PreSonus Blog

Update 9/6/13: This workshop has almost sold out! Due to popular demand, Joe has added two days to his LA seminars, September 28 and 29. Click here to register! 

Just added:  Music Supervisor Panel with seven of Hollywood’s top music supervisors who’s work includes Pulp Fiction, West Wing, Shameless, Paramount, HBO, Coldplay, Seal, and many current films and TV shows. There’s also VIP packages available that include dinner with these Music Supervisors—only 9 slots left!

Presonus customers who sign up by 9/21/13 get a 15% discount, too! Use Discount Code PRESONUS15

Two days.  Get your road map to success in the music business.

PreSonus enthusiast and world-class producer/songwriter/engineer Joe Solo has another workshop coming up, this time in Los Angeles on August 10 and 11, 2013. This is a great opportunity to sit down with a man with some truly valuable industry experience. Joe’s clients and collaborators include Macy Gray, Fergie, Michael Jackson, Rick Rubin, Quincy Jones, and American Idol. No joke!

Joe’s Music Success Workshop is about the farthest possible thing from a boring old lecture. Bring your tracks, and Joe will give them a listen and critique them for you live during his presentation. In addition, expect Joe to cover myriad topics on success in music, including but not limited to songwriting, production, and getting your music placed in film and games.

Here’s a full list of topics covered, from Joe’s website:

• New thinking on music career paths, finding one that works for you.
• Strategies for independent musicians, building a presence and a revenue stream.
• How to present yourself to get signed to artist and publishing deals.
• Revenue streams, strategies to boost your earnings.
• On-the-spot song evaluations.
• Song production, how important is it? Hear “before” and “after” examples.
• The psychology of producing hit songs.
• Real world examples of breakthroughs that you can learn from.
• Fresh techniques for marketing your music.
• Industry gatekeepers: What you need to know about label execs, managers, A&R reps, music attorneys, music supervisors and other key members of the industry.

Special Guest Panel of Music Supervisors & Publishers, and other Industry Players
Joe leads a panel of film & TV music supervisors, music publishers and many other key members of the music industry. They’ll be on hand to answer your questions and give you insights on how to win valuable placements.

This is a rare opportunity to gain access to the taste-makers and gate-keepers of getting your music to the world.

Panelists:

Carmen Rizzo
Producer for Coldplay, Seal, Ray Charles

Michael Eames
CEO and Publisher of PEN Music Group
Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez, Shrek, Homeland, New Girl

Ann Kline
Music Supervisor – The Lying Game, Shameless, ER, West Wing,
Quintin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown

Jason Kramer
Music Supervisor & KCRW Radio Host

Michael Todd
Sr. Director of Film & Television Music at ASCAP

Stacy Palm
VP Film & TV Music Paramount’s Famous Music Publishing

Peter Cohen
Talent Coordinator for The Voice

Max Luces-Tucker
Music Supervisor for Keeping Up With The Kardashians, ABC, HBO, NBC, The Real World, many others.

Chris Jackson
Music Supervisor for E! Network

Jack Diamond
Music Supervisor / Music Editor for 2 Broke Girls, Seinfeld, Will & Grace, many new pilots.

Joe is offering a special 15% discount on registration to PreSonus customers, using the discount code PRESONUS15. Be sure to use it before July 21 to take advantage of this offer, and get access to a private networking dinner party hosted by Joe on the Friday before the workshop.

There’s also VIP packages available that include an exclusive dinner with Joe and his panelists, and an in-studio session musician experience is available, too!

Click here to register for this exciting event: www.JoeSoloWorkshop.com/PresonusLA

To sign up for Joe’s FREE Music Success Video Nuggets and weekly tips email, go to www.joesolo.com.

Join steadyb as he shows you all the latest and greatest in Studio One 2.6! We’ve added so many incredible features to 2.6 that there’s no way he can get to them all. steadyb will cover the biggest improvements—and take your questions near the show’s end!

http://www.presonus.com/videos/presonuslive

Here’s marketing maven Ron Koliha during his tenure with the Classy Brassy Oompah Band. This photo was taken shortly before he was kicked out of the band for hyping an upcoming show by canvassing parking lots and distributing flyers under the windshield wipers of cars. Flyers that looked a lot like parking tickets.

The entire band was held responsible for the hefty $12,000 littering fee—still a record fine for this charge in Yakima county—and Koliha was summarily dismissed.

Perched atop a crabapple throne gilded with the tears of lesser designers, Ron directs all PreSonus marketing efforts with an iron fist in a burlap glove.

Following up last years’ “25 new features in Studio One 2.5,” YouTube genius AudioCzar put together this video celebrating 26 new features in Studio One 2.6!

Noteworthy: 2.6 came out on August 29, and AudioCzar had this video posted on the 30th. The man works fast!

Rick and Johnny explore the latest features of the new StudioLive 32.4.2AI, and also reveal the big #UnveilPreSonus secret: there are THREE boards in the StudioLive AI family!

For more on the StudioLive AI series, click here.

