6 Awesome Google Doodles For The Music Nerd

1. Les Paul’s 96th Birthday

For the man who created musical history, Google put together an interactive guitar app that allows you to strum, record, and enjoy the wonderful sounds of a classic Les Paul. A sound that has defined guitar for the past century.

2. Robert Moog’s 78th Birthday

A tribute to Robert Moog, who brought us the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. This, just like the Les Paul, became a staple in musical history.

This highly interactive app let’s you shape just about any sound you want and then record, playback, and share it with your friends.

3. Claude Debussy’s 151st Birthday

This Doodle plays Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The developer was able to sync this beautiful animation to a sequence of one of Debussy’s most recognized and magical pieces.

 

4. John Lennon’s 70th Birthday

To pay tribute to one of the most influential people of the 20th century, Google Doodler’s put together a short animation that plays Imagine synced to a psychedelic landscape of moving pictures.

5. 30th Anniversary of PAC-MAN

This one is probably more on the gamer side, but that music could never be mistaken for any other game in history. Simply click on “Insert Coin” and you’ll kill at least 5 minutes of your day reliving  the most classic game created for arcade.

 

6. Freddie Mercury’s 65th Birthday

An incredible animation for Queen’s “Having a good time” was posted to take you on a visual anecdote in memory of rock legend Freddie Mercury. The animator cleverly incorporated themes from other famous songs like “Bicycle” as well as wardrobe that Freddie sported during his years of fame.

Meet the Bakers: Lars W

Music is something I’ve always loved since I was very young. I played a few different instruments throughout school. In third grade I picked up the Baritone horn in grade school and played that through my senior year or high school in the concert band. As I got older my passion for music and different styles of music grew. In high school I started going to local rock shows which is what made me want to be in a band.

Being on stage and connecting with an audience was something I really wanted to do. That’s when I decided to start playing guitar. Not long after that I ended up switching to the bass after the bassist in my first band quit and that quickly became my primary instrument. The more I played shows the more I started to take music more seriously. What started as a hobby quickly became my life. In my junior year of high school I went to a 4 week workshop on Recording Studio Technology at the New England institute of Art. After spending a few weeks in the studio’s there I was hooked. Going into my senior year I decided I wanted to pursue a career in music production and engineering. So I made that my focus and took just about every music elective I could and then I applied to the New England institute of Art for Audio & Media Technology and got in.

While I was in school I studied with lots of inspiring teachers and made a bunch of great connection through doing internships and going to the AES Convetions and local AES events. About half way through college I started freelancing as an audio engineer working for various different audio companies in the Boston area doing live sound, studio recording and location recording. I graduated from the New England institute of Art in 2007 and not long after graduating I landed my gig at cakewalk as a customer service representative. Since then I’ve expanded into tech support as well. Continue reading “Meet the Bakers: Lars W”

Meet the Bakers: Joey A

How did you get started with music?
When I was about 10 years old, my dad bought this acoustic guitar for himself for $20 or so. I thought it was so cool that my dad knew how to play AC/DC and Kiss songs (correctly or not made no real difference to me at the time), so I asked him to show me everything he knew. I picked up the basic chords pretty quickly and started sneaking into his room while he was at work to play the guitar unsupervised. One day he came home earlier than usual and heard me in my room playing the guitar. He was too shocked at how quickly I surpassed his skill level to scold me, and he said I could keep the guitar. Around the same time, two of my cousins were getting into guitar and I HAD to get as good as they were, so I put in as many hours of practice as I could.

Fast-forward about two years, I was starting to get into electric guitar more and more, and for Christmas I got this multi-fx pedal, and I was quickly obsessed with tone and all the neat things you could alter about a guitar’s sound. This naturally evolved into a passion for the field of audio engineering, and I decided that’s what I wanted to study after high school.

I managed to hone my musicianship enough to get accepted to Berklee College of Music right out of high school, and I took on a Music Business major, a Music Production and Engineering major, and an Acoustics & Electronics minor. During summers I interned for various music-related companies, not the least of which was the world-famous Blackbird Studio in Nashville, TN. It was throughout these college years and internships that I learned a lot about myself, particularly that I knew I wanted to work in the music industry to some degree, but I wanted audio engineering to remain entirely fun for me; I wanted to keep it around as a serious hobby but not make it my full-time profession. Continue reading “Meet the Bakers: Joey A”

Meet the Bakers: Dan Gonzalez

It was right about ninth grade when I first started getting into playing guitar. Before that I was all about the Clarinet until 8th grade – when I rebelled for a couple years and didn’t want anything to do with school band. It wasn’t until I entered my Junior year of highschool when I realized that there could be benefits to playing a wind instrument as well as a stringed. So, I joined a the choir, jazz, the string orchestra (upright bass), and directed the marching band during football season. Continue reading “Meet the Bakers: Dan Gonzalez”

Subtractive EQ Part 5: When Should I Boost EQ?

Missed Part 1? Read it here.

When should I boost?
Some of you may read this and field this very question.  Boosting is something that you can do any time you want with any given instrument.  Obviously it is your own choice in the matter but if you find yourself constantly pulling your faders up and down because your master level is clipping then you may want to apply these EQ techniques to your workflow. In my world it is always a matter of reducing first and then boosting later.

