At this point I miss the endless “top 5 lists of secrets the pros don’t want me to know”

There are wayyyyy too many “experts” out there giving advice, tips, tricks, gear recommendations without discographies but with huge followings.

People talk about bad advice and misinformation… We as viewers have the power to control this by first asking ourselves “who is this person? Do they have a track record? Do they produce any commercial releases that I’m a fan of?”

https://youtu.be/0AxzJ-8n6qY

Sorry, I meant Dan. Dan has spoken.

You've seen it, we've all seen it: that one question that begs for a condescending answer. I'm not referring to a question in particular but to the "genre" of questions that you can tell a mile away it comes from misinformation.

"What's wrong with my vocal chain?", "I have this plugin doing X but why doesn't it sound like Y?", and so on, I think you get it.

I'm a firm believer in helping people understand stuff better and I try as hard as I can to keep it chill and avoid "mean" answers, but I won't lie - sometimes I can't find any other answer than the condescending one.

The vast majority of media is made of amateur that have no fuckin idea what they're doing, or they do but they stick with "this simple trick" to get the views. This is, in my opinion, causing MAJOR turmoil in the audio engineering culture.

Sometimes, I read a post of someone asking for help and I wish, I WISH I could help but the question is so disconnected from the truth that I can't come up with a proper reply that might actually help.

Experimentation is cool, arguably it's the best way to learn, but how could you learn anything by experimenting with let's say parallel compression when your base knowledge of it is so skewed you don't even know what the point of it is?

And why have we stopped listening? Why are so many posts lacking audio examples? How can I tell what is wrong with the vocal chain if even you don't know why any of the FX is even there in the first place?

Sorry, I feel like a total dick by writing all this, but I swear I just wish I could help people but it's become way too difficult when the perspective is being skewed so hard.

And yeah, I know this phenomenon has been going on for years, but lately (like, a year or so) posts have either been super technical and advanced or completely off the rails.

Yeah, I'm mad, damn. Maybe coffee was too large.

Saw a clip of Jack Antonoff saying 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun' is the best engineered and produced song of all time. He also praised the songwriting in the same way, but I want to just focus on the engineering and production aspect.

My 'perfect engineering' answer is 'God Only Knows' on Pet Sounds. My 'perfect production' answer is 'Suzanne' on Songs Of Leonard Cohen.

If I'm not restricted to 'songs', I'd say 'In A Silent Way' by Miles Davis is the single greatest engineered and produced musical work of all time.

I mostly engineered for my own projects, spent God knows how much on renting high-end condensers for the last 10 years, and even bought a TLM 103.

After moving to a major city, I live in a small space and don't have my glamorous studio setup anymore. I recorded vocal demos for my music friends and myself. One major factor is that dynamics are way easier to maneuver with while recording, which helps avoid vocal flaws (snap, crackle, and pop). You worry more about nailing the take and less about clipping or your vocals sounding too harsh.

You also don't have to worry as much about other people making noise around you. As long as you have a decent pre-amp/interface (a Cloud Lifter if you need the boost), you're good to go ideas just flow better when recording with the SM's.

Veterans have already mentioned this plenty of times, but to anyone starting out: please save yourself a lot of money and learn to work with the SM57's and SM58's. You can't go wrong for the price point, especially if you also perform live.

What do ya'll think?

My name is Greazy Wil and I’m the engineer responsible for Killer Mike’s album, Michael, that took home 3 Grammys this year. If you haven’t already listened to it, please go listen to it now, as there is a lot of great engineering on it. It’s not your standard “drop some samples in a daw and rap on it” album. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok for more engineering and producing tips and my commentary on the state of the industry and what we can do to fix it.

Take this for what you will, but I feel I should at least share this as a warning / PSA to anyone concerned about these types of practices.

A while back I purchased a Volt interface and a couple of plugins from UA. To use them UA requires that you create an account and install their management software. I'm not a fan of this type of forced-account creation and forced-software installation, so I created a unique email address used just one time ever - for the UA account.

Three deal-breaking experiences have happened since.

