Everyone loves tips and tricks right? Well iZotope paired up with John Perry to show us all how iZotope Nectar and Nectar elements can be used in real world vocal tracking situations. Nectar is iZotope’s one stop solution to vocal processing. No more hunting through insert menus to find that perfect signal chain. iZotope has you covered, and with someone who has years of experience with vocals, you can’t miss this free video series.

 John Perry knows a thing or two about vocals. He sang with The Beatles on Hey Jude, and as a support singer, he has worked with Kiki Dee and Elton John, Roger Daltry of The Who, Leo Sayer, Elkie Brooks, Al Stewart, and many others. He knows that everything from mic placement to reverb settings can make or break the perfect vocal take. To get the best results, John likes to work with Nectar and Nectar Elements.

He now shares his knowlegde about best practices for getting the most out of your vocals. The 8 part Vocal Master Class at http://izotope.com/products/audio/nectar/protips.asp is the latest addition to iZotope’s Pro Tips.

For more info on Nectar and Nectar Elements, click HERE.
For the video master class, click HERE.

Ever wondered how Dubstep was made? Easy… Watch this informative new video. I’m pretty much convinced this is exactly how it goes.

Ok guys, you’re going to smack yourself right in the face when you see the solution to this one. Please place YouTube links to the video of this in the comments section. So your beats are too short and you need that Maschine Gun roll on the fourth bar. Well here’s how you fix it.

-In your main beat window, you have all of your info.

-Toward the bottom where your drum sounds are, you will see a very small option that says BAR LENGTH.

-From there you can click with the mouse and drug up to change the bar length.

Here’s a pic. I’ve chosen pink to show you where the bar length is, because… well you know… I’m calling you a girl.

Click to zoom the pic.

Hope this helps you guys.

OK so you’ve had Native Instruments Maschine for a while and you have upgraded to the new 1.7 update, but when you open it back up for the first time, everything is gone.

Don’t panic my friend, Everything Recording has got you covered. It’s a very easy fix to a problem that really should be there in the first place.

Simply go to the top of your screen where is says “Maschine” and go to “Preferences.” From there you can go to the tab that says, “Libraries” and click “Rescan.” Boom… you’re back to dropping those big booty beats.

Let’s be honest. I’m not always here all of the time to post how-to’s on various Pro Tools issues. I’m barely here to even post new gear updates as of lately but that should get better, but Pro Tools Expert is here to pick up the slack. Three of the biggest information sites for Pro Tools have merged to form one aggregate site for all of your Pro Tools needs.

Three of the world’s most visited Pro Tools sites, ProToolerBlog.com, The AIR Users Blog and Pro Tools For Media have entered into a strategic partnership to create a new online community ‘Pro Tools Expert’, that will create the biggest independent Pro Tools community on the web.

The aim of the partnership is to bring together their expertise and influence for the benefit of the Pro Tools Community in both music and post and to offer manufactures and distributors a single point of access to the huge community this will create.

AIR USERS BLOG
The Avid Pro Tools Blog and the AIR Users Blog, a huge community for users of Avid Pro Tools and AIR plug-ins. With over one million hits a year, we’ve grown to be the place to come for training, resources, tips tricks and news. We offer advice for users of HD, Native, LE and M-Powered. We’re independent and are not affiliated with Avid or their associated companies. We offer thousands of FREE samples and sounds and over 350 training videos in HD quality covering every aspect of Pro Tools.

PROTOOLER BLOG
ProToolerBlog is the largest website in the world dedicated to Pro Tools, save Avids own. We’ve been around for around four years and average two posts a day. ProToolerBlog is owned by Stefan Hedengren. The aim of this website is to bring you the fresh fruits of the Pro Tools and pro audio world. We update daily with news, tips, reviews, contests and topics to discuss. We try to satisfy both the high-end pro studio and the low-end project studio. Anything audio goes, but we are primarily focused on Pro Tools.

PRO TOOLS FOR MEDIA
Mike is Pro Tools genius and an award winning ‘audiomeister’, with over 30 years experience in the broadcast industry. Pro Tools For Media is his blog with the aim to bring the latest info on Pro Tools from a media and post perspective. We try to satisfy both the high-end pro facility and small scale ‘home-based’ setup alike but this site is not primarily music focused. Last but not least, Pro Tools for Media is not in any way affiliated with Avid or their partners.

Keep an eye on this site. It should be one of the most indispensable websites for any user of Pro Tools
http://pro-tools-expert.moonfruit.com/

Remember THIS review? Yea, I hope you own this plug-in by now. If not, GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW. These guys have seriously reinvented mastering compressors on top of making them useful for single tracks as well. Now they’ve made life even easier by giving us some of their tailored presets.

We have received quite some requests for presets ever since we have started to release our products as plugins. While discussing this at the Musikmesse 2011, sound designer and early elysia adopter Denis Goekdag kindly offered his support.

Denis started straight away and created ten presets for each of the four elysia plugins currently available. On top of this, we have added the suggested settings from the alpha compressor and mpressor manuals.
Of course these presets can only be starting points for your own explorations. Please keep in mind that especially the threshold and ratio values have to be adapted to your specific audio material…

To download the presets, click HERE. I already have and they’re really helpful starting points.

I don’t care how many millions of dollars in outboard gear you have and if you drank the blood of Chris Lord-Alge, but if you have poorly tuned drums, you can only go so far. Sure yes, there are plug-ins like Slate Digital Trigger, that will replace your drums for you but ask yourself this. Do you want to capture the drummer you are recording’s performance, or someone else’s. Ohhh someone elses, your drummer claims to be a human metronome but plays more like he has epilipsy? Well the just move on to the next post, but I must warn you, drums tuned right help!

