Promedia Blog - Page 14 

Within the last few weeks here in New York City, I was hired to work on a radio commercial for McDonald’s. The producer and his writing partner had constructed a demo song (over 2 minutes long) for a new product promotion.  

We get folks that ask us if ProMedia's Pro Tools training classes are tax deductible? The answer for many people is "YES!" The IRS Publication 970 states that employees and self-employed persons can deduct training costs if the workshops, seminars or courses allow individuals to improve and develop their job-related skills, especially if the employees require the training to remain in their roles. Similarly, the IRS allows self-employed workers to deduct training costs, including transportation to and from course locations, so long as the training relates specifically to their current business. Consult your CPA for details and specific allowances.

For those who want the facts, we have included a link to the IRS Publication 970 or consult your CPA.

Today you can use Social Media to market your music in ways that can really make a difference in your overall opportunities to increase your fan base, exposure, as well as gain avenues to be heard that were impossible in the past. Learn how to make Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and other social platforms work for you and your music. This free guide, compliments of DiscMakers, offers ProMedia Training's students and subscribers a great resource in how to use Social Media to promote your music. Hit the ground running with advice featuring tons of suggestions for how to get the most from your videos, photos, tweets and more.

Avid Everywhere: The Future of Production and Media Distribution

At the recent NAB Show in Las Vegas, Avid unveiled their vision for the future with the Avid Media Central Platform and the Avid Everywhere vision. This new platform will be accessible directly within Avid products such as Pro Tools and Media Composer and allow users from all over the world to collaborate on projects. Users will be able to "invite" other people to share their session via the web while also able to message and video conference with those people. Imagine being able to work with musicians, artists, producers, and singers all from the creative comfort of your own private studio space. Pro Tools Cloud Collaboration will allow you to work and communicate with people from around the globe as if everyone were hanging out in the studio together. It will soon be common for people to work via collaborative Pro Tools sessions in real-time.

The most exciting features of the Avid Media Central Platform (for music production & recording) is the ability to work with talent via a remote Pro Tools session. I can "share" my session with a singer in LA, for example, once she downloads my session we can communicate via the built in web-chat feature, she can then record her vocal parts and once we're happy with the result, I can download the new track and changes back to my session.

Founded in 1998 by Colin McDowell, armed with "a haircut only an engineer would want, and a passion for Digital Signal Processing", McDSP has some of the most widely used plug-ins in the audio world.

John Frye: Multi-Time Grammy Award Winning Mix Engineer Joins ProMedia Training

3-Time Grammy Award WinningMix Engineer John Frye is teaming up with ProMedia to bring you an exciting opportunity to have your song mixed like a Hit Record. After many requests from our clients and students to offer our professional production services and music know-how. we are opening our studios to you. With a proven track record for mixing some of the biggest songs on the planet, John Frye and his team of professionals will be personally available for an evaluation to mix your songs. If additional production assistance is needed, advice will be given as such and a referral upon request.

What is the Avid Customer Association (ACA)?

The Avid Customer Association (ACA) is a new organization designed to provide essential strategic leadership to the media industry, facilitate collaboration between Avid and key industry leaders and visionaries, and deepen relationships between the company and our customers. If you are a Pro Tools User, this is a great organization to join when you are looking for help, industry news, networking with the music community, gaining access to webinars, and staying on top of the latest advances and techniques. We encourage students registered in Pro Tools Courses to consider the benefits of joining as a source of continued education.

(Proximity Effect, Mic Types, Pick-up Patterns and More)

Recording Vocals in the studio can be one of the most challenging aspects of tracking and music production. Not only does the type of mic affect the quality, but so does the placement, the surrounding acoustics, the room, the polar pattern on the mic, etc. This tutorial will be of assistance to shed some light on these topics, and particularly useful for engineers working in home studios. The mic’s we use today are direct descendants of early telephone technology. Once radio broadcast and recording technology started to emerge in the mid-20th century, music lovers looked at developing better, more specific microphones for use in the studio and recording world. Today, we have an endless variety of microphones to choose from, however, they all still work according to the fundamental principles developed by our techno-ancestors.

In this Pro Tools Course tutorial, we will discuss producing and arranging background vocals in Pro Tools in a method that is often used in modern pop songs.  

Mixing in Pro Tools with Analog Hardware is one of the many techniques used by professional engineers. For many years certain devices in the studio have become "infamous" amongst engineers and producers. The never-ending list includes equipment such as a FairChild Compressor, Tube-Tech EQ, Amek 9098i Channel Strip, Lexicon FX Processors, along with dozens of other unique and flavorful devices that are still used to this very day. While the majority of these "classic" devices gained their notoriety during the hey-day of analog recording, they are also being utilized this very day in the latest Pro Tools based digital studios. The power of Pro Tools lies not only with what it can do, but also with its ability to incorporate hardware and software together into a seamlessly package.

The usage of equipment in this way goes back to analog consoles, which allowed user to plug in various equipment by "patching in" (connecting) the input and outputs to the console. The only difference we have nowadays is that our "console" is called Pro Tools and the "patching in" occurs via the Audio Interface. If we follow the same rules of signal flow our forebears did, we can patch in any piece of hardware equipment directly into Pro Tools, just as if it were an analog console and tape machine.