How To Mix In Headphones

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Not everyone has access to a treated studio, with perfectly placed acoustic padding, bass traps, and calibrated studio monitors whose balance is perfected by professional metering. Many aspiring producers have aspects of this, but ultimately will fall short when it comes to setting up everything perfect, since a well tuned studio is something that professionals charge a lot of money to do correctly. 

Therefore, a lot of my students ask me what they can do instead, since many don’t have thousands of dollars in order to tune their room. The answer is simple – mix in headphones. But should you mix with headphones? There is a lot of chatter online saying that if you mix in headphones, you will screw up the mix, since it’s not an accurate representation of sound in space. They’ll say in a true stereo field, your left and right ears hear both channels, not each in mono. And while this is true, there are plenty of artists, myself included, who do a lot of mixing on headphones, and their productions turn out fine.

A photo of Sennheiser HD650, which are great to mix in headphones

Sennheiser HD650

A Good Mix In Headphones Starts With Quality Headphones

My first piece of advice is that you need a really good pair of headphones, and you need to get used to them. I’d recommend Sennheiser HD650 on the high end, and for the best budget mixing headphones, I’d recommend Sennheiser HD350BT which are also bluetooth.

Once you get these, or equivalent, don’t start mixing right away, since you have no idea what these headphones truly sound like. Instead, choose 10 or so songs that you really respect, buy the lossless version of them, and listen to them intimately through the headphones. Learn how the kick sits in the mix. Learn how the different layers sidechain when said kick is introduced. How bright are the hi hats? How crisp is the lead? After listening to this set of songs over and over again for a month or so, then you’ll be ready to give it a go on your own stuff. 

Mixing In Headphones Is Like Cooking Authentic Food

Another good tip is to choose songs that have a particularly excellent element. I liken this a lot to eating authentic food. Whenever I visit a new country, I make sure to ask the locals what location has the truest food, and what elements of that food really define the regional cuisine. 

With music, I take a similar approach. For instance, when I started mixing a lot of Romanian techno, it became apparent that the aspect that producers craved the most was the kick. Therefore, if you want an example of a really pretentious kick, a good place to start would be with Romanian techno. It’s like with a food like Mexico’s mole. If you wanted to replicate the best mole, you’d use Oaxacan mole as your reference.

 

Mix In Headphones At Multiple Volumes

Listen to your mixes at multiple volumes to get a good idea of how it truly fits in the mix. Different levels will expose what’s wrong in the mix pretty accurately. While it may sound good at high intensity, when you listen to it at a low intensity, you may notice that it doesn’t quite fit. In my experience, it’s the low volumes that reveal the most, so if it sounds good, low, and just ok, high, then chances are that the lower volume is the correct one.

REFERENCE Plugin is great for mix in headphones

REFERENCE plugin

Best Headphone Mixing Software

The best mixing with headphones plugin has to be Mastering The Mix’s REFERENCE.

Ever felt that your mix was not quite comparable to your reference mixes? 

In order to keep you closer than ever to the sound of your favorite music, Mastering The Mix created REFERENCE. It’s packed with powerful features and insights that allow you to get closer to your reference than ever before.

With REFERENCE you can:

  • Compare your master with up to twelve reference tracks, and creating several loops will allow you to quickly compare various sections of your track with a reference track.
  • Match the loudness of your track and the references instantaneously and accurately. This will enable you to make more informed decisions about shaping your sound.
  • Make matching the true peak, loudness, EQ balance, punch, and stereo width of a reference track smoother than ever. 
  • Adds a source plugin called REFSEND to make loudness-matched A/B comparisons.

If you want to emulate stereo crossfeed like you’d get on loud speakers, you can also use a VST such as Goodhertz’s CanOpener, which simulates the stereo bleed you would get with loudspeakers. I’ve personally never used a crossfeed emulator, but they do exist.

CanOpener allows you to mix in headphones more accurately

CanOpener

Stereo Is Different In A Headphone Mix

The biggest hurdle to overcome when mixing on headphones is that the stereo field is mono in each can. Especially in electronic music, we tend to have extreme pans, which in headphones can prevent that natural left/right bleed that you get when you listen to a song with both ears from monitors.

To fix this, you can simply tweak left/right panned instrument settings a little but don’t overdo it because this will compromise the loudspeaker performance. Keep in mind that stereo, when heard through loudspeakers, will have a noticeably narrower image than when listened to on headphones.

Another trick is to add just a tiny bit of reverb to up-front exposed sounds (5-10% wet). This allows them to glue themselves together like they would in a natural room.

 

Judging Low End With Headphone Mixes

Having an idea where the bass sits in the mix is difficult unless you have some serious subs. However, we live in the 21st Century, where Subpacs are a thing. If you’re not familiar with Subpacs, they are essentially wearable subwoofers, where they use your body as a bass transducer. Therefore, they produce all the sensation and feeling of low end, without any of the decibels required to pump it out. Therefore, with a solid set of headphones, and a Subpac, you can get a full frequency experience, and accurately judge where the bass sits in the mix. 

I often prefer using a Subpac to even using a good set of subs, because unless you are in a place where your mixing isn’t going to disturb anyone, having club ready loudspeakers that allow you to feel the bass is usually intenible in most environments. It’s also a faction of the cost.

 

A Mix In Headphones Reveals The Small Details

The best aspect of mixing in headphones is their precision. Even with a well tuned room, and professional grade monitors, you often miss many of the finer details of a mix, such as hisses, artifacts, unwanted distortion, and clicks/pops. With headphones, these become abundantly clear, allowing you to surgically correct these issues.

On the flip side of this, it allows you to add small details that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to. Let’s say you want that synth to have just a touch of white noise to give it a warmer feel, a mix in headphones allow you to do that with immense clarity.

As you can see, there are many advantages to mixing on headphones. However, nothing truly beats a professional mix. Therefore, if you want it done right, consider going through me. I’ve mixed thousands of songs, all for a very reasonable rate. Your music will last forever, so you may as well have it sound as good as it possibly can, at an affordable price.

 

Links may contain affiliate offers.

 

VCV Rack Ideas And Meditations

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If you’re not familiar with VCV Rack you should be. While modular synthesis is an expensive hobby, usually reserved for people with cash flow, the open source, mostly free VCV rack is democratizing people’s access to this amazing creative tool. VCV Rack acts as a Eurorack DAW, allowing you to build complex patches using a variety of free, or premium modules, often based on existing hardware. In this post, I won’t talk so much about how to use VCV Rack, as there are tons of tutorials already on it. Instead I will talk more about how it has inspired me, VCV Rack ideas, and how you can use it to inspire yourself.

 

VCV Rack Ideas Are Meditative

The first benefit I noticed from VCV Rack was how meditative it is. I have been an avid practitioner of traditional meditation for many years now, and the similarities are striking. It forces me into a state of flow, one that often results in the dissolution of all outside distractions. A state where time and space become irrelevant, and I am concentrated on a singular purpose. 

A lot of people conflate meditation with a silencing of thoughts, when that’s far from the truth. We’re human; we’ll never be able to silence our mind. Instead, we have to funnel those thoughts into a singularity. A singularity where you accept you have no control over what happens, both of which VCV Rack ideas do for me.

 

The Random Beauty Of VCV

That’s the beautiful thing about modular. These electrical circuits are so finicky that often what you aim to create and what comes out are often vastly different. It’s that sense of unpredictability that makes it so wonderful, and thus, meditative.

Surprisingly this sense of randomness and unpredictability isn’t lost in a digitalized version of modular. Somehow the community of open source developers have kept this aspect true to form, demonstrating the increasing dissolution between analog and digital as technology advances.

Many of you probably don’t know this, but I was an actor, before I was a musician, and even went to school for it. While you have a script, the fine art of acting was always in the slight improvisations. Lines often wouldn’t come out as intended, and you would have to react in the moment. This would often lead to beautiful accidents, far superior to the original script. 

In a sense, the life that exists in modular is very much like a fellow actor on stage. It may have its lines, but ultimately, it will improvise, and it’s up to you to harness this improvisation and redirect it to something evolutionary.

 

photo of vcv rack ideas

 

VCV Rack Tutorials Are Fun

The second thing I noticed about VCV Rack was that it made me appreciate tutorials again. If you’ve been a power user of Ableton for as long as I have, you may find that Ableton tutorials an get super cookie cutter, and formulaic. This often results in stale music that sounds like everyone else who watched the same tutorial.

This may be one of the reasons why the sound we hear is becoming more and more homogenized, and less innovation is seeping through the cracks. This is despite an exponential increase in the number of musicians. However, with VCVRack, the tutorials seem more personalized. Even if you try to recreate something precisely, you’ll almost never get the same result, due to the nature of modular. The sheer amount of VCV Rack ideas you can get from these tutorials is incredibly exciting, and constantly motivating.

 

VCV Rack Tutorials Help You Build Existing Hardware

Another fun aspect of tutorials is that there are some people out there, like Omri Cohen, who build faithful reconstructions of existing pieces of hardware. The one that I linked to is for the Moog DFAM, a semi-modular percussive sequencer that allows you to build really wild, synthesized patterns. 

Normally a DFAM runs for about $700 USD, which isn’t a small investment. While following these tutorials, you not only learn the ins and outs of the DFAM by building it piece by piece, but you also get to try it before you buy it, in a sense. 

This allows you to figure out your setups and configurations for your hardware studio, without having to buy things, and send them back if they don’t fit. Also, since it’s fully modular, you can in theory connect multiple recreated devices together. This allows you to see how they will perform as a hardware version. So let’s say you wanted to see how a DFAM would interact with a Moog Subharmonicon. This is now possible through VCV Rack, for the low low cost of zero dollars. These are just some of the hardware VCV Rack ideas found in tutorials.

photo of the dfam vcv rack ideas

VCV Rack emulates the Moog DFAM

VCV Rack Changes How You Listen To Music

The third thing I learned while formulating VCV Rack ideas is that it changed how I listened to music. Normally I have a nerdy way of listening to music from a sound engineer point of view, where I analyzed EQ, compression, stereo spread, etc, but now when I listen I notice the changes in the patterns, and how things modulate. 

While toying around with VCV Rack ideas, I start thinking about the patches that make the sounds. For instance, what waveform is controlling the FM, or how the envelope routes to the VCA. Or what hooks up to the clock, or how many VCOs are in play. Still, super nerdy, but it adds another dimension to the whole thing, which in turn, stimulate more VCV Rack ideas.  

 

VCV Rack Ideas Help You Build Your Real Modular Setup

The fourth benefit I got from playing with VCV Rack ideas is that just like it allows you to build existing pieces of hardware to test in your setup, it also acts as a way to test modules for your real modular setup. There are a bunch of faithful emulations of existing modules. For instance, the Audible Instruments line is a software emulation of Mutable Instruments. There, you can get clones of things like their Clouds or Tides modules and test them in your setup.

Other examples include:

 

  • Lateralus: Hybrid diode/transistor ladder. This models itself after the Roland filter circuit where they added a few alterations to get close to the Moog circuit.
  • Vorg: Single segment of the filter circuit of Korg MS-20.
  • Ferox: CMOS filter based on the circuit of the CGS749.
  • Nurage: The Nurage bases itself on the circuit of Thomas White LPG which bases itself on the Buchla LPG.
  • Vortex: this bases itself on the circuit of the Polivoks (Erica Synths version).
  • Tangents: This bases itself on the Steiner-Parker version of Yusynth. The three models are variations of the same circuit.
  • Stabile: based on the textbook Stave-Variable filter circuit (linear version).
  • Unstabile: Nonlinear State-Variable filter with low voltage simulation

 

vcv rack ideas real clouds

The real Mutable Instruments Elements

vcv rack ideas photo

VCV Rack that includes Mutable Instruments emulations, aka Audible Instruments

 

VCV Rack Is Constantly Improving

Since it’s community supported, it’s constantly evolving, with new modules being added frequently. Most are free, too! 

Some people will complain that it doesn’t integrate into other DAWs in a smooth fashion, but VCV has heard the complaints and in 2.0 the rumor is that they will have this integration. 

These are just some of my observations about VCV Rack and its amazing ability to spark creativity. In truth, the sheer amount of VCV Rack ideas and inspirations you can get from those VCV Rack ideas are quite staggering. If you have any questions about it, or want to share your experiences with it, feel free to contact me, or make a post in Pheek’s Coaching Corner and let the community know what you think!

How To Release Music During A Pandemic

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A question that I commonly get during my mentorship sessions is if it’s different to get signed to a label during the pandemic, or if it’s the same. The answer is yes to both, but with some caveats. These are some of the best ways for how to release music during a pandemic.

The best way to get signed to a label is through networking, rather than cold submission, pandemic or not. Over the years of running Archipel, only about 2% of its releases are from cold emails. 

That’s because most of the people I sign I have a personal relationship with. And most of these personal relationships were fostered through meeting people at events. 

