mrclay.rg

Wedding Mixes: Moose

Moose “This River Never Will Run Dry” [marry in the morning mix] In this mix: More balanced volume across the song (you can hear the intro without having to turn it down several times later). This is a simple volume envelope, so it didn’t squash the dynamics any more that they were already. Shortened outro

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Less is More: Billie Davis 1969

“Nobody’s Home to Go Home To” was a 1969 B-side for Billie Davis that I have a weakness for. The bass playing is incredible and the song cleverly jumps between three keys, but the strings and backing vocals kind of take over the recording. I noticed this morning that they’re both panned hard right and the

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Five years later a “new” French Horns recording

In 2005 I wrote a vocal melody and lyrics on top of a blissy keyboard instrumental by Slavagoh. I really liked the repeating three chord progression and had planned to incorporate his recording into the French Horns demo, but decided to keep it minimal. I kinda had always regretted that, so five years later I

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Fire Jimi

Flipping through the radio I heard “Fire” and thought, “could I get this without guitar?” Of course, the answer is yes. And I like it.

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Polyphonic pitch adjustment is born

Aside from the horrors of Auto-tune, the tool changed the state-of-the-art dealing with monophonic sound. Well, competitor product Melodyne will soon be able to apply pitch adjustment to polyphonic sound. This is huge. Huge. The amazing video shows this advance and a taste of the amazing power this will bring to recordists. About 2/3rds way

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Please no more Red Book CDs

The Red Book standard defined how audio was to be encoded on a CD, and it was great for 1980, but it, well, kinda sucks now. 1. The error correction is too minimal to withstand real-world abuse (cars, friends, etc.). 2. Tracking is pretty loose, and a lot of players have trouble seeking to the

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Audacity failing the audition

As much I want to root for Audacity for being an open source and multi-platform multitrack recording solution, it’s just not there yet. I set it up for my coworker to record lectures and, even in this light-duty (mono 44.1 recording, nothing fancy), after about 10 min of material the program starts to sputter and

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Malmö Gearlust

I’m totally spoiled having a big back room dedicated to making and recording music, but sometimes you can still dream. Check out this amazing pic of the “Mothership”[1] in Sweden’s Gula Studion. Gula was built as a sister studio to the perhaps more famous Tambourine Studios, birthplace of most Cardigans and Eggstone albums. More than

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