Its been a crazy 5 year ride living in London and I have met many amazing people who have helped me grow but all good things must come to an end. So after two years of posting an episode every week I am taking a long holiday and traveling through south east Asia for four months before returning home to New Zealand to follow my dreams. Dont worry though The DSP Project will be coming back via New Zealand next year and if you haven’t been following along there are now 85 previous episodes for you to check out. So this last video is just a thank you to some of the people that have helped me and we finally give away the TC Electronic Impact Twin.

A huge thank you to all who have watched and supported the show, without you none of this would of been possible. And I look forward to bring you new things in 2012!

After the mixing better bass episode I had a few people ask how to get a good sub, so this week I will show you how easy it can be. If you combine this tutorial with the aforementioned episode you will be shaking windows in no time. Although I also touch on the idea that its not always just pure SPL we should be considering when designing the bottom end, just because you might not hear it doesn’t mean you cant FEEL a more interesting texture.

Last year we had our 2010 studio headphone shoot out consisting of 5 of the most popular brands of closed back circumaural studio headphones. To our surprise Shure won taking out brands that have been in the headphone game a lot longer and costing more (I ended up buying a pair for myself). So I was excited to find out they have released a new flagship model the SRH940 I decided to see how it stacked up against last years winner.

The Sonnox SuprEsser is a fully featured de-Esser and Dynamic EQ. Part of what makes it so attractive besides its transparent sound is the vast amount of visual feedback allowing you to quickly lock in on the exact offending frequencies. I took it for a test drive.

Dont forget to enter our competition to win a TC Electronic Impact Twin!

This week a review and give away!
We will be taking a close look at the Impact Twin firewire audio interface made by TC Electronic.

I have very few “rules” that I follow on every track in fact I can only think of two: Dont clip (but even I will break this on occasion for certain creative purposes) and the tip that I am going to share with you this week. It is easy to do but can have a HUGE impact on the power and clarity of your mixes.

You can find Prism Sound converters in most of the big name professional mastering and recording studios here in London so its fair to say I was pretty excited when the courier delivered to me Prim’s premium quality firewire audio interface the Orpheus. Not wanting to make life too easy for it I put it up against Bryston’s DBA-1 to see if the Digital to Analog conversion was as good as everybody says.

Sonnox’s Inflator is an interesting mix of perceived loudness enhancement without compression via what I suspect is tricky harmonic excitement mixed with emulated valve over drive. The ability to increase perceived loudness with out damaging transients is an exciting prospect for any mastering engineer so I was keen to try it out. This week we explore what its capable of as a creative tool in production on a single channel and in mastering over a complete mix.

This week we take time to listen to some of the entries from our fellow DSP viewers and find the new intro for The DSP Project, it was cool to see entries come in from all over the globe. Congratulations to the winner who will be taking home a brand new Launchpad to mashup Ableton Live until his heart is content. And a BIG thank you to the dudes at Novation for putting up the prize.

The original Jupiter 8 was an 8 voice polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizer released by Roland in 1981 responsible many classic 80′s tracks. Arturia have had a crack at recreating this iconic synth in plugin format. I was going to playing some samples but wanted to get you a bit closer so we are going to quickly walk through the original interface and the extras goodies Arturia have added. Sorry there aren’t more audio examples but this episode was already way too long!

Disclaimer: This is no way a complete walk through, please dont get upset because I missed out X function. I know I missed out X function.

Interested to hear what you guys prefer in a review a detailed walk through like this, or more audio examples & over view approach?

The BMC-2 is a monitor controller and DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) with a headphone output rolled up into one neat desktop unit. I decided to test it out against the standard DAC in an edirol UA-101 interface and the considerably more expensive DAC in the Prism Orpheus to see what it could do.

The Finger is an effects plugin that is specifically designed for live performance by Tim Exile himself. Built on Native Instruments Reaktor I was keen to get stuck in to it.

This week I release the details on an exciting new comp, giving you a chance to win a brand new Novation Launchpad.

Continuing on with part 2/2 of our review of the Primacoustic London 12a I decided to take some acoustic measurements to find out how much of a difference the panels actually made.

It was time to upgrade my home made acoustic solution to something a bit more profesional, so I gave the guys at Primacoustic a call and arranged a London 12 kit to be sent out to me. This week week I am going to walk you through the install first hand. Next week we are going to measure the acoustics before and after the install to see what was really going on in my room.

I have been playing with the Novation ZeRO SL MkII for awhile and it is a very capable controller. Its rare that a controller allows me to do something new but ZeRO SL has done just this. Thanks to the LCD screen and Automap 3 for the first time I mastered a complete track in the box with my monitor turned off. While admittedly the first time round I wasn’t as fast as with a mouse but I think eliminating the distraction of visual feedback forced me to focus more intensely on the audio at hand.

Automating volume in Live is easy. Mixing down a project afterward is not as easy. In this video I will show you the right way to add volume automation and if you have already recorded automation onto the channel faders how to keep that automation and free up the faders for mixing duties. Another important note about this method is the device must be at the end of your fx chain.

