Mixing / Production

It's often necessary to work on headphones in the home studio, even when mixing. So what headphones should you choose, and how do you go about getting the best results?

If you play live regularly, sooner or later someone will suggest that you use a backing track on stage to enhance your performance. So here's how to go about creating them, based on experience learned the hard way!

Thinking of taking your carefully-crafted studio creations to the masses? Here are some pointers to make sure your sound survives the transition to the live arena.

For the 2002 album Heathen, David Bowie and Tony Visconti revived one of the greatest artist/producer partnerships in pop history. Following the success of that project, the duo have again worked closely together on Bowie's new album, Reality.

A new generation of vocal processors, and a new generation of engineers, confront the possibilities and ethics of digital vocal manipulation.

SOS reviewers often mention their test or reference CDs — compilations of what they feel to be well-mixed, well-recorded audio, which they use to evaluate converters, monitors, and so on. But how do you go about making one yourself? We reveal all...

"When we originally mixed Avalon in stereo, I was thinking that it should be in surround,"says Bob Clearmountain. Twenty-one years on, he and producer Rhett Davies describe how they first made Roxy Music's classic album and how they finally got the chance to mix it in 5.1.

It seems that almost everyone who's heard Goldfrapp's debut album Felt Mountain has fallen under their spell. Now the duo have returned with a second, Black Cherry, and a harder, synth-based sound.

Although delay can be one of the most simple studio effects, software delay plug-ins often provide a bewildering array of options. So we take a look at what all the sliders and switches do, and provide advice on how best to use them.

Reverb is vital for most types of modern music production, so it's no surprise to find that many sequencers provide a variety of reverb plug-ins. But what do all those different parameters do?

The SOS team battles through snowdrifts to help Nick Redman and Mike Sinnott with two different vocal sounds.

All of the main MIDI + Audio sequencers now have a bewildering array of compression and limiting plug-ins built in, but many home musicians are unclear about what all those controls and options do. And with so many varieties of each plug-in available, which one should you choose for the job in hand?

Jack Wall is a leading light in the video game soundtrack industry, where his credits include the latest chapter in the best-selling Myst series of computer games.