A good guideline was uploaded by Blue Cat Audio.

So what is M/S, what’s it good for and should you use it.

Let’s say you have a stereo signal. You want to enhance the stereo width without affecting the way your signal sounds in mono (this being regarded by some as a good indicator of correlation). With various short delays, you’re certain to succeed but may lose quality when listening in mono. This is where Mid/Side processing comes along.

The basic idea behind it all is this: you turn your stereo track into a Mid track and a Side track, hence the name. I think words don’t cover the concept as good as this:

Now you have two mono tracks which you can process separately. Notice that the Side cancels out if the master is to be converted into mono, thus preserving mono integrity. After you’ve processed these, you can turn them back into a single stereo signal just as simple:

(Thanks to hydrogenaudio for the schematics.)

As you can see, Mid/Side processing can be achieved in any DAW with basic I/O routing. You’ll probably wonder why are there dedicated M/S EQs and dynamics processors? Well, these plugins convert your stereo signal, process it and convert it back into stereo, thus being a lot faster and more convenient. But remember, Mid/Side processing is a technique, not a plugin.

Should you use M/S processing when submixing or mastering? It depends on the project. There is no definitive answer and no final technique for making something sound good, wide, narrow etc. You can always experiment with different approaches until you find the one that suits you best.

If you want to get started on M/S, you should try Voxengo’s MSED. It’s free!

That being said, if you’re a creative person and not just some copycat, you will generally want to avoid samples. There are several reasons:

1. Samples are usually ‘dedicated’ to sound good only in a certain way. They come in packs organized by Loops, Bass, Single drum hits, Arps etc. Normally, you can’t use these out of context, unless you chop them up, mangle, pitch shift, downsample etc. But if you’re going through all this trouble in the first place, why not just do it with your own material?

2. They make you sound like anyone else using them. If said sample is popular, through enough repetition, it actually becomes funny.

My purpose is not to bash sample library devs or people who use such samples creatively. I’m just sharing my personal view over the issue. The bottom line is that you should use whatever works for you, but if you find yourself spending more than 15 minutes trying to pick a snare, maybe you should rethink your method.

With all things considered, I fully support sample library developers such as Vienna Symphonic Library, LA Scoring Strings, Sonivox and others. Not everyone has an orchestra in their backyard and drafts can’t be made out of silence (unless your name is John Cage). Other sample libraries could come in handy, such as pianos, guitars, flutes etc. I’ll admit that there’s no way to go around this if you absolutely need such sounds.

But if you play a certain instrument, why not record it? You shouldn’t be shy. Play what you can play. Background noise and all. I won’t care. I love the sound of an intimate piano in the corner of a room, mic’d in such a way that you don’t hear high frequencies. Or a very old guitar, with spider webs inside. Or even a simple and cheap diatonic harmonica. Try to use what you have around you. It doesn’t matter which microphone. Experiment with pitch shifting, microtuning, layering, stretching, chopping, reversing, rearranging. If striking a pan with a specific pen makes the perfect drum sound for you, sample it, use it.

I hope this helped some of you surpass your moment of desperation. Sometimes, you need some time off all the $19.99 sample library offers. You deserve it.

In ancient Rome, the genius (plural genii) was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family (gens), or place (genius loci). The noun is related to the Latin verb gigno, genui, genitus, “to bring into being, create, produce.”

Now that’s an interesting thing because I witnessed this a couple of times. I normally keep all my gear in one place. I don’t travel a lot, meaning that I don’t need portable equipment. But when I do travel, I often find myself being inspired. It’s not as if I hear music in my head suddenly, since that happens all the time. On the contrary! Everything goes silent, I open up a sequencer and start throwing in sounds. No outboard, nothing. Just a laptop and headphones. I keep doing this for a few hours until my creativity begins to fade away. At this point, I’m almost done with all the major elements. This happens most of the times in which I’m (far) away from my studio. That’s not to say that I never get any inspiration while I’m in the studio, it just doesn’t happen that often. I’m still searching for possible explanations.

So what gets you inspired? What (or who) are your genii?

http://soundcloud.com/defyer/the-shimmer-dwells-within

I’ve been playing with this for a few hours and I have to say WOW. This is one of those specialized plugins which does a limited amount of things and does them best. This is Brian Eno in a virtual Box. If you’re into deep ambient, this is for you. Be creative with it. Experiment with different parameters, automate them (adjusting the size in real-time creates pitch-shifting!) This won’t replace decent IR packs replicating real spaces, it won’t replace complex algorithmic reverbs (which usually require loads of resources). Shimmer is unequaled in terms of sound. Perhaps you’ll be able to get there by owning a real Eventide 3000 or by designing a complex Reaktor patch.

