Or your top three things? I'm brand new to the field, and I'm sure a lot of heads here have forgotten more than I'll ever know, but I'd like to know what general direction to go because it's a vast subject.
Hey there everyone!
I went to the Ivy Room a while back and saw a lone singer-songwriter on the stage dressed up for gunsmoke on a Saturday night, performing originals to 30 or so distracted people milling about waiting for the headliner. He didn't care, he played his heart out like he was on stage with 10,000 adoring fans cheering him. The lyrics were so good I thought they were covers, like they had always existed. Later after the show I approached him outside, I told him I had a recording studio and would love for him to come down and record sometime. He told me he was a long time punk rocker and this western thing was a relatively new mode for him -- that it was funny to grow up as a punk rocker driving low-riders and listening to country. Anyway, he told me he was going on the radio, I tuned in and started recording (of course), along with his songs, he gave me and my studio a shout on the air! The next day I went to his show in the city with some friends, and brought him a studio t-shirt. The day after that we recorded a full albums worth of songs. The session went great. I'm proud that he is my first client, and it's his debut western album. No point I'm just stoked.
I came to country and western music in a roundabout way. My parents didn't listen to it, Neil Young was about as close as they got. I've always been a big Ry Cooder fan, and though it's roots (and world) music, he talks about the country connection a lot in his songs. I really liked in particular, his sountrack to "Paris Texas" and the album "I Flathead"... it was through him that I found Ray Price. From there I found Willie Nelson's "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," just a beautiful album. On the other extreme, I was exploring Jerry Reed and David Allan Coe. Billy Jo Shaver brought me to tears with "Live Forever" and Jimmy Dale Gilmore with "When The Nights Are Cold", I heard the Flatlanders and Flaco in the Texas Tornados and I was tracking down country-adjacent things like old-time music like Seldom Scene and steel players like Mike Auldridge and Jerry Douglas. Session players like Chet Atkins. I love the pedal steel, and that led me to Buddy Emmons, and Daniel Lanois, not strictly country but his music evokes a desert highway blown by the wind to me. That's country if you ask me. I've driven alone down 395 on the eastern side of the Sierras and that's exactly what it evokes.
Anyway, it's been a fun ride and there's still a long way for me to go. Now that you know a thing or two about me, tell me about your music journey, or tell me who I'm missing.
Hello dear musicians, specifically bluegrass musicians,
I am owner and operator of a small home studio. I recently recorded a virtuoso of the blugrass banjo and guitar. The session went really well and I thought they were some of the best recordings I've made. Two original tracks, both featuring banjo and guitar, and one with vocals. It was an experimental session, we recorded wind chimes, rock salt hitting the bottom of a large pot. After he was done with his track I had him overdub a foot stomp, hand clap and salt shaker for one of the tracks, the one with the vocals. The instrumental track got the rock salt and wind chimes. I reversed the wind chimes in the end of that track, and threw a phaser on the banjo which sounded like a sitar in some places. I brought in an uncautious amount of reverb and automated it so it was at it's wettest at the end of the last phrase on the verse and chorus. Anyway, it was his first session and we were having fun with it. He said I could use them in my portfolio but he expressed no interest in using them in an album. He is a repeat client and has brought me more business. So he wasn't unhappy overall.
The mixes are decent, the production was fun. I'm just wondering if the bluegrass scene is so rigid that there is no room for productions like this? We never did anything like that again, but I think we should. In my opinion genre-bending music is where the edge is, and I want to lean into that. I'm not sure what to do or say to try to convince him, my standard operating procedure is to be hands-off, but I think he could have a breakout album if he embraced the experimental. How should I approach this?
Under the table are about two dozen mics, and every one of them serves a unique purpose, lots of cable, long runs for tracking in the "isolation booths" (bedrooms), desk is standing height, 8ft wide solid wood on custom welded metal frame, got that for $250 and snuck it into the house while my girl was at work. She had the thousand-yard stare when she got home, but she eventually came around.
Following up on a previous post made here and r/audioengineering: REAPER Session Auditor, the session monitoring script I built for my studio (Panama Sound), is now open-source under the MIT license. Figured this is a better home for the technical side of things.
**What it is**
It's a "change observer" script that runs the whole time you're recording. It snapshots every record-armed track, watches for anything that changes against that baseline, and logs it ...clipping, hot input, dead/silent channels, FX/fader changes, arm changes, audio engine lag, buffer underruns, disk space, and hardware disconnects. When you stop, it matches up what got recorded on each track (including takes added to an item that already existed, not just brand-new items), runs a peak/RMS pass, and writes out a full human-readable session log plus an optional crash-recovery journal that's written incrementally during the session, so if REAPER hard-crashes mid-take you don't lose the record of what happened. As of the latest version it'll also auto-generate a take/file/peak summary into your track notes without touching whatever you've already written there.
