Anderton

...and if you aren't a good listener, doing lots of mixes will definitely train your ears

Thanks for catching that! I fixed the text. Some non-breaking dashes were broken when the articles were transferred from the previous platform to the new one.

Or at the very least, a humanoid biped

Thanks for the props!

Doesn't sound stupid at all, I use the "reduce peaks" technique all the time...I call it "micro-mastering." One of the great features in Wavelab is that it will find those "rogue peaks" for you. I often reduce the gain on an individual half-cycle in 10-20 spots, and find I can raise the level 3-4dB without any apparent effects of dynamics changes, or artifacts from compression. Thanks very much for adding info about that technique!

Well, the good news is that the link for HC Confidential 148 is now fixed on both the home page and the listing of articles. The bad news is that, unfortunately, what you're experiencing is not a rare occurrence. The editors who put these articles together often open the article to do some editing and find some, uh, "surprises" - of which images not loading (but then loading the next time it's opened) is one of them. Sometimes font colors are dropped, sometimes articles disappear completely, and sometimes audio examples can't be loaded in the article - for the Ravish Sitar review, the audio example had to be loaded as a separate file, and couldn't even be linked to from the article for some reason.

The bottom line is as editors, we are aware of and frustrated by these problems, and are actively seeking a solution. Hopefully the code fixes to be implemented the first week of January will help considerably.

Aha! So the fact that you couldn't tell there was pitch correction proves that it works

Your vocals are fine, I've heard them isolated and they're even okay then.

Another cool article, Phil

You're very welcome.

The more harmonically-rich and complex the carrier, the more you'll hear the effects of the vocoder. For example, modulating something like a distorted power chord with drums will give really obvious results. A violin is a pretty rich sound, so it should be effective as a carrier if vocoded with something that has variations of energy all over the frequency spectrum. That's why drums make good modulators...flutes, not so much, although you could at least get amplitude-based gating effects.

Bach would agree...so would John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix!