production tip of the moment

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

production tip of the moment

hey guys!

i recently started a blog and added a section called “production tip of the moment”. in the first post i featured aout6 who was kind enough to contribute to this idea.

this section will feature many other artists in the future, just stay tuned!

i hope you can get much from this tips!

greets

2

a little compression goes a long way :wink:

3

Turn your screen off when you play back the track. Makes you listen to it rather than watch it!

4

i recently started a blog and added a section called “production tip of the moment”. in the first post i featured aout6 who was kind enough to contribute to this idea.

5
  1. Do a 40 Hz highpass and a 15kHz lowpass on every channel. On every channel but kick and bass, you can do a 100 Hz+ highpass. Helps to remove that mud and annoying hiss.
  2. It doesn’t matter how an instrument sounds on his own. Only judge it in the mix
  3. Take the volume down. Music always sounds better loud, you want it to sound good when quiet too
  4. Make a change at least every 8 bars. Even simple things like changing the decay of a synth or adding a few extra notes will help
  5. Don’t draw in notes with your mouse. Play it with a keyboard or even your computer keyboard and quantize. It will sound more human
  6. Less is more. It’s the silence between the hits that makes a groovy beat.
  7. Don’t be afraid to copy. Have a seperate audio track with one of your favourite tracks and solo it from time to time to see what is done there.
  8. Don’t spend too much time on a single aspect. Lay down the basics of a track before tweaking details.
  9. Force yourself to finish a track. You will learn much more from arranging than from creating a cool sounding 8-bar-loop.
  10. Theory is important, but don’t spend your whole time reading. You learn making music from actually making music.
6

…

don’t draw in your notes, let your computer correct it for you. lol

7

today i posted a new tip by great britain based producer Hostage. visit the blog if you want to see the tip. :slight_smile:

greets

8

haha yeah no doubt.

quantizing is definitely not the answer to getting a more human sound.

9

You should maybe reread my post.

You either have no idea what you are talking about or you use a 100 % setting. Unless you are an excellent keyboard player (which I doubt), you’re not going to hit all notes right on the grid, and a modest quantization is a good compromise between human feel and correct timing.
I guess if you don’t have anything to contribute you shouldn’t post.

10

ok dude, no need to get your shit in a wad.

i was once told by a veteran engineer that if you can’t play your part good enough you need to learn to play your instrument better :stuck_out_tongue:

11

you just answered your own question.

“quantization is a good compromise between human feel and correct timing.”

what i said is if you want a human feel you don’t quantize… i guess if you’re completely hopeless at playing keyboard you don’t have a choice but to quantize for a human feel…lol

12

I could name 10 top notch house producers that use quantization yet scored a few hit tracks that all have that ‘human feel’. Human feel is essential to funkey house tunes, but quantization doesn’t elimante that at all if used appropiately. Varying velocity, using creative patterns and choosing the right sounds is way more important.
Maybe you should cool down from your elitist keyboard player position. You don’t have to play a tune live. You just have to make it sound good in the end. Nobody cares on the dancefloor if you played that keyboard pattern live without using quantization. Really.

I still wonder what that has to do with “production tip of the moment”. Contribute to this topic.

edit: I’d like to hear a tune of you, just of curiosity.

13

why are you telling me to cool down… nobody is getting worked up about this except you.. it’s not a big deal man. some people can play keyboard. we were just stating the irony in using a software function to create the illusion of live playing, i’m sorry it’s such a touchy subject for you. get a grip

14

Tobert. Some good tips,BUT… [quote=“Tobert, post:5, topic:7487, username:Tobert”]

  1. Do a 40 Hz highpass and a 15kHz lowpass on every channel. On every channel but kick and bass, you can do a 100 Hz+ highpass. Helps to remove that mud and annoying hiss.
    [/quote]
    EEK!.. Whilst it’s not a bad idea to do a pass on the low end for all tracks (apart from sub bass parts & occasionally kicks) rolling off all your top end is a bit silly. especially at 15khz, that’s where all the air of the sound is! If you’ve got hiss up there you need to sort out your signal path not dull your sounds. and if your working ‘in the box’ there shouldn’t be any hiss up there, so again - no need!
    Also ‘mud’ in a track occurs in the 200 - 400 hz range, if you want to reduce mud in any of your parts your better off attenuating 1-6db in that area. Cutting below 30hz will increase headroom in your tracks by removing any infrasonic rumbling on your tracks but 40hz is a bit high, your getting near your sub bass territory with that!
    and is this what you meant for point 5?
15

I wouldn’t call rolling of the top end silly, more a personal preference and starting point. It’s meant to be a template that can be tweaked to suit the individual tracks. If you take a look at commercial house tracks, you’ll see that most tracks don’t really have that much high end at all.
Concerning the mud, you are right. I misused the tearm “mud”. I meant mud = “infrasonic rumbling”.
I don’t consider 40hz too high. My monitors can’t reproduce anything accurate under that whatsoever so I am better off just passing that. And if I want real sub bass, I’ll just drop another track with a deep sine wave. But that’s just my way of working…

Yeah, I should probably clarify that! I’m not native and it’s not easy to express me.
What I meant:
As I was beginning to produce tracks, I did all the midi tracks by drawing into the piano roll, with snap to grid turned on. There were no timing differences what so ever. Of course that sounded much more like a machine gun than an actual real hihat pattern / bassline / whatever. By playing parts with a keyboard, you get little timing ‘errors’ that will make the track sound better in the end. If you are too bad at playing the keyboard, the quantisation feature will be a good compromise between human feel and timing correctness.
Just don’t try to make your tracks sound like MIDI!

Hope I could clarify…

16

But I bet that the club’s soundsystem yes…

Quantisation = putting on the grid everything played off the grid… so you loose every “human feel”… you can quantitize and then add “shuffle” or “groove” to add this “human feel”…
If there’s quantization, each note will be on the grid > no “human feel”, souding MIDI programed…

17

What he meant was playing it with a keyboard (which will be a bit off beat) then quantize around 70% so the notes almost snap in place and you get a good compromise between the human and computer feel

18

Finally someone that understands me and doesn’t put words in my mouth that I didn’t use, lol.
Is my English really that bad?

19

What he means is when you record midi notes played from your midi keyboard the melody will have a more ‘human’ rhythm, because actually playing music with an instrument has a natural flow.

Then adjust not velocity to taste and whatever notes you’d like off-beat.

For instance claps in deep-house can sound nice with the ocassional one off-beat.

(I usually don’t post anything on the net because of silly fueds, but seriously, as if you didn’t know what he was saying)