In my first studio, I had four monitor paths. When I moved to the United States, for the first four months I had zero monitor paths and only one pair of headphones. Did the quality of the work I produced during those months change? Not that much. A large part of that was thanks to…

Usually, when recording drums, I use 10–13 microphones across the entire kit, of which 8–9 typically remain in the final recording. However, the microphones and their positions are only a small part of getting a good drum recording. If they play too softly or too hard, with poor timing and inconsistent dynamics, no amount of…

Have you noticed how many more AI mastering services have appeared lately? Sometimes even music distributors practically push their own “sound enhancement” services right before you release a song. The question is simple: is this actually a useful service, and is it worth your time and money? In a few words – usually not. For…

Let me start by saying that, to me, monitors are the most important part of any studio – second only to, or perhaps equally important as, the room acoustics. Ever since I took my first steps in music, I have been fascinated by the search for the “perfect” playback system. I always wanted to find…

REAPER Whoa, what DAW is that? This is a question I hear constantly whenever I walk into a new studio to record. It’s just a custom Pro Tools skin, I say, and calmly continue running the session. In the United States, probably around 1% of engineers and producers are genuinely familiar with REAPER. Another 10–20%…

Over the past three years, I have almost stopped buying new plugins. In fact, the palette of tools I actually use in real projects has only been getting smaller. Even with hundreds of plugins and dozens of bundles available, only a very small number of them make it into constant use. Thinking about it, I…