I found a list of 10 great tips in an unexpected place – Wikihow. Wikihow is a collaborative site with how-to manuals on almost every subject, including writing thrash riffs apparently. The tips are simple but really very good and most of them can be applied to writing music in general. Here’s the list in […]
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Palm muting is really essential to most metal genres, and fast alt.picked palm muting even more so. I’ve really put time into my alt picking – practicing slowly with a metronome at first – really aiming at getting a consistent sound between upstrokes and downstrokes, and getting a good chug out of each note. It’s […]
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Have you been practising your scales, your picking and your bends like crazy and your solos are still crap? I know mine are… I found a post on guitar blog Guitar Noise that is really on to something. The answer is phrasing – the division of a solo into small parts, alternating between fast and […]
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I said on a guitarist forum that Reaper is really easy to get started with. One member didn’t really agree and challenged me to make a tutorial to prove it, so – here it is! My first video tutorial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOdHnhd-sHM The tutorial covers really basic stuff and only assumes that you have installed Reaper on […]
Read more Last week the editors of Audio Geek Zine, SoundHow and DIY Recording Equipment posted almost 100 tips and tricks for my favorite DAW Reaper. A few samples: #REAPER tip: The Dynamic Split function can be used to chop up media at transients, remove silence and turn audio to MIDI #REAPER tip: Every media item has […]
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I get this question a lot – how do you get started playing guitar? Learn From the Best Well, I’m clearly no expert – I didn’t really get started until I was 33. Luckily, there are numerous experts. One of the best is Justin Sandercoe, an Aussie living in London. His site, www.justinguitar.com, is one […]
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As I’ve blogged about before, there are some really good amplifier simulators available as VST plugins. Leader of the pack is LePou’s virtual Rectifier, Soldano and Engl. If you have two or four rhythm tracks, making the same adjustments to all tracks or copying the plugins between them rapidly becomes very tedious. If in Reaper […]
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My summer reading is not a crime novel this year, it’s a fantastic book on mixing using Reaper: ReaMix – Breaking the Barriers with Reaper. The large focus is on doing things in a methodical way, following a well-defined process. The first eye-opener for me is to do what the author calls pre-mix corrections. This […]
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Peter Hodgson at the I Heart Guitar blog has written a guest post for Gibson.com on how to get started on playing seven string guitars. What’s interesting about it is that it’s not just “let’s play the same but lower”, it is more of insights into how you can use the extra string to extend […]
Read more Now that we know there’s a way to emulate monitor output in rooms when mixing, wouldn’t it be cool if you could add room simulation to the cabinet or cabinet simulation you are using? Well, you can – using impulse responses. An impulse response is the recording of a special kind of sound – a […]
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