Drummer Jonathan “Sugarfoot” Moffett is a living legend. A spectacular
performer, he’s best known for his 30 years with Michael Jackson and
also has worked extensively with such A-list stars as Elton John,
George Michael, Madonna, and Janet Jackson. Moffett is beloved for his
melodic drumming, based around huge kits. In order to do his musical
magic, he tunes his drums very carefully and with specific goals in mind.

Now you can learn to tune drums like Jonathan Moffett, thanks to a
free instructional video from PreSonus! Although Moffett uses a
PreSonus StudioLive 24.4.2 mixer, this is not a sales piece or product
demo; it’s simply a fascinating lesson in drum tuning from one of the
world’s great drummers, including brief but amazing performances.

Drum Tuning with Jonathan Moffett is a must-watch for every drummer,
drum tech, engineer, and producer. It’s available free on YouTube,
courtesy of PreSonus.

I’d post the video here, but my stupid WordPress is being an (Expletive) and won’t let me but HERE is this link.

UPDATE: This dude is nuts… It basically didn’t sound like music. It sounded like some dude with fancy Jazz hands playing different kicks. I see no music at all… This video is pretty useless… and this guy is a joke… Presonus makes videos like they make equipment… CRAP

Nowadays Cmd+X,C,V,Z just aren’t enough. You gotta know then other great shortcuts like cmd+a, Shift,cmd,N, and most importantly for the mac Command+Q, and for windows alt+F4.

I’m gonna wait a few minutes for all of the people who fell for that shortcut to get back after closing out their screen,

They didn’t come back? Oh well, if you can’t take a joke, you might not wanna be here.

This book is essential to the new and old Pro Tools users. I’ve been using Pro Tools now for about 10 years now and I’ve still barely scratched the surface. The great thing about Pro Tools is they’ve found out the perfect formula to allow newcomers to instantly record while also giving the seasoned vet the exact same interface but with all of the features as well.

Hal Leonard Books, the musician’s best source of books on the music business, audio technology, instrument history, and more, has published The Complete Pro Tools Shortcuts ($29.99) by Jose Chilitos Valenzuela. This second edition is newly revised and expanded with over 400 shortcuts for the latest versions of Pro Tools HD and LE.

The Complete Pro Tools Shortcuts is an indispensable guide that provides a complete list of shortcuts to help readers get the most out of Avid’s industry-leading digital-audio software in the fastest possible way. Each shortcut shows the key combinations needed to complete a given task and in what context the command is available, as well as other important features.

Since key command shortcuts exist to speed workflow, The Complete Pro Tools Shortcuts is designed to help readers find and use shortcuts quickly and easily. Readers can find shortcuts for specific tasks contained in a detailed table of contents divided into more than 60 sections, each pertaining to a section or workflow within Pro Tools. From there, each shortcut contains key commands for Mac and PC, multiple screen shots to help navigate the software, and notes and descriptions to help execute the shortcut task.

In addition to the latest keyboard commands, The Complete Pro Tools Shortcuts is packed with valuable tips culled from the author’s many years as a Pro Tools producer and instructor, making it a must-have aide for any Pro Tools-based studio.

The book is $29.99 and can be found HERE

Pro Tools 9 is a remarkable leap in Avid’s flagship DAW, but with the new advances come a little confusion and frustration, but FEAR NOT. My hardship is your gain. Is your 002, 003, or Mbox getting the awful error: “Pro Tools could not initialize the current playback device?” Its really annoying and it appears you are completely powerless because you can’t select any options to change anything so you’re stuck right??!!

Not necessarily.

What’s going on is your Pro Tools instance playback device isn’t matching the device settings stored. So how do you fix it?

Very simple. All you have to do is follow these instructions

1. Launch Pro Tools 9

2. When the splash screen appears on the screen, hold down the “n” key on your keyboard, which will eventually open the Playback Engine dialog for Pro Tools.

3. At the top of this window, you will see the ‘Current Engine’ drop-down menu.

4. Choose a different Engine (such as Pro Tools Aggregate I/O)

5. Click OK.

This should allow Pro Tools to launch.

Mac OS X Only

If the solution above fails, you can try deleting the “com.apple.audio.AggregateDevices.plist” preference on Mac OS X. You can find this preference file in the following location:

* Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences

 

If any of these don’t help your problem, you might want to try reinstalling or if you haven’t yet, installing the drivers.

You can find all the drivers HERE

Hope this helps

Oh crap!!! Its 3 days until Christmas and you KNOW that one family member is going to bring a complete stranger to Christmas and he’s not going to have anything open, which only adds more to the “awkward pie” of having some weird dressed musician sitting in the corner hanging all over your family member and then having every family member bring him up to you and say, “heyyyy this guy is a musician too.” Then you have sit there and have forced conversation about gear so you do the only thing you can to get out of it. You grab one of the millions of screaming kids running under you and run off yelling at their parents, “YOU NEED TO CHANGE THIS SMELLY KID.” So make this Christmas a little less awkward by buying something that will cover ALL musicians of almost any type, This Furman SS-6B power block. Odds are, he or she doesn’t have a power strip this nice to protect their home studio / guitar, keyboard, etc rig. $40 is a small price to pay to make the situation a little less awkward. And I promise you, I won’t be that weird musician at your house this year. I have a strict, “no major holidays” policy and plus, girls think I’m too attractive to approach.

To buy this ice-breaking gift, click HERE. Or you could just go to Urban Outfitters and get some skinny jeans and an ironic 80s T-shirt. Good grief musicians disgust me!

UPDATE: Think this musician is probably just the flavor of the month? Well buy them this, so you’re not putting too much money into this relationship. Save the fun stuff till next year if they show up. Either way, its not going to hurt you to have an extra power strip or instrument cable around. Lord knows yours are all worn out.