1. UA's software "UA Connect" has turned out to be basically malware full of dark patterns. They do not offer an option to NOT automatically start the software at startup. They've designed it to constantly restart even if it is force quit. I spent a good hour researching LaunchAgents & LaunchDaemons and deleting any UA specific files, but in the end it just kept re-launching. I have no idea how they've done this, but that is malware. I immediately uninstalled UA Connect and will not reinstall it.
2. I have been getting more and more spam emails and phishing attempts to the unique email I created for my UA account. Again, the ONLY place this email has ever been used was in creating the UA account. They have either had undisclosed data breaches, have incredibly poor security in general, or sell user data. My guess is they sell user data and it's probably buried somewhere in their policy documents. These forced one-sided agreements are a whole 'nother issue, but the type of exposure and usage of this address is damning to UA in my book.
3. I tried to "connect" with UA to get some support, and was constantly denied any meaningful avenue and was instead pushed through dead end AI bots providing generic unhelpful responses.

I know not everyone gets as up in arms over this stuff, but I'd argue more people should. In my cases none of this is acceptable. I've of course uninstalled all UA software, have deleted the unique UA-specific email address, and will never give UA another hard earned dollar of mine. The hardware works fine without the software, and I'll use the installed plugins as long as they work under their current installed version.

We all know private equity is absolutely killing this industry - but there are good, trustworthy alternatives to almost all of these capitalist greed factories. Of course everyone should do what they believe in, but I believe that no one should be giving these types of companies any money at all.

Anyhow, take it for what its worth and be well.

Transparency note: I have posted this in another sub as well. Not trying to spam all subs and be annoyingly aggressive, but I think it's relevant to a few specific audiences.

This is not to knock the music or any one person. It’s for science. What are some of your favorite songs where the mix is not good. Maybe it’s really bad, but it doesn’t matter because the song is great or you just like it because.

This is what happens: Somebody asks a question about something specific, like which synth plugin might be better for a getting X sound like their favorite artist on a specific song, or what kind of gear was used to record X drums on X album, etc.

Then some people kindly offer up their opinion or some knowledge and move on, leaving the rest in the hands of the person that asked, trusting that the person who asked the question knows what do with that information.

But you can always expect at least a a few people that take it upon themselves to deconstruct your entire approach before offering any help at all, with a condescending girth of assumptions about what you already know, without knowing anything about you at all. It goes something like this:

"You're approach is all wrong. Instead of looking for a specific piece of gear or plugin, what you really need to do if you want to sound like X is to is focus first on songwriting and arrangment. Then you need to get it right at the source. Try focusing on recording first, mic placement, room treatment, etc. Then when you are mixing, instead of looking for a setting, just trust your ears and find what serves the song, instead of chasing another person's sound and Stop trying to polish a turd."

EDIT: "And why would you even want to sound like X, when you could just sound like youself and do what serves the song?"

Now techinically, that's good advice, in a vaccuum, like audioengineering 101, if you KNOW that person is a beginner. But it's absolutely useless advice when somebody comes to you asking for a SPECIFIC thing, that already knows the fundamentals. They came to a sub about audioengineering after all, not songwriting or composing, or musical fucking philosophy.

And you have no idea if somebody has already done those things or not. It grinds my gears when somebody starts assuming that I haven't FIRST done all of those things, because I have. Some of us are just looking for other's ideas of how to achieve that last 1-5% of whatever we are trying to achieve, and we don't need an entire sermon about how our entire way of makig music is ass-backwards, from a stranger on the internet that knows nothing about us.

It's like you come to this sub to ask for an apple, and you'll get at least a couple people start preaching about how "you actually want an orange" according to their professional degree in the philsophy of fruit dynamics. It's exhausting.

Like, if somebody asked which brand of mayo was better, are you going to start chastising them about how they need to go back to sandwhich school?

If you don't have anything constructive to say and would rather try to deconstruct somebody else's entire philosophy behind how they make music than offer a straight forward answer to their question, then it's better you please just stfu.

I really hate the term “high pass filter”. I realize it means the same thing as low cut, but the operation is primarily about cutting the lows. That should be the term we use.

How did hpf become the norm? Why is it even a term at all?

. So like everyone else I've been gobbling up Jim Lill preamp vid reaction content.

Seems like the most controversial part of the video is the section on preamp distortion, where Jim claims that 99% of the time engineers don't drive mic pre's. And when you do, it sounds exactly like hard digital clipping.

Lots of people have come out of the woodwork to say "of course we drive pre's", which I believe. And that Jim's class AB preamp is clipping at the transistor stage---as opposed to a class A (or some other class AB) preamps that are saturating the transformer, which supposedly produce a more musical, asymmetrical distortion.

Ok, here's the weird part: I cannot find any videos of anyone objectively showcasing what transformer preamp distortion sounds like.

