Seeing other forums with these kinds of threads leaves me inclined to believe that GHF could benefit from one to call our own.

In a nutshell: each Friday share a production tip that you wish you had known long ago, or one you find yourself constantly using over and over.

Hopefully this thread kicks off well and becomes a resource for us here at GHF.

My tip:

I have found when eq'ing sounds it is best to cut rather than boost. (more natural?) Another thing I have learned is to either manually automate alot of parameters for dynamic sounds or even just route LFO's everywhere. I overlooked these simple FUNDAMENTALS for so long.


Granted, these are not mind-blowing techniques, but they are ones that took me years to get accustomed to utilizing consistently.

Hopefully those with more experience can really kick start this thread... <looks at a FEW particular GHF members>

Show us some stuffs!

Good Friday to all.

kinda hard to come up with something off the top of my head like that...

nah I got nothing. I'll be back later when I'm not hungover

Im counting on you to come up with something as rad as the MFM2 as a synthesizer tip. Finally pulled that off. It was wikkid.

I love the idea for this thread....so you guys go ahead and share things, i'm too newb to offer anything good.

the sweaty one's solid production tip is....make sure you make good music that is good. thank you!

stereo chorus on vocals = a good thang imo.

happy friday yo, now go get drunk and write up on the i'm drunk thread!

i hear compressing your drums is good

take a fifteen minute break every 90 minutes. try not to listen to the same loop for more than 10 minutes. work at a low volume.

dont be greedy i gave you all that one already. wait for another one next week

yo how bout this one for ableton heads.....wish i figured it out a while ago...
you can basically freeze your midi track in session view...copy those clips to an audio track (as many as you like).....and whalla!! you will have audio versions of those midi clips effected by whatever plugins are on the original midi track at the time. Then unfreeze it and return to Normal.

make variations and chop em up for Dessert. thank you and love things.. Peace

ill-esha and I were talking about this in bed last night:

If you have reverb on a send channel, the balance should be achieved with the send amount, i.e. the effect should always be 100% wet.

My computer monitor and the walls around me just fogged up. Is that the sexiest tip i've ever heard in my life? It just might have been haha!

haha.

I disagree.

Actually, I agree in part. The effect should definitely be 100% wet - but the effect should not be balanced by using the send level.

I think that the balance should be achieved with the return volume. The send amount should always be 0dB so that the reverb plugin generates a full, loud, accurate signal. Then it should be attenuated with the return channel's volume fader to keep it sitting properly in the mix.

I'm open to debate on that however

Here's a random reverb tip:

If you have reverb on a rhythmic element, like a snare or a clap, time the reverb tail so that it drops down to near silent (-60dB) right before the next one hits. For example, if the song is at 120 bpm, the time between snares, assuming a kick/snare/kick/snare 4x4 pattern, is 1 second. So the reverb time on the snare should be 900-950ms. Also try adding a compressor on the reverb and sidechaining it to the kick so that it ducks out a little bit and gives your kick lots of room to breathe.

lol @ bedtime production conversations. i have quite a few of those too hahaha.

keep the tips coming, ppl. the only thing that i've been remembering lately is to play in both headphones and speakers....since I do my work in headphones, I'd been basing my sounds on what I heard there. When I play it out, the sounds are, at times, really off.....highs not hitting as high, bass not as heavy as I thought, et. al. So now I'm reminding myself to have regular intervals of working in headphones as well as checking the piece out loud to make sure i'm on point.

i'm sure thats a given to a lot of people here but its the only thing i have to add

If you have multiple channels routed to the same bus you would want use the send to control the wet level not the return, as you obviously do not want both channels to have the same amount of verb.

I use the send to control my wet level as a rule of thumb as I frequently have more than one channel going to the same bus.

Sending a channel to a bus with a pitch sifter inserted on it can be fun, gets cool harmony effects and such.

headphones tend to be a little TOO revealing - you will be able to hear parts of your mix that will disappear on nearfield monitors or a club system. definitely try it on as many systems as you can. also, try burning a cd and throwing your track back and forth on a dj mixer with a similar track that you know hits hard on a system. in my early days i did this with tipper tracks a lot, trying to figure out how he made his shit hit so hard

Ill add convolving. This technique basically takes 2 sounds and combines there characteristics to make one sound, Im to lazy to write the details on how it all works here what Wiki says on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution

You can get some really amazing original sounds doing this, perhaps the best I got was convolving the drums from "we will rock you" with a volcano erupting, sweeeetness.

Some programs will even let convolve an image or any other file type with an audio file the result is quite often glitchtastic.

I use Peak as my weapon of choice for this, there's a ton of other apps that will do it.

Try loading some sounds into a convolution reverb it does the same thing.

Sorry if this has been posted before, but...

I found this the other day, and the demo is fully functional and at 8 mins it shuts off the app. The price is cheap, and I might buy it. For mac you can route into Ableton Live with Soundflower. The application itself is written in MAX.MSP. Check it out -

http://www.gleetchplug.com/Gleetchplug/software.html

"Gleetchlab 3 is a modular software designed to process audio files and live sound sources in realtime"

Mac only.

Iv'e gotten some great chunks of sound recorded to use and layer with drums and other elements.

So I've been trying to master a tracks the past couple days and I've been using a tipper track for comparison. How do people get tracks to hit that hard with out sending to a professional mastering house. I've been using ozone a lot but still am missing that punch and fullness of sound. If I push the track that loud I always get distortion. Granted I'm only a couple years into producing. Any tips would help. And thanks for all the great advice so far.

One thing I am learning that hopefully will start working more consistently for me is to keep the stages of production separate. What I mean is that:

arrange a tune (samples, composition, sound design, etc)
mixdown (levels, fx, etc)
master (polish, bring out qualities)

These steps often kept me from completing anything for the longest time because right in the middle of arranging a chorus I would find myself fiddling with compression or reverb. NOTHING would ever get close to being a song. I still struggle with this today.

Hopefully, in time, I can become better by following a stricter mindset from the start of a studio session.

Just a common knowledge tip I felt like getting out there. It is crucial IMO.

On that note, a bit OT:

anyone care to drop knowledge on some reverb production tips?

Cheers.

It's a few hours past Friday but oh well. Here's a simple one: you can minimize Ableton effects just by double clicking the title bar! Saves you space in an fx chain and let you see only "essential" effects you are controlling actively. It's funny the little things you can still learn even after years of using the damn program

Another cool thing I found out about recently: routing audio from one (or many) Ableton channel(s) to a separate channel with "dummy" clips. A dummy clip contains no actual audio, but it's clip envelope controls any audio that is routing into it. Which means you can trigger fx, rhythmic volume gating, or anything else controlled by clip envelopes on the fly. For example, instead of drawing in a filter sweep on 20 different clips, you can route those 20 clips to 1 dummy clip containing the filter sweep. More details here: https://ableton.cosm.co.nz/~morphicc/ab ... ummy+Clips

snare --> long reverb --> compressor --> gate --> room reverb

for a sexy big snare (swap compessor / gate around for slightly differnt sound)

No that's just common sense, all send fx (reverb, delays, filter sweep, etc) need to be 100% wet because when sending a track's output to a send, it is still playing itself 100% dry through its own channel so if the effect is even a little dry it will just add to and increase the volume of the original signal.

When you start doing this:



Take a damn break and enjoy life.

Crunkalicious Friday to all.