Clearly there aren’t events now. 

Another common way that tracks would get signed is DJs would play a track at a club, and label owners like myself would ask what the track was. We would then contact the artist, and see if they wanted to sign to the label. 

But alas, clubs aren’t open, and live streams aren’t attended like clubs are. So the chances of an organic signing happening like that are slimmer than it used to be. Sure, it can still happen, especially through DJ mixes, but it’s not the same.

But don’t despair. Just because traditional, organic avenues of track signing are unavailable, doesn’t mean that new avenues haven’t become available.

 

Strategies For How To Release Music During A Pandemic

 

How To Release Music During A Pandemic – Things That Don’t Work

Before we get into what does work during a pandemic, let’s cover what doesn’t work. Harking back to emails, like I said before, only 2% of my signees are from them. During a pandemic, this number is significantly reduced due to the sheer volume of people soliciting signings. 

Additionally, many labels are reducing the amount of signees, since DJs aren’t buying as many tracks, thus drying up their revenue streams. Plus, if they release on physical formats such as vinyl, or cassette, many of these factories are operating on reduced staff for health reasons. This delays releases, and increasing the cost of these mediums.

This makes labels even pickier about the stuff that they sign, considering that it will ultimately net them less revenue. 

In other words, unless you are someone they really want to sign, the chances of you getting signed through a cold approach are pretty slim, due to scarcity.

 

How To Release Music During A Pandemic – Things That Do Work

This doesn’t mean that artists are screwed though. Even with clubs closed, and inboxes inundated, there are both alternative routes to getting signed, as well as new ones that have become available due to the pandemic.

First, lets talk about the alternative routes. 

 

Getting Discovered On YouTube Or SoundCloud

This is a process involves a sacrifice; a sacrifice to the YouTube or SoundCloud gods. There are dozens of sound specific YouTube and SoundCloud channels out there, dedicated to supporting good music. A lot of the time, these channels aren’t concerned about brand recognition, or revenue potential, since they don’t make a lot, or any money off of what they upload. Additionally, the cost to them is only an opportunity one, since it’s free to upload to SoundCloud and YouTube.

 

how to release music during a pandemic YouTube photo

 

If it’s a well curated channel, there will be label owners who frequent it, because first and foremost, label owners are music fans. Secondly, if your track is that good, and they hear it, they may reach out to you to see what else you have.

The track you uploaded won’t be signed usually, but if you make a similar sound, chances are one of your other ones will. Additionally, you will get your track put up on a well trafficked page, so who knows who else will hear it. It could lead to new fans, downloads, etc.

So how to release music during a pandemic on these channels?


Target Your Channels

First, make sure the channel is targeted. If you are making minimal house music, it doesn’t make sense to send it to a drum n bass channel, or vice versa. Not only will you waste your own time putting together the contact info and email, but you will also waste theirs, which increases the chances of your email being flagged as spam. Get enough spam flags, and none of your emails will deliver, even to relevant ones.

A good way to target these channels is to think of a small to mid sized artist that has a similar sound to yours, and then search for them on YouTube or SoundCloud. Then, if you see a channel that has uploaded it, then reach out to them. 

 

Make Sure The Channel Isn’t A Label

Note, that many of the channels that upload these tracks are the labels themselves. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to contact these, as this is not the goal. Just make sure to pay attention to who you are submitting to.

 

Example Email

When reaching out to these places, understand that the more popular the channel, the more solicitations they will get. Therefore, keep your messages short, sweet, and relevant.

Hi {channel name or first name of channel owner},

Thanks for supporting smaller artists. It’s people like you who keep good music flowing upwards, and for that, I appreciate you. 

I saw that you uploaded {similar artist name}. I just finished this track (link to download enabled track on a private SoundCloud) and I think it has similar vibes, and would work well on {channel name}.

Would you let me know your thoughts on it?

Thanks for giving it a listen!

{Your Name}

{Links to EPK, website, etc.}

 

See how it’s short, sweet, flattering, and provides all the necessary information. This is a great way for how to release music during a pandemic.

 

how to release music during a pandemic SoundCloud photo

 

Advertise That It’s Unsigned

If they decide they want to upload it, they will most likely contact you about it to ask for more info. Ask them to stipulate that the track is unsigned and self released in the YouTube description. This will typically be in the section where it says the label name, but instead will read unsigned. 

This will signal to potential labels that you’re available, and is a key tactic in how to release music during a pandemic. 

 

You Will Get Thousands Of Listens

Don’t despair if you don’t get signed this way, though. If it’s a popular enough channel, you will get thousands of ears on your track, which in itself is a win. Also, there is nothing from stopping you from submitting to multiple channels as well. They are channels, not labels. You can be on multiple channels with the same song. This is still a solid tactic for how to release music during a pandemic.

 

Paid Channels

Note, that there are a lot of paid channels. Some are good, some are not so good. The good ones will have a curation process, and won’t accept just anything. If you get a reply back from one soliciting payment for an upload, check their other tracks and see if they are quality. If they are just uploading anything they can make a few dollars off of, then chances are the engagement you are seeing is fake since who wants to engage with bad quality stuff? 

 

SubmitHub

Some people may be familiar with SubmitHub as well. It is a common channel people would use for how to release music during a pandemic, or not.

If you’re not familiar, SubmitHub is a place where you can pay a small fee to solicit a listen from a blog. If they like it, they may upload it. However, you only pay for a listen, not an upload. 

SubmitHub is a decent route for how to release music during a pandemic, if you have really good stuff. But make sure 1) your stuff is relevant and 2) they have a decent acceptance rate. If they only have a 1 or 2% acceptance rate, that’s a similar chance of your stuff getting signed from a cold email to a label, so you might as well just go to the label directly instead of doing this roundabout way. Look for channels that accept at least 10% of submissions.

how to release music during a pandemic Submithub photo  how to release music during a pandemic submithub settings photo

 

Networking, Pandemic Style

The next way to get signed is through referral, or through meeting the label head directly. While it will be less personal than meeting them in person, while under the positive influence of the club, and it’s many vices, there are still ways to achieve a similar goal using things like social media. These methods are one of the more sure fire ways for how to release music during a pandemic.

 

Reaching Out To DJs/Producers For A Referral

While in the past, DJs would have been on tour, and thus less responsive to messages online, in this current environment, they’re all home. That is, unless they’re playing Tulum and killing someone’s abuela for clout. 

But for the non-selfish DJs, most are sitting home, or in the studio, not doing much, just like everyone else. Therefore, they are more likely to respond to messages. That means they are more likely to respond to your message. If done tactfully, you can turn this message into a referral to a label that they are on.

One of the best ways to get noticed by someone is to ask for their advice about something. People like to be appreciated for their expertise, and since they have time, they are willing to give it out. 

However, just like in Pheek’s Coaching Corner, if you’re going to ask them for advice, make it specific. Don’t just ask them what they think of the track. Ask them specific things, like parts of the mix, what they think of the bridge, or a specific tone you use. Ask them how they would improve it, or if they think it’s good as it is.

If they have advice, modify the track using it, and then send it back to them for a follow up opinion, which, if they helped you the first time, they’re likely to help you again. 

how to release music during a pandemic instagram photo

 

Proposing To Them

Once you get it to a point where they are excited about the track, you can drop, “In your opinion, do you think it would work well on {insert label} if I sent it over to them?” They would hopefully give you a yes, or no answer. If it’s a no, maybe ask them the reason, and what you can do in order to improve your odds.

Don’t take it personally, sometimes labels are just not signing new artists, or they only sign artists within a certain social circle.

If it’s a yes, almost apologetically, ask if they would make an intro for you, or allow you to use their seal of approval in the email you send over to the label. This will go a long way in proving to the label that you’re just not another submitter, but rather someone who is part of the inner circle. Getting them to agree to feedback, or an introduction, will one of the best recommendations I can make in regards to how to release music during a pandemic.


Reaching Out To Labels For Advice

This same approach can be taken for labels. While, it’s not recommended that you send them your track right away for them to provide feedback on, maybe hit them up with a, “Hey, I love your label {briefly talk about what you like about it]. I’m an artist who’s trying to learn the ways of the world, and I was curious, what’s the best way to approach a label like yours? Do you recommend just submitting it cold, or is there a better way?”

This way, you’re asking for their feedback, not necessarily submitting a track. If you’re able to build solid rapport with them, then ask if they will check out your track. Worst they say is no, and you will have learned a valuable lesson about how to approach labels, and made a good industry connection that you can call on, assuming you keep rapport with them.

A piece of advice before reaching out to anyone though – make sure to interact with their content beforehand so that you show that you’re a real fan, and not just someone who wants something. For a couple months, like, and comment on their posts so that they recognize your name when you eventually reach out to them. This will warm the water a little bit, and make them far more receptive. 

 

How To Release Music During A Pandemic – Other Channels


Join A Group

For instance, Pheek’s Coaching Corner. There are tons of label owners on there, and if you stay active on there, and upload your tracks for advice, there is a good chance a label owner listens to it, and reaches out to you if they like it. There are tons of groups like this for their respective genre, on Facebook, and Discord. You can also ask these groups about how to release music during a pandemic.

 

Join A Class

There are tons of producers who are hosting online classes. For instance, Justin Jay currently teaches a group of students, and he recently released a class compilation on his label.  They may even cover how to release music during a pandemic.

 

Start A Blog

You’d be surprised how easy it is to get an artist to give you an interview, especially nowadays. If you target your blog to a specific topic that isn’t well covered, then you can build an audience around that niche. 

Another good thing to do is to just create a Facebook page where you do video podcasts and upload them to Facebook. Once you upload them to Facebook video, you can share them in relevant groups, and each 3 second view counts as a view. This way, you can show some good stats to potential interviewees, and show that it won’t fall on deaf ears. 

You can then upload your videos to YouTube as well, and start a YouTube channel with the interviews. 

This method is valuable because not only do you get an introduction, but you also provide them value, which begets reciprocity. And reciprocity is a great “how” for how to release music during a pandemic.

 

Contribute To An Established Blog

If you’re a good writer, many of these blogs are looking for people to contribute and add new content. Many don’t pay, however, the amount of value you can get from these is worth the money, as it gives you access to people you normally wouldn’t have access to.

Also, this way you don’t have to build your own blog, and are instead using the position of something already established to garnish interviews.

However, I would not recommend a quid pro quo, where they get an interview for signing or listening to your track. This can come off wrong, and runs the risk of the blog you write for dismissing you as a writer.

Instead, after you publish the interview, ask them if they wouldn’t mind answering some questions for you and/or giving you feedback. 

 

Start Your Own YouTube or SoundCloud

This is similar to the method we talked about before, where you get discovered on a YouTube or SoundCloud channel, but kind of in reverse. Now, the labels come to you. And if you curate the channel with a sound that is similar to yours, the labels that will come to you are targeted. 

Since it’s your channel, you can set up whatever terms you want for them getting their track on your site. 

This will obviously take time to build to a point where it’s viable, but once it’s established, you will have a constant stream of labels that you wanted to sign to reaching out to you, instead of vice versa. You will also have a channel to premiere your own music on, if you chose to.

 

Start Your Own Label

Similar to starting your own YouTube or SoundCloud channel, this makes it so the people you want come to you, in a sense. At first, you will have to build a base of releases. These can be from friends, or small producers looking for any label to sign to (some small producers just like to collect labels). 

Then, once you have a dozen or so releases, you can start reaching out to smaller artists on labels that you want to be on, or labels that are related to labels you want to be on. Then you sign those people, and continue to trade up, until you start signing more established artists.



Use Torrents

Another route is to use Soulseek. Soulseek is a private bittorrent network where people share music. Many of the people on Soulseek are the types of people who just need to own everything, so by putting your stuff on there, there is a chance that it will get picked up by someone, and disseminated organically. Once again, no guarantees, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to put your stuff out there.

 

Some Final Thoughts On How to release music during a pandemic

These are just some of the creative ways to get on a label during the pandemic. Most of these techniques work at any time during history, but are made more available due to people just having more time.

When the world gets going, DJs and labels are going to be less enthusiastic about responding to all the messages they get from fans over social media. 

Additionally, people aren’t going to have the same amount of time, and thus desire, to start blogging, or start their own label, or even take classes. Therefore, there is no better time than now to seize the day. History has given creatives a silver lining; we might as well mine its ore while the getting is good. 

Hopefully you got some value out of this article on how to release music during a pandemic.

Minimal House Ableton Template

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Recently, we released our Organic Inducer minimal house Ableton template and minimal house texture pack.

The Organic Inducer is a mindfully crafted Live session template which provides a staggering array of luxurious sounds and effects with a balance of elegance and complexity. The powerful and intuitive macros bring possibilities to any unique and engaging sound design.