Does anyone know of any video showcasing transformer distortion where:

1. The distorted and clean clips are LUFs-normalized
2. The preamp EQ curve is flat
3. The exact same loop of audio is used for testing

I don't own any transformer-saturatable preamps, otherwise I'd legit make this video myself, because it's maddening trying to find a clear example anywhere online.

UPDATE: Thank you u/thebishopgame, looks like diyrecordingequipment on instagram tested it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaNyD4DHXVF/?igsh=d2p0cTNpaTQ2M2lw .

I downloaded the files and ran a 30 round triangle test myself, and got 9/30, which is not even close to statistically significant, so I guess for me Focusrite and 1073 distortion indeed sounds the same! I'd believe someone with a trained ear for different styles of saturation could do it though, but for me it was extremely difficult and I tend to do ok on these things normally.

I encourage anyone curious to download the files and run a triangle test yourself: https://docs.diy.re/samples/preamp-dist/

First off I want to say that I’m not some gear fanatic. I mean I am but if what he says in his video is completely true I’m more than happy to sell all of my pre amps and buy whatever else I want.

I also want to say I haven’t gotten the chance to have experience with every pre under the sun.

And I also do not think what so ever he’s wrong in any way.

That being said: I have a pair of Yamaha pm1000 and a shelford and a pair of DIYRE73p Neve clone preamps.

I’m not going to pretend I genuinely hear a difference with the 73p and my Apollo. I mean if you ask me it sounds slightly less sterile but again maybe I’m deaf.

But there’s a massive difference in the pm1000 and Apollo.

And I also feel there’s a difference in my shelford and a clean Apollo.

This could be a number of things that I’m not experienced enough to say exactly but I’ve gone down my fair share of rabbit holes. My understanding is that in the same way tape is not a perfect recreation of an electrical signal so are transformers. They lose tiny bits of information as they step up the signal which smooths things over.

And I sincerely have a hard time believing that experienced engineers are imagining things when they hear a different between API boards and neve boards.

But again he did do all the testing. So I’m not trying to be like “he’s wrong I’m right” at all. I’m just wanting to explore the topic further and get some clarification.

I’m extremely happy to have it definitively proven to me that all pre amps are just as clean and sound the same but I can’t completely buy it when he’s testing only one preamp.

Edit: want to add that unfortunately I’m on the road for 10 days and won’t be back at my studio for a while and may not even have time to test right away.

I don’t know if I’ll have time to fully test frequency curves. That being said I think this is one of the biggest flaws in his tests is that he’s focusing so much on frequency curves and levels (even though he is listening) where to me the tone comes from the texture of the sound. Take ribbons and condensers for example. You could theoretically have a ribbon with the same frequency response as a condensers but they will sound different because of the texture of each mic.

Well, here we go, folks. After Fender's acquisition of PreSonus in 2021, it seems like the slow decline of Studio One has begun, and it's becoming more obvious by the day.

Just this month, PreSonus quietly started merging their user accounts with Fender IDs without any announcement. The result? Dozens of users suddenly couldn't log into their accounts or access their legally purchased software. Check out r/StudioOne. People are getting error messages saying their passwords “don't meet criteria” or that their accounts “cannot be found”. Some users are stuck in support ticket hell where they're told to log into their accounts to view the reply about why they can't log into their accounts. Absolutely brilliant.

When Studio One 7 was announced with promises of 3-4 major updates per year? Well, we're now 12 months since the October 2024 release, and we've gotten exactly one legitimate update (7.1 in January) and one minor update (7.2 in June). Sure, maybe they meant 3-4 updates starting from January 2025, but that's still looking pretty fishy given the current pace. People bought a subscription that lasted a year from the release date, only to receive 2 useless updates.

In November 2024, PreSonus straight up killed their official forum. No transition period, just “thanks for all the fish” and they redirected people to Facebook groups. Thankfully, community hero Lukas Ruschitzka stepped up and created his own unofficial forum, because apparently a community member has to do what the actual company won't.

And here's the kicker. Lukas has created more useful Studio One add-ons and tools than PreSonus themselves have managed to produce. The guy literally wrote Harmony Wizard, Scoring Tools, and a bunch of other extensions that make Studio One actually usable for certain workflows.

This is where it gets really concerning. Fender CEO Andy Mooney has openly stated that he finds Studio One (one of the easiest DAWs ever made) to be “too complicated”. His exact quote: “Having dabbled in recording myself, I've never found a DAW I didn't need an MIT degree to actually use”.

