitar players could layer acoustic guitar backgrounds with electric guitar rhythm parts. The possibilities were endless.
The number of tracks available increased over time. At first, the 4-track was common. The Beatles, for example, recorded “Strawberry Fields Forever” on two separate 4-track tape machines, for a total of eight tracks. Modern recordings can be twenty-four, forty-eight, or, in the case of computers, several hundred tracks. For you, the home-based musician, this process allows you to slowly build up arrangements one track at a time. You can start with a bass line, add a guitar part later, track some vocals later — all by your lonesome. The finished product will sound like one large, live band even though you played it all yourself.
But home studio owners aren't the only ones who work this way; Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails always multitracks. He records alone in his home studio, multitracking to build songs. Tom Scholz of the group Boston records the same way, playing each instrument one at a time.
Hey Everyone!
I just wanted to share some information with everyone. I know a lot of people wanted the old audio player back and we are in the process of having one built. It is being coded by the same person who coded the previous ones so it should have the same look and feel. He is going to start building it this week so hopefully in the next week or two we will be able to have that one back on the site.
On that same note, I have added in some code that will allow you to embed a playlist on any site. If you click your Playlist tab and you have an existing playlist, you will see a small link icon that will have the embed code. The player is the same one that appears on your page. So what this means is that if you want to embed your music on an external site, just go to your audio page and click the small music icon. Create a new playlist and then add each song to that playlist. You now have all of your music one one player.
I hope this helps!
Todd
February is the start of big things for me this year. February 8th and 9th, I will be in the studio recording the first of 2 love song CD's.
February 14th, I kick off the first of the Live music series at El Arroyo in Arlington, TX, with more dates being added in the coming months.
Also, my rock project, 5lb Piranha is on Spotify, Amazon, and I tunes - you can also download a song here as well as buy the whole CD.
Working up some cool logos for new merch as well. I hope to include shirts and stickers on here soon. #SuperTrashy #KABOOM, #Thunder Diva