It contains samples of some of the most unique synthesizers in the world, including the Lyra-8, Folktek Matter, and Eurorack modular synthesizers. It also contains many foley sounds, as well as organic drum kits, and field recordings. This is an unrivalled source of inspiration for creating unique synthesizer tones. 

One of the reasons we created this product came from the numerous requests from friends and clients who felt lost at adding depth to their music. For many people, textures are always a dimension of sound design that is difficult to master. It also requires a lot of time to carve out elements that really bring a song all together.

However, people often ask what the advantages of using a minimal house texture pack is. They also wonder if it affects their artistic integrity. In this article, we go over these questions, as well as flush out what the Organic Inducer minimal sample pack, and texture template can do. 

 

What Is A Minimal House Ableton Template?

The Ableton Live Template is a project that’s created, configured and saved for later use. Its structure comes from using exactly the same process as a song. The template is tailored so that it is used on each new song you create. It usually does not include the entire song as MIDI or audio, but it can contain the elements used in most songs (for instance, a MIDI kick or a hat pattern, or an audio sweep). A good example is The Default Project Template, which shows up every time we launch Live, is a template that we can use repeatedly.

Image of a minimal house Ableton template

How Does A Minimal House Ableton Template Help?


We can generate any type of template you are looking for. The idea for the templates below is to satisfy some or all of the following requirements:

 

  1. Eliminate the need to create everything from scratch, allowing you to get right to the creative parts.

 

  1. Boost creativity by focusing more on the creative part of music-making and less on the administrative and technical part

 

  1. If you have already pre-configured and loaded musical items like favourite synths and plug-ins then you will be ready to go.

 

What Makes The Organic Inducer Different?

The Organic Inducer is a different kind of Ableton template that concentrates on the textures that make minimal house so alluring. Rather than being an arrangement template, the Organic Inducer exists to make sound design a fun, engaging process, rather than one with lots of technical ins and outs. You can easily import these samples into a new arrangement, or even arrange directly in the template. However, like we said, this minimal sample pack and texture template is primarily used to design fun, novel tones and textures.

Often, in some of the top minimal house gems we love, there’s an absence of motif or catch phrase and the song heavily relies on texture and hard to catch ideas. These are actually part of the ASMR movement in a way which has made its way to techno. The idea came basically from analog infused production that has some of a noise floor which makes it really warm to the ear. But one can’t have enough of it and with time, people started decorating their music with more elements that just simple noire.

Session view of a minimal house Ableton template

Organic Inducer session view

How It Works

By using its preconfigured effect chains, and macros, with just a twist of a knob, you can use this to manipulate either the samples that come loaded into it, or import your own. Depending on how you use it, you can either lightly texture the samples, or completely destroy and deconstruct them, transforming them into something that is barely reminiscent of the original sample. 

There are 75 samples on this minimal house texture pack and template, where each sample says itself out on multiple tracks. Each track has its own set of macro controls to control its own unique signal path. There are many possibilities: similar samples can be processed in different ways, you can experiment with different audio-effect racks and their controls, and there are numerous other possibilities.

The samples that producers can manipulate are drawn from the Lyra-8, the Elektron Rytm, the Folktek Matter, Eurorack modules, as well as dozens of foley room sounds, acoustic drums, and field recordings. You can also import any sample that you want, as well. 

 

Is It Artistic To Use A Minimal House Texture Pack?

Now, some people might not be too excited about using other people’s sound design, and that’s fair. Part of the magic of electronic music is that it allows producers who of minimal house to create a minimal house Ableton template of their own, using the dizzying array of plugins included within the software, as well as external VSTs. It’s this exploration, and artistry that give rise to unique, genre bending compositions that become the vanguard of futuristic music.

However, let’s look at it in the context of music as a whole and use the example of a guitarist. Many guitarists use the rigs of other famous guitarists. For instance, Jimi Hendrix used an Arbiter Fuzz Face fuzz pedal, a Vox Crybaby Wah Wah pedal, and an Octavia octave pedal to create his sound. However, he certainly wasn’t the last to use this setup as a basis for their rig. 

David Gillmore (Pink Floyd), George Harrison (The Beatles), and Pete Townshend (The Who) would all use similar setups, augmented with their own chain, in order to create their distinct, forward thinking art for the time. They just used it in different ways, making it so Pink Floyd didn’t sound like The Who, just as much as The Who didn’t sound like The Beatles. While they all could have, in theory, created similar music, they didn’t. 

pic of minimal house sample pack effects chain

Effects chain in Organic Inducer Ableton Template

But They Didn’t Use A Minimal House Texture Pack

You’re right, these guys didn’t make electronic music, let alone music using a minimal house texture pack, so it’s a moot point. Especially in the 60’s and 70’s, the idea of using a graphical interface to make music is a little absurd. There certainly were no guitar rock Ableton templates, let alone a minimal house Ableton template. The previous point was to illustrate that since there were effects, people were copying other people’s effects, which were in a sense, templates.

However, let’s concentrate on electronic music then. If we are using Ableton, whether that be a minimal house Ableton template or not, we are usually using some native plugins, whether that’s the EQ, compressor, delay, reverb, etc. However, despite this, Ableton is capable of creating hundreds of different styles, and genres of music that don’t sound like each other. Same goes with minimal house textures using these plugins – many sound completely unique, yet they used the same foundation. 

This is the beauty of the Organic Inducer pack. While everyone who uses it has access to the same thing, the sounds that come out of it are drastically different, based on what module you use. Additionally, these modules are set up to accept any sample you put into it, so you can mess with the signal chain across many different tracks and channels, and route them in as many creative ways you can think of. 

  

Remember, The Greats Use Presets And Sample Packs

In this feature with Resident Advisor, Dutch dubstep producer Martyn is talking about how he was in love with a sound in a Jeff Mills song that he thought “was from outer space.” However, one day, he bought a synth, and saw that this otherworldly sound was just a preset. He doesn’t name the song, or the synth, but it just goes to show that even genre defining artists use presets.

Another example of using sample packs is the Amen Break, the most used 7 second loop in history. It’s been used in hip hop, drum and bass, and a litany of other genres. How about the four to the floor, 909 or 808 kick, hi hat pattern? How many times has that been used? 

At the end of the day, almost nobody is going to notice if you use a minimal house Ableton template, or a minimal house texture pack. Not using them,  is most likely going to be only a sense of pride for the producer that very few other people are going to care about, because at the end of the day, most listeners aren’t producers. And most producers aren’t using a niche minimal house texture pack and minimal house Ableton template like the Organic Inducer. 

For more info on how the Organic Inducer texture template and minimal sample pack works, as well as to preview the sounds, check out its dedicated page.    

 

Photo of minimal house texture pack

Organic Inducer minimal house texture pack session view

Producing Music With Minimal Gear

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In this pandemic, it’s especially easy to get apathetic, and start looking for excuses not to create. “The clubs aren’t open,” “nobody is dancing,” “DJs can’t even play my stuff,” “I’m stuck with my current gear, and I can’t afford to get new gear, because the economy is bad.” 

All of these things are just excuses. 

The clubs aren’t open and nobody is dancing? Well, make the music now and release it when they are open. Spend the extra time to work on getting the marketing set up, or consider what labels you want to send it to. 

DJs not playing music? Well, that doesn’t mean they aren’t listening to it, and stashing away music that they like. If anything, they are more responsive than ever because they aren’t on a plane, going on four hours of sleep in two days. Spend some time building relationships with them, so they actually care about you when you send them your stuff.

You can’t afford to get new gear, because the economy is bad? Well, don’t fear, there is tons of free, or low cost gear out there that can accomplish exactly what you need, and even provide some constraints that allow for true originality to shine. Producing music with minimal gear is a great way to make music.

What Are Some Free, Or Inexpensive Tools?

There are dozens of different tools that you can use to produce music with minimal gear.Moog, Korg, Image-Line, and predictably, Apple, have all thrown their hat into this creative ring. Here are some of the better ones for producing music with minimal gear.

 

Android Tools For Producing Music With Minimal Gear

GStomper Studio

A great way to produce music with minimal gear is the GStomper Studio app. GStomper Studio is an app that installs on any Android device, downloadable from the app store. Built for performance, it contains a full featured sampler/sequencer, microphone recording, a multi OSC and PCM enabled synth, piano roll, drum pads, mixer, master channels, timing and measure functions, and multiple effects. You can upload your own samples, or buy some inexpensive ones in the store. Feeling especially creative? Plug in your favorite MIDI keyboard with a simple USB converter. It’s only $12.99 in the Google Play Store.

image of gstomer. This is a great tool for producing music with minimal gear

FL Studio Mobile

Coming in at a cool $15.99, FL Studio Mobile is the little brother to the full fledged desktop version. While it lacks the VST support, and dynamics of the desktop version, this app is a powerhouse. It has a sequencer, mixer, low latency audio engine, audio recording, built in synths, effects, and samplers. 

If you use the desktop version, FL Studio Mobile comes with the FL Studio Mobile plugin that allows you to swap between desktop and mobile functionality. Also works for iOS. 

This is an excellent way to produce music with minimal gear.  

iPhone Tools For Producing Music With Minimal Gear
GarageBand iOS

Free with all iOS apps, this cultural icon has been responsible for tons of hits, and is the undisputed champion of producing music with minimal gear. While it wasn’t the best when it first debuted on iOS in 2011, now it is a full functioning miniature DAW, with virtual pianos, percussion, microphone recording, loops, MIDI functionality, and way, way more. With the right adapter, you can even plug your guitar into it, and record in the park.


Korg iElectribe

The Korg iElectribe is the mobile version of the renowned Electribe hardware. Think this piece of gear isn’t capable of creating a full album? Think again. Daman Albaran created an entire Gorillaz album using an iPad, a guitar, and this piece of software. It’s only $9.99 in the App Store. If Daman Albaran is capable of producing music with minimal gear, then microhouse can certainly be done on it.

Image of Korg iElectribe. A perfect tool for producing music with minimal gear

DAWs For Producing Music With Minimal Gear

 

Ardour

Ardour is a full functioning, open source DAW that has been maintained by a dedicated team of decentralized developers. It has full VST support, and uses audio engines that are just as good as any other major DAW, allowing for 32-bit, floating point playback and rendering.

It has recording capabilities only limited to the hardware you use, and has full mixing, mastering, and editing capabilities. It’s totally free, and is available on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and FreeBSD. The only caveat is that if you use the free version, you have to code all of it together, which takes skill.

However, for a small donation, or a monthly subscription, you can get its full functionality. How much you pay determines what you get, naturally. According to them, “If you choose to pay less than US$45, you will get the current version and updates (e.g. buy version 6.0, get access to 6.1, 6.2, etc. but not 7.0). If you choose to pay US$45 or more: get the current version, updates and the next major version, plus access to nightly (development) builds”.

This is a very inexpensive way of producing music with minimal gear.

a picture of the Ardour DAW. A great app for producing music with minimal gear.

Cakewalk by BandLab

Cakewalk by BandLab is a full functioning, free DAW, with analog console-style virtual mixer, VST plugin support, multi-touch support, Bluetooth MIDI, a suite of in the box plugins, and more.

The only cons are that it’s only available for Windows, and that you have to sign up for a free BandLab account. However, there are no annoying ads that come up with this registration, so that’s cool. Cakewalk by BandLab is a great way for producing music with minimal gear.

 

Chasing The Dragon Of Perfection

One thing that many artists have in common is the strive for perfection. A tweak here, a tweak there, all to get that sound, color, or note to fit in exactly how you imagine it in your head. This can lead to endless hours of analyzing one aspect over and over again, when chances are that the other listener is never going to notice, and it’s just getting in the way of actually finishing and moving onto the next stage. It’s this need for perfection that starts the musical journey for a  lot of people – they hear a style of music, and think, “I can add something to this to make it perfect,” and thus from that, comes many’s signature. 

This strive for perfection doesn’t only extend to the composition; it extends to the medium that artists use to create. Currently using Ableton 10, and feel stuck? Well, maybe when you finally get Ableton 11, it will reinspire you to make music again, by giving you access to all these new features. 

So you wait until you have the money saved up to get Ableton 11, and decide that you’re not going to do anything music wise until it comes out, lest you start something in Ableton 10 that you can’t fix in 11. Then, like many before you, you drop hundreds of dollars on that new version, and lo-and-behold, you’re still not making music. That’s because often it’s not about the equipment that you have, it’s about using it as an excuse to not do anything. Many times its more fruitful to be producing music with minimal gear, rather than upgrading your fancy DAW.

 

Where To Find Help

However, sometimes you really can’t do something that you want done, like a vocal, guitar riff, or live percussion. Luckily, there are a lot of places you can go to get reasonably priced studio musicians. 

Before we into what the resources are, a quick note on individuality in music, especially electronic music. Most likely due to the 90’s DIY attitude towards dance music, there is a permeating attitude that somehow if you don’t do everything in the track, it’s somehow cheating. 