**Use cases (how I actually use it)**
I run sessions solo, so there's no second engineer watching meters while I'm tracking. A lot of what I do is live ensemble work --bluegrass and folk trios/quartets, multi-mic close+room hybrid setups. When you've got 7+ channels open and you're trying to be present with the musicians instead of staring at the DAW, it's easy to miss a dead channel (phantom power didn't engage, an XLR came loose) until after a take you can't always get back. This is basically a second engineer for that situation. It's also been useful for long-form sessions where disk space and engine health matter over multiple hours, and for going back months later to reconstruct what mic was on what or troubleshoot a session after the fact.
**On the clicks question from r/audioengineering**
Someone asked if this would help diagnose clicks on input, worth clarifying here too since it'll probably come up again. Clipping (signal over 0dBFS) is fully covered, real-time, every frame. Clicks/pops (transient glitches, usually from buffer underruns or xruns) are a different thing, the script doesn't do waveform-level analysis to detect those directly, but it does log buffer underruns and engine lag with timestamps, so you can cross-reference a click you hear against the log and get a fast read on whether it's a digital dropout vs. something in your analog chain.
**What it won't do (yet) / out of scope**
- No waveform-level DSP analysis -- no click/pop/glitch detection on the audio itself, no spectral analysis. It watches REAPER/engine state, not the signal.
- Not built or tuned for huge sessions (100-200+ tracks). I deliberately skipped chunk-based state reconciliation and rolling peak buffers since my own sessions top out well under that, and adding that complexity didn't seem worth it without a real use case driving it.
- Single-file by design, not a multi-module architecture. Easiest to distribute and install as one REAPER script; if your use case needs something more modular, that's a fair thing to fork toward.
- It doesn't fix anything. No auto gain-staging, no auto-punch, no signal rerouting. It's a monitor and a logger, not a repair tool ...think flight recorder, not autopilot.
- Doesn't touch mixing or mastering at all; it's strictly a tracking-phase tool.
- I've only tested thoroughly on macOS with SWS installed. Should run fine on Windows but I haven't been able to put it through its paces there myself.
Here is the full source code, download the file and load or open the Reascript editor and paste it.
Hi all,
I’m reaching out to update those who were interested in the REAPER Session Auditor I built for our studio work at Panama Sound.
It’s now hosted on github.
I’ve decided to release the project under the MIT License. It’s the most permissive way to ensure other engineers can adapt this tool for their own specific workflows without any legal red tape.
Recording failures are the worst part of any engineer's day. This script functions as a "change observer"--it monitors your record-armed tracks for hardware anomalies, disk bottlenecks, and silence/clipping in real-time. It's like having an assistant documenting everything from the time you hit record so months afterwards you can reconstruct the session.
I built this iteratively, and it’s a bit outside my depth to refactor on my own. If you’re looking for a project to contribute to, or you’ve been looking for a way to add deeper session monitoring to your REAPER template, I’d love to have you look at the code. Pull requests are more than welcome.
Since reddit filters links in this forum, just go to github and search for "REAPER Session Auditor" or paste this after the last slash on the github website: PanamaSound/REAPER-Session-Auditor
I've spent the last week building something a little unusual for REAPER: a recording session watchdog / flight recorder.
It started with a simple question:
"What information would I wish I had if something went wrong during a session?"
That rabbit hole got deeper than expected.
The script currently monitors things like:
At the end of a take it generates a detailed session log showing what happened, when it happened, and what was being recorded at the time. It also acts as a self-documenting session recall log via reaper's track notes functionality.
Script rundown: soooo basically the whole thing is a watchdog that hooks itself into REAPER, hits record for you (i have it tied to "R" for record), then snapshots every armed track's state as a baseline before settling into one big reaper.defer loop that multiplexes a few independently-timed jobs -- track audit every 0.5s, hardware scan every 1s, disk scan every 2s, journal flush every 1s -- instead of running a bunch of separate loops fighting each other. While that's running it's watching peaks every single frame (clipping needs to be instant, no debounce there), tracking hot input as a sustained-duration thing so a stray transient doesn't trip it, escalating silence warnings the longer a track stays dead, and diffing fader/pan/mute/solo/FX-chain state against the last snapshot so it only logs things that actually changed. Hardware/disk/engine-lag stuff runs on its own slower cadence since those don't need frame-accuracy.
