Fish(er) Tales

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! These posts will give you a better idea about what this site is about. Start here, then go here, and here, and then here.In the fine book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar James Bach discusses how self-education can lead to success. I found it quite inspiring and enlightening to read about his story, and apply it to...

To support the release of my latest book Soundtrack Success - A Digital Storyteller’s Guide to Audio Post-Production, I thought it’d be fun to have a contest. The winner (chosen at random) gets a FREE, autographed copy of the book. What’s the catch? Think of your favorite movie, TV show, documentary, or commercial where the use of sound was exceptional. Let’s avoid musical examples...

Are you putting money toward your retirement nest egg? I hope so. The cost of your future years is getting more expensive for most of us because we live longer and are more active. Also, you may need to take on a greater portion of your retirement costs because fewer companies provide traditional pensions. Unfortunately, just about 57 percent of all workers are earning retirement benefits at work,...

Do you need sound effects for your next project? Of course you can buy a lot of them. But where’s the fun in that? Instead consider making your own sounds. Footsteps, doors, prop handling, and other such obvious sounds are easy to create in the studio. But what if you need unique or esoteric sounds? The fine folks at Epic Sound maintain a handy-dandy, free, A-Z guide to sound effects (SFX) creation....

A new study conducted by Suzanne Mettler at Cornell University shows a wide “disconnect between what government actually does for individuals” and what they believe. This amazing  and deeply disturbing graphic  shows the percentages of people who say that they “don’t use a government social program.”   It clearly illustrates that many of us (if not all) continue to...

Film and video soundtracks can be very sophisticated with dozens of tracks. It’s essential to organize all these various elements. Since dialogue, music, and (sound) effects are the three primary elements to a soundtrack, setup three main busses for your DM&E. Route these three busses to the master volume for the final mix. This setup allows you to produce both a stereo a master file and...

There’s never enough time to chase your artistic dreams, right? If you only had more time, you’d get so much more finished. But “more time” is misleading. We all get the same allotment each day. How you spend those hours is what separates those who accomplish more from those who only wish they could. Grab a piece of paper and write your most important need-to along the top (e.g....

Go into a Kindergarten classroom and ask the students to raise their hands if they think they are an artist. Probably every hand will go up. Ask them if they can draw. More hands. Ask if they can sing? Ditto. Ask if they can dance. Ditto ditto. Now go into a high school classroom and ask the same questions. You’ll be lucky if one student raises her hand to any of these questions. What happened?...