No other genre of music thinks like this. Michael Jackson isn’t less brilliant because he had Quincy Jones. The Beatles aren’t any less enigmatic and sonically revolutionary because they had Phil Spector and George Martin. The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds isn’t any less game changing of an album, because it’s made primarily by session musicians. However, in dance music, if there is outside help, somehow it’s cheating. This is kind of ridiculous. Electronic musicians are not more legitimate musicians than The Beatles, sorry. Many of these albums were created with antiquated gear, that equates to producing music with minimal gear nowadays. If they could do it then, you can certainly do it now.

SoundBetter

Soundbetter is a platform where musicians can hire people to do things that they don’t want to do, or aren’t capable of doing. Need someone to play bass on your new house track? SoundBetter has that covered. Mixing or mastering? There are engineers that work with most conceivable genres, for a reasonable price.

Fiverr

Lots of people know Fiverr, and for good reason. It’s an excellent repository of services, from graphic design, to session musicians. Many critically acclaimed musicians sell their services on Fiverr for a reasonable rate.

Pheek’s Mixing And Mastering

Shameless plug. Here you can get mixing and mastering services, as well as track finalization. If you specialize in underground electronic music, and want your track to sound pristine, or need someone to help put finishing touches on the composition, then this is a sure bet, for a good price.

 

Examples Of Music Made On Minimal Gear

If you’re just getting started, or are looking to change up your medium to find new inspiration, don’t let brand names, and expense, get in the way of creating something great. Some truly great works of art have been made on stock, dated, repurposed, or even free software.

Here are a few:

Burial – Untrue

burial's untrue is a perfect example of producing music with minimal gear. This is the cover of the album.

If you’re not a stranger to Pitchfork’s social media feed, you have probably noticed how they absolutely gush over this album, reposting their article, Why Burial’s Untrue Is The Most Important Electronic Album Of The Century So Far ad nauseum. What’s most fascinating about this article, is that it is made on SoundForge, which is not a traditional DAW by any means.

The version he used didn’t have VST support or even multitracks. It didn’t have neat timing, or BPM features, or anything that modern DAWs use. It was simply a medium for designing sound. Yet, he used it to create an impeccably modern, important album, using old YouTube, and video game samples.

It’s this constraint that made such a unique, airy sounding album that still receives near daily praise the world over.

Justice – Cross

Pretty much the flag bearers of the post-Daft Punk “French Touch” revolution, Justice exploded onto the airwaves with their 2008 album, Cross. A distorted amalgamation of punk rock, disco, soul, and stuttering samples that were modern, and loud. Even to this day, the production value of Cross, while bordering on EDM, doesn’t feel plastic, or overproduced. By any stretch of the imagination, this album was made in an excellent studio, on well tuned gear, and warm, analogue synths. 

Well, that would be wrong. While there is definitely some post production magic, the majority of Cross was made by two French dudes with GarageBand, and clever sampling.   

Justice’s  Xavier de Rosnay says, “A lot of people think it’s bullshit when we say we use GarageBand, but it’s actually an amazing tool.”

Jon Hopkins – Immunity

An image of Jon Hopkin's Immunity, which is an example of producing music with minimal gear.One of the most revered electronic albums of the last decade is Jon Hopkins’ blistering techno/neo-classical masterpiece, Immunity. While he now uses Ableton, at the time, he built this album in a Frankenstein combination of his MacBook running Logic for arrangement, with a parallel processed version of Windows 98 running a 1999 version of SoundForge to do his sound design. 

This album was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and is #37 on Pitchfork’s Greatest IDM Albums of All Time.

Steve Lacy (Kendrick Lamar / The INternet / GoldLink, etc)

Steve Lacy is known for making beats on an iPhone and iPod. He has his beats on Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN with the song PRIDE, co-executive produced The Internet’s Ego Death, and has done collaborations with many other well known artists. 

Yes, it may not be the type of music that many people who read this blog care for, but you can’t deny its impact. If you can make hip hop on an iPhone, you can make ambient techno on one too.

There are many, many more examples of this, in pretty much every genre imaginable. If anything it’s the constraints that give these pieces of art their depth. Never underestimate the power of limitations.

 

Hopefully this article provides you with some resources, and inspiration for making music with minimal resources. Whether that is using an antiquated, or repurposed piece of software, an Open Source DAW, or even your phone, there is no shortage of brilliant pieces of art that have been made by minimal, and unconventional methods. 

Just remember, in the information age, there is a litany of resources available to help you get from A to B. And even if you have all the gear in the world, sometimes it’s good to try something new, and restrictive. You never know what will come out of it. Plus, making things in unconventional ways is a great story to pitch to media outlets to promote your music, so there is that too.

How To Make An EP

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In my coaching group, someone asked:

So, how do you make an EP ( I ask this thing regarding the atmosphere, like all the tracks should be in the same way let’s say, or create a story)? I find it really hard, if I count my last 10 projects, all of them are really different. How can I approach this kind of vibe for more tracks? Can you tell me how to make an EP?

I replied a quick answer but I thought it would make sense to expand on this because the real answer of how to make an EP is a bit longer and covers multiple things. Why? Because as a producer, a music lover and label owner, there’s nothing that frustrates me more than having an EP that has no soul, no concept and no direction. It feels bland and empty. There are different kind of EPs you can find out there and all of them will find an ear but I get picky. Let’s see some successful EP types:

The utility:

This type of EP is more for DJs and has a collection of tracks with the function to be played in sets.

The compilation:

Either various or 1, this one is simply a collection of random tracks picked from unsigned material.

The conceptual:

Sometimes an artist has a patch, a system or a way of working that will make a series of songs sound the same, which a few songs will united because of the direction.

The last one is the preferred type of EP I want. If I listen to it on Spotify, I sometimes like the non-linearity experience of shuffling it. To me, it is successful if I can listen to this EP that way in repeat and not get bored or even better, wanting to dig for more music from the artist. As there are multiple people who enjoy an EP just as much as an album, there is value to make one. People were saying that streaming services killed these types of releases but I really think otherwise. As a label owner, if I see someone who put enough energy to do an album, it certainly shows a lot of maturity that makes it special to my eyes. These, whether instinctual, or planned, are perfect examples of how to make an EP.

 

Chicken Or The Egg: How to Make An EP from What I Have Vs Starting From Scratch

Many people make music on a regular basis with the idea to eventually publish it. If you think about it, if you go from one project to another, you certainly will explore different moods, techniques, softwares and ideas. If you work on hardware gear, your music will mostly have some sort of common aesthetic though but with the computer, it gets pretty much all over the place since you have access to so many tools and samples.

It’s a bit more difficult to keep something coherent and you can easily start making music that is completely different from previous song you did. If you remember some past posts I did about my approach of working in a non-linear way, you’ll be working here and there and you may borrow some ideas from a song that is not working to another one that needs something specific.

The idea of how to make an EP is, to my understanding, is to try and propose 3-4 songs that have the same direction and aesthetic. This is one of the idea behind my approach to always try to work on multiple songs, bring them to about 90% and export them to a folder as a reference.

Later on, when working on an EP or album, I’ll go in that folder, listen to the tracks. Then I’ll know which ones have relatives and similar ideas, so I can work on the last 10% that is lacking to call it done. Whenever clients come to me that they can’t finish songs, there’s need to clarify that it is not necessary a bad thing. You can practice wrapping them but it is not essential. Same thing for all the fuss about what if I do this or that. I believe those questions can be answered once you have let the song ripe for a few weeks.

 

How To Make An EP – Purpose And Direction

photo of how to make an EP record

Credit: Blocks

One of the things we talked about a lot on this blog is how there’s not many secrets to music making if you can analyze a reference song. When it comes down to it, how to make an EP is sometimes as simple as referring to previous artist’s formulas. Many people I work with are concerned that a reference track will taint their art direction in a way that will make them not sound like themselves.

The thing that is making smile is how those people are more likely to come to me and share they’re lost. You can use reference EP/LP as a way to pick your songs that are going to be part of the same project. For instance, perhaps a very important EP for you had 5 tracks, where 2 songs were ambient and the others had a different take. Perhaps that is something that you can consider.

The way I see the use of a reference project in this condition is that you get your framework around it and then discard it. How many tracks on an EP is a matter of preference, based on whatever your goal is for the EP.

A thing that boggles people a lot are when they start thinking about what the listener expects. There’s equally a balance between people who want the same type of music from an artist from release to release, and another who wants the artist to keep a core but evolve, change, and not repeat formulas. This can also be the same kind of balance of how people want an album or an EP – All tracks slightly the same or all the tracks very different from to another.

Where do you situate yourself in this?

Wherever you feel like. You don’t have to worry too much because no matter what, some people will like and some will dislike anyway. One approach I have is to imagine the project for a friend in particular. How would they like it? Or a DJ… what is it that they like?

Sometimes I find that a good exercise to compile some tracks all together for an EP is to think of my current purpose. How do these tracks answer my own need, today, when recording an EP?

 

Mindset

How to make an EP starts and ends with mindset. There are different moments where you will have time to make music. I like to approach my session with an intention otherwise I quickly lose my session either troubleshooting issues or getting lost in details that aren’t useful at the end of the day. The different intentions could be listed as:

What I Do

The mistake a rookie producer will do is to approach the use of his time without an intention and deal with whatever comes up. It works most of the time but you’re not using your time wisely. If you start a session with one thing in mind, you won’t get distracted by chasing something else that is taking you away from what you’re trying to achieve. Your mind can do something really well if you put all your energy to it. In that sense, I have developed a natural self-confidence that whatever happens, a future-me is going to fix it or recover it at some point.

photo of how to make an EP

Credit: Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu

Having this approach is an open call to work on multiple projects and songs all at once, and makes the process of how to make an EP easier. You’ll create a huge pool of sounds and ideas that is ready for the moments where you want to feel creative and make loops, core to a song.

It’s important to capture the song mood and try to finalize it quickly so you don’t overwork it but you can also create a bunch of skeleton ideas that you’ll wrap later. Keep in mind that if you make music on a regular basis, you’re improving yourself and the future-you will be more skilled that your current-you.

That mindset has been my best approach in the last year when thinking about how to make an EP, allowing me to create a lot of music. To grind my skills to a point where I can, in full inspiration, make a song from scratch, gets easy. The other mindset I find useful is to record little live moments as often as possible.

The reason behind this is to know how it feels to jam, to play, to live the song instead of mouse-cliking it away. This is particularly important so you can perhaps imagine your music fitting an artist’s podcasts and sets. You want to have that fun factor as well as being essential for an artist to have your music in his arsenal.

Another benefit from having a focused mindset is that when it comes to working on an EP or LP, the 2 mindsets that will really benefit that will be the optimizing part as well as the finalization. I’d rather have 10 unfinished songs and then pick 4, wrap them based on a single aesthetic to unify them than have 10 finished songs that are not really coherent all together. If you shop for music often and look for EP, what grabs your attention and what kind of EP makes you go wow on it?

 

Aesthetics

Now that you know that you can have a bunch of songs almost done and that the last 10% of polishing can bring your entire project in a direction, I hear you asking how that last detail can be achieved. There are different things you can do but usually what unifies a project, if we refer to techniques, we can classify that into different clusters:

Sound design related

A good example is how the use of a same set of sounds can create unity. For instance, a 808 drum kit for all the songs gives a sense that all songs are the same for its core but you can add different ideas around it. Same for a synth in particular, where Mathew Jonson is a good example. In that sense, building a percussion kit is really useful.

There are multiple ways to build one but my favourite way is to use XO by XLN because it creates a map of all the sounds I have and also put them in a way that similar ones are closer on that map. So you can not only create a kit based on another but you always have the flexibility to search a huge selection and not go to far off. It’s the kind of tool that I’d be dreaming about but not only they made it happen but they made it better than what I would I have done it.

how to make an EP effects photo

Effect driven

The main effects that can bring a project together, from subtle to drastic, are the ones that are coloured. Think of reverb for Dub and distortion for breakbeats or lofi effects for some old school house. They are the key the the key signature of the genre, and help define how to make an EP that’s similar. Sometimes it’s interesting to grab all tracks part of the EP and use the same effect rack that you can create. It’s easy to import into each of them and you can save a few presets that are easily set.

There are multiple aesthetic related plugins you can use and try. I would also not hesitate to simply drop it ON the master bus (yes, I’m serious) which will give you a very coloured version that you can dial back after. But like I often say, you need to push things exaggerated to see how far you can otherwise, if you go with 2-3% of wet signal at a time, you’ll never really see the full picture. I find that a multi-effect like RC-20 by XLN can give you a really good idea of your song in a new space. It adds saturation and noisefloor. It makes your song sound as if it was taken from a dubplate. Pretty impressive.