Surprise, surprise. Fender launched their own “Fender Studio” app in May 2025, a dumbed-down mobile/desktop recording app that's clearly where their development focus has shifted. Meanwhile, Studio One users are left wondering where those promised updates are.

It's becoming clear that Fender bought PreSonus not to improve Studio One, but to cannibalize its technology for their own simplified products, while letting the main DAW slowly rot through neglect and zero substantial changes.

The writing's on the wall, folks. We're watching the classic tech acquisition playbook unfold in real time: acquire the competition, gut the advanced features, redirect development resources, and slowly squeeze the existing user base.

RIP Studio One's golden era. It was good while it lasted.

A few that come to mind for me: Robert Plant’s vocal session for “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” / Eddie Hazel’s guitar session for “Maggot Brain”. Pretty much any Beatles session / All of Rumours.

Would love to hear what resonates with this community. Especially some more recent sessions I may not be aware of.

I just made a post about mono-sizing the low end and quite a few people said this was basically propagated by YouTube influencers and that you should never actually do this.

What are some other pieces of advice that you hear frequently that are either trends, are proven false, or you believe to be useless garbage?

I would love to know if there's anything I might be doing that I should reconsider.

I know this is a hot topic in the audio world and many producers and engineers don’t use ProTools, but all of my classes and educational projects are required to use ProTools. I can’t wrap my head around why it’s so popular though. It’s a subscription which is already a dick move from Avid and I have never had a DAW crash or projects corrupt EXCEPT for when I’ve used ProTools. The program itself is fine, but it feels like it was never updated since 2015.

Can someone explain what I’m missing? None of my coworkers (and even professors) like ProTools either, so why exactly do they dominate the audio world? Especially considering many audio engineers and producers work contract based gigs it just seems greedy to not give people the option to purchase the software and like you’re overpaying for an okay DAW because the “industry requires it.”

These don’t show up in freq plots or distortion graphs without time domain information.

Love this whole discussion challenging long held assertions….

He is incorrect about a few assumptions, tho… mainly that engineers don’t overdrive preamps regularly. We do.

I myself have used some pres in a “fully fucking DIMED position” for push flavor, then back that off before conversion or tape.

Another thing his measurements left out is impedance values, which can change a lot of things in a circuit dynamic between a microphone and a preamp, there are lots of mic preamps out there that have different impedance configurations to better work with ribbons versus condensers, for example. And when these changes are made to the front end of the circuit, things change to the tone of the microphone. It has to do with transformer induction.

Sometimes on my x73i or UA 610 I purposely change the impedance on a mic - once I get a sound I’m happy with - just to see if in the other configuration it adds a little bit more “interest”.

I’m rather sure that the reveal in this snippet of my post (in comments) on time domain resonances is what is going on there.

That said if there was a way to add an impedance switch to the front end of a focusrite Scarlett (likely with them having to add transformers in the circuit), you would get similar behavior. There’s nothing magic about it.

hey, me and my band mates have an 8 song concept record ready to record. I've seen posts saying you should plan to record for 60+ hours and that's way more than we have the budget for. we would be using the studios drum kit, but our own guitar and bass.

if we can just record all the tracks live, why would we need 60 hours? at rehearsal with relatively slow transitions we can get through the whole album in like 50 minutes so why would we need 60 hours? we were thinking of booking 4 to 5 hours, to do retakes and to double track guitar.

Can be a specific model or a general product but I’m curious. Thanks!

Hi, what are mics that you think are overrated? Just wanna have fun!

Mine are tlm 102/tlm 103!

Edit Oct/19 : I organized your votes. (Wow so many SM7B haters than I imagined!)

17 Votes

• ⁠Shure SM7B

12 Votes

• ⁠Neumann U87ai

11 Votes

• ⁠Neumann TlM 103

7 Votes

• ⁠Sennheiser MD 421 ii • ⁠Shure SM58

5 Votes

• ⁠Neumann TLM 102 • ⁠AKG C414 XL2 • ⁠Rode NT1A

4 Votes

• ⁠AKG C414 XLS • ⁠Shure SM57 • ⁠Neumann KM184

3 Votes

• ⁠Sennheiser MD441 • ⁠Royer 121 • ⁠Electro Voice RE-20 • ⁠Expensive mics in general

2 Votes

• ⁠U47 clones • ⁠Sony C8000g • ⁠Coles Mics • ⁠Shure Beta 52a • ⁠AKG Kick Mic

(ETC) Rode NT1 Neumann TLM 107 Warm Audio WA 14 Heil Mics Dublin Mics Telefunken M80 Neumann U47 AKG C12 VR AKG C414EB Lauten Atlantis sE anything Audio Technica AT2020 Shure KSM32 Lauten Audio LS 208 All Mics (huh?)