Conclusion
Mixing is as much of an art as it is understanding the logical ways that instruments interact with one another. Continue reading “Subtractive EQ Part 5: When Should I Boost EQ?”

Subtractive EQ Part 4: Bass

Miss part 1? Read Subtractive EQ – Snare Drum.

Bass
The bass in this track caters to fans of the early Metallica era.  Bassist Cliff Burton popularized this distorted sound on such tracks as (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth.  It’s important to blend this type of bass tone into the bottom of the guitars.  In this mix the guitars and the bass become a single unit ebbing and flowing with one another at certain points through the song.

Understandably one can assume that there was much processing done to this track before it’s transfer into SONAR.  It’s important to capture the sound before you start mixing so that your mixing process is not a patch-job.

This tone is aggressive and piercing to the ear.  A significant way to know that this instrument needs attention is by the aural fatigue that you may experience while soloing this track and listening to it rather loudly for more than 10 seconds.  I aimed to adjust the bass track to fit like a glove under the mix by applying a HPF at 78Hz with a steep bandwidth setting.  The amount of bass here needs control. Using a compressor to control the sound would be redundant because of how much overdrive was applied to this track.  The overdrive has ultimately eliminated any trace of strong transients.

Lastly, there is another dip in the EQ around 2.2kHz.  This adjustment reduces some of the aforementioned piercing sound. Any harsh tones in this register will be too overbearing in the mix.

Subtractive EQ Part 1: Snare Drum

Introduction
Equalization is one of the most powerful tools that an audio engineer can get their hands on. Live engineers, post-production engineers, and recording engineers all have their specific uses for it. It’s so powerful that some beginner engineers habitually reach for it without understanding what it can ultimately do to a mix.

Overview
Let’s resonate on the concept of volume momentarily. It is in our human nature to enjoy music at high volume levels. Concerts are a great examples of this. Outdoor festivals and the like tend to blast our eardrums with massive amounts of volume that we cannot experience in any other format. To most, increasing volume directly correlates to better sound. In a mix setting, dramatically boosting various frequencies can be a crutch for inexperienced mix engineers. By increasing the gain of a specified frequency band on an EQ one can subsequently add unwanted gain to the overall mix. Typically the problem that follows is a battle to keep your master fader from clipping and you all of sudden feel stuck in a gain-staging paradox. This can happen to best of us.

In Use
Apply subtractive EQ techniques to your instruments. Instead of boosting your favourite signals try limiting yourself to cutting. We can call this concept “carving”. Let’s take a look at a musical example. This series of articles will demonstrate some key elements of a typical Rock Mix.

Snare
Generally the snare is the focal point of a typical rock oriented mix. I’ve started with all my faders down and raised the snare to a suitable level: 0dBu. This recording was tracked with two snare microphones. The bottom snare microphone captured the sizzle of the snare and the top microphone captured much of the attack.

Snare Bottom EQ

The first drawbacks I noticed when isolating the snare recordings Continue reading “Subtractive EQ Part 1: Snare Drum”

Free Download: White Knuckle Bass Presets for TH2 Producer

I sat down with some of my best session players to collaborate on 50 presets for TH2 Producer that are sure to add some grit to your low-end instruments. It’s no secret that my passion is mostly in the Rock and Metal world of music and I’ve felt that Bass doesn’t get enough love in those genres. Below are 5 examples from the Free Download that outline some great Rock and Metal lead, rhythm, clean, and ambient effects and I would definitely pull out of my bag of tricks for a record.

1. Pick Rhythm

Here’s a style of playing called “Djent” that has been popular in the last couple years. Typically this sound is done with down-tuned guitars but why not just use a bass? I’ve double-tracked this recording to give a wider sound Continue reading “Free Download: White Knuckle Bass Presets for TH2 Producer”

First winners announced for "Intel Superstars Competition"

The voting results are in and the fans have selected the top 5 artists in the categories of Rock, Pop, and Country. The first round of the “Superstars” songwriting competition invited artists to submit original music in the Rock, Pop, and Country genres. The submitted tracks were judged by fans of Intel’s Facebook page with five winners from each genre winning prize packages including Intel® Core™ -processor based computers, Cakewalk SONAR Producer Software, V-Studio 100 & V-Studio 20 recording solutions. Additionally, the first round winners could be in the running for the $10,000 cash Grand Prize that will be awarded at the conclusion of the contest in January 2011.

Here are the winners:

ROCK:
The Strange Kind- “The Last Time”
Brave Chandeliers- “Sinking Ship”
John Allred- “Let Somebody In”
Jules Larson- “Falling for the First Time”
Joker to the Thief- “Butterflies”

POP:
Jason Eaton- “Furious Love”
The Girlfriend Season- “Butterflies”
Lauren Barrett- “Last Time”
Matt Brouwer- “Writing To Remember”
Sara Lindsay- “Best of Me”

Country:
Chicken Grease- The Road I’m On
Michael Sonders- Your Pretty Face
Aria Summer- Sweet Summertime
Lauren Strange- Jump
MDB- Man Behind These Eyes

Get more information about the winners

Learn more about the contest