Tone

One thing I see when I master an EP from an artist is a coherence with the tone. When there’s not, I usually emphasis it so it feels better. It’s weird to have a super bright song amidst a few dark ones. If it’s artistic, ok it can work but it makes the listening experience a bit bumpy. If you use Fabfilter Pro-Q3, You can apply one EQ curve from a song to another. Sometimes you can have a curve for an EP that you apply on all songs. That can provide some interesting results.

Complementary stories

In a past post I was saying how you can layer all your tracks and see how they would be mixed from a DJ’s point of view. Have you tried layering them to see if some nice combinations are possible?

Templates

As explained before, I like to save the arrangements of a song to keep them as templates for future ones. Really handy to speed up the process from a loop to a song.

 

How To Communicate With Audio Engineer

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how to communicate with audio engineer photoOne thing that I love doing is to work with unestablished artists. It’s why I have Pheek’s Coaching Corner, and it’s why I price my services at a reasonable price. Working with new artists is fulfilling as I often find artist’s earliest work to be their most creative, and raw. It’s in these musicians that you find stuff that can be truly seen as original, having the vestiges of being an entirely new genre. It’s this sweet spot that exists before they start to become either derivative of their own work, or pivot to fill more socially acceptable shoes. However, unestablished generally means inexperienced in the rest of the music industry. There are certain things that both artists and engineers should understand while working together, simplified by good communication. If you are able to put things in a language the engineer understands, your experience will be much smoother. In this guide, I will provide tips, tricks, and methods to make this process as seamless as possible. Therefore, here’s how to communicate with audio engineer.

First, it’s necessary to lay out what a mixing and mastering audio engineer does and does not do.

 

What An Audio Engineer Can Do

1. Their Job Is To Facilitate And Mediate

People come to someone like me to either get guidance, or have access to a set of tools that they would otherwise not invest in. At my disposal are a bunch of plugins, and hardware that are specific to making sure things sound great, and translate well across as many mediums as possible. Additionally, I have access to creative tools that artists may not even know exist, yet could be applicable to their sound.

Additionally, artists come to me to get advice on where to go with their sound. Do they need additional elements to fulfill its intended purpose? Are they having writer’s block, or their skills limit them in what they want to do next? It’s my job to find resources that will help them reach their goals. These resources are something that I will touch on later in this article.

2. Their Job Is To Understand The Genre They Are Working With

how to communicate with audio engineerNot all genres are the same, and they require different equipment. If you were to record a cowboy outlaw record, it’s probably not the best idea to go to a micro house producer. However, I have had rock bands come to me because they wanted their album to sound electronic in nature, despite it being a rock album.

If you were to come to me as a micro-house producer, I’ve been in this genre for a while, and have a lot of resources. Therefore, it’s easy for me to tap these, and find things like reference tracks, or communicate with other artists who have tricks to help your track get to the next level.

Additionally, this genre understanding allows me to reverse engineer aspects of the music, and apply it to your track. Having a problem with simulating a certain textural effect that you heard in a micro-house track? Chances are I know how we can get pretty close to that with the resources, and experience I have.

Additionally, we understand how to reign in things like low-end if you are creating a song that you expect to be spun in a club. Remember, you’re competing with common frequencies of another song, like the kick, or the hi-hat. It’s good to know how to moderate these things for a club environment, and that’s where engineers come in.

3. Audio Engineers Understand The Technical Aspects Of A Release

Do you know how many LUFS the loudness of a track bounced out of the limiter needs to be to normalize correctly on Spotify? How about SoundCloud, or Beatport? Each platform has different loudness variations in their codec, and often if your tracks aren’t uploaded with these standards in mind, then there can be translation issues. This is where audio engineers come in. We understand this boring, uncreative stuff, and how to achieve it in the mix and master, so you can concentrate on being creative. Then again, if you want to learn, we can also play the role of instructor.

4. We Help Accent The Best Parts

Let’s say that you have a killer bridge. We can recognize this, and help bring that out in the mix, or even add elements that will help it transition better into the next part of the song.

 

What An Audio Engineer Cannot Do

1. An Audio Engineer Cannot Please Everyone

Perception is reality, and some people have different perceptions on what things are supposed to be. Especially when dealing with their art. With audio, producers often get married to their sounds, thinking that they should be specifically in this spot in the mix, when, in reality, it probably won’t translate the way you want it to. This may come from hearing said sound over and over again in whatever room, or on whatever medium they were listening to while they were making it. However, in a well treated room, with calibrated equipment, or conversely, in a club with a good, or poor sound system, it may not translate exactly how you anticipate. Some people are more judicious about this, and accept the reality. However, some you just can’t please. So is the way of the artist.

Therefore, I take the approach that it’s best to do the least amount of damage possible to a track, while still allowing the frequencies to properly breathe, and translate to whatever medium the artist imagines it being listened to on.

This is why it’s important to know how to communicate with audio engineer, so we can both come to a mutual understanding through the techniques I will discuss in a bit.

2. Audio Engineers Can Never Say What Does And Does Not Sound Good, Artistically

Kind of expanding on the idea of doing as little damage to a track as possible, it needs to be noted that like all other art, music, and sound is subjective. Sure, there are best practices to get something to translate, and upload to platforms properly, but as far as the timbre, and aesthetics of a sound are concerned, that’s so subjective. There is a reason why techno fans can’t agree on all techno being good, despite it being the same genre. Where everything else is the same, it’s the sonic grade that ultimately defines a song.

Extremely, there is a reason why some prefer the frantic shouts and pounding SH101 basslines of Nitzer Ebb to the soft musings of John Prine. As a matter of fact, they might detest John Prine, and John Prine fans might detest Nitzer Ebb. Does this mean one is better than the other? No, because our realities are subjective.

It’s my job to help you get to the sound that you truly desire, using references to other tracks, or having clear, simple communication.

However, it needs to be noted that we know what sounds good, technically. Like, for instance, if you’re making pop music, or if people are casually listening to your music (alternative or pop), they like mids, because mids translate the best on common speaker systems, and headphones. Chances are that if you submit your track to a blog, it’s not going to be listened to out of a soundsystem – it may be listened to out of a phone, laying in bed, which are mid intensive.

3. Provide Critique Without Having A Solution

Talent is subjective. So is if something sounds good. Therefore, if an engineer gives feedback, or says that something could be better, it’s their professional duty to have a way to fix it. That’s what we are hired for. However, if you aren’t looking for that sort of feedback, it’s good to have that role clearly defined beforehand.

 

Tips On How To Communicate With Audio Engineer

1. Keep Things Simple

how to communicate with audio engineerEngineers get that artists have a lot of things to say about their work, and may use poetic language in order to communicate it. And this prose sometimes leads to elaboration. However, there is a saying in sales, called K.I.S.S, which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. This is because people understand things if they are simplified. No need to get technical, or elaborate. Just say what you mean. A good way of easily communicating is to provide examples of things that already exist. Let’s be real, nothing is new under the sun, so if we can pinpoint where that idea is coming from, then maybe it can be recreated, with a flourish that makes it your own.

No need to write out a full page of diction. Instead, just Keep It Simple, Stupid. Also, don’t use vague words like, “I want it to sound tight.” That doesn’t mean anything, and is subjective. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Provide References

Expanding on what I said earlier, we are all borrowing ideas. Even if your track borrows many different ideas, and creates something new, if you think hard, you can find tracks that provide the feeling you are going for, which can give clues to the frequencies, and mastering qualities you want to match.

The references also don’t have to be sonic, instead they can be cultural. Let’s say that you imagine your song being played in an after-hours spot. This means that the song will likely be played in a place with little treatment, or in a long, narrow venue that isn’t typically used for music. This requires specific mixing, and pre-mastering to properly express its full potential.

Also, there are moments where something is created that doesn’t exist. There is no way for me to know how to create something if there is no reference to it, so don’t ask for that, since it’s impossible to know without endless tweaking.

3. Contact Us Before You Buy

This is true especially if you have doubts. You wouldn’t hire someone without vetting them normally, so why should this be any different? If you have a song that you think might fit my aesthetic, but not quite, then let me have a listen to it, and I will let you know if I think it’s worth working on. Believe me, I don’t want to work on projects that are unnecessarily difficult, just like you don’t.

You’d be surprised at what projects I have worked on. For instance, even though I make “underground” music, I worked on an EDM project, because the producer liked that I didn’t sound EDM. 

4. Know Some Basic Terms

As producers, many have at least some basic knowledge of the audio engineering spectrum. Most know what equalizers, and compressors are, as well as reverb or delay. They also know what mono and stereo means. However, there may be more specific things that they don’t know – like for instance the difference between a transparent and colored master. A transparent one is where you have a mix you’re happy with, but you want everything to be properly balanced. A colored one is where you aren’t totally satisfied with the mix, and want some more textures, and other elements, such as compression, and saturation added to bring out new elements. In other words, you don’t mind things being changed.

Other common terms used in studios to describe frequencies are:

Muddy: Too much bass.

Boxy: Too many mids.

Tinny: Upper mids or lower highs need reduction.

Bright: Similar to tinny.

Airy: The high register frequencies. The ones that can break glass.

Warm: Reducing high end, or boosting the lower mids to give it a toasty feeling.

5. Don’t Micromanage

Do you hate being micromanaged at work? Well, so does everyone. By micromanaging, you’re distracting away from the work that could be getting done on your project by pointing out things that the engineer recognizes, but hasn’t got to, or may not even be necessary once another process is done. We’re professionals; let us be professional.

 

Conclusion:

All said, if you learn how to communicate with audio engineer properly, you are making yourself better at what you do, because you are furthering your education by understanding the terms. Also, you’re making yourself easier to work with, and at professional levels, easy to work with can get you far.

This skillset will also help with other artistic undertakings, such as remote music collaboration, or doing collaborative DAW projects, or even online collaborative DAW ones.

Hopefully this proved to be a valuable guide to helping artists with how to communicate with audio engineers. Like in most things in life, solid communication, means a solid experience.

 

Social Dilemma Of Social Media For Minimal House Producers

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If you’re like me, when you watched the new Netflix documentary, drama hybrid, The Social Dilemma, you felt a sense of disgust. The main takeaway: social media isn’t addicting by chance, it’s addicting by design.  The effects of social media for minimal house producers is no exception.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the other media conglomerates invested an obtuse amount of resources into making sure that there was an active dopamine response from your brain when you use their platform – the same response people get from using drugs, or drinking alcohol, or having sex. 

They hired the brightest neuro, and behavioral scientists to work hand in hand with interface designers to keep you hooked, and make their investors money. This, on top of an algorithm that feeds you tailored content based on your previous interactions, has led to the consequence of the spreading of fake news, lies, and polarization between our communities. Admittedly, this wasn’t their intention from the get go, but often the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

However, it’s a necessary evil in a lot of ways. While marketing used to be reserved for the well funded, and tightly networked, social media has opened up a sort of democratic ecosystem, where, if you play the game right (the algorithms), a budding producer can now reach a targeted fanbase with little to no investment. 

This has allowed for many bedroom producers to have a shot at success based on savvy, and talent, rather than relying on a suite of marketing consultants. But with that, bears the responsibility of ultimately, these artists, no matter how big, are fueling the machine of dopamine release for ad impressions that is psychologically encouraged by these mega corporations.

However, some artists have stepped out of the rat race of social media, and forged other ways of networking. Some of these methods are creative, while others are dangerous. In this post, I hope to lay out my views on the advantages and disadvantages of social media for minimal house producers, ways to detach from the grasp of these mega corporations through alternative media channels, and techniques you can use to have a healthy media balance.

 

How much are we responsible, as artists and labels, for people’s addiction to social media?

As “content creators,” we are the fuel for the proverbial social media engine. By creating stuff that people interact with, we are reinforcing the reward pathways in our audience’s brain. Every time we create something quality, we are responsible for a brief dopamine release by our audience. This is what keeps our fans coming back to our page, to listen to our music, to interact with us. However, this ultimately keeps people on the platform longer, allowing advertisers to solicit them, and quick information to satiate them, which influences their opinions.

However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if content creators are creating something that people ultimately want to see, especially artists. By putting a song out there, unless it has a greater purpose beyond just being enjoyable to listen to, we’re not creating misinformation, we are not eliciting fear, or promoting division. However, by keeping them on the platform, we provide more opportunities for these bad actors to impact our fans. We must remember that every time someone comments on our stuff, and gets a response, negative, or positive, we are stimulating that neural pathway, and keeping them hooked to the platform. 

 

Benefits of social media for minimal techno producers

1. Promotion 

This is pretty obvious. In the past, you would have to spend days sending demos and press releases to media channels to get syndicated by them. If you were more digitally savvy, you could build an email list, but that took time through creating a simple way for people to sign up for it at shows, on your site, or through general networking. 

If you wanted to advertise, you would have to buy a spread in a magazine, flyer, or get on someone else’s mailing list. Spreads in magazines are expensive, and have no trackable Call To Action. Flyering is expensive too, and doesn’t have any way to track, or target. Joining someone else’s mailing list costs money too, and isn’t necessarily targeted either, as it’s someone else’s fan base, not yours.

