Mixers

Everyone wants to be a DJ these days, and with good reason—DJs are cool. Movie stars are doing it. Sports stars are doing it. Guess what? You could do it, too.

Way back—five years ago—if you shot video, you used a video camera, and if you shot photographs, you used a still camera. Today, that distinction is all but meaningless. Almost every video camera today captures stills, and virtually every still camera now shoots video.

A podcast is a digital audio or video show that can be created by anyone and shared through the Internet. The shows can be streamed live, and posted on a website after they’re finished. The format of a podcast can be anything you want it to be.

You can learn a lot about audio by recording your own music (or a friend’s music), and by volunteering to assist a local sound engineer. However, attending a formal audio school can also really help you learn the nuts and bolts of sound.

Deleted scenes often end up “on the cutting-room floor,” but how did specific pieces of equipment end up on the editing-room desk? It’s common to see a computer keyboard and multiple video monitors on the desk of every video-editing station, but there’s usually another piece of equipment that may seem somewhat out of place: an audio mixer. 

A clever new piece of equipment is available that corrects all of the shortcomings of HDSLR audio, in a single compact, camera-mountable box. The Fostex DC-R302 is a three-channel field mixer, with a two-channel high-resolution audio recorder built in.

A sports photographer needs a different set of tools than someone who shoots elementary-school portraits, and similarly, a wedding DJ often relies on different equipment than other kinds of DJs. 

The new QMix app from PreSonus creates an easy new way for performing musicians to control their on-stage monitor mixes wirelessly, from an Apple iPhone or iPod touch. 

Barry Manilow gently sings “Copacabana” in the background as you pick up a jar of mayonnaise, when suddenly the jar slips from your fingertips and crashes to the supermarket floor. An announcement blares over the soft music: “We need someone to clean up Aisle Nine!”

IK Multimedia unleashed a fresh batch of new iOS and iPad-centric accessories at NAMM 2012, which can help you do everything, from recording excellent-quality sound directly into your Apple device, to mixing songs on separate media players with a purpose-built iPad hardware DJ mixer.

The new Novation Twitch DJ controller is an innovative DJ software control surface and audio interface that offers a relatively small footprint and a mountain of power. It ships with a copy of Serato’s ITCH DJ software, but it’s just as capable of a controller for Native Instrument’s Traktor DJ software (a graphic overlay for Traktor is included in the box).

One way you can offset the overall cost of a wedding is this: take on the task of providing the music yourself. Obviously, creating a do-it-yourself wedding DJ system will require a bit more effort on your part.

There’s a wide range of workflows in today’s production world, and the new Sound Devices MixPre-D is a versatile piece of equipment that will flow with the many different kinds of work.

Have you ever wondered what’s going on inside the audio bags that are used in professional video and film productions? In this article we’ll take a close look at the gear found in a typical professional location sound bag, and explain what each piece of equipment does. You’ll gain an understanding of how all these devices connect together and why each tool is necessary to have.

Okay, you've done some research and determined that many people are using portable digital recorders like the Zoom H4n and Tascam DR100 to record the audio during DSLR video shoots. Now you need some real-world advice about using this equipment properly with external microphones, field mixers and clapper slates.

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