I'm in the process of having my first LP record cut.  In the past, I've had 12" singles on other labels, but this time, I am seeing firrst hand what an in-depth process this is and why many labels want nothing to do with vinyl.  To me, this makes it even more special to be doing real records in 2009.  First of all, if you plan on doing a release both digitally and on wax, you have to submit two different masters.  While DIY mastering is possible in the digital domain to an extent, records can only be mastered by people with the right equipment and the right ears.  So, ...

There's sites popping up everyday that are trying to revolutionize the way music is heard/distributed/promoted/recorded/produced(indaba, anyone?).  Some of them are innovative and some of them are jumping on the band wagon to make a quick buck.  I'm def not feeling Sonic Bids - I think it's a scam and they're clearly all about making money and not about providing a quality service.  And of all demographics to rip off, none is broker or more vulnerable than the starving musician.  Shame on them.  Obviously, I'm into the way Indaba works and the new look & functional...

Alright, thanks for tuning in these last few months.  Coming soon is the first Vinyl Life remix contest on Indaba.  Check THIS SESSION where you can contribute your sounds and download the community's samples, including the ones I used to make "Like This".  This song will be on my next album and will also be released as a single on Tape Theory .  The winning remix will be on that single.  Let's do it. P.S. If you want to hear the album online, check out vinyllife.com to preview the whole album. No snippits. You heard it here first.    

It's usually the most obvious things that get over looked, right?  I had an epiphany after upgrading my studio a year ago that the most quintessential piece of studio gear, the mixing board, was my "secret weapon".  I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true.  Having better preamps and EQs opened up a new quality of sound that I have never achieved at home.  Other features like direct outs on every channel and six aux sends per channel also inspired some of my best work.  And analog summing is where it's at for me as well. The reason i bring this up is because I also...

  After about 3 years, I am putting the VERY final touches on the debut Vinyl Life artist album. These last two weeks have been especially intense: finishing "final" mixes for the 17th time, re-mastering tracks that were "done" 2 years ago, graphic design insanity, you name it.  My advice to anyone who is putting together an album is this: if you have a deadline, expect it to be days, weeks, or even months after the deadline for the project to be complete.  It's not everyday that you will pull thousands of dollars out of your pocket to make permenant all of your musical ideas fo...

In our first tutorial, we discussed layering sounds together. This time, we are going to perform real-time processing, knob turning, and tweaking to transform one sound into many.  The performance will be recorded, and the best stuff exported for future use. Once again, this will work for any setup, and we will discuss the hardware and software applications of this technique.  The following tutorial applies to the processing of a single drum sound.  Obviously, this can be done with any sample. The basic idea is to program a single sound to play steadily like a metronome.  S...

If you are not hip to this already, let me give you a very valuable and well known piece of advice: get a turntable.   Vinyl samples are some of the richest sound sources around.   They can be incredibly inexpensive, diverse and fun to dig for.   If you are a DJ and you don’t get your hands dirty in the dollar bin, shame on you.   Because it is time extensive to go through records for samples, sometimes it is helpful to load up folders on our hard drives or drum machine memory cards with a bunch of samples.   Get yourself a nice dusty crate of records and open up...

Thanks for the great response so far.  As a follow up to our first tutorial together, I have created a session where we can check out some of the sounds that everyone is coming up with.  Have you made any banging bass drums?  Upload them for us to hear.  I posted ten snares in which you can hear the changes as I worked with layering to create a variety of snares based on the same samples.  By creating a folder of sounds this way, picking material for your sampler will be easier and you'll have many original sounds at your fingertips.  When sequencing, use some sou...

We all have different studio setups based on preference, space, budget, and other factors.  If you don't have the gear or software we discuss here, figure out a way around it.  Getting buried under patch cables, real or virtual, is integral to exploring new sounds. I use the computer sometimes to create sounds for easy loading into my hardware sampler.  You may work on a cassette four-track and import into a software sampler.  If so, we want to hear about it and hear those sounds.   The fastest road to sounding unoriginal is to use manufacturer presets.  Gran...

Yes yes y'all. Thanks to Indaba Music for having me as their first Artist In Residence.   I love what Indaba represents and I hope to use this medium to create an environment for all musicians to learn about electronic music production, aesthetics, and concepts.   In this space you will find lessons, discussions, videos, sound files, and ideas.   We will go through a series of tutorials followed by collaborations.  Do you have interesting methods of crafting your sounds?  We want to hear about it. Yes, we are going to have fun.   Stay tuned. Tristram Cary's hand-b...