Now, with social media, you can put a post out there, and your biggest fans will ultimately see it, because algorithmically, they are important. Additionally, if you want to promote something beyond your following, you can drop it into the hundreds of targeted Facebook Groups that exist, use hashtags, or spend somewhere between 1 and 3 cents per targeted advertisement. Sure, there is more noise now-a-days than there used to be, but you know that your ads are getting in front of people who care, and you’re not killing trees from all the paper you’re printing. 

2. Networking

photo of checking social media for minimal house producers

Nathan Dumlao

Labels, artists, groups are all on social media. It provides a channel for you to make yourself known to labels before you solicit them. You can like their posts, comment on their stuff, send them DM’s on Instagram, and tag them in your Twitter posts. After doing this enough, unless they are a huge label, they will recognize your name, and thus be more likely to check your stuff out when you eventually send it to them. In psychology, this is known as the “mere exposure effect,” where if someone is familiar with something, even subconsciously, they are more willing to engage with it. 

As a producer, you most likely want to have your music spun by DJs, and respected by your industry peers. These artists are mostly all on social media. Doing the same “mere exposure” thing as you would with labels, with a little effort, you can make your name more known to them, and thus increase your odds of having them listen to your track. These artists can also provide a valuable gateway into networks that you would otherwise not have access to. By making friends with these artists through social media, you too can have some of this access.

Also, one must never underestimate the usefulness of Facebook Groups. For instance, Pheek’s Coaching Corner, the one that I run, was created to find like minded people who were into what I am into. I have made many valuable connections through it.

3. Artist pages 

Most labels expect you to have a social media presence (except in rare exceptions, which I will get to), since it shows a sense of professionalism. It also allows for promoters, and other industry people to gauge marketability, thus leading to more opportunities. 

 

Disadvantages of social media for minimal house producers:

1. Takes away time for creative things

Social media is distracting for the same reason why it’s useful – it produces dopamine release for you just as much as it does for fans. By interacting with social media, you are participating in this neverending feedback loop. Therefore, this feedback loop can distract minimal house producers from actually creating. As Chris Liebing recently said on his DJ’s and Beers podcast, every time he replies to someone’s comment on Instagram, that is just one more thing that is keeping him away from making music. 

While larger artists like Liebing might be more desensitized to their social media interactions, since they get so many, for a small artist, a new comment, or new like can be very distracting, since it produces a high, in a way. Every time your phone vibrates, or dings, you are being pulled away from whatever you are working on at the moment, and will eventually affect the outcome of whatever that is.

2. Mental Illness

Using social media for minimal house producers can be dangerous. 73% of musicians report suffering from a mental illness of some sort, and are three times more likely to suffer from depression. 

Additionally, research has shown that social media use is causated to increased depression. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical and Social Psychology, researchers concluded that, “What we found overall is that if you use less social media, you are actually less depressed and less lonely, meaning that the decreased social media use is what causes that qualitative shift in your well-being.”

This combination is volatile, and can lead to some serious consequences, if not properly managed.

3. Private life being used for commercial interest by bigger companies.

artistic representation of tracking social media for house music producers

Tony Liao

A quote that stood out to me in The Social Dilemma was the business adage, “If a company isn’t selling you anything, then you are the product.” Every interaction that you make on social media is analyzed by algorithms designed by data and cognitive scientists who are vetted to be some of the best and brightest in the world. To think that these algorithms are oblivious of your deepest personal secrets and desires is willfully ignorant. They exist to hyper target you, and sell you products, so advertisers keep on using their services. Unless you install plugins, and software, these algorithms track you well beyond the platform, looking at how you interact with all websites, not just theirs, using tracking cookies, and pixels. They listen to you on your phone, and translate what you say into text to analyze (if you think that talk to text was just a convenience, think again). That time you looked up something that only exists in your medical records? Well, that’s recorded too.  

 

How to detach from social media for minimal house producers

You don’t necessarily have to be a slave to social media; there are artists who get away with not using it at all. Ricardo Villaobos doesn’t have a social media presence, and he’s a shining star in the minimal house scene. Nils Frahm doesn’t have one, and he’s considered one of the greatest living pianists. Burial doesn’t have one either. Neither does Aphex Twin (or at least one that is maintained in any serious manner). However, with the exception of Frahm and Burial, these artist’s careers flourished before social media was a thing.

So how are these artists able to get away with this, and what can you do as an alternative to social media for minimal house producers? 

In the case of Ricardo, he made his connections by partying excessively. Late nights with promoters, PR professionals, and A&R allowed for chemically induced promises to be made, which he followed up on. While Ricardo doesn’t have a social media presence, memes of his sweaty, sleep deprived visage certainly do. 

a photo of Ricardo Villaobos not using social media for minimal house producers

With Frahm, he had a social media presence up until 2017/2018, when he decided to deactivate it before working on All Melody. By this point, he was already a globally recognized artist, whose label and publicist got him all the promotion he needed to sustain his career. He also studied under Nahum Brodsky, a protégé of Tchaikovsky, so he was obviously connected.

Burial had a couple things working for him. The first, is that his marketability was in his enigmaticism and mystery. Having a social media presence would have worked against him in a lot of ways. He also started sending demos to Hyperdub in 2002, years before social media was a necessity. One thing that can’t be ignored either is where Burial grew up. He went to the same school as Four Tet, Hot Chip, The XX, and dozens more. In other words, this guy was connected, whether his profile leads you to believe that or not

So what can you do if you weren’t blessed to go to private school, study under a world renowned mentor, or aren’t willing to sacrifice your health with copious late nights and consumption?

  1. Find out a way you can help the scene and make connections. Volunteer at events, become a journalist, throw events, become a radio DJ, intern and eventually work at a studio. These are all options. 
  2. Do things old school – hand out fliers after shows, solicit journalists with a solid press kit, and a compelling story. Not all stories need to be about your music. If you were a refugee, or had a parent who was a murderer, or you survived cancer, these are all stories. Think of alternative publications as well. If you are really into healthy eating, you can get a story published about your diet while touring on health blogs.
  3. Trim down your network of relevant people to 5. It’s like real life, you don’t have a ton of really close friends. Concentrate on the people who really care about what you do, not the people who kind of care. Only care about the people who will provide honest feedback, and encourage them to help you make connections.
  4. Find a mentor. Just like Frahm had a teacher, so can you. They all won’t be protégé’s of fabled Russian composers, but they will have their own set of connections that when the time is right, you can capitalize on. However, it’s sometimes easier to connect with these people on social media.

Alternative social media for minimal house producers:

1. Telegram

A great social media for minimal house producers. For instance, there are 640 members in the minimal techno channel. Telegram doesn’t monetize through ads, as it’s an encrypted network. This encryption means more privacy as well.

2. Discord

Just like Telegram, there are music networks on here. Here is a list of channels.

3. Twitch

While not necessarily a forum, this is a place where established producers have opened up a community to watch them do things like DJ sets, and produce music. Artists like Kyle Geiger have been doing almost daily tutorials for music production, and answering questions. If someone has something interesting to say in the chat, you can private message them, and make a connection that way. You can also ask Kyle questions, and send him tracks. He encourages it.

4. Reddit

More anonymous, and focused, these groups, also known as subreddits, can be an excellent place to find like minded people. If you can think of a genre, there is probably a subreddit for it. People ask for feedback on tracks, DM people who they want to connect with, find playlists to be a part of, and even promote their own tracks on these forums. Major artists are often found on reddit, doing question and answer sessions, called IAMAs. It’s generally a helpful community, but beware of being too self promotional. 

 

Ways To Moderate Your Social Media

1. Install tools to restrict access

Tools like OffTime can limit what apps on your phone you can use, between certain times, or with certain permissions. It will also track the amount of time that you use apps, which could be humbling.

If you use Chrome, there is an extension called Work Mode that allows you to block all social media URLs between designated times. Stay Focused is another great extension.

If you use something like Mozilla, there is an add on called LeechBlock, that allows you to block certain websites.

If you are concerned about them tracking you, plugins like AdBlocker and UBlock restrict this. However, keep in mind that if you end up advertising on their platforms, you will have to disable these blockers so that you can monitor your own ads.

2. Only interact with certain people so the algorithms only show you those things.

Ultimately social media will display things to you that you want to see. If you don’t want to see anything about politics, or celebrity gossip, don’t interact with it. This will tell the algorithms that you aren’t interested. Conversely, if there is something that you are interested in, then interact with those things, and the algorithm will reward you with more of that.

3. Outsource

Get someone else to manage your social media presence. You can use places like Fiverr, and UpWork to hire virtual assistants who can create, and post on your behalf, for a reasonable price. Therefore, you will have a presence, but not have to be managing it day by day. There are also apps and bots out there to streamline this process, such as HootSuite or InstaZood. 

 

Hopefully this post provides you with some resources that you can use in order to make an informed decision about how you want social media to impact your routine as an artist. There are ways to step out of the social media game, but to do so prematurely will have long lasting effects on your success. Therefore, strategize carefully, and see what you can do about limiting your access to it, rather than disconnecting entirely. If you do feel the need to remove yourself from the algorithm’s grasp, there are ways, but it will require a lot of effort, and can be less cost effective. 

Social media isn’t going anywhere, so we can either lament at its destructive capabilities, or harness it’s potential to benefit ourselves, while using tools to reduce its negative impact on our health, and society’s perceptions. 

Find A Record Label Looking For Talent

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So, you’re looking for a record label looking for talent? We’ve been talking about collecting references for your mixes in previous posts quite a lot. By using software to help you match the tone of a track you like, with some analysis, you can now reverse engineer your favorite tracks to eventually make something similar. With this approach, eventually you’ll end up having music that you want heard and eventually published on a record label looking for talent.

There are many advantages of being on a record label. I covered this in previous articles. However, the crux of it is that being on these labels gives you access to a community of artists that you enjoy, provides social recognition by peers, and can provide accolades that artists can leverage for more gigs. Being on a credible label also allows artists to move up the ladder to larger labels, just as having a job on your resume allows people to move onto bigger, and better jobs. 

 

Independent Record Labels Vs. Major Record Labels

Finding a record label looking for talent like yours comes down to having a song that fits the aesthetic of the label. You wouldn’t release a Dubstep song on a boutique Minimal Techno label, just like you wouldn’t release a Minimal Techno song on a boutique Dubstep label. While they are both electronic music, the contacts that said label would send the song to are inherently different, since Dubstep DJ’s not usually spin Minimal, and vice versa. This is especially true for independent record labels looking for talent. 

Major record labels might have a broader approach to what genres they accept, and might sign a minimal techno track, and a Dubstep track since they have more resources to handle a diverse sound, since these genres have a place in their business model. However, to get noticed by these labels, you need marketability that a lot of smaller artists don’t have. You need a solid fan base already, a brand, and professional tunes.

Sometimes it is possible to get lucky with talent alone, and being in the right place at the right time, but this is not the norm. So if you decide to go the Atlantic Records demo submission route, and don’t have a credible foundation, then it’s really like winning the lottery. Sure, major record labels looking for new talent is a thing, but it’s a special circumstance if they get selected.

 

How Do You Find A Record Label Looking For Talent?

There are many approaches to this. A solid way is if you made a song based on a reference track, see what label they signed to. If you have a similar stature as the artist referenced, then chances are that you may be a good fit. If you aren’t on a similar tier as this artist, that doesn’t mean that they were always at this level. Go back into their catalog, and see what labels their earlier releases were on. Next, make sure they are accepting demos. They will usually say on their site, or social media if they are. Make sure they are recent posts, and releases as well. Small labels don’t last forever, just like small businesses, and the information may not be up to date, especially if they don’t exist anymore. 

Next, see if they still are curating the sound that you have produced. Labels evolve. Just because they were into Minimal in 2007, doesn’t mean that they are into Minimal in 2020. They could be into hard techno now, since that’s what sells. 

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of popular labels have smaller sub-labels that cater to up and coming artists. Make sure to pay attention to what those are. For instance, Get Physical has Poesie Musik, which caters to a melodic sound, and signs small artists.

If you’re part of a scene, and your colleagues have signed to a label that fits your sound, ask for an introduction. That is the most surefire way to get on any label. 

 

How Should You Approach A Record Label Looking for Talent

Keeping the aesthetic of a label in mind, it begs the question – should you make music with a label in mind, or find a label based on the music you make?

It’s something difficult to answer and there’s not a right answer either. It’s the chicken or the egg question. There are different options and perhaps one will suit you best. But let’s look into the different types of feedback they can provide as they could be giving you an insight on what is happening. This is where many people get confused.

In the most common scenario, people come to me for mixing and mastering with the idea of having music done. Once it is, the question that always comes is “now what?” Sometimes it happens I just did mastering of similar music and will suggest some clients of mine or in other cases, it reminds me of someone I know, so after looking up Discogs, I share a hint or 2. This is the “finding a label looking for talent that fits something already made” approach. 

