Difference between head overdriven channel and distortion pedals.

Have you ever thought about why amp head has "overdrive" channel and pedal is named "distortion"? They are slightly different.

1) Amp head. Why do you hear this crunchy sound? (on tube amps, for example). Because you play notes with different volumes. And you just "push" a part of your signal over the "distortion point", which could be played by amp. So, your signal becomes cut (sine wave becomes edgy).

2) Pedals. In the first example "distortion point" was constant. But here we can just tweak "Gain" know and bake this "point" easier to reach. So your signal will be distorted more because you cut more signal. The more you cut, the more additional harmonics you will hear and sound will be more distorted.

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Happy New Year!

Now it's the time :)

Happy New Year, dear subscribers!

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Vocal recording tips and tricks

Hi again!

Today we gonna discuss vox recording.
There are lot of ways and techniques to record vocals. But here I'm gonna give you some advices for recording at all.

1) Think about genre. Do you prefer aggressive singing or yells? If you do then you should use dynamic microphone (firstly for home recording, there are lot of possibilities in studio). It's very hard to overloud this type of microphone. If you want to sing calm and intimate songs then it's better to use condenser microphone because it catches all nuances of your voice. But this type of microphones needs phantom power (+48 V) Take care about it.
2) Distance. There are two important rules at all:

• 1. If you want your vox to stay close to listener in your mix then sing closer to microphone. But try to avoid loud "p" and "sss" sounds.
• 2. If you want to make "wide vox" feeling thут try to stay a bit further from your mic (15-35 cm, individually). And sing loud :)
• 3. Plan the volume of your vocal passages. Stay close when you sing quietly and lean back when you want to shout. Don't let listener be badly amused :)

3) Effects. Do not apply any effects before recorder in your vocal chain. You could do it after recording. Your mixing will be much flexible if your vocals are pure dry :)

Wish you success. You may put links to your recordings below :)

__________
unLatem.

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The DAW of my choice. Discussing Reaper.

Hi again.
Today we're gonna talk about best (IMO) digital audio workstation called Reaper.

I used to use FL Studio as my main DAW. It has a lot of advantages but there are couple of dissapointments:
1) Appearance. Beautiful but hard and sumetimes unuseful interface (for instanse I want to open several plugins at the moment but they take a lot of workspace)
2) Pattern system. I don't usually do club or electro music so I don't need a lot of looping phrases in my mixes. And this option forces me to create new and new patterns. And it's getting boring.
3) System Requirements. It's easy to listen and mix light brojects. But If you want to use a lot of plugins hen get ready to get smashed (yes!) by memory lack. I have 2GB RAM and want to upgrade but at the moment it's hard to use FL for big projects.

And one day I discovered Reaper. Simple but very-very-very powerful program to record your songs and make them sound as good as you want them to! Here are some reasons why I prefer Reaper:
1) Usability. No patterns, no disturbing interface - everything is simple as possible! Playlist on the top, mixer on the bottom and nothing more that could make is look bulky.
2) Requirements. My track "Metal Factory" is the first song that was created by Reaper. It has 2 guitar tracks, kick, top snare, bottom snare, hi-hat, overheads, room and etc tracks. About 13 channels at all + master track. Every channel have inserts. And I mixed this song only in one session without any crashes, critical reboots and other. Stability - one of the greatest advantages of Reaper.
3) Price. Full version of FL costs $300. But full version of Reaper costs only $60. For better perfomance.
4) Comfortable Piano Roll. Not so important but very useful thing. You can tweak velocity or other parameters of note just by hovering your note and scrolling mouse wheel up or down.

But everything has "dark side of the moon".
For example I like Peavey ReValver MKIII.V VST Plugin for my guitars. But there are problems with it in Reaper. Plugin resets everytime when you open plugin window. So I just tweak my amp settings and never change them during current session.

I hope this article helped you a bit. Feel free to ask and comment!

_____

unLatem.

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"Metal Factory". Track presentation.

Hi there and it's me again.
Today I want to show you my track called "Metal Factory".
You can check it out here:

Now something about the structure of song:
Guitar:
Chain: DI->Revalver MKIII. Then I added some EQ. I know that sound isn't excellent but something is done. Also, guitars are double-tracked. Each speaker plays different guitar track.

You could check the links to full version of track in video's description.

_____
Artur.

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New Design!

I just have updated my blog. Do you like how it looks? :)

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Guitar Reincarnation

My friend gave me his guitar and I repaired it.
List of changes:
1) Singles=>Humbuckers
2) 0.09 => 0.11 inch strings
3) Measure tweak
4) Anchor tweak
5) Fingerboard cleaning
6) Strings height adjust.

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