Automation Clips/Items/Regions/Whatever are a neat concept that some other DAWs have. It allows you to contain automation data in a region so it can be easily moved around and/or linked to other regions.

Studio One doesn’t have this feature natively, but years ago I figured out a workaround. I just realized last night that I never wrote about it, so here we go!

The following is a tutorial on how to emulate ‘Automation Clips’ or ‘Automation Items’ in Studio One.

Wood blocks are cool. There’s many ways to make them, and many types and shapes.

I’m going to go through two methods of making one appropriate for use with a drum set: minimal tools and ‘appropriate’ tools.

At minimum all you need is a block of wood, a drill and a chisel. You can even substitute a screwdriver and file for the chisel. Anyone can do this!

The design I’m using was created through testing various shapes/styles of wood blocks until I found something that I felt was at home on a full sized drum kit.

So let’s get to it!

I’ve added more categories to the DAW chart, clarified some things, updated some ratings in response to criticism/discussion and improved some explanations.

I’m always open to ideas on how to improve it. Feel free to e-mail me via gmail. The bit before the @ is audiolabs. Even better is to comment on the DAW Chart page.

Thanks as always!

I often need to use drum triggers. Drum triggers are basically a type of transducer that is applied directly to a drum head. This gives you an isolated signal, without leakage from other instruments, that you can use to convert to MIDI and trigger a drum sound with a sampler.

In this post I’m going to walk you through how I do this very cheaply, and how I use the resulting trigger signal in Reaper.

YOU DON’T NEED DRUMS TO DO THIS!! You can trigger anything. A desk. A lamp. A mousepad. Your wife’s belly. A floor pad. Anything you can hit/tap/punch/stomp or impact, you can “Trigger”.

On with it!

Studio One 4 has been released and I’m sure there’s a lot of folks expecting me to do a 30 days with it, or an exhaustive review.

I won’t be doing that. I did have a post half-prepared, but as I was working on fleshing it out and doing some extra research, I realized that there’s people out there with great content on this already.

So what I’m going to do is list some content that I think is great, then go over some things that I particularly like/dislike. This won’t be a complete review.

The DAW Features Chart has been updated in response to Studio One 4 and FLStudio 20.

There’s also been some updates to other products, since this is a relative chart. When one DAW changes, the ratings of others often change too.

In my Axiom Review I complained about the presets. One of the fine fellows at Blue Cat more or less told me to “put up or shut up” in a very kind way, and (s)he was totally right in doing so.

I didn’t actually give a good constructive summary of how to improve the presets, or how a user could create patches suited to their tracks.

Not all of these are guitar sounds!

So that’s what I’m doing today. I have 10 presets here for Axiom that I took from “real sessions”. I’m going to explain how to use them, how I came to the settings I used, and the tricks I use when utilizing Axiom.

A lot of these tips apply directly to Blue Cat Destructor as well.

Part 2 and the conclusion of the MeldaFreeform series review. Be sure to Check out Part 1 since that has a lot of info as well.

I’m also doing a short comparison between the Harrison AVA Mastering EQ and some of the Melda Freeform products.

Enough chattering… let’s get on with it.

MFreeformAnalogEQ, MFreeformEqualizer and MFreeformPhase. That’s what I’m going to cover because I was asked by Lorenz at Xarc Mastering.

The Melda system is quite feature-filled, so I’m going to be splitting this review in to 2 parts: Part 1 (this) and Part 2 (coming soon!). Part 1 is going to cover features that are common between the 3 products, and other Melda plugins. Part 2 is going to cover the unique functionality of the 3 products.

I will also be comparing MFreeformAnalogEQ and MFreeFormEqualizer to Harrison AVA Mastering EQ.

Be sure to check out Part 2 as well!

Without further ado… let’s see what these plugins have in common.

My wife has a neck injury for which she uses resistance bands in her therapy regimen.

The rub is that the bands need to be held at certain positions, in various ways, so that she can pull on them. Our house is basically a labyrinth of workshops, we don’t even have a living room. We’re both artsy/crafty folk that don’t have much of an interest in a “normal” house. The result is that there’s only one place in the house where she can spread her arms out.

That place also happens to be the main walkway in the house. Which means I don’t want things on the wall where I’ll inevitably run in to them and destroy it, or me.

My solution was to build a portable resistance band holding station that can be clamped on the wall.

Luckily, this also buys me some time for my next review that’s coming up later this week. It’s taking me some extra time so consider this post my ninja-kung-fu redirection while I finish it.

On with it!