Instant ambient bliss.

From my personal view, we’re still in a stage of transition from 32 bit to 64 bit and as long as you’re not a major film music producer or involved in working with high quality images or film, you don’t even have to worry about all the hassle for now. Most software right now is still under 32bit, and I’m not talking about VSTs necessarily. You’d be amazed at how few 64bit video players there are.

Now don’t get me wrong. You don’t really need every application to work under a 64 bit OS natively. I think there’s a lot of confusion on the matter, so let me clarify. A 64 bit OS CAN run 32 bit applications. It’s just that those applications won’t be able to take advantage of all those resources that you have. I’m currently writing from Google Chrome, which I’m sure you know, doesn’t have an x64 version (neither does Opera or Firefox as yet). OpenOffice is also for x86. Again, they run just fine.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but Windows 7 is actually good. I can keep the visuals high with minimum RAM loss. It has two “Program Files” folders, which may be confusing, but it’s actually very nice and intuitive. One is for native x64 applications and one is for x86 applications, indicated by brackets. All of your 32bit applications will be automatically installed here (and you should install your 32bit VSTs here as well).

So you see, as an average consumer, you’ll do just fine. But because you’re working on a 64bit OS (64bit processor and a lot of RAM), that means you’re not just an “average” consumer. You probably work in a special field with specialized applications. I can only vouch for my field (in which I’m an amateur). There are three important things you must check before deciding you want to go this path:

1. Sound card drivers. This is simply self-explanatory. Make sure that you choose or have chosen a soundcard that was created by some very responsive people willing to support its customers with all the drivers and beta drivers possible (I usually look around to see if they’re at least trying to offer drivers for Linux/Mac). Choose wisely.

2. Main DAW. Since we all tend to have our secret weapons (and I’ll probably reveal some sooner or later) made by lesser known developers with buggy interfaces and poor documentation and only in 32bit mode, and since a 32bit host can’t handle 64bit plugins, you’re left with few choices: either a) use a 32bit host to be able to run everything nicely (although I don’t see the point of having a 64bit OS with lots of memory if your DAW can’t use it all) or b) use a 64bit host with some kind of bridging system (that is, until every developer you support releases native 64bit versions of his plugins).

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Reaper currently has an inbuilt bridging system that worked on some of the plugins that I feared I was going to miss (SynthEdit creations, mainly). From what I know, only Reaper and Sonar have this feature (somebody better correct me on this). For everyone else, there’s a nifty inexpensive tool called jBridge that works pretty well from what I’ve read, with a few exceptions of course.

Currently, there are almost 400 plugins that work natively under 64bit hosts. I’ve compiled a special search on KVR here.

I haven’t had any trouble resuming my activity after this switch. I haven’t noticed any improvement in any real sense. I’m just glad I can undertake larger projects.

That’s about it for now. Good luck!

Edit: there’s been a lot of confusion with these bits. There are some DAWs that have “64bit internal mixing engine”. Many people ask whether they need a 64bit operating system to benefit from this. The answer is no. The DAW’s  mixing engine has nothing to do with the operating system’s architecture aka you won’t get better sound simply by changing the OS. You’re better off switching the microphones or the preamps, I’ll give you that.

2. OhmForce ALL-ALL – if you’re a student, you must be crazy to overlook this offer. Just look at the numbers: if you were to buy these plugins individually, it would cost you $600. If you buy the bundle you only have to pay $400. And if you’re a student, you get a 50% discount, so that’s an incredible $200. This is the most twisted set of effects you’ll ever find.

3. Voxengo plugins – you should try them out first. They are really for more advanced users. VariSaturator, Elephant, Voxformer and Pristine Space are a good place to start, along with all the useful freeware.

4. Stillwell and Schwa – these are the real value for money developers. The demos never expire and the sound never goes away. You’d be a fool not to try their plugins. I highly recommend Event Horizon, The Rocket, Olga, Oligarc, schOPE. They are extremely CPU efficient and pleasing to the eyes (but also ears!)

5. u-he Zebra 2.5 and Uhbik – the ultimate synth + effects combo. This needs absolutely no introduction. A sound designer’s wet dream, along with Komplete 6.

That should have you set for just about anything. And it doesn’t cost as much as a, say, a Virus TI.

Sorry for being away for so long. I’ve been busy with really important stuff for my personal life. I promise I’ll come back with a lot more and frequent updates.