Studio One 2.6 launched today! After you check out this video, you may want to

• Read the release notes
• Check out the new Studio One website
• Install it! To update, choose “Check for Updates” from the Studio One help menu.

Here’s Peter Burrows in a much more tranquil time, back before he became the raging wildman we know today.

Peter is now our Senior Hardware Engineer, where he is able to leverage his psychobilly gearhead roots into the mechanations of our top-shelf products. If you ever found a little extra grease leaking out from under the pan knob on your StudioLive, blame Peter.

Nowadays, Peter’s musical focus is with a new top-secret rockabilly band alongside PreSonus cohort Matt Conrad.

ACTIVE INTEGRATION HAS LANDED! Click here to watch today’s show and learn all there is to know about the StudioLive 32.4.2AI.

Note that this show is not to be confused with Thursday’s #UnveilPreSonus webcast, which can be viewed at the following link at 3:00 p.m. CST | 4:00 p.m. EST | 1:00 p.m. PST | 20:00 GMT: http://www.presonus.com/videos/presonuslive

Note that this is not to be confused with our #UnveilPreSonus webcast at 2 p.m. the same day at: http://www.presonus.com/videos/presonuslive

Can you really get a great recording of a guitar AND vocal perfomance with just a single mic and a single preamp? Absolutely! That’s how the majority of classic recordings were done back before multitrack recording. The benefits of recording with one really great mic and preamp are twofold:

• The sound is pure and focused
• You don’t have to deal with phase issues

With a single-mic setup, you have the ability to make the listener feel like they are literally in the room.   So how do you pull this off? First of all, you need to have a great song and a great performance. If you’ve got one mic or 1000 mics, it won’t matter if the song sucks or the performance isn’t there. Assuming you have your song and performance together, here’s a few tips on how to pull this off using the PreSonus ADL 700 Channel Strip and the Blue Microphones Kiwi. The artist I recorded is the amazing Chris LeBlanc.

Mic Positioning:  We’re using Blue Microphones’ Kiwi, a nine-pattern microphone (omni, cardioid, figure of eight, and everything in between) featuring their B6 capsule, to capture as much detail as we can. Most of the time, I set the mic to a cardioid pickup pattern, so it is picking up what’s going on in front of it while rejecting reflections that are coming off of the wall behind the mic. When I’m miking a singer/acoustic guitar player, I try to place the mic far enough away to pick up both the guitar and voice—but not too far, otherwise I will get to much room sound. Once I’ve positioned the mic for the correct distance, the next challenge is to position it vertically to get the correct balance between the singer’s voice and guitar. This is also a bit tricky, as placement is dependent on how loud the artist both sings and plays. On this particular session, Chris’ voice was actually a lot louder than his guitar was. Notice I have the mic actually positioned lower, toward the guitar, to account for this. With the Kiwi, it’s good to experiment by opening up the polar pattern to achieve more omni pickup when trying to capture multiple sources. The flexibility of being able to move in-between cardioid and omni is extremely valuable in these settings!

Setting the mic preamp and compressor

The preamp gain was set so that I had plenty of headroom. Chris is a very dynamic singer, and puts out quite a bit of volume, so it was important to make sure I didn’t let him clip the input of the mic preamp. The ADL 700 features variable microphone impedance settings, so I set it to the highest impedance available to get a bright, dynamic sound. The High Pass Filter was disabled, and the compressor was set to a light ratio of about 3:1.  I was getting around 5 or 6dB of compression on the meter. This smoothed out the response, and helped control the inevitable peaks that occur when Chris really belts it out.

Setting the EQ Since the mic was pulled back from Chris by about 1.5 feet, I found I needed to boost some lows around 60k just to bring out the body in his acoustic guitar. Since the guitar was tuned down, the low-mids sounded a little muted, so I boosted a few dB at around 400Hz. Lastly, I added just a tad of highs at around 6kHz to bring out the high-end definition.

Point and Shoot That’s it! As you can see from the video, sometimes Chris wasn’t looking directly at the mic, but because I had some distance between him and the Kiwi, it didn’t matter. What you hear is what the performance actually sounded like if you were in the room. The trick with this type of technique is to experiment. It also doesn’t hurt to have a world-class mic and preamp, but nonetheless, it all starts with the source. Experiment—happy tracking!

Limited time offer from Blue and PreSonus!

Sure, we’ve been talking a lot about the StudioLive 32.4.2AI, and how elegantly it integrates with the StudioLive AI PA systems. And of course you MUST know about PreSonuSphere, coming up in October.  And the RC 500 solid-state preamp? Come on. That jazz is so last-week.

On Thursday, August 29 2013, at 3:00 p.m. CST, (4:00 p.m. EST | 1:00 p.m. PST | 20:00 GMT) head over to www.presonus.com/videos/presonuslive, where we’ll dagger the cloak, tip our hand, and reveal the other players in our triumvirate. But what is it?

Exactly. We encourage you to speculate about precisely what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks we have going on over here using the hashtag #UnveilPreSonus. You are also welcome to direct questions to us on the matter, but are decidedly less welcome to expect useful answers.

At least until the 29th.