The second option is to find a label that you want to be on, and design music to fit that label. You analyze the songs BPM, you take reference of its genre, you incorporate the timbre and instrumentation that you hear in the records. You make sure that your mix and master have a similar color to the ones on the label.

However, sometimes you can do all of this, and the work can come off as being derivative, because what you made has been sterilized down to elements. Not even labels with a specific sound want work to be derivative, they want it to be complementary. This is a skill that takes lots of dedication and practice to hone. The process of making something contextual, yet with its own signature is one of the hardest things that any artist can accomplish, no matter what the medium. So, if you’re going to take the “finding a record label by producing to fit the label” approach, then you have to be confident in your skills. By taking this approach, you are also diluting your potential to submit it to other labels if it’s rejected. 

Record label looking for talent

Credit: Tim Marshall

 

Key Factors When Approaching A Record Label Looking FOr talent

However, sometimes your music fits perfectly, and you have invested a lot of work into it, but the label rejects it. What does it say exactly? What it says is that you probably didn’t have one of these factors:

Dedication

The most important thing you can do to get signed to a label is to have dedication. Artists need to dedicate themselves to being the best at their art that they can possibly be. They need to dedicate  themselves to learning the best practices to succeed as a musician, whether that’s reading blog posts like this, or talking to successful peers. Remember, artists are going to fail at what they try to do, often. That’s just a fact of life. It’s what they do after they fail that defines them. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Marketability

Credit: Jorik Kleen

The next thing you want to do is make sure you’re marketable. Yes, just like major labels, more boutique labels want to make sure that artists have a brand. Branding can sometimes be seen as the antithesis of creativity, but it’s always been a necessity in music. Name one moderately successful musician that doesn’t have an image? Artists need to make sure their social media is in order, have an Electronic Press Kit, have a website, take some press photos, and just overall look like they care. 

Depending on the size of the record label looking for talent, artists should expect to have a fan base that is relative to said label’s stature. If an artist only has a couple releases, and a few hundred fans on Facebook, it might not be wise to go after a label like Toolroom Records, or Kompakt. Most likely their demo will just get lost in the mix, so to speak.  

Submitting Your Best Work

This next thing should be obvious, but it’s worth mentioning anyways. Artists should make sure to present their absolute best work to labels looking for demos. Make sure everything is mixed properly, and even better, it’s mastered. I can provide those services at a reasonable price, and it will go a long way to showing the labels that the music is serious. 

Having A Solid Network

Another factor that is important in getting signed to competitive labels looking for talent is networking. Artists should make sure not only to nurture themselves, but nurture everyone around them. Reciprocity goes a long way as a human being, so be helpful. Burning bridges don’t always light the way. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, this is the most surefire way of getting signed to a label of your choice. 

Personalization

Finally, when approaching a label, make sure to add a personal touch to your approach. If you can find the name of the A&R, that’s helpful. If you know someone who works for them, or is connected, get a referral in, or drop their name. Maybe mention why you think your sound fits well with the label. The more you can personalize, the better chance you have to get heard, because it shows that you’re dedicated.

 

Final Thoughts On Finding A Record Label Looking For Talent

If you follow these approaches, then you have a much higher probability of getting signed to a label. Nobody said that it would be easy though. There is a reason why many people laugh off art as being a career path. However, if you are willing to have dedication, network, and be vigilant in your craft, it can be a long, rewarding job that can jetset you around the world, and introduce you to some incredibly interesting, and talented individuals. Remember, without art, there isn’t culture, without culture there isn’t society. Don’t let anyone tell you that what you do doesn’t matter. It’s just to matter, you have to work hard. There are no shortcuts (unless you have a trust fund, and a connected family).

How can you start a song while stressed out?

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Disclaimer: this post is based on reflections resulting from the COVID pandemic.

Every other day, I exchange a few words with artists I know—friends, label partners, people I like, or anyone who wants to connect. I believe during these times, it’s important to keep social contact to divert our attention away from the madness, misery, or other constantly emerging concerns.

“How can you still make music with everything going on?” someone asked me today (and last week). I did a workshop for MUTEK and the main question was similar, something like “where do (music) ideas come from?”

Both answers overlap, in a way. If you think about where ideas come from, (let’s call it “inspiration” if you want), it can strike at random moments. For some people it’s in the shower, others while commuting, or doing yoga…etc. Basically, 90% of the time it’s happening somewhere else, rather than when you’re making music. Hence the importance of taking long breaks when you make music, and by breaks, I mean, leave the studio, go out and do something else. Your mind is still making music, but the space you create for yourself to think, will create space for you to solve problems.

I don’t know about you, but my mind is pretty much always making music, in some way. I’ll be washing dishes or walking my dog, and there goes my brain, creating patterns, imagining song structure, paying attention to ambient noises and figuring out how to translate that with a synth. So, whenever someone asks me where my ideas come from, it’s a bit tricky to give a definitive answer, because the source of some ideas emerge a long time before I sit in front of the computer. The thing is, once I sit in front of the computer, it’s like whatever I have been thinking about vanishes..I’ve forgotten everything and there I am, thinking what now?

The first good habit of sitting down to make music starts with the commitment to a 5-minute session.

The existentialist question(s) of “why make music?” sometimes strike me during this pandemic, and hard. Why am I making this? Who am I reaching out to? Why, why, why?

The answer to everything can be resolved in the 5-minute commitment. If you’re someone who’s interested in meditation, we say that the hardest step to meditate is to just sit and start. It’s the same for music making.

Another part of this challenge we face is the isolation. Most artists feed themselves events to get inspired. Now touring is hard, and that cut-off happening cold-turkey was a mental challenge. Having the resilience to be able to continue making music after months is another obstacle in-itself, as this is something that’s not only demanding, but also unusually frustrating.

If you watch that movie about The Doors, they go in the desert and try taking peyote for a spiritual experience. A lot of artists in the ’60s and ’70s had a breakthrough moment where they wanted to go beyond the rock-and-roll lifestyle to seek out answers about their life, their art, and to open new avenues of creating. There’s something that makes me wonder, when I see artists calling their art meditation or such, if there’s some sense of integrity towards the commitment of what they want to translate. Is the song just another new take on something they did before or is there a real interest to do something meaningful?

I’m sharing this because if you hit a wall with the music making, it might be directly related to a part of yourself that is either hungry for something more, or experiencing revulsion towards the repeating patterns that aren’t providing answers to your current needs. One doesn’t need a change but if your drive to create has hit a wall, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Because you are an artist and we create just like we breathe.

How to reinvent yourself artistically has been covered on this blog in the past, as well as how to start a new song. I’m not going to cover those again, but I can share how to approach music in these difficult times, when facing stress or a feeling like abandoning it all.

What are you listening to? Connect with the new audience.

A lot of artists find inspiration in clubs and touring. Without that kind of energy in context, it doesn’t mean that music is dead, it’s just transposed. It’s been really difficult to explain to people that have never been in club to relate to the experience of loud music because that same music, out of context, is often very bizarre and sometimes, pointless. But there are other options. You can make the same kind of music for when these events will return, but you could also take the time to make music that is not aimed at those contexts. What makes an artist mature is the depth he/she has. If your music is one-dimensional, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Many of the best artists will have different monikers to explore other avenues and I would say that it’s strongly encouraged to work on different types. Start by listening to a lot of music, perhaps more than you usually do.

Focus on the effortless.

Effortlessness seems to make some people feel uncomfortable. There’s a general attitude out there that great music was made through countless hours of work. Well, yes and no. If you think that you need to work a lot to sharpen your skills, yes, that demands resilience, motivation, curiosity and a lot of discipline. That is where the hard work is. But to record a song…this is where you put to practice your acquired skills and when you compose, that should be effortless. The whole aspect of post-production, editing, arranging endlessly and click-click-clicking your music to perfection isn’t, in my book, the real deal. It’s the rabbit hole of perfection grasping attempt that kills the original, pure and raw idea. I’m more interested in ideas than perfect production. In many cases, over-produced music ages really badly.

To get into “effortless music-making”, prepare for future projects by sketching out a lot of ideas, but mostly musical ones without much of anything supportive. Start a lot of projects, make loops and motifs, build presets, macros, collect some as well. A part of that means to also put away productivity and focus on spending time making music and not finishing anything. Think of guitar players who just play with their guitar without making a song. They’ll just play whatever they just feel coming.

Collaborate, talk, and connect.

How much time do you spend talking about your music? I don’t mean plugins and techniques, but ideas, emotions, and what you are trying to share. Do you reach out to other artists and share how you feel about their music or what it gives you as imagery?

Talking about music in general is pure fuel for imagination. The idea of putting words to the abstraction of sounds is a way of getting closer to understanding techniques and helping you having more precision on whatever you want to do. If you can explain it, you’ll understand it more. Plus the idea of sharing with another artist is a way of also getting technical feedback on parts that remain obscure and confusing.

One of the things I used to do, and still love doing, is to invite a few people to share our favourite music of the moment with one another, listening actively, commenting, getting lost in it. This is for musicians, quite a critical activity as the idea of how others perceive music is a very essential understanding of what people are looking for in the music, just as much as what is the music they’re willing to listen and share. This should fill up your references and study for future projects.

Making a collaborative playlist on streaming sites allows you to be also more connected. That’s the beauty of streaming even though it gets a lot of hate. Plus in time of Covid, this is possible even remotely.

Purpose, Passion, and Your Natural Gift

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Maybe you’ve been using music as a way to get through the pandemic—you wouldn’t be the only one. When the pandemic first took hold, I started getting an unusually high number of requests for mixing and mastering. I saw about 25% more work than I would have in the similar time years before. At some point, my work load doubled. Mainly because everyone is making music right now that there are less things to do.

One question that I’ve encountered multiple times keeps coming up—is there a way to turn my hobby, what I love doing, into something that can be my day job? Can you really make a living as an artist? Many of us chase the idea of finishing a song, releasing an album, and seeing out there online with other artists we love. There must be some money coming back from that which would support me day-to-day, right?

Sorry, but the truth is money that comes back from sales, streaming and other exposure is really low.

So how can one make money then and making a living from a passion?

I fumbled upon an interesting article based on a study that you’ll find more happiness if you chase your purpose rather than your passion. It’s also quite known that making your passion a job can also kill it. I’ve been a musician full-time, run a label and tour…I can tell you that if you find yourself making a bad investment, it can completely scrap your career that you’ve been building for a decade. It hasn’t happened to me, but I did see a scene I was relying on, die out after a long stretch of golden years. What followed that genre wasn’t inspiring to me, and I never felt like jumping on the bandwagon like most of my peers did. Instead, I went low profile for a while, got some random jobs that could pay the bills and with some distance, I can see that I learned a lot from doing something else than just making music all day. You can lose perspective of yourself, of your direction, of your initial vision.

Maybe you’ve already seen or read about it in this blog, but I started 2020 with a challenge of making one track per week for the entire year. I thought initially it could be a good way of attracting people to what I do while learning more about production, revise/reinvent my own method and of course, hatch a bunch of tracks to release, eventually. That experience really brought me back to circa 2006-2008, when I was producing madly and had a lot of releases. Some people had been saying they wanted me to do techno like back then, but I felt that what was said then didn’t need to be said again, and wanted to bring something new to the table.

Adding this challenge alongside my daily work almost burnt me out, which is a really bad thing to happen if you’re an artist. With that in mind, I started dosing my music making and other insights came to me:

  • How to efficiently do I know my tools to do exactly what I need to be doing.
  • How to quickly spot obstacles and know the technique(s) to overcome them.
  • Know my limits, both creative, personal energy, and also technically.
  • Try to identify things I don’t know and not overlook them.
  • Remain humble.
  • Know what I love doing and/vs what I do best.

Just looking back at the last few weeks, there are a few things that became clear also—if you start doing something in order to get attention, you’ll get tired of it quite fast, especially if the reaction doesn’t meet your expectations. In my case, I quickly saw (I had foreseen it!) that after the 8th week, people didn’t really care anymore about the music posted. I sort of stopped posting and decided to share to a handful of people who I knew would listen. Eventually, I started making music for myself alone and even stopped uploading them on Weeklybeats, the website of the challenge. What’s pretty fascinating is to look at the first 8 tracks and what I do now and it’s completely different. Stuff I do for myself is purely experimental, either incredibly weird or very repetitive as I made some sonic moments for my loft, to be played on my Sonos.

How is this bringing me closer to my purpose or to my passion?

It’s not a secret that I found my passion many years back when I discovered I’m pretty solid teacher. Now it pays off. To teach, you need to know your craft inside out and be able to explain it properly. So exploring different techniques and reverse engineering music that I and others love is a way to teach people who want to know. This is why our coaching group is precious; we are collectively trying to understand certain techniques. What’s amazing about music is, you can understand a technique, teach it to 10 people and all of them will apply it in their own way, which will make 10 different results. The funny thing though, is that 50% will not like not being able to do what others can already do; which is a topic I work a lot in coaching: control.