Part 2 of Mike Hillier showing us how he approaches mixing down a real drum kit. While he is using Pro Tools most of the mixing techniques can be used in any DAW.

Mike Hillier is a professional mix engineer and journalist, if you want to know more about Mike check out :

The DSP Project interview with Mike Hillier

Mike on Twitter

Mike’s site

Mike Hillier is THE Pro Tools guy for MusicTech magazine so I was thrilled when he agreed to show us how he approaches mixing down a real drum kit. While he is using Pro Tools most of the mixing techniques can be used in any DAW. Part 2 next week.

Mike Hillier is a professional mix engineer and journalist, if you want to know more about Mike check out :

The DSP Project interview with Mike Hillier

Mike on Twitter

Mike’s site

The TC Electronics Level Pilot is a balanced passive volume control that sits between your audio interface and monitors. But why would you need this when your interface already has a volume control?

Also I got the new final cut this week, not happy / sorry about the doggie edits.

Kraag Wainstein asks “how do i get led feedback for parameters eg. wet/dry ?????” Getting LED feedback for a parameter range i.e. mapping a row of pads to a knob or crossfader is not something the Launchpad is designed to do… But that doesn’t mean you cant do it! While the solution I present this week is a bit of a hack and limited in some respects it is an answer to get that precious feedback that can help us get away from the dreaded laptop screen while performing.

Enjoy.

Amplitube 3 by IK Multimedia is a guitar and bass cabinet simulator I have had for awhile now. But what would a guy who cant play guitar out of a paper bag want with a guitar rig plugin? Well turns out you don’t need to rock an axe to find a lot of useful applications for this bad boy. In this review / tutorial I will walk you through the interface and give you demos of my application. You guys have asked for more audio samples in previous reviews so this time I will let you have a good listen for yourself, demonstrating 1000 presets (almost).

The first guitar loop used in the tutorial part is from Loopmasters Rock hip hop guitar and bass

The drum and bass samples are all from Loopmasters (sweet) Ray Keith orignial drum and bass vol 1 pack

In the final episode in our Studio Monitor series I will be reviewing my new PMC TB2S-AII also we will finally be giving away the Primacoustic prize to some lucky human. You will probably notice a fair few edits this week as I ranted on way too much while recording.

This week I share my top 12 tips for studio monitor positioning. You might be surprised by the improvement in sound that can be gained by a little bit of adjustment and testing to find the best placement. The best part about all these tips is they are all free and you can try them out right now. Even if you have had your monitors a long time proper setup is a must!

In Part 2 of our interview with Peter Thomas (chief designer and founder of PMC) we continue our talk on speaker design including materials used by other manufactures. We break news of PMCs new warranty and find out about the next generation of PMC monitors nobody else knows about yet!

Peter Thomas is the chief designer and founder of PMC, so its fair to say he knows a thing or two about studio monitors. Even though jet lagged from a long tour of Asia Peter kindly agreed to talk to us about his history in the BBC, starting PMC and monitor design. So we headed up to the PMC HQ, had a look at the factory and sat down for a chat over a nice cup of tea.

@djpetermorgan asks “In your monitor series, will you be talking about the foam pads you can buy to put under your monitors and what they do?” First a bit of theory on the problems that come from not decoupling your studio monitors from your desk. Then we will be talking about a few of the different things you can stick under your monitors including foam acoustic isolation pads, speaker spikes or cones, speaker stands and finally the Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizer. Weighing in at double the price of a standard foam isolation pad what makes it so special?

Also I forgot to mention in the video that speakers stands vibrate and cause noise too (even when spiked) but as they aren’t a large flat surface its less disruptive. But still worth decoupling your monitors from your stands.

Do expensive cables make any difference at all? Or is all sales bs? Ive heard allot of different opinions on this subject ranging from “you cant tell the difference Monster cable and a coat hanger” to people who insist on £2000 cable for their speaker connections, claiming it makes a big difference. We went to Urban Chain studios with Mike, John, Charlie and myself to test the following cables:
£7.13 Junior special – Home made from crappy bell wire  (£7 for the connectors)
£20 Van Damme
£55 Chord cream
£100 Monster cable
All cables are 4 meters long with Neutrik XLR connectors. We tested the cables with both our ears and our eyes and do you think we could find a difference?

Wave form screen grabs:

Gate metal wave forms

Square 1000hz 0dBFS

Square 100Hz 0dBFS

UPDATE: Thanks to Charile here are ALL the .wav files from our test.

Just by chance I had access to two different brands of monitors both using ribon tweeters that are very simuarly spec’d. Seemed like a perfect oppertunity for a shoot out! The Adam Audio A5X are equipeed with the new XART tweeter claiming to reach an impressive and possibly pointless 50khz. The Samson Rubicon R5a are my old monitors I initally brought just for DJ mixing, but when I  extended my stay in the UK they ended up sticking around longer then initaly planed.