One more of the fundamental tips is to keep your distance from the mic which most people forget for with proper distance (which by the way you get only with experience with your setup) from the mic for whatever cost you may have spent on a mic use it wrong and you get trash. Mic filters, wind screens and many other stuff will get you respectable audio yet if you are still in the learning curve, try this trick, make a distance cue, say a pencil with the tip coated with some fluorescent paint to make it stand out and focus on the proper distance using it as a guide till you get it to sink in. More →

A gate is typically the same thing as an expander, but set to a such high ratio (I.E. high compression) that it doesn’t let anything past the set threshold. In other words, it is almost to the gate, what the limiter is to the compressor. Gates are perhaps most often used as a noise gate, that is, to remove unwanted noise from recordings.

An expander is in a way the opposite of a compressor. While a compressor uses the threshold setting to reduce the signal above the set value, an expander reduces the signal below the threshold value. This makes the signal more dynamic, and is thus expanded instead of compressed.

As with most audio tools, the parameters can vary between expanders. Typical controls found are ratio, threshold, knee, range and attack.

Here’s a series of clips where I’m basically playing around with a couple of rhythm loops and a synth. They’re variations of the same theme.

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Nothc filters, or “high Q notch filters” are basically EQ bands used to eliminate certain frequencies. Usually they have very high Q settings so that they only affect a very specific area of the frequency range. Notch filters are usually used to remove hum or other noise.

A multiband compressor is simply a compressor that can be set to operate differently on different frequencies. For instance, you could set it to a ratio of 4:1 on 500-1000 Hz and a ratio of 2:1 on 3 kHz. In the same way multiband limiters also exists.

Mid-side – or M/S – recording is a way of setting up two microphones to create a wide stereo image. The mid microphone is placed to face the sound you want to record. The side microphone must be a figure-8 microphone (such as a ribbon). It’s placed at about the same spot as the mid microphone but aimed differently, like 90º off-axis.