When you stop recording (well, REAPER stops, but it waits ~5s of quiet first to make sure you're really done), it goes track by track matching up what got recorded -- primarily by spotting brand-new item GUIDs that weren't there before the pass, with a fallback now for takes that landed on an item that already existed -- runs a peak/RMS pass on each take to flag dead or hot-RMS files, pulls your track notes, and stuffs all of that plus the whole event timeline into a human-readable .txt log. Markers get dropped on the timeline as it goes (now with optional minimum spacing so you're not staring at a wall of overlapping flags), everything's throttled per event-type so it doesn't spam you, and there's a parallel JSON "journal" being written to disk the whole time specifically so that if REAPER face-plants mid-session, you've still got a record of what happened up to that point instead of losing everything.
I'm still refining it and fixing a few rough edges before releasing it publicly. A GitHub repo is coming first, followed by (hopefully) submission to the REAPER ReaPack ecosystem once I'm confident it's ready for other people to use.
I'd be curious to hear from other reaper users:
If you had a recording watchdog running during every session, what would you want it to monitor?
Stay tuned.
I've spent the last week building something a little unusual for REAPER: a recording session watchdog / flight recorder.
It started with a simple question:
"What information would I wish I had if something went wrong during a session?"
That rabbit hole got deeper than expected.
The script currently monitors things like:
At the end of a take it generates a detailed session log showing what happened, when it happened, and what was being recorded at the time. It also acts as a self-documenting session recall log via reaper's track notes functionality.
A recent test session looked something like:
The goal isn't to replace good engineering practices. It's to create a forensic record of a session so that if something weird happens, I can reconstruct exactly what occurred instead of relying on memory.
I'm still refining it and fixing a few rough edges before releasing it publicly. A GitHub repo is coming first, followed by (hopefully) submission to the REAPER ReaPack ecosystem once I'm confident it's ready for other people to use.
I'd be curious to hear from other engineers:
If you had a recording watchdog running during every session, what would you want it to monitor?
Stay tuned.
I just got the fabfilter mastering bundle with Pro Q4, Pro C3, Pro L2, and Pro MB. I am kicking myself a little bit for not getting izotope ozone instead. My philosophy was that I could be more surgical and know exactly what was going on at every stage, and also teach myself the moves. But theoretically I could also do that with ozone by working backwards from track analysis to breaking down what it was doing and using that as a rough starting point.
My question is did I just burn $500? My engineering advisor told me EQs are a dime a dozen. His opinion I respect because he developed his own DAW and single-handedly coded matrix reverb for Apple. For me the 3dB scale seems to help me make smaller, incremental changes as opposed to wacky and weird decisions I was making without the great visual feedback fabfilter provides. I also close my eyes and listen to each change obviously. Anyway, cast your vote: pile on and tell me I wasted my money or tell me it was a good decision.
My other tangentially related question is this: does anyone have experience using the ElasticStage vinyl cutting service? For those who don't know, you basically upload your stereo tracks and they lathe vinyl for you for a 50% cut of the take, no upfront costs... it makes sense for smaller runs. For larger runs it probably makes more sense to do the footwork yourself. I was wondering especially if they master in-house. Does anyone know?
Is there a "cheat sheet" for mastering for vinyl outlining the moves I should make?
Thanks!
Hello everyone, I am recording a griot from Mali in a couple hours. He a master of the Kora, if you didn't know, this is an acoustic 21-stringed calabash gourd instrument which is stereo by nature, 10 strings on the left, 11 on the right.
I have two pairs of small diaphragm condenser mics going into a pair of Grace Design M101s, Neumann KM184 and Line Audio CM4. The KM184 are on loan and I haven't used the CM4s very much. I understand the KM184s are more premium, but I've read the CM4s are sub-cardioid and very flat and natural. The room is mid-sized with a vaulted ceiling, it is lively... the only treatment are the rugs, curtains and furnishings. That is intentional, I want a room sound.
Other mics include AEA KU5A for his vocals going into BAE, and an M160 into ISA for his wife's vocals, and an AT4047SV 10 feet back and 8 feet up for a mono room mic.
My question is, which SDC pair should I use for the kora to get a natural, open sound? They are mounted on an 8" stereo bar, should I use AB, XY, ORTF or coincident pair? Thoughts?
A year ago I began a project to record songs by different artists I met at a local watering hole. I began with a goal of ten songs, but interest caught on and I've recorded 20 songs for the album. Each song has a different lineup, with some guest musicians sessioning on multiple songs. There are only 6 original songs. There are 28 performers altogether.