Why Linux? Being a user myself and having some previous experience, I can safely say that generally Linux knows how to handle resources without pushing the system to a grinding halt. On the same hardware, almost invariably Linux ran smoother, regardless of the chosen window manager (Gnome, KDE, Xfce…even though the fastest I ever witnessed was fluxbox.)

Another good reason is the ability to do complex audio routing between applications using JACK Audio. From what I’ve read and experienced while testing different DAWs and reading various user responses, routing and flexibility are important elements to any DAW.

In many cases, if the application is written natively, it’s very stable.

What do we have so far? Ardour is a potential contender for virtually any Windows and Mac-based DAW. Of course, we all love our stretching and advanced editing features, but the important aspects developers need to solve right now are usability and the ability to do basic audio and MIDI editing. This will attract users which will contribute over time while requesting new features to be added, thus attracting more users etc.

Ardour is due to implement MIDI in the upcoming version. This is probably going to happen within the next few months. There are many people donating as much as $100 to see this implemented (by the way, did I mention that Ardour is free?)

There’s also Qtractor which somehow slipped right by me in the past. Feature-wise it sounds brilliant. It supports virtually everything needed so far. I highly recommend checking it out.

Also free and featuring MIDI is MusE. It has a pretty old looking interface (but so did Reaper not too long ago), but it’s pretty usable. Also usable is Rosegarden, which is the notation software to have under Linux.

Then there are the very good ones that have been ported, applicatons like energyXT and Renoise, which are quite powerful.

What about plugins? There’s an interesting site which shows you what VSTs are known to work under Linux, how stable are they and under which version of wine do they work.

There are also native LADSPA and LV2 plugins. Ardour.org has a decent list of tested ones.

The Linux Sampler Project should not be overlooked. It supports GIGA instruments quite well and it can import samples from the old Akai S1000/3000 etc. Plus, it has an easy to use interface.

The real issue is hardware and accessibility. In most cases, major audio interface devs will provide your basic Windows and Mac drivers. And that’s it. The Linux user either has to request it and wait 4 months or he has to write it himself. That’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it? And even if someone gets some piece of hardware to work, it either doesn’t support 96kHz, live monitoring doesn’t work, audio inputs can’t be detected and so on.

I’m pleased to see there’s a dedicated site for showing the audio interfaces that are known to work uner Linux. There’s also FFADO which is aiming to provide FireWire drivers.

I left out the most relevant part for last. Linux is not Windows. It’s a very well-documented article I urge you to read. Then there’s another issue: I did mention at the beginning that Linux is faster. I’m going to have to rectify that to Linux can be faster if you know what you want and how to get it. A few days ago I’ve  upgraded Kubuntu 8.04, which has been really stable, to 9.04, which began to be clunky, to 10.04 which completely obliterated any attempt to startx. That’s what always happened to any distro that I have had for more than a year. After being through this a few times, I know learned the what’s and how’s of it and how to fix it, albeit temporarily. Invariably, there are a few dependencies that were lost during the distro upgrade.

Bottom line: there’s no distro that will work for your hardware completely, no matter how many upgrades your distro undertakes. At one point, your distro won’t understand some piece of hardware from your system and things are gonna go haywire. If you want something truly stable, you have to make it stable. I know there are a few guides showing you how to optimize your Windows version for audio. Those are simple stuff compared to what you have to do in Linux. First of all, you have to optimize your OS for your hardware!

So any somewhat new or inexperienced Linux user will be quickly deterred after going through something as simple as an X failing to start (for those of you who don’t know, X is the main platform on which you load your window manager. Without it, you’re stuck with the classic command line.)

I don’t want to discourage any potential future Linux user. My past experiences have involved using Linux on a Netbook, and that has been known to cause some problems. I’ve seen very stable desktop setups. You just have to find what works for you.

With dedicated developers working hard to provide working DAWs and plugins under Linux, I can assume that this sleeping giant will slowly but surely awaken. There’s a current user base that will slowly grow in time. People, like myself, are willing to try out and learn new things.

I leave you at that and hope for the best.

I’ve followed some of his tips and I can safely say he knows what he’s talking about. Enjoy.

I think this bloke is pretty damn talented. Impressive use of the Korg Kaoss Pad (he has around 3 or 4 of those)

I don’t have much to say about this. This comparison only proves that:

1. FM8 is really close to the real thing.

2. The software certainly is cleaner: no dust accumulating or noisy outputs by which you could identify it in such “blind” tests.

3.  People will still say hardware is better when comparing individual patches, millisecond by millisecond but will probably get confused when trying to identify which is which from a dense mix.

Even though I’ve stated the above conclusions, I will still buy an original Yamaha FM synth because I care about my CPU and RAM and it will also have sentimental value.