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 <strong>Magazine</strong> 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
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