Recent content by dkerwood

We're all talking about different things. If your sole goal is to keep sound from getting out (ie, you're drumming and you don't want the neighbors calling the cops), then you just need material. Some material works better than others, but all material will do SOMETHING to dampen the sound...

The plan eventually is to redo the garage and purpose-build a studio out there. The only issue with that is that I'd have to intentionally go out there to practice, rehearse, or record. Right now I walk past my studio 15 times a day and I'm likely to sit and play music any of those times!

I'm planning to set up a drum recording room in my basement (due to no room in my regular studio room). The basement stairs are around the corner from my studio desk, and the total run will probably be something like 30 or 40 feet once we get around the corner, down the stairs, and to the spot...

I did a lot of recording a couple of years ago, then we moved and my gear sat in storage for a long time. Finally have a band going again and we're getting ready to record a couple of tracks over Christmas break. Then Mother Nature dumped a ton of ice and snow on us, so I had 4 days of...

Getting ready to start working on my EP over Christmas break, but wanted to get back into the practice of recording and mixing, so I decided to throw together a few Christmas tracks on a snowy weekend. Here's the first tune, "Run Run Rudolph." Let me know what you think. Thanks...

I'm in the middle of an album project in my home studio, and I'm almost ready to begin recording the new songs. I've always done one song at a time as they are written, but this ends up with inconsistent sounds across the tracks. It's got me thinking about how to do this as a cohesive 10-12...

Here are the four quasi finished tracks... finished with the tracking at least. The Bon Jovi was the easiest to do, as it's the closest to my personal style; the King of Anything track was hardest as it was completely keyboard driven. Enjoy!

I'm a high school choir director and have a show choir performance coming up in a little over a week. Normally we have a live band backing the choir, but since this performance is so early in the school year, we haven't been able to get the band together. Thus, I sat down after church this...

Okay, so I wrote this song this morning and went to go do a scratch track on my laptop so I wouldn't forget melodies, chords, etc. Anyway, as I got it all out, I remembered that I hadn't really done any real recording on my new laptop- so the end result of the morning's work is this track. My...

Hey, all. I'm having a perplexing problem with my Yamaha UX16. I'm trying to play in some parts, and every once in a while the interface freaks out. It'll be triggering and recording fine, but then out of the blue it will start only catching every 6th or 10th or 15th note and sustaining that...

I direct a pops choir, and have been doing MIDI sequences for accompaniment tracks. I've had some good success routing the MIDI through a decent keyboard for better sounds, but it's a bit of a pain to haul around the keyboard all the time. Can anyone recommend a good sounding free (or super...

So I'm using a cheap Roland electric kit and am trying to sequence some drum tracks by playing them in through Sibelius 3. Using a Yamaha UX16 USB MIDI interface. Works without a hitch when using a regular MIDI keyboard, but having a couple of problems with the drum. First, drum notes are...

Ok, I know this probably isn't the place for this, but I don't know where it should go otherwise. If there's a better place, let me know and I'll take it there. I'm looking for a clip of someone manually cruising through FM stations before settling on one (good old fashioned FM dial). Think...

I finally got the first mix back on our EP from my engineer friend (he's a hobbyist as well). Still fighting the "wish I woulda done it myself" bug, if you know what I mean. :D Anyway, I sort of have my own ideas about these four tracks, but I'd like to hear your comments on them - to...

Our recording friend is now mixing down our NEW set of songs for our EP. The first go round, he didn't realize that he had a bad setting on his DAW, which rendered almost everything from that session useless. The good thing is that this time around, we really nailed the instrumentals and...