If I want to release I still have a long way to go, one song needs to be re-tracked, and there are possibly two more new songs that need to be tracked. Some songs still need overdubs. I have to try to master the songs myself because the cost of outsourcing the mastering is prohibitive for me. Physical release is out of the question, so they would be mastered for streaming only.
Full disclosure, I am proud of the work we've done but I don't think the album is commercially viable for many reasons.
I have three options as I see it.
1.) Walk Away.
Stop all production on the album immediately. Shift the studio focus
to more lucrative and less mind boggling areas.
2.) Release Without Agreements.
Just a nod and a wink, cross my fingers and hope for the best.
3.) Release With Agreements.
3a.) Studio keeps the master sound recording rights,
with a full rights transfer to the artists after a net recoupment of $7500.
3b.) Artists keep the master sound recording rights,
studio releases with a limited non-exclusive license.
3c.) Studio negotiates splits with 28 artists,
keeps a spreadsheet and issues checks in perpetuity.
What should I do?
A friend of mine who I respect and is very experienced (30+ yrs) as an audio engineer in broadcast television, told me: "A small home-based studio recording musicians and bands is not a viable proposition to make a living in 2026 in the Bay Area." He said you could make a little money, but it probably won't pay the mortgage or rent. He advised me to slowly shift my priorities into music for film and tv (sync, I guess), and atmos mixes. He said if you can do atmos, you'll stay busy and earn a living.
That was a little depressing to me, because I started out recording my friends, and I've moved into digitizing tapes and recording more well known acts. After 15 months of hard work, it's finally paying off a little bit, I've got my first three paying clients booked, a solo country act, a traditional kora player from Mali, and a member of a first wave punk rock band who wants to record solo and with his old band.
I've spent everything I've earned on gear, I've finally got a decent setup, the acoustics here are surprisingly good and proven with my first studio album (a collaborative project with 20 musicians). Not to everyone's taste (not dead), but good enough for what I do. I've spent the last 8 years teaching myself reaper, and audio engineering, I'm a tape op subscriber, I have a some audio engineering books on kindle. I haven't read all of them, but I've started.
I've surrounded myself with amazing people, for example: my engineering advisor is an electrical engineer, audio engineer, programmer, dj, and musician. He worked on core audio and single-handedly developed matrix reverb for apple. There are a few other people with equally impressive resumes that I work closely with.
My website is tight, my rates are set and fair. I have studio t-shirts (which really makes it official--you're not a real studio unless you have schwag /s).
Anyway, I'm just beginning to gain traction with my local music community and I feel shot down...
Brighten my day or make the rubble bounce.
We were setting up matched pairs of small-diaphragm condensers (specifically Line Audio CM4s and Neumann KM184s) and getting intermittent, high-amplitude, low-frequency thumps in the raw audio.
Here is what we isolated during testing:
Multi-channel dependency: It only happens when multiple SDCs are connected to adjacent channels on a shared interface power block (e.g., Focusrite Clarett+ 8pre or RME UCX II internal preamps). A single SDC on the same cable runs flawlessly.
Cable length & capacitance: Swapping from two 25-foot Star Quad runs to one 6-foot and one 25-foot run drastically dropped the amplitude of the thump. Physical cable length/capacitance was directly modulating the issue.
It’s not acoustic: Engaging a 50 Hz high-pass filter (HPF) on the preamp didn't eliminate the thump—it just shifted the artifact up in frequency. This confirmed it's an active electrical discharge happening before the preamp filter circuit, not a room rumble or air conditioning pop.
This issue is due to three electrical design factors:
Modern precision SDCs (like the KM184 and CM4) omit traditional output transformers to keep transient responses ultra-fast. Instead, they use active electronic impedance-balancing circuits that are hyper-sensitive to the precise DC equilibrium of the +48V power.
Cables like Canare L-4E6S or Mogami 2534 are great at rejecting EMI, but their four-conductor geometry inherently doubles the capacitance across the mic's active output transistors.
On integrated interfaces, phantom power is usually switched in blocks of channels drawing from a localized internal power rail.
When you run two transformerless SDCs on long star quad lines off a shared rail, the cable acts like a tiny battery. It builds up charge until the active driver circuit or the interface's power rail experiences a micro-sag, followed by a quick DC discharge. The interface interprets this sudden electrical burst as a massive low-frequency impulse… the "thump."
Our solution: for SDC‘s use Mogami 2549..
AND
Plug them into a pair of grace design m101 pres. separate power supplies separate 48 V rails makes this problem impossible.
Hopefully this helps somebody.
Cheers!!