There’s no excuse for you to “not know how to do something” nowadays. For example, if you want to be a successful home producer, there are tons of YouTube videos, blog posts, and music podcasts for you to devour. You can learn. The content is out there. You just have to know where to look...
As a modern music producer, you’ve got a lot of tools to choose from. Even a low-budget home studio can offer almost unlimited possibilities… Want to multi-mic your guitar amp? Good microphones and multi-channel audio interfaces are cheaper than ever. Need the sound of an SSL console? There’s a plug-in for that. How about an...
I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, or even write a post about it. But, yes, you should record to a click track. I know the greats like The Beatles and The Beach Boys sometimes didn’t use a metronome, instead opting for the live-band-in-the-studio setup. But nowadays, pro-level music is set to a...
Everyone has their own style of mixing. Some people prefer mono, some stereo. Some engineers like using either analog or digital, some like using both. And I’d like to present two mixing tips that I’ve recently found helpful. This post is not saying, “You have to mix this specific way!” I’m simply sharing a method...
Drums are the backbone of your track. Unfortunately, not all drummers play them the way you’d like them to. If you edit them you can’t make them too robotic – but you can’t leave them too loose either. In this post, I’ll share 10 tips with you that will make your drum edits tighter and...
Sync licensing is all the rage now. Artists are realizing they can sit in their home studios, make film-friendly music, and earn a nice full-time or supplemental income. But the trick is knowing how to do it effectively. So in this post, I’ll cover how to make the right kind of music, how to submit...
You may be a good songwriter. But imagine if you knew some basic music theory. People say it can give your songwriting a serious boost. As a songwriter myself, I was curious. So I did some digging to see what music theory could actually do for me. And here are the three most compelling ways...
A common problem with a lot of DIY musician recordings is thinness. I’ve run into this with my own arrangements and mixes. You know, when a song just needs a little something, a little meat on its bones. That’s what we’ll talk about in this post — how to make your songs sound fuller. These...
Mastering music can seem like some scary voodoo magic. And that’s because that’s what it is. If you’re someone who’s never mastered a song, mastering might as well be magic. But if you can’t afford a mastering engineer or an automated mastering service, there’s a workaround. I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t master your...
Saturation is one of the most misunderstood and underused plugins in mixing – it adds warmth, punch and depth to your mix, and can give it a high quality, “expensive”- sounding sheen. At some point in the music production journey, EVERY successful producer and engineer I know has at some point stumbled across the revelation...