Paper Plane Pilot Blog

Magazines for Recording Electronic Musicians

June 27, 2009

Today in the mail I received two of my three magazine subscriptions. (The third, as a bi-monthly mag, won’t be here for another month.) All three are related to creating music, and tend to focus on using computers to do that. Most of the articles center around DIY music creation and gear, as opposed to the idea of showing up to a studio, booking time and sitting back while someone else creates your “sound” and record (that’s rec-ord, not re-cord) for you. But I digress…

The first music magazine I subscribed to was Future Music. In addition to experimenting on my own, blogs, forums and other online recording websites had formed most of my working recording knowledge, but I was looking for a more passive form of keeping up with gear and other developments in music creation. The depth of most online content is rather shallow (and shrouded in noise and heavy amounts of clutter); the beauty of print is that by definition the content needs to be succinct and relatively good, if only because people must be convinced to actually buy it.

Paper Plane Pilot First Flight CD available direct

June 14, 2009

Last week I mentioned that First Flight was available at CD Baby. Today, I’m happy to announce that the CD is now available for purchase direct from the website through PayPal. Head on over to the CD section of the Paper Plane Pilot store for more.

DAW Software Guide: A Digital Audio Workstation Round-up

June 10, 2009

With all the different DAW (short for Digital Audio Workstation) software packages out there, it’s hard to know where to start when thinking about recording music on a computer. While the technical aspects of computer recording are beyond the scope of this article, a quick presentation of the top software packages available should help you in choosing a DAW for your studio.

I’ve broken up the list below into a few sections: Mac-only, PC-only, cross-platform and misc. The misc. section contains DAWs that are used primarily as songwriting tools or that are less full-featured than their pro counterparts.

It’s also interesting to note that most DAWs hover roughly around the same price. You get their entry level offering (usually a limited version of the pro package) for a couple hundred dollars while the premium package is about $500-$1,000 or more.

Paper Plane Pilot First Flight CD now available at CD Baby

June 8, 2009

Update: The CD is also available direct from me through PayPal. Head on over to the Paper Plane Pilot store for more.

A new batch of First Flight CDs are now available for order at CD Baby:

The CD is also part of their 3/$15 promotion - buy 2 other CDs and get all three for $15. How cool is that!

First Flight was printed on paper digipak and the final product came out just great! Here are some pictures of the packaging/CD:

If you’re in the San Diego area you can also pick up a copy of the album at Lou’s Records in Encinitas and Spin Records in Carlsbad. Just ask for the local music section. If they’re out, tell them to call me so I can give them more copies!

Building my home recording studio one piece at a time

June 7, 2009

When people ask me about Paper Plane Pilot, one of their first questions is usually about the gear I use. And what better way to answer that question than to give a quick run through of my recording studio gear. Whether this encourages you to build your own music studio, or just serves to satisfy your curiosity, I hope you find the list below inspirational.

While many producers and engineers prefer either a pure software or hardware approach, I like to use both and don’t really favor any one method. Obviously, space and budget will determine most decisions here, but I find that good results can be achieved with either method and that, honestly, the engineer plays a much larger role in the final result than the gear does. That said, nice gear makes everything just that much easier once you get past learning how to use it all. Yes, that means reading the manual cover-to-cover for every single piece of gear you buy. It’s not the sexiest part of making music, but you’ll be better off for it.

Hi, I'm Dustin. I create electronic indie pop music. Click here to learn more.