John Garden

Musical Director and Live Tour Consultant

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Bright Horses: Baby Loss Awareness Week, October 2019

Bright Horses: Baby Loss Awareness Week, October 2019

Trigger Warning: Baby Loss.

It’s #BabyLossAwareness Week in the UK. It’s also #MentalHealthAwareness Month. I’ve been avoiding writing something all week, even though I have wanted to. Last night on the train back from London, I started listening to Ghosteen, by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. ‘Bright Horses’ came on, and I listened to the words. They brought me to tears, and I had to stop…

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Mix Walkthrough - Setting up a Mix in Reaper

Mix Walkthrough – Setting up a Mix in Reaper

1. Starting with imported audio 2. Copying in FX busses from previous sesison 3. Organising into folders, reducing volume of audio items 4. Song structure, regions 5. Levels / pan / adding plugins 6. Recreating a drum loop 7. Re-recording bass part 8. Final mix

Thanks to Simon Arlidge for permission to use this song. https://www.s…

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Varispeed Editing: Cut Time after increasing playback rate of item (in Reaper) When increasing playback rate of items in Reaper, there is a chunk of extra time left over that you want to get rid of. Here is one technique for accurately removing the extra time after increasing the playback rate of an audio item (or items).

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Stems Mastering: Multiple Item Placement – Custom Action for Reaper How to organise groups of multiple tracks in a stems mastering session using custom actions in Reaper. Dropbox link to download custom action:

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Before and After Mixing: Carve My Name Before and after mixing: "Carve My Name" by Simon Arlidge. Many thanks to Simon Arlidge for permission to use this song.

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Rendering Stems Using Wildcards and Track Manipulation in Reaper

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Hide and Unhide Children Tracks Using Custom Actions in Reaper

How To Make Your Children Disappear Completely!

Hide & Unhide Children Tracks in Reaper Using Custom Actions.

3 custom views: Folders only; all tracks; single folder with children.

Custom Actions here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o59shs182b…

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Import / Export Markers and Regions in Reaper How to quickly import a song structure from one session to another using the Region/Marker Manager.

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Using Playback Live – Some Thoughts

If you are a musical director, session musician, playback tech or band member who regularly uses backing tracks as part of their live show, then this post is for you. Whether you are using Ableton Live, Digital Performer, Reaper or Pro Tools, I hope there are some ideas here that you find useful or informative. As always, if you have any feedback or…

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Quanthumanise!?! Here's a quick custom action tutorial. Zoom to midi items, quantise, then humanise. I really like the humanise function in Reaper, as it avoids quantised notes layering up exactly on top of each other, and gives the mix a bit more breathing room.

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Pre-soundcheck light flex, Alison Moyet world tour 2017

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Onstage somewhere in Europe, December 2017

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Onstage, Alison Moyet world tour 2017 Photo courtesy of Georgie Gibbon

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Rig Rundown end of UK Tour

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Live performance of Other and The Rarest Birds on Sirius XM

Live performance of Other and The Rarest Birds on Sirius XM

Here’s a performance with Alison Moyet and Sean McGhee from a Sirius XM session we recorded during our recent US tour. They were so welcoming and obviously over the moon to have Alison in the studio.  [soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/345024373" params="visual=true&color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"…

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San Francisco Sep 2017 The last three shows of the US leg of this tour will be San Francisco, San Diego and LA.

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Washington, Philadelphia, Boston 

Two shows into the Alison Moyet US Tour and everything is sounding great. Very enthusiastic audiences. Having a lot of fun playing new songs and new arrangements of familiar songs. This is tonight’s venue in Boston. Day off tomorrow and then we play New York.

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