Abominable Electronics | Boutique Pedals from Hell

In the mass market of guitar pedals, it can be tough to find the right pedals for your tone. For those of you that want a heavy distortion sound, there is a new option that will rip your soul in pieces. Abominable Electronics has the pedals that will melt faces and summon the powers of hell right to your rig.

I am always on the prowl for new pedals to have on hand here at the studio. Many of my clients like to use distortion & fuzz on their tracks, so I went on a search for something new that would offer something more than the standard Boss, Ibanez, or the horde of pedals available.

My search lead me to the handmade pedals of Abominable Electronics. Hailing from North Carolina, these pedals are built tough and live up to their appearance. I ordered the HAIL SATAN DELUXE pedal and it has been a workhorse. The "Dirt" pot dials in subtle fuzz to bone-crushing distortion that works for all ranges of hard and heavy music. The deluxe version of this pedal offers both the standard Hail Satan option + the Russian version. The Russian toggle dials in a smoother signal response that has worked magic on bass tracks that need some fuzz, but want to retain the low end punch. This pedal is perfect for all fuzz/distortion applications and can even be a great reamp pedal for double tracking vocals. The power is unmatched and this pedal will be a cornerstone of my pedal board for a long time to come.

This pedal is extremely versatile with the ability to adjust so many parameters of the signal. Priced at a modest $200, this is a must-have pedal.

2015 Year End Sale | Shine On Studio Cyber Holiday Sale

2015 has been a great year for music at Shine On Studio.

Shine On Studio was voted the #1 recording studio in the Bay Area by Thumbtack.com and is currently the featured spotlight business on their website.

With the studio success, there have been some upgrades to the equipment and studio furnishings. We've added (5) 16 channel headphone mixers to the recording room. This allows each musician to create a custom headphone mix for tracking. This is a great way to dial in the perfect sound during recording. Plus we've added some new mics & mic preamps to offer a wider selection of recording options.

Now it is time to wrap things up for 2015 and I'm offering some huge discounts on studio time. Check out the Cyber Holiday sale for big savings on studio rates. Plus, all Cyber Holiday deals come with 2 bonus offers that will save you even more cash all the way through 2016. All the details are on the webpage. Please contact me if you have any questions about the Cyber Deals.

I'm looking forward to working with everyone on their new music projects in 2016!

Happy Holidays!

Mixing Vocals | Adding Distortion and Lo-Fi

Vocal distortion can be the glue that pulls your vocal tracks together. Just a simple side-chain with the vocals being processed through a distortion plugin or amp head can pull the vocals coward in the mix and at the same time find the right pocket for the vocals in the mix. You may be saying to yourself, "I don't want my vocals all fuzzy and gritty." Not to worry, by side-chaining the effect, you can blend in the dry and wet vocal signals to a level that works best for your mix. The distortion will add just enough color to the vocals so they feel like part of the music and not just ambiguously floating above the music. Slap some EQ on the distortion track to get a brighter or darker tone to your distortion coloring. Just don't go overboard with the vocal effects, unless that is the goal for the track. Happy mixing!

Mixing Keyboards & Synths

Keys and synths can appear to be an easy task to mix. They have dedicated outputs and don't require microphones. This very fact is what makes them difficult to tame sometimes. Their EQ spectrum can be all over the stereo field and this can make them unruly when it comes time to mix. My approach is to save the keys & synths for last. I like to mute them and address the drums, bass, guitars, & vocals first to get a nice even balance. Then the keys are like the icing on the cake. They layer a nice thick sound over the mix and it allows you to use surgical EQ to get the pockets filled to your taste. Keys are sometimes the glue that pulls a mix together and sometimes they cloud up the mix and make it murky.

Approaching keys with care can give you more control over the final balance of the mix. In some mixes, it would be a good idea to add some light delay on a 16th note. This can give the appearance of a wider sound for the keys in the mix. You can also split the signal into two mono tracks and add reverb to just the left channel. This will give the keys more depth in the low end and allow the high end to shine a bit more.

Piano tracks typically benefit from proper EQ and a silky sounding reverb. The mood of the track will lead you to what style and depth of reverb to use. I love to hear a dark reverb with long tails, so I like to use a low pass filter on the reverb return. This allows the initial attack of the bright notes to shine with a very pleasing trail of dark tones following behind them.

Avid HD Omni

AVID HD OMNI 

Shine On Studios is proud to announce the addition of the AVID HD OMNI system to our studio. This top-of-the-line HD interface for Pro Tools HD offers pristine A/D & D/A conversion with two high-end mic pre-amps. Paired with our 96 i/o, we now offer 20 channels of HD recording!

The studio is sounding better than ever. Tracks are clean and punchy! The clarity is amazing and Pro Tools 10HD offers our engineers so many ways to enhance and mix tracks. Everything from Elastic Audio to extremely low latency, gives every track produced at the studio that professional touch that makes them shine! 

 

Kevin Barnard recently recorded some tracks from his upcoming album and the acoustic guitar has so much emotion and life in it. The album will be completely mixed in Pro Tools 10HD and will be our first full-length album to feature the impressive quality of this HD system. Kevin has some teaser tracks up on his Reverbnation page.

Shine On Studio in full swing

Shine On Studio is now fully operational and already making amazing tracks with the new digital and analog gear. With the addition of our new EUCON 28 fader console, the "hands-on" feature of the studio is taking mixing to a whole new level. Clients can now get a feel for their mix and add a more personal touch to how the mix turns out. The EUCON console is completely integrated into our upgrade to Pro Tools 10HD and gives accurate precision to editing automation and clips. The new enhancements to PT 10HD have streamlined the workflow in the studio. Clients can spend more time working on the recording stage and then get a focused session to produce a mix that yields professional results on the first pass of the mix.

A new addition to Shine On Studio is the Dangerous 2-BUS LT analog summing console. Paired with our Dangerous D-BOX, we now have 24 channels of analog summing to work with during mixing. These amazing little boxes bring more life, punch, warmth, and clarity to mixing. Being able to take the digital tracks and add some analog signal to the chain has drastically improved the final quality of music produced at Shine On Studio.