These days, owning an analog tape machine is somewhat akin to driving a classic car, with ongoing maintenance, scarcity of parts, and exotic fuel (analog tape) that's expensive and hard to find. So while a handful of top studios still offer those classic spinning reels (and the engineers to maintain them), the good news for the rest of us is that there are now more convenient ways to achieve that classic magnetic sound.

Has your mix ever sounded “not quite right?" You might be experiencing phase cancellation, a phenomenon that makes certain frequencies vanish from your mix. This Studio Basics article will help you understand phase — what it is, why it matters, and what it means to be out of it.

When most people think of stereo recording, the first thing that comes to mind is a matched pair of microphones, arranged in a coincident (XY) pattern. But while XY microphone recording is the most obvious method, it's not the only game in town. The Mid-Side (MS) microphone technique offers some dramatic advantages—a malleable stereo field, and true mono compatibility.

Data compression schemes like MP3, FLAC, AAC, and other relatives have fundamentally changed music as we know it. Daniel Keller breaks down the different formats, and how data compression can change the music you make, and how you listen to it.

Reverb is arguably one of the most often-used effects in modern recording, and probably one of the most misunderstood. It’s interesting to consider the fact that, as with so many things, we’ve spent decades perfecting different ways to imitate something that occurs on its own in nature.

The science of acoustics is something that tends to alternately baffle and intimidate most of us. Outside of a handful of highly trained individuals, the aspects of what makes a room sound a certain way is looked upon as a sort of black art. Performance venues and upscale recording studios routinely include acoustic designers in their construction budgets, spending considerable sums of money in pursuit of sonic perfection.

No one will argue that digital technology has done much to empower musicians to take control over their recordings. Today’s artists are far less dependent on high-priced recording professionals, with many great-sounding projects having never even seen the inside of a recording studio.

Ask ten recording engineers about recording drums and you’re likely to get more than 20 opinions. Few instruments combine subtle nuance and brute force the way a good drummer can, and capturing that sound has been the subject of hundreds of articles and thousands of conversations.

For those of us who toiled over faders back when the earth was still cooling, the concept of gain structure was fairly easy to grasp. Each separate box was a link in the audio chain, visibly connected via patch cables, and analog distortion was easy to hear and identify. In today’s all-digital, all-in-the-box world, it’s not that simple. Signal paths can be unconventional and convoluted, and digital distortion can be subtle and sneaky.