09/24/2008 - Touring can appear to be the pinnacle of achievement for an artist. Others know it's not so glamorous. Lavish tour buses, parties, and exotic traveling is usually a cramped back seat, exhausting nights after a long set with sound problems, or getting left at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere. And if you're a one-man-band, like No One Conquered, Wyoming's Israel Cilio, you may just find yourself alone with a broken radio and nail polish remover in your gas tank to improve the mileage of your forest green Subaru Impreza as you drive to your next unpaid gig. But there are ways to make touring less painful ...
Articles
2008
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09/09/2008 - Good music won't get you noticed if you don't get the word out. With modern technology's grace of easy home recording techniques, there's been musicians all over the world writing potential hits, but if no one hears them then the music remains confined to the studio. Half of having a successful band is marketing yourself: spreading the word about your music so you can reach a bigger audience, get bigger shows and make more money. So put down your instrument and get on your computer, it's time to start marketing ... -
08/29/2008 - If you multiply the number of musical instruments, mics, amps, bundles of cables, and merch you tour with by the number of cities you'll be visiting, you may be faced with an outrageous number. That is, the number of possibilities that your music equipment could be broken, stolen, sat-upon, tinkered-with, or molested in any number of ways. So to aid in the protection of your gear, here are a couple of precautions you can take when traveling with or shipping your precious equipment ... -
08/05/2008 - Vocabulary. It's one of those things we don't usually think about once the quizzes stop in high school. And we are relatively content until someone says a word we don't understand – suddenly there is a tingle of embarrassment, a moment of insecurity. If you're new to recording lingo and entering the music industry, this is a sensation you are either going to have to grow accustom to, or you're just going to have to learn what VSTs and MIDI controllers are ... -
08/04/2008 - Unless you do it for a living, mastering can be something of a mystery, and with good reason. The three main steps in recording a track are recording, mixing, and mastering. Recording is easy enough to understand – you make noise and through the magic of technology it is saved, in some form, to listen to again and again. Mixing is taking all the separate components that build your recording and layering them until the song, or whole album, is as close to perfect as possible ... -
07/17/2008 - Music sampling is the act of taking a segment of a recorded sound and using it as means of instrumentation or reproduction. The type of sample itself can range from a sampled drum loop, to a person's voice, to random sounds of any nature. The boundaries of sampling are virtually limitless, as anything that produces audible sound can be used as a sample ... -
07/09/2008 - The Effects Dictionary is a quick source to learn about effects such as: bitcrusher, chorus, distortion, noise gate and many more ... -
07/03/2008 - While the trials and tribulations of recording should lie in the creation of your opus, they often start with figuring out what you need to set up your home studio. This is a quick guide to get you started ... -
06/19/2008 - Since the creation of the guitar amplifier, the quality of sound has evolved through several technological advancements. Among those advancements is the transition from the old school vintage tube amps (or valve amps) to the more advanced, solid-state amps ... -
06/10/2008 - As progressively more music is produced digitally, MIDI equipment has become a standard, even a necessity. MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is a means of sending digital information from one electronic device to another. For example, sending music from a keyboard to a computer for recording ... -
06/04/2008 - Whether you are setting up a home studio for your professional career or pushing your new twin-sized bed up against the wall to squeeze more room for your band’s new practice space, there's no getting around figuring out where cables go, what they do, and how long they should be, and finding the correct cable material to purchase ... -
06/01/2008 - A synthesizer is an electronic instrument that creates different electronically produced audible tones, most of which are manipulatable by the user via control devices ...