Zone-Magazine-Wally-Lopez-Issue-040

Your Environment
The very first thing you would like to ensure are your
speakers are set up and positioned correctly. I talked about
this last month and gave a link to do so, however your room
might also have issues that will interfere when you produce.
For me, my most recent studio space (which is now my
Daughter's bedroom), was ridiculously bass heavy. I didn't
realise it at first but when testing mixes in different
environments, it really highlighted where my tracks needed
more bass, as I was always turning it down to compensate
here and as a result made for mixdowns needing more bass/
low end.
A very useful investment/tool for this if you have the
budget (and I know the article is called making music on a
budget!) is Sonarworks SoundID (https://
www.sonarworks.com/soundid-reference). This is a wonderful
bit of kit that you can place a microphone in the middle of your
room and it lets you know the response from over 30
measuremeants and gives you an EQ reading of your room, so
you can see where the areas are really heavy and lacking. It
then stores this as a preset and corrects it, that you can run in
your sequencer/DAW and have a true response of how your
mix should sound on speaker systems with a flat response.
There is a wonderful Oscilloscope plugin called Schulz
Audio's Oszillo's Mega Scope (https://schulz.audio/products/
oszillos-mega-scope/), which is currently at £69. This is also a
very beneficial tool no matter what sequencer you use, due to
the fact that you can place this on any audio or instrument
channel and you can visually see the impact of that channel on
your overall mix, highlighting which parts/colours are too loud
or too quiet in certain areas. This was a very much
unexpected and needed lifeline and I cover it in detail in my
reviews this month. Both this and Sonarworks/SoundID come
with a free trial so are worth trying before you consider
purchasing.
Next are a couple of free tools, first up is Voxengo's
Correlometer (https://www.voxengo.com/product/
correlometer/). This is a VST plugin, more information about
how to install that is in the below section. Correlometer is
great for showing the phase alignment of your tracks, and if a
track's signal is out of phase which will cause issues. A1
Stereo Control by Alex Hilton (https://a1audio.alexhilton.net/
a1stereocontrol) is another decent free tool, this gives you a
wide range of tools, to mute sections of your tracks, see how
they sound in mono and to enhance the stereo field. There is
also an option called Safe Bass where you can make anything
under a certain frequency mono, this is very useful for making
your kick and bass/low end sections of your mix warmer and
perceived to be tighter.
Finally is ASIO4All (https://asio4all.org/). This is a
universal windows audio driver, and has reduced latency and
helped reduce issues many times over the past 20+ years for
me making music. For a free tool it is highly worth a
download!
Setting Up Your Production Computer
I will try to keep this short, but an area I've hugely
neglected in making music since the turn of the millennium, is
I wish I backed up more music. Now I back up various
versions of projects, premasters, stems, samples, music files,
contracts, statements, the whole nine yards. I also keep
digital copies locally and on cloud storage.
I recommend purchasing a pro version of Dropbox
(https://www.dropbox.com/products?source=plans). This is a
cloud based storage platform that has been absolutely
phenomenal and offers you 2TB of space. This is far more
than I need for backing up but the transfer speeds and uptime
are second to none.
I would also recommend purchasing an external hard
drive, or my preferred choice a NAS Drive. There are very
suitable options but anything from 2-4TB upwards are your
best bet. You can transfer files anywhere and also keep back
ups of your dropbox folder. Since the last issue, box.co.uk has
sadly closed down but you can purchase NAS drives or external
hard drives in a caddy from Amazon or PC world.
Backing up is essential!
Installing Plugins & DAW Selection
If you followed the instructions last month, then
installing plugins should be a doddle. Depending on your PC
spec, I would recommend always sticking with the 64 Bit (and
where applicable specifically VST3 version) of plugins where
possible. These default into a folder on your computer if you
install the VST3 versions, however if this isn't an option then
install 64 bit versions in VST Plugins---->64 Bit directories as
specified last month.
If they are an older plug in that is only 32 Bit, then
this needs to go into VST Plugins---->32 Bit. Again each
plugin should go in it's own folder, so V-Station for instance I'd
install in 'VST Plugins\32 Bit\V-Station' or Spire I'd install in
'VST Plugins\64 Bit\Spire'
Once these are all installed, you can use JBridge to
conver the 32 bit plugins to 64 bit using a wrapper, and
installing them in the 64 bit Plugins directory. This is very
handy as some later sequencers/DAWs blacklist 32 bit plugins.
Now that I've covered that I am going to skim over
some DAWs of choice:
- Steinberg Cubase Pro 13 (https://www.steinberg.net/
cubase/) - I use this and have been using Cubase since 2000.
It is a very powerful tool and used by many artists such as
Ferry Corsten, Giuseppe Ottaviani and more. I would
recommend this, but it isn't an easy learn from scratch.
- Ableton Live (https://www.ableton.com/en/) - Again a very
powerful tool, used by many producers at the moment. If you
are starting from scratch I would recommend this as there is a
wealth of tutorials and Udemy courses out there.
- Renoise (https://www.renoise.com/) - This I use as well as
Cubase as it reminds me of my Amiga days learning how to
make music on trackers (I have a hardware Polyend Tracker
too). The sample manipulation is excellent. Working with
trackers is a really fun way to work and also there are free
versions.
There are others to mention too such as:
Fruity Loops / FL Studio (https://www.image-line.com/)
Studio One (https://www.presonus.com/en/studio-one.html)
Bitwig (https://www.bitwig.com/)
And there's a free sequencer on the Computer Music Magazine
Library I mentioned earlier too.
However I have been informed that I am holding up the
magazine by missing the deadline twice by writing this. Next
issue, more about plugins, samples and what to do once
you've finished a track!
Much love!
56 ZONE-MAGAZINE.EU