There’s an impressive shortlist for this year’s MPG Awards, who do you think will win?

Producer of the Year, sponsored by The BPI BRITS 2012: 

• Paul Epworth 
• Flood
• Ethan Johns

Recording Engineer of the Year, sponsored by Prism Sound: 

• Dan Austin 
• Haydn Bendall
• Geoff Foster

Mix Engineer of the Year, sponsored by Solid State Logic: 

• Dave Bascombe
• Tom Elmhirst
• Mark ‘Spike’ Stent

Mastering Engineer of the Year: 

• John Dent
• Mandy Parnell
• Ray Staff

Live Production of the Year, sponsored by Shure: 

• Later with Jools TV series
• Radiohead – Live in Praha
• The Who – Live at Leeds/Hull

UK Album of the Year 2011, sponsored by Universal Audio: 

• Adele – 21
• Everything, Everything – Man Alive
• PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

UK Single of the Year 2011: 

• Adele – Rolling In The Deep
• Noah & The Whale – l.i.f.e.g.o.e.s.o.n
• Anna Calvi - Desire

Re-mixer of the Year, sponsored by Novation: 

• James Rutledge
• Jamie XX
• Starsmith (Finlay Dow-Smith)

Breakthrough Producer of the Year, sponsored by Deep Recording Studios: 

• Stevan Krakovic
• James Rutledge
• Yogi

Breakthrough Engineer of the Year, sponsored by Genelec: 

• George Apsion
• Tom Morris
• Lee Slater

International Producer of the Year, sponsored by British Grove Studios: 

• T-Bone Burnett
• Dimitri Tikovoi
• Butch Vig

International Recording Engineer of the Year, sponsored by Focusrite: 

• Andrew Scheps
• Jonathan Shakhovskoy
• Craig Silvey

If you are new to mixing then this list should help you, if you a veteran then you can drop your top tips at the end of this article in the comments. In the meantime, here are 5 mixing mistakes you should avoid.

1. Compress The Hell Out Of It.
   With the advent of mix bus compressor plug-ins and our immersion into flat-lined MP3s, some people think the challenge is to see how little the master output signal should move, it’s not. My advice is leave the final compression to a mastering engineer who knows their onions.
2. Wash It All Out
   Reverb used well is an art, but stick a different reverb on every channel or put so much on a send that it sounds like an acoustic Tsunami and your track will lose all clarity. Whenever I mix one of the final things I do is to pull all the time delay effects down by 3db - more is less.
3. There’s A Hole In My Life
   Or for a lot of people, right in the centre of their mix, often vocals and guitars are missing some vital mid-range eq to help them cut through. Leave the smiley graphic Eq shapes to Radio Shack catalogues.
4. Not Enough or Too Much Tuning
   Lazy auto-tune is awful, which is simply to press a preset amount of auto-tune on the whole track. Take time to go through vocals and apply auto-tune at a forensic level, even if you insist on heavily stepped tuning, it’s more impressive on parts of the track, not all of it.
5. Taking It Out Of Context
   Make sure you get reference material before you mix. If you’re mixing for a client then get them to send you reference of what kind of sound they like, if your own material then listen to some tracks you’re trying to sound like. Of course also listen to it in the room you’re mixing in so you can hear how the room sounds.

So there you are, 5 things that can make or break a mix - what tips do you have?

The Gobbler team will be launching monthly pricing this coming Monday morning.  Monthly accounts will start at $8 per month for a 25GB storage/monthly transfer account. 

Up until Monday morning, they will be offering our super-sweet reduced annual pricing, which is up to 70% off the monthly subscription price (if you were to purchase through the whole year). 

So if you know anyone who might be interested in snatching this deal, please let them know! More

He might have a name I can’t pronounce, but my buddy Eli has just relased Reverb Explained.

Reverb is perhaps the most misunderstood /misused effect in the mixer’s toolbox today. In this timeless series, DAW superman Eli Krantzberg reveals everything you need to know about this mysterious effect and how to apply it to the most popular instruments in your productions.

$39.99 | Sale: $29.99

Click Here to Learn More

Russ Hughes Talks To Bobby Lombardi About Pro Tools 10 from AIR Users Blog on Vimeo.

Check out this interview with Bobby Lombardi from Avid, some surprising information on how some features got into Pro Tools 10.

News in from several sources (including vendors) is that Pro Tools HDX is selling, in some cases it’s selling out. There is some stock still in stores, but Avid have run out and are now working on getting more stocks into the dealers, no one at Avid would confirm numbers sold.

From what we can ascertain, there has been a large take-up in hardware upgrades which has fuelled this early adoption, it’s also important to remember that Pro Tools 10 gave many HD owners the final warning on compatibilty with the future 64 bit version.

Avid today reported revenues of $185.3 million for the three-month period ended December 31, 2011, compared to $195.3 million for the same period in 2010. The GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $1.2 million or $0.03 per share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $571,000 or $0.01 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2010.

What this means for us mere mortals, is that Avid have had their first quarterly GAAP Net income since 2007. This has been reflected in the share price too which has seen steady rises since it bottomed out at the last part of 2011.

Sad news for both musicians and lovers of British studio gear, TL audio has gone into liquidation.

TL products are high quality rack and anologue mixers, this will be a significant loss to many producers and engineers.

I have spoken to the liquidators this morning who have confirmed that it is a disposal of assets rather than an attepmt to sell it as a going concern - this is a great shame.