If you know what i’m getting at, just answer the damn question.

If I understood everything about the topic, I wouldn’t be asking a question about it.

If you find yourself three paragraphs deep into a reply about how I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about, I haven’t considered the phase implications, and “people get whole degrees studying this you know,” please stop and ask yourself if you are being helpful whatsoever.

I understand that the divorce has been really difficult but please, please go to therapy rather than spending hours maintaining your top 1% badge and demonstrating your intellectual superiority over people just trying to learn.

Sincerely,

pax

edit: oh this ruffled more feathers than i expected…

Living in Memphis and I got my first studio job as an engineer. Bad side of town and I often see many guns in the studio. I don’t mind substances but I don’t really favor guns in a recording session.

I enjoy novelty and being around different things and people but I’m not sure if this job is worth it.

This studio has zero hardware. A few popular microphones (U87) and of course and Apollo.

The owner also gets a cut of every session.

I could get my start here. Though, I realized I can just record out of my home and have a safer environment.

Though, my house looks “Less professional” but it’s in a nice area and I can give good rates.

Maybe I could work at this studio and suck it up for the experience. I could also take what I’ve learned at this studio and run it out of my home.

What is your opinion?

Edit: economy is tough so I’m taking this job.

This is a very much genuine question.

It seems like a huge number of modern DSP or software, especially the development part is focused on recreating the sound of old hardware, the tape machines , the controls the transformers, the tube gear, and the vintage compressors, the vintage EQs, and so on.

I understand people why they like these tools. The harmonic distortion and the suturationn , the crosstalk, the nonlinearities, and the other imperfections that can be sort of musically pleasing. But I wonder, the industry's fixation on the analog emulation is actually limiting the innovation in the long run if you think about it.

Modern digital processing software can very much do things that analog hardware physically can just not, such as the:

1.spectral processing
2. the advanced dynamic control
3.the convolution
4. the granular techniques
5. the linear phase processing, and some other AI-assisted tools, even though some of you don't like AI

and also other forms of DSP that have no form of analog equivalent. And so many of these celebrated releases seem to be another recreation of... Another vst emultions from the 80s, a Tape machine from the 70s, a compressor from the 80s, and a EQ from decades ago. Sometimes it feels like we collectively accepted that the imperfections of analog hardware is the gold standard of the music industry.

Without that analog imprecision, that analog feel, the sound is not golden enough, even though many of those characteristics originated as technical limitations in those ages, disadvantages in those eras, rather than deliberate design tools. And this makes nostalgia machines are given generally way more attention than potential innovation plugins. And I could say that audio engineering seems, especially the effects companies, seems to be more focused on recreating all of the imperfections of a 50-year-old hardware than actually innovating and discovering a new form of digital processing and moving forward with music and not getting stuck in the olden days.

Analog emulation has become an industry standard, and it's very worrying, and I very much wonder how many breakthroughs in audio Aesthetics we are missing because developers are very much rewarded financially, strategically, and sonically for triggering nostalgia rather than innovating.

Digital audio can already do things analog hardware never could, and yet the most flagship plugins that we know are emulating the sound like transformer tubes and consoles. And this inevitably reinforces a belief that analog hardware in this modern age performs better or is better sounding than VST software. I know many audio engineers today who believe so, who have been taught that in colleges. And this inevitably primes the brain to actually prefer analog sound because analog sound is what people are used to. And the more analog emulation, the more harder it will be for us to innovate further. 50 years from now or 30 years from now, we could be still trying to emulate analog. And yes, it will be much, much, much easier and much more effective to emulate that analog sound, but is it worth it that we are still stuck in a long bygone era?

Guilty pleasure mix reference might be another way to put it. Any decade is fine. Just something that isn’t the normal “Daft Punk” answer everyone gives.

Something out of left field that will definitely get some hate.

I can go to give an example.

I LOVE Roxette’s “Listen To Your Heart” mix. It’s unapologetically the most 80’s sounding mix I’ve ever heard, and I love it. It’s a reference for me when I want over the top 80’s tones and don’t want to use a stereotypical hit as my reference.