Welcome to The Jargon Buster
I remember when I first entered the world of recording my own music. There were many confusing terms and vocabulary that I had never seen before. From the very odd, to the most technical. All of this jargon can become confusing and overwhelming very quickly.
Therefore, to help you out I made this handy glossary to include the most commonly used audio terms, with easy to understand definitions. Feel free to bookmark this page and come back to it anytime you like. If there is something not included that you’d like to know about, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to get back to you.
- acoustic treatment
- ambience
- amplifier (amp)
- analog
- attack
- automation
- auxiliary track
- bandwidth
- bit depth
- bounce
- BPM
- buffer size
- bus
- cardioid
- channel
- clipping
- colour
- comping
- compression
- compressor
- condenser microphone
- console
- crossfade
- DAW
- decay
- decibel (dB)
- de-esser
- delay
- distortion
- dithering
- doubling
- dry sound
- dynamic microphone
- dynamics
- EQ
- fade
- fader
- feedback
- figure-of-eight
- filter
- flat
- fundamental
- gain
- gain staging
- headroom
- hertz (Hz)
- highs
- kilohertz (kHz)
- knee
- latency
- layering
- limiter
- loop
- lows
- makeup gain
- masking
- meter
- MIDI
- mids
- mix bus
- monitors
- mono
- mute
- noise gate
- omni
- overdrive
- overtones
- pad
- pan
- phantom power
- phase
- ping-pong
- pitch shifter
- plosives
- plug-in
- polarity
- polar pattern
- pop filter
- preamp
- pre-delay
- proximity effect
- Q
- ratio
- release
- reverb
- ribbon microphone
- room resonances
- room tone
- sample
- sample rate
- saturation
- send
- sensitivity
- sibilance
- signal flow
- sine wave
- slapback
- solo
- sound processor
- spectrum analyser
- stereo
- sustain
- sweetening
- talkback
- tape
- threshold
- timbre
- transient
- TRS cable
- waveform
- wavelength
- wet sound
- XLR