Morph Productions

As many of you are aware Morph Productions moved to a new location in the middle of august this year.  It was really important for me to keep the studio at my home or else my family would never see me.  Equally important was keeping it in downtown Toronto near the subway.  Unfortunately (or in many ways fortunately!) the houses in downtown Toronto are very old and thus have basements with really low ceilings which are not ideal for anything except storage. The challenge for myself and my partner was to find a place that worked for both of us at a cost that would allow us to do the reno's I needed to do to make a workable space.  This would almost definitely include digging out the basement for extra ceiling height along with soundproofing and finishing.  Not cheap! In May we ended up getting lucky and getting a great place in a great area near Bathurst and Dupont.  The basement was unfinished which worked great for us because it meant we weren't paying...

Quite regularly I get emails from young people asking me what recording schools I recommend.  When I was in the same position in the mid nineties there wasn't a lot of options in Ontario; you had Fanshawe college as the "public" option and a bunch of private schools with varying degrees of reputations.  Currently there's a lot more choice as a few more public colleges have started programs and the list of private schools offering programs is getting pretty long.  I often joke that there's more recording schools out there than there are actual recording jobs! As with anything in life you always have to be focused on your goal first and destination second.  That is to say, figure out what you want to do and then devise a plan on how to achieve it.  In this situation it's always best to talk to people doing what you want to do and find out how they got there.  If you decide you're going to take a post secondary program do extensive research.  The cost o...

This may seem like a random post since I'm largely a mac user but I recently upgraded the ram in my sisters Acer 5000z laptop and figured I'd throw up some pictures on the blog for those who may be intimidated by doing an upgrade like this.  If you find your computer slowing down a ram upgrade can be the simplest and cheapest way to give it some new life.  Ram upgrades are generally the easiest upgrade you'll do to a computer but for those with a faint heart it doesn't hurt to have a tutorial.  Please keep in mind that I am not a professional computer technician and this blog is only for advising purposes.  Please do your own research and do this upgrade at your own peril! To upgrade the ram on the Acer 5500z you need to buy some ram chips.  Luckily the type of ram these machines use is really cheap.  I picked up 2 - 1 gig chips of kingston ram for 40 bucks.  Not bad!  The type of ram this machine uses is: DDR2 Non-ECC 533MHZ SODIMM chips. ...

More and more artists are recording themselves at home, and a lot of them hit the same wall when they get to the mixing stage:  “I just can’t get it to sound right.” There can be a lot of reasons for that, but sometimes the best move is to bring in a professional mixer to finish the project properly. I regularly mix for other producers, artists who were unhappy with a previous studio mix, and people recording at home who want that final polish. If you know you may be sending your song out for mixing, a little planning during the recording stage can make a huge difference. Here are a few simple ways to give your mix engineer more flexibility and help them get the best possible result. 1. Record clean drum samples while you’re tracking If you are recording live drums, it is a great idea to capture a few clean single hits of each drum, especially the  kick, snare, and toms . Why does this help? Because during the mix, there may be moments where a tom hit is buried under cymbal bl...

It's been a while since I posted because the studio has been crazy busy but I figured I'd spend a few minutes to give a shout out to a great company.  In the 12 years since starting my Toronto Studio - Morph Productions , I've been fortunate to not have a major hard drive problem on the studio computer.  Just in case though I do have two separate back up systems (both hardware and software) in case something does though.  I have had problems with personal hard drives of no consequence and I have to tell you that Alsoft's Disk Warrior can provide minor miracles. The real reason I'm writing this post though is to give these guys a shout out because their tech support is incredible.  The first time I had an issue with a drive I bought Disk Warrior to see if it would fix it.  It didn't and I thought to myself, "that was a quick way to lose a hundred bucks".  I read in the instructions that if DW can't solve an issue you can contact tech support for ...

An arpeggiator is a feature available on some synths and software packages that plays notes individually in a patten according to the chords played by the user. It's a feature that has been used in many forms of electronic music for decades and has also found it's way into other popular forms of music like rock and pop through the years. Many people aren't aware that Logic Pro has an arpeggiator built right in, it's just hidden in the scary environment. I was playing around with it the other night and figured I'd put up a step by step picture tutorial on how to use the arpeggiator in Logic Pro. If you can't see the pictures clearly enough just click on them and you'll get the full size. STEP 1 Go into Logic Pro's Environment window: STEP 2 Once you're there go to the top left of the window and select "clicks and ports" in the environment layer menu: STEP 3 Go into the environment menu "New" and select "ar...

I recently got an Apple Magic Trackpad and thus had to get bluetooth running on my mac pro. You can't get the bluetooth card at The Apple Store because it's not considered a user installable part. After checking on ebay I picked one up for about 60 dollars and waited. Upon it's arrival I went to install it and slowly watched a 15 minute job turn into one that took several hours. Many of you may know that Mac Pro's sometimes have a problem where the internal antennas wires for airport and bluetooth were mislabelled and I apparently have one of those machines. After fiddling for hours with different combinations the best I could come up with was the trackpad sometimes working, sometimes well. Not cool! I did some research and there are some usb bluetooth options that work for the mac. I picked up an IOGear USB 2.1 bluetooth Micro Adapter, plugged it in and got my Magic Trackpad working within minutes. It can now be used from far away distances too. If you...

This past fall was a bit slower than the busy busy pace I'm use to so I decided to put a bit of work into getting my songs licensed to TV, film and video games. I contacted a ton of music supervisors and as you can imagine very few got back to me. Some that got back to me wanted me to submit music either via CD or online with mp3's. Others recommended some music licensing catalogues that they use frequently. Music licensing catalogues are a double edge sword for a music creator. They do make your music available to people who want it but of course they want a cut (in some cases a hefty cut). Unfortunately with the large swath of musicians wanting to license their music, music supervisors aren't as receptive to listening to submissions directly from music creators and have started using these catalogues more and more. The thing to be aware of with these catalogues is that most of them are a complete waste of time because they don't have the connections they cla...