Producing is so different depending on who’s doing it. There are so many things involved: arrangement, instrumentation and pre-production. For instance, even before you decide to record anything, songs can come from many different directions. A guitar riff and a drum groove can be a basis for a song. A chord structure and a melody can become...
=====Special Announcement at the End of this Post. Scroll to the bottom if you can’t wait!===== A lot of your songs might start off pretty bad. I mean, maybe even as bad as a tired vocal and an out of tune guitar. Even if you had a great acoustic/vocal demo that’s only the beginning of...
I was asked a question about starting your mix the other day: I was taught in digital mixing to start by setting all tracks to approximately -18db to -12db through clip gain to make mixing and headroom better. Did anyone else do this? Maybe I’m just really bad at this but I don’t really concern...
A cool way to add some stereo imaging to your sounds without needing the fancy stereo plug-ins is to use panning, delay, the modulation within the delay and some EQ to make the delay sound different than the other source. The best part is it also makes it shimmer more in mono! Here’s what you...
We talk a lot about how to get a good recording and how we can make it right before any of that. Getting the right instrument for the job. Drums are especially important in that aspect because not only are they hard to record in general, they can be constructed in so many different ways...
I got this question from a reader that I thought was interesting: I am a baritone singer with a dynamic voice. I do some mimicking of singers of the olden days and record my voice with karaoke tracks and send these through WhatsApp or emails. I never use auto-tuning plugins. I do it very honestly with...
I was talking to a friend of mine about how we mix the other day. He said that’s a very “reactive” process. He basically reacts to what’s going on in the mix and tackles it however he sees fit that time. The thing about that is that it can also be pretty different every time....
This week’s Long Wait video (support us on Patreon for more) is about something important to do when you’re self-producing. If you’re self-producing your own album it’s hard to switch roles all the time but here are some tips on switching gears and putting your producer hat on. Or if that fails, at least get...
When it comes to mixing hip hop, rap and EDM, the guys over at The Pro Audio Files have got it covered. Matthew Weiss especially. His thoughts and training on mixing hip-hop are really useful, fun to watch and highly practical. A while back he wrote some articles on mixing rap vocals that I got...
As I’ve told you before, I like hearing student progress throughout the 5-week Mixing With 5 Plug-ins course. One of my students, Howard Rabach, was gracious enough to let me use his mix as an example of his results in the course. In week 3 we finish our compression video and at that point the...