Gobble this up folks!

Yes, Canadian Thanksgiving was over a month ago, but there is no freakin’ way that we can ignore the holiday celebrated to the south this weekend. Well, especially when I’ve also got three little dual-citizens running around here. That, and the bombardment of advertisements … even Canadian retailers get into the spirit with “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” deals.

It’s been a bountiful harvest of blog posts out there in the audio-related blog-o-rama world. I’ve actually categorized them this week. Enjoy!

Recording, Mixing and Mastering

• We’ll kick this section off with an off-the-wall post from Bobby Owsinki about analyzing annoying sounds and how that might help in mixing: Scratching the Blackboard Sound.
• Björgvin Benediktsson at Audio Issues was on a where’s-my-signal? kick this past week with a couple of posts: Connecting Your Equipment – The Basic Rule of Signal Flow and The #1 Thing to Avoid While Routing and Subgrouping.
• Home Studio Corner was active this week. Joe Gilder finished up his “Five Steps of Recording” series with “Step 5 – Mastering” and then has some sage advice on “Why Your Mixes Need to Be Critiqued” and on recognizing gear-acquisition binge activity with “Why Your Home Studio Might Be Bloated (and why that’s a bad thing)“.
• Not to be outdone, our friend Ian Shepherd finished his 11-part mastering series with “Day 11 – Check your level“. He then turns around to navel-gaze and ponder “Do mastering engineers deserve any credit?” He also posted a very eye-opening comparison analysis of the RHCP track “I’m With You”: Vinyl versus CD.
• Can’t forget about Graham Cochrane. He posted a video showing us how he recorded his band using only 8 inputs: “Recording My Band With Only 8 Inputs“. Later in the week, he posted some great tips on how to enhance your live show with some pre-recorded tracks: “Take Your Studio Tracks To The Stage“

Creative

• Kim Lajoie kicks off this week’s creative section with some tips, advice and pointers on “What makes a successful collaboration“. As with a lot in this business, talent and equipment only really take you so far – it’s all the other soft-skills that get you to the finish line.
• Gary Ewer over at The Essential Secrets of Songwriting always seems to have some thought-provoking angle to think about songwriting. He didn’t disappoint with an entry entitled “Songwriting Tips and Tricks: Changing Tonal Focus” which looks at ways that you can make things interesting by avoiding the stereotypical resolution to the tonic chord.
• On one of my favourite topics, Jeff Tolbert from FilmScoring.info provides some head-nodding common-sense advice for film composers with “The Role of the Score“.

Business

• Jeff Tolbert kicks things off this past week with some thoughts on website design and points to some easy-to-use resources one can use to get a good-looking site up quickly with “How’s Your Website?”
  
• Bobby Owsinski did not hold back this past week:
  - Online Music Store Showdown – a very interesting chart comparing the “specs” of online music stores.
  - How We Currently Discover Music is an interesting article on a study done by NARM and the NPD Group
• David Andrew Wiebe posted some thoughts on looking to enhance the user’s experience at your site with “Fewer Clicks“

Dang! That was a huge amount of fantastic blogs. I sure hope these guys eat a whole lot o’ food this weekend and spend some time resting and digesting… ;)