nice one

use the random midi effect in ableton to give a nice feel to your drums! sometimes i will take a few samples, and map them to different keyzones, or sometimes even use the velocity tool and crank up the random and map my samples by velocity. this is also a super effect way to add randomness to synths, map a bunch of cool parameters to velocity then induce that randomization.

something bil bless mentioned in his Q&A has been huge for me and i will highlight it... detune your oscillator! organic sounds are not harmonically static. you dont have to overdo this technique, you can keep the oscillators low in volume.

quit fucking around in VST/audio world. limit yourself to what you have for a while and focus on the process of creating music! read about theory, listen to some rural blues (those guys made great music with one fucking nylon string! find musical inspiration from new places. copy melodies from other songs to deconstruct how they were made. investigate.

take out unnecessary parts of your beat. let it breathe. it s easy for me to lose site of whats important in a track when i have 102432 things going at once. make sure the main musical ideas are powerful enough alone, and use glitching/effects/etc to put the icing on the cake. audio fuckery will not be able to distract the listener from poorly composed music i've found.

walk around the room and dance around to your shit, its fun. and it will give you a less critical ear so you have more of an open mind for possibilities rather than "problems" with the song.

use your favorite auto-slicer/beat repeater on your reverb bus - or take whatever track you have with reverb and set the verb to 100% wet mix.

bounce out a rearranged track of your reverb and slice out your favorite one-shots or rhythmic loops of sliced-verb. Overlay them back against your original beat. Makes for nice subtle edits and lots of change of space fuckery happening behind the beatwork.

it's also dope to automate reverb size/decay/eq (pre-slicer) to get more variation amongst the cuts. That said, decay/size automation stuff only works well with a non-convolution verb.

also helps to eq both pre and post reverb for this kind of thing as it will help you tame unwanted artifacts and spatial badness.

used this 'trick' for years - seems like one worth sharing. . .

this thread is so awesome

A little fun trick is to automate the shuffle on anything. Makes it a little more 'human'. I've found that percussive sounds on shuffle still sound robotic. So when your pattern doesn't require any serious midi editing to get the feel you want, maybe try this.

i love you guys

Here's a different style of production tip.

Whichever emotion you want people to experience during your music, create that emotion within yourself while you are making your tune.

If you want people to get excited and say "Fuck yeah!," then do something that will ignite that within you first. Emotional energy you transfer into your tunes is POWERFUL. If you're melancholy then your music will reflect that too. People pick up on it at a quantum level.

Steve

!!!!!

^^^^ HUGE tip. It's one of those things that can be hard to do but makes everything so much easier. Sometimes I like to stand when I'm producing, to get a more live-feeling energy flowing. I tend to work faster and do stuff that works better in live sets when I'm actually moving around.

this is a great tip, have a box, or something else which you can raise your gear on, at hand so you can raise your gear to jam standing longer. If im bending over a table at home ill end up sat back down within 5 minutes.

one liner.

Yes. I found that sessions where I am standing instead of sitting/slouching can sometimes provide a nice flow. It like feels more immediate or something. Like u have a little less time to kill.

I almost always make better music this way...

As for a production tip (concerning synthesis)... try to do more with less, think about how many awesome analog patches were create on a synth with nothing but two osc's, a filter, and an amp... it will help you use those huge complex soft synths much more effectively

Something I've been experimenting with lately is to take video into Ableton and score my tracks to them (muting the audio from the .mov). This has proved to pull me out of writer's block many times and provides another source of inspiration. It's interesting to develop the structure of a track based on the visuals. I've been getting some great ideas for track flow and getting away from 16/32 bar sections and typical track structures.

^... dark side of the moon

velocity velocity velocity... and natural swing.

This thread is awesome, tons of great tips..

I don't know if this has been said or not but try out your midi clips on a different patch or synth.

Sometimes I'll find a bass line works a lot better as a lead, or vise versa.

or just try taking a fully crafted patch, with a clip in it and changing the patch entirely, even if its a preset.. so you've taken the time to make a patch and write a clip that works with it, but then you just throw in the random element and pick any other patch to see if it might sounds good and bring inspiration.. YMMV