Hello PreSonus! My name is Luis “LH Dub” Henrique, a Brazilian who is passionate about music production and mixing technology. In particular, I love mixing tracks with Jamaican rhythms to create new songs. I have always needed a high-quality interface in order to create my songs, and I have finally found it in the PreSonus StudioLive 16.4.2. It has everything to fulfill my needs, and meets my high standards of quality while offering a great variety of tools. It was love at first sight! I had no previous experience with digital mixers, and I was a bit afraid that I couldn’t manage it, but as soon as my 16.4.2 arrived home I quickly realized that StudioLive is a very easy interface to work with.

Personally, I really like reverb and delay effects. So when I first experienced the effects available on the 16.4.2, I was totally amazed. The delay filter is incredible. I also have been using StudioLive to record live bands and it does a great job! The compressor, gate and all other tools are very well placed. It’s easy to handle and work with.

The StudioLive 16.4.2 is also very resistant  By accident, it has fallen from 1.5 m height and it still works perfectly… only few scratches tell the story!

Because of my wonderful experience with StudioLive, I have decided to purchase only PreSonus products in the future due to the fact that I am very pleased to work with this equipment that, besides having a great design, has the best quality you can get.

LH Dub on YouTube

Check out more of these over at YouTube!

Retro5pect (Dallas, TX)  and Cloud Stryfe (New Orleans, LA) tied for first place, with each receiving a pair of the brand-new PreSonus Eris E5 monitors! Eduk8 (Baton Rouge, LA) took third place and walked away with a set of PreSonus HD7 headphones.  B. Brooks (Baton Rouge, LA) took fourth place.

Photos by Travis Robertson

See pics from the show over at our Facebook page!

Rick and the RACK OF DOOM

Hey there! I got something for ya. Here’s a pile of 30-second tracks from the sessions we did recently with Briana Tyson. Every signal on this recording was recorded direct via an ADL 700 or ADL 600 preamp. Because we could.

No other processors were used in these recordings. The guitars were recorded with Shure SM57s and Royer R-121s, and the bass was ran direct into an ADL 700. The stereo sources—keys, drum overheads, and two room mics were ran through the ADL 600s.

Here’s the mic list for this session:

Kick (Shure Beta 52)
Snare (Shure SM57)
Hi Tom (Sennheiser 421)
Low Tom (Sennheiser 421)
Stereo Overheads (Neumann K184′s)
Stereo Room Mics (AudioTechica 4080)
Bass Guitar (Direct)
Electric Guitar (SM 57)
Electric Guitar (Royer 121)
Female Vocal (Brauner VM1)
Keyboard (Yamaha P100 direct)

These tracks are available via SoundCloud for download. Help yourself to them and do with them what you will. Mix ‘em up! Or down.

We hope you think they sound as amazing as we do.

Here’s the tracks:

Here’s video of this session:

[Olesya Star is a 26-year-old UK singer, songwriter and record producer. In 2010, she co-founded the independent record label Graffiti Records, purely to release her own material. All work on Olesya Star has been done through Graffiti Records to date – including all self-produced videos, recordings, production, photography, artwork, social media and general music management.]

• According to this article, women account for 5% of producers and engineers—why do you feel this is?

Perhaps it’s a lack of interest in the subject. To be perfectly honest, I got into all this “record and produce myself” affair because I couldn’t afford to pay good studios for all those hours, and pay their producers for every song I wrote. Besides, I wanted unlimited access to recording any crazy idea I got in the middle of the night, be it a song or a beat. I wanted to experiment with my sonic identity. But it is only now that I’m into record production, that I get excited discussing the benefits of a particular piece of gear. Speaking of gear… I must say, I still think that men get more irrationally excited about all the hardware, all the knobs and faders, and the look of a console with its industrial design and funky lights… I, personally get more excited about what it does to my vocals! I care more about the end result than all the reasons and logic behind third level harmonics that tape produces.

It also seems to me that most girls lack confidence, probably because of men, because of all the jokes that men make about women…  Could that be one of the reasons why there are not more females in audio engineering? I read somewhere that many female scientists submit their works under a male pseudonym. Food for thought? Are they afraid of prejudice and being judged?

It could be a cultural thing too, as traditionally it’s a male-dominated field. And many girls think, “Oh god, I’m not going into all this technical wizardry…. boys ‘n their toys, etc.” Our society, unfortunately, still has many gender stereotypes, and it’s very slow to change. How many women are there as fighter pilots? Or train engineers?

• Do you feel that, for whatever reason, that there are some elements of the pro audio field that women have a more natural predisposition toward than men? If so, which and why?

Girls are highly capable of understanding sound engineering. They’re quite often better at math than guys. Us girls have a knack for multi-tasking. But then again, maybe, the male ability to concentrate on one thing solely, like the harsh frequencies around 2 kHz is a good thing. The smallest gain changes, harmonics and sub-bass frequencies that I hear often differ from the sounds a guy will hear, and vice versa, so I think that you need both sexes to make a truly awesome mix. Like most girls, I tune in to the top end easily—guys will always opt for more bass, often way too much in the mids, and then struggle to find ‘air’ in the mix. This is where you need the female ear!

I think, however, it’d be a good thing if more girls got into record production. Nice, clear mixes that aren’t over-compressed, lifeless and flat—that’s the goal! And girls really get that. I think educating people on the differences between being a producer and a sound engineer would help. Sometimes you don’t need to be the latter to be able to accomplish the former.

[This just in from Rob Seifert Gage, producer/engineer and owner of Audio Evidence Mobile.]

As an independent engineer/producer since the pre-DAW era, I had the opportunity to see the development of the modern-day DAWs. Some had all the bells and whistles but sounded terrible. I have learned so many through the sessions I’ve worked, and I am so excited about PreSonus Studio One 2.5 ! The sound of 64-bit processing and the extensive native plugins  put a smile on my analog face every at session.