A meeting of creditors is being held at 2 Mountview Court, 310 Friern Barnet Lane, Whetstone, London, N20 0YZ, on 13 February 2012, at noon. Harris Lipman LLP has been appointed liquidator.

Click to download/Enlarge

I’m not sure how helpful this is for anyone, if nothing else it’s just good fun and if I say so myself a little cool.

I’ve created a Pro Tools 10 Menu infogram, which is FREE to download and distribute as you wish on your own site or social media, just please ensure you credit it back to the blog as it took 4 hours to make and in its native PSD format is 30mb in size.

Just download it and then open it in your favourite app, but make sure to zoom to 100% and explore it in detail.

Enjoy!

I have a Liquid Mix (32 channel version) that I’m not using. It’s a great product, but to be honest I have more plug-ins than I know what to do with. I was about to put it on Ebay to sell, then Eric and I thought it would be nice to give it to a member of the community; not anyone, just those who are committed members. SO YES YOU HAVE TO BE A BLOG MEMBER TO HAVE A CHANCE OF GETTING YOUR HANDS ON IT.

Just go here and enter by answering the questions, which require some skill to win. Also tell us how you will use it and in the event of a tie-breaker, it may well clinch it.

May the best person win!

Sorry we just don’t have the time to enter into any correspondence on this matter, so we will be unable to reply to any questions either by email or via comments.

ENDS Midnight GMT 29th February 2012

I’ve been asked to join the MPG at their 2012 Awards and I will be sending out the results live on Twitter and Facebook as they happen.

The awards take place in February 2012 at London’s Café de Paris and celebrate the creative talent and technical ability of music producers, engineers, mixers and re-mixers. For the 2012 event the MPG have launched two new international categories, International Engineer and International Mixer, to join the existing International Producer category The UK Producer of the Year will again be awarded a BRIT.

I’m a huge supporter of the Music Producers Guild who work hard to support producers and engineers, both emerging and established. I know some of their leadership as friends and have a huge amount of admiration for them, so it was a no-brainer when I was invited to attend the awards.

You can read more about them here

Can I encourage you to add them on your preferred social media platform and then you’ll be the first to find out who the hot talent are in music production on the evening and right from the horses mouth as it happens! Check out the short list here

Facebook is here

Twitter is here

A nice video from Avid of Tony Cariddi (my new buddy) talking with the legend Dave Hill. Pity there’s some idiot who wants to stand where Tony is for half the interview - top marks for Tony keeping on it with this oaf behind him!

Pro Tools SE is the intro version of Pro Tools bundled with several M-Audio interfaces and available for around £100. I know some Pro Tools user get all sniffy when the mere mention of anything but a full HD rig is suggested, perhaps they are insecure about the idea of a talented young kid learning how to make music or have forgotten where they came from?

Anyway, I’m doing some work with Pro Tools SE for a project I have on at the moment and whilst it may not be the full version of Pro Tools, in my opinion there are some things that should have been in the full version that appear in SE. Let me tell you my top 5. 

1. Avid decided to speak English with naming conventions in SE. An example; in SE if you have a number of clips you want to combine after edit it’s called ‘Combine’ not ‘Consolidate Region’ which sounds more like the merger of several European states than gluing some audio edits together.
2. When you right mouse click on an audio clip it gives you a ‘Transpose’ audio option; it doesn’t require me to know I have to turn on elastic audio and choose the Polyphonic algorithm to make it work.
3. The loop browser works in one click. Again to get to your loops in Pro Tools normally takes several clicks into Workspace, then when you’ve found the right folder of your loops you’ve got to make sure that the audition patch is set correctly to hear them. Workspace is long overdue for an overhaul and loops in SE seems far simpler to use, even if it is based on workspace.
4. I don’t need to create a separate click track to get a click, it is simply a button on the transport of SE.
5. Pro Tools SE has effects combinations. In other words you can open up one window that has 3 different plug-ins and their controls, so reverb, eq and delay in one handy little rack. 

Now I understand that Avid has 25 years of legacy to have to work with and they can’t just start naming things differently overnight, although Regions became Clips in 10, so a precedent has been set for naming conventions. I also understand that SE is meant to be simple, but perhaps in trying this approach with SE, Avid may want to consider that even pro musicians and engineers don’t want to have to second guess the developer’s naming conventions, or have to open the manual every time they want to do everyday tasks. Oddly enough in some ways working with SE is more like working with Logic than Pro Tools.

As Pro Tools 11 is a new build from the ground up, perhaps Avid could learn from the ‘less-is-more’ approach of Pro Tools SE and really make some changes to help us all in our daily workflow, professional or not.

In these videos Russ shows you more tricks using Mod Delay III on Pro Tools.

In this video we use it on vocals and add some cool automation tricks.

Copyright information here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cd_loudness_trend-something.gifIt has been an ongoing debate for over a decade now, but I was intrigued and a little shocked to see this excellent visual representation of how much louder mixes have got in the last two decades.

I’m not sure how I feel about the whole compression thing, I appreciate how useful it can be when used approriately or even imaginatively, but squashing the sh*t out of everything seems just plain silly.

Many mastering engineers are at the mercy of the record companies who want the ‘loudest’ possible mix, instead of what is more musical and what a skilled mastering engineer would judge as the right mix. So often for the sale of protecting their income they have to master in this way.

Thoughts and comments welcome?