Reviews
Review: JBL Professional 308P MkII
An Upgrade to One of the Best Values on the Monitor Market
Mike Levine, Mix Technical Editor-Studio, has been a music-technology journalist for over 20 years. The former editor of Electronic Musician and Onstage magazines, he was also the US editor for the Paris-based music-technology site, Audiofanzine. You’ll also find his writing on pureMix.net, the Yamaha Music blog (the Hub), Waves.com, the Universal Audio blog, Sound on Sound, Popular Science and ask.audio. Levine is a professional musician, producer and composer. He’s written music for TV shows on CNN, the History Channel and A&E and TV commercials for Advil, Days Inn, Lysol and more. He played in Broadway and Off-Broadway pit bands, on numerous sessions on guitar, pedal steel and dobro, and engineered and mixed countless projects. Check out his music at michaelwilliamlevine.com and his writing at mikelevine.journoportfolio.com.
New Products
Product of the Week: Apogee FX Rack Plug-Ins
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Apogee? Hardware, right? That was certainly my mindset when I walked into...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: What’s in Your Archive?
I was too busy looking at new products to attend many panel discussions at the recent AES Convention, but one I did get to...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: AES 2018—Let the Games Begin
The AES Convention starts tomorrow, and it’s the organization’s 145th International Pro Audio Convention. No, that doesn’t mean that the first AES show was...
New Products
Product of the Week: Celemony Melodyne 4.2 With Logic Pro X Support
If you’re a user of Celemony Melodyne 4 who works in Logic Pro X, the newly released Melodyne 4.2, provides a significantly improved workflow...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Tick Tock and Gridlock
Click tracks are a given in electronic and other loop-based music styles, but when recording with live musicians, they can sometimes be more trouble...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Two for One?
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you spend countless hours working in your digital audio workstation and countless applications. As you know very...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: We’re All Gonna DI
As you probably noticed from the photo that appears most weeks along with this blog, I’m a guitar player. So you won’t be particularly...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Truly Mobile
The idea of being able to record anywhere is compelling. Whether you do field recording or just want to be able to work on...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Farewell to Noise
Recently, two innovative noise-reduction plug-ins, Audionamix IDC (Instant Dialogue Cleaner) and McDSP NR800, have hit the market. Though quite different in design and application,...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Residual Knowledge
Recently, a fledgling twenty-something composer named Darren visited an old-folks home outside of New York City to talk to a man we’ll call Grandpa,...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Cool Plug-Ins from the Land of the Euro
There’s no shortage of music-software developers out there, and sometimes because of the glut of companies, it’s hard to keep up with them all....
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Mixing on the Long and Winding Road
For me, mixing is the most fascinating, challenging and rewarding part of the music production process. It’s like a long, multifaceted story that unfolds...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Yo, Merge This!
For a long time there were rumors about Apple wanting to eventually merge iOS and Mac. There have been some developments in that direction,...
Blog
Conjuring Up a Dead Session
I had an interesting lesson this week in why it’s important to do more than just hit Save—or even hit Save and make a...
Blog
The Digital Tail Wagging the Vintage Dog
For many recording musicians and home-studio engineers in the digital age, the sound and behavior of vintage hardware is defined largely by digital emulations...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Test Your Gear Obsession
Have you ever wondered if your love of audio gear goes beyond just normal professional curiosity? Could you be… gear-obsessed? It’s a serious condition...
Blog
The Silicon Mic Locker
It strikes me as a wee bit odd that last week in this space I was talking about commercial studios with real consoles and...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Survival Strategy—Move to the Suburbs
It certainly won’t come as news to you as a Mix reader that the commercial studio industry has dwindled over the last 20 years...
Blog
The Creative-Control Conundrum
When mixing your own music in your own studio, you have complete creative control. You can experiment with different ideas, try weird stuff and...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Sweating the Details
DAWs are incredible pieces of technology, combining most of the functions of a hardware-based recording studio into a single piece of über-software. If you...
Reviews
Review: Steinberg UR-RT4
Flagship of a new I/O line in collaboration with Rupert Neve Designs
Blog
Working Without a Net Is Becoming Passe
Infocomm 2018 takes place this week in Las Vegas, and there will be plenty of talk on the show floor about AOIP (audio over...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: “Fade” Accompli
The Fade-out. It was once ubiquitous and is now almost as rare as a whooping crane, a snow leopard, or even a large-antlered muntjac....
Blog
Is Your EQ Smarter Than You?
Music software is getting smarter. Several developers now offer processors that analyze your audio using artificial intelligence and offer suggestions for settings. Other software...
Blog
Mix Blog Studio: Loops Don’t Improvise
I was recently asked to perform, along with some other artists, at a memorial concert for a folk singer. The day of the show,...
Blog
Don’t Get Down About Downtime
If you rely on your studio for all or some of your income, odds are that you’re going to have downtime. It’s a reality...
Blog
Mix Studio Blog: Hear Today, Not Tomorrow
Forget about pork bellies or soybean futures; a great long-term investment might be to buy stock in hearing aid manufacturers. Why? Because a whole...
Blog
Mix Studio Blog: Dour DAWs and Dracula
If you’re working in music production or post-production, you probably spend more time staring at your screen than you do hanging out with your...
Blog
Mix Studio Blog: Can’t See the Forest for the Digital Trees
When it comes to audio processing, we’re in a golden age. We have plug-ins available that can get inside of polyphonic audio and edit...
Blog
Mix Studio Blog: To Subscribe, Or Not To Subscribe
From what I’ve observed, musicians and engineers who are accustomed to purchasing their music software find the idea of renting it (aka “subscribing”) to...
Blog
Mix Studio: Allow Me to Introduce Myself
New Weekly Blog on Recording and Production, With Mike Levine
2017
A Salute To Leonard Cohen
The setting: Toronto’s Luminato art festival. The venue: a gigantic, long-disused industrial building called The Hearn Generating Station. The performers: Rufus Wainwright and 1,500...
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