Mojo’s Pick of the Week – Musician’s Survival Guide to a Killer Record

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Mojo

The latest book by award winning producer, mixer, and recording engineer Eric Sarafin (aka Mixerman) is hot off the presses and already stirring up controversy in the indie recording world. His hold-no-punches style is frankly a refreshing change in a sea of know-it-all experts that offer endless tail-chasing advice on how to record, mix, and write music at home.

What his new book “Musician’s Survival Guide to a Killer Record” does best is tell you how to get out of your own way and learn to enjoy the process of making music again. In other words, you don’t need to know everything there is to know about recording and mixing, just use what you have and make the music that stokes your own fire.

Along the way, he lays out all the basic info you need to buy and use recording gear, audio software, and even how to record and mix unusual instruments. There is recording advice, production advice, mixing advice, but above all, the means to get back to focusing on the fun part, making music. Recommended for struggling indie musicians.

Buy it here on amazon

Mixerman on the net
https://mixerman.net/
https://twitter.com/Mixerman
https://www.facebook.com/mixerman/

Eric’s discography

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Mojo’s Pick of the Week – TDR Nova Dynamic EQ

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Mojo

It’s one of those things that I knew was over my head when I first downloaded it, and now that I know a little bit more about what the hell I’m doing, I happily remembered that I already had this tool in my arsenal to fix some tricky mastering EQ problems.

What Nova basically is, is a multiband parallel dynamic EQ with optional high pass filter and low pass filter. So instead of picking an EQ band that is problematic and adjusting it once for the whole track, you can quickly and intuitively dial in dynamically responsive EQ taming or boosting.

What a bonus for, say, mastering, where you don’t want to affect the whole song, just the spots that need some EQ adjustment as they arise. It’s extremely easy to use, very responsive, and extremely transparent sounding. It does way more than that, including acting as separate EQ and compressor, but that’s the basic use case.

The original Nova plugin was called Nova 76 and was written by the amazing Vladislav Goncharov of Molot and Limiter No 6 fame… for a CONTEST. So he released it free, with a very basic UI Even as I downloaded it years ago I knew that even the concept was over my head at the time, but I trusted it would come in handy someday.

Vladislav’s partnership with Tokyo Dawn Labs has resulted in a new, slick, and very intuitive update to Nova called TDR Nova, sporting much the same look as Slick EQ and the Kotelnikov compressor (also both free, and both great).

Features:

4 band parallel equalizer with auto-gain.
Optional high-pass and low-pass filters.
Full-band frequency dependent and/or split-band compression.
External side-chain support.
64-bit internal processing.

And, did I mention that the basic version is free? I highly recommend all of Vladislav’s plugins and all of Tokyo Dawn Labs plugins as well. Glad to have this one in my bag of tricks.

Tokyo Dawn Labs
Vladislav Goncharov / Vladg

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Mojo’s Pick of the Week – Logic Pro X 10.3

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Mojo

My pick of the week is the latest, greatest version of Apple’s digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X 10.3. This is no minor point release, but an overhaul of an already world-class DAW. You must have OS version El Capitan (10.11) or greater to install it, but reluctant as I was to leave the comfort of 10.9, even that upgrade was a performance bonus.

The actual list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in 10.3 is so long I’m not even going to try to cover more than a few standouts. The full release notes are here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203718

Some of the more obvious changes are with the UI itself.

The colors are different – the background is lightened from the bold darkness of 10.2, it’s now somewhere between the look of v9 and X. This is to make it easier to see in different lighting conditions.

And the buttons and tools all have a simplified 2d look that goes along with the aesthetic of the last couple OS versions. The whole thing is very responsive and slick.

My personal favorite changes in 10.3:

When you move the ends of a region, a ghost region appears so you can better see where you are in the audio file waveform.

There is a new standalone loudness meter that measures in LUFS (Loudness Units).

The cursor icon now changes more obviously and intuitively for the different selected tools.

You now get the choice of stereo vs dual mono in each stereo track, and true stereo panning. (What was it before? I don’t even know!)

Less obvious changes:

Faster startup and shutdown times
Less unexpected quitting when switching between projects
Touch bar support for the latest MacBook Pros
64-bit summing engine and support for 256 busses per project
Ability to process clips separately within the same audio track

Bottom Line

If you have OS X 10.11 or higher, this is a great update to a great DAW. And if you don’t, I recommend updating. My mid-2012 MBP is so much happier with El Capitan, and so am I. And though I’m not 100% thrilled to be re-re-learning my daily use DAW, I’m loving the new features so far.

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