Anyway, if what you do best might not be music-related, is there some hope? Well, maybe more than you think, if you have a bit of imagination. Here are a few other types of work that are more relate to music that you might think:

  • If you’re good at writing, you can work with artists on their bios, press kits, song descriptions, online presence and so on.
  • Graphic design is often a skill musician have. You have no idea how many designers are also musicians and in a world where image is crucial, you could really find work in the music industry for sure.
  • Web skills? There are so many aspects that you can tackle that as well.
  • Gear skills? If you have electronic based skills, maybe you can help assemble gear such as modular who come in kits and need assembling.
  • Networking is your thing? You have no idea how we need people that can connect people all together or create bridges between parts who need one another.

You might be thinking that musicians have no money to pay anyone, so how can that generate anything? If you’re really good at something, people will want to pay. Maybe not much at first but if you do a great job, it eventually it gets noticed. When I started this site and full time services, it started slow and I did a lot of free work (or highly discounted). I took a lot of time to build relationships with clients, and eventually happy clients referred in others. It became my purpose to make sure my clients can grow at what they do, both with the music making but also as artists that can shine in their community.

This is why I took a bunch of people under my wing with the idea to push them as if they were me. What can I do for this person that can make a difference in their career? Is it teaching them something? Is it connecting them with promoters or labels?

That’s when I understood that another skill I personally had is networking and establishing contacts. I’m a natural social butterfly at events and that is something that can pay off on the long run, especially in what I do.

The pandemic affecting events is making it really difficult to not only make that happen effectively, but also for the global inspiration to make music. Being in isolation confronts you to make music based on memories without having much (or any) of a chance to test it on a crowd…forcing you to do what you love and to simply be patient.

Sound Design and Arrangements Series Pt. 4: Emphasis and Proportion

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This post is part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In this post I thought I’d dive into two principles that I find go hand-in-hand: emphasis and proportion. Let’s start by defining what they mean, then how we can use them in what we love doing—music production.

In past articles I’ve talked about how to start a song. While there’s no right or wrong answer here, we can agree on certain points for the core of a song. Let me ask you a straight-up question to start with, which is, when you think of your all-time favourite song, what automatically comes to your mind as its most memorable part?

All kind of answers can come up, and perhaps you’re hearing the song in your mind while reading this. Maybe you remember the chorus, the main riff (motif), or have a part of the song where a specific emotion is evoked in you; you might even be thinking about a purely technical part.

Whatever you remember from that song was your point of focus. The focal point of the listener is what grabs attention and keeps it engaged.

Emphasis is a strategy that aims to draw the listener’s attention to a specific design element or an element in question. You could have emphasis on multiple focal points, but the more you have, the less emphasis impact you’ll have.

When producing a song, I like to ask, what is the star of this song? What is the motif, the main idea? What’s going to catch your attention first and keep you engaged? When listening to a song, you might have different layers and ideas succeeding one another, but of course, they can’t all grab a listener’s attention, as you can only really focus on 1-2 elements at a time. As explained in past articles, the listener will follow the arrangements exactly like one would follow the story line of a movie.

I see emphasis is from two perspectives: from the tonic side and/or from the storytelling part.

The tonic part is where you have your phrase (melody) and there is a part that is “louder” than the others. So, let’s say we take one sentence and change the tonic accent, it will change it’s meaning (caps represents the tonic):

  • I like carrots.
  • I LIKE carrots.
  • I like CARROTS.
  • but also, I LIke carROTS!

We have here 3 different tonic emphases, and in each, the focal point of the listener is shifted to a specific word. When we talk, we change the tonic naturally—emphasis on a specific word is to put importance on it for the listener. It can be used as weight, on insisting your position about a topic, or to clarify one word.

The same is also true for timing:

  • I like… carrots.
  • I… like carrots.

Or spacing perhaps the syllables to create another type of tonic:

  • I li..ke carrots.
  • I like car…rots.

Pausing creates tension as you wait. If you can focus on one idea and articulate it in various ways, you can imagine that your motif will keep the interest of the listener.

Now imagine these ideas transposed to your melodic phrase; you can play with the velocity, but also create emphasis by pausing, delaying, and accentuating it.

Potential solutions to add emphasis: velocity, swing, randomness.

In our coaching group on Facebook, I often see people try to focus on everything a song should have, but without a main idea and therefore without emphasis, listeners have a hard time getting hooked on any part of it. You can do anything you want in music, yes, but perhaps if you listen to your favourite songs, you might notice that they usually have a strong hook or something to suck you in.

Tip: Strip down your track to the bare minimum but so that it’s still recognizable as the same song. Are you left with the melody or is it something else? What’s unique about your song?

While this post is not going to discuss motifs and hooks in detail, since it was previously covered multiple times on this blog, I’d like discuss how emphasis can be used to bring a hook/motif to life.

To emphasize a specific sound, hook, or motif, you can use any of these techniques:

  1. Amplitude: One sound is 25-75% lower or higher in gain than another. Think of different drum sounds in a kit.
  2. Brightness: Brightness mostly starts at around 8khz. A filter or EQ boost around that area and higher will feel like magic. Same for multi-band saturation. This is why cutting or taming sounds compared to the one you want brighter will help contribute to emphasis.
  3. Thickness: If you take multiple samples, percussive for example, and compress some in parallel (eg. 50% wet) very aggressively with a ratio of 8:1, you will definitely see a difference.
  4. Dynamics: Using an envelope, map it to some parameters of your plugins to have them interact with the incoming signal.

However, all of these techniques depend on one thing: whatever you put emphasis on must have an “edge” in comparison to the other sounds. In ambient or techno with multiple sounds, you’ll want to make sure to setup routing in your production even before mixing your song. I like to group all elements that are decorative so they are treated as if they’d be a bit more distant. For example, for that group you could start by cutting most of the highs at around 10k with a gentle filter curve, then control the transients with a transient shaper by making them less aggressive and then have a reverb that focuses on a late response, which will create a distance. You can then lower the gain of the entire group to taste to get more of a background feel from all those sounds. Something like Trackspacer could also very useful here to create space between the main idea and your other sounds.

To support emphasis, you need proportion. In sound design, I like to think of proportion as an element of design more than a pragmatic thing. If you think of a drum set, all hits are really at different volume levels—you never see a drummer hit everything at the same volume level; they probably wouldn’t even if they could because it just doesn’t sound right. This is a version of proportion that can be applied to any of your sequences, percussion, and other ideas—it’s often related to velocity.

I also see proportion in the wet/dry knob of your effects. How much do you want to add or remove?

For the listener to understand the importance and emphasis of an effect, you’ll need to counter-balance it with something proportionally lower. If you want the listener to hear how powerful a sound is, try using another one that is very weak; the contrast will amplify it.

Proportion comes from different aspects. Arrangements take over from the mix in a dynamic way. So, if you think of your song as having an introduction, middle, and ending, proportion can also be address from a time-based perspective in arrangements. While there’s nothing wrong with linear arrangements, which are some of the friendliest DJ tools possible, they are perhaps not strongest example of proportion in music.

Here are just a few examples of how you can address proportion in your productions with some simple little tweaks:

  • When mixing your elements, look at the volume metering on the Master channel. You want your main element to be coming the loudest and then you’ll mix in the other ones. You can group all your other elements besides the main element and have them slightly ducking with a compressor. I’ve been really enjoying the Smart Compressor by Sonimus. It does a great job at ducking frequencies, a bit like Track Spacer but, cleaner since it provides a internal assistant.
  • If you’ve missed past articles, one technique I’ve outlined is the 75-50-25 technique, as I’ve named it. Once you have your main element coming in, you’ll want other channels to be either a bit lower (75%), half of the main (50%), or in the back (25%). This will really shape a spatial mix to really provide space and proportion for the main element.
  • I find that if you want emphasis, there’s nothing better to bring in some life in it and I’d recommend you use a tool like Shaperbox 2. I would automate the volume over 4 bars. I find that 4 bars is the main target for electronic music, mostly for the organization and variation it needs to keep the listener engaged. If it changes every 2 bars, the listener will notice, but every 4 bars, with a progression, it will create the idea that there’s always a variation. Also, I like to create fades in different plateaus of automation. You can have a slant between bar 1 and 2, then jump to a different level on 3 and a slow move for 4. This is very exciting for the ear. Pair that with filtering automation, and you’ll have real action. Emphasis will work well if this type of automation is happening on your main element, but it’s hard to do on all channels because it becomes distracting.
  • Supporting elements can share similar reverb or effects with the main idea for unity.
  • Dynamics are helpful for articulation and emphasis. The new Saturn 2 is pretty incredible for this—it can tweak the saturation based on an incoming signal.

Can you trust yourself to judge your own music?

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This has been a popular topic recently—I think that because of the pandemic and the isolation that comes with it, people rely a lot on online contacts to get feedback on their music. The lack of in-person music testing as well as and lack of being able to go to clubs has changed the way we are able to analyze our own music.

I was a part of an organized live stream recently to support a friend named Denis Kaznacheev, who has been held in prison for something we all think is impossible (but that’s another topic). Being in a room with 4 people, playing live, and getting feedback after months of isolation was a weird experience. The first thing that came to my mind was, that my music sucked. Yeah, I also go through it once in a while, and I had forgotten how playing music for and in front of people changes the dynamic of a song. In studio, it sounds a specific way but add one listener and it’s all of a sudden, different.

Some song, different context, completely different mood. Was there something I could do to predict this?

Technically, there was absolutely nothing wrong with what I did. People who tuned in loved it. The thing that clashed was the mood, the feel of the track, compared to what I had in mind. In past articles I’ve discussed the importance of a reference track, and this could have helped me in this particular situation, and could have helped better classify my music as well. But as you know, there’s no do-it-all plugin that can prevent this. This is why many people struggle with judging their own music.

Technical Validation

When it comes to technical items, you can self-validate using some handy tools.

See if your track is, compared to a reference, feeling like the same tone and balanced, I’d recommend using Reference. This tool is my go-to plugin whenever a client insists that the track I’m working on doesn’t sound like a particular song. I’ll load up the reference song and then, after volume matching, I can see if the lows, mids, highs are adjusted in a similar way than my mix. It also shows you if you have, per band, the same level of compression or wideness. It doesn’t lie and you can match it to have something similar. But how do you raise one band to match the reference?

I use a multi-band compressor to compress and, or EQ. A shelving EQ, with 3 bands can be helpful to adjust, but a multi-band compressor really can set the tone. You’ll set the crossovers of each band to match Reference and by adjusting, you’ll see it react to your gain or reduction. While you could use any multi-band compressors, I’d highly recommend the Fabfilter MB.

The same company that makes Reference also made a plugin named Mixroom which, with the same idea as reference, focuses on everything in the mids and highs. It’s a bit tricky to use at first, but once I found reference songs that were analyzed properly, it gave me some interesting pointers on what to push or remove. I thought it was pretty interesting to reverse-engineer some complicated mixes.

Many times people will tell me they don’t like to compare to anyone or that they’re going for their own style but that’s like trying to draw your grandmother from your memory. Some people might do better than others, but audio is abstract and you need to compare yourself to someone else to know what’s lacking or overflowing. I mean, even within a mix, I compare my channels to see their peaks, densities, and panning to make sure one doesn’t cross another, unless to create something as a whole.

People struggle with loudness, but it’s is a bit easier to manage. You’ll need a metering tool such as the IKmultimedia TR5 Metering or the lovely Hawkeye from Plugin Alliance. They are costly but necessary. For a mix, you have to keep in mind a few details: the loudest peak should be -6dB, the RMS (more or less the density) around -13 to -20dB, in LUFS, I’d suggest to be around -15dB and dynamic range to be above 10. A plugin such as Reference will also indicate loudness, and that can be really useful to see if you’re in the same ballpark.

Please consider these are numbers I deal with, and that for certain genres, it can be completely different.

If you come to struggle with the low end, the guys from Mastering The Mix also have a low-end validation/enhancement with the excellent Bassroom plugin. Again, you’ll need a quality reference to do the trick, but once loaded and with some practice, a muddy, weak low end will be a thing of the the past.

These are the best technical validation tools I’ve used in the last few years. They’re efficient, affordable and very useful in whatever I do.

Self-Mastering and Mixing

Pretty much anyone who’s been making music for a while or has studied audio engineering will agree that mixing or mastering yourself isn’t the real deal. It’s doable, understand me right, but you’re not winning. With the previous listing of all the technical tools I shared, you can make some really efficient mixes, but perhaps sometimes that’s not enough.

As an engineer, the main thing I’ll say is that someone else might spot things that are in your blind spots, plus that person is also emotionally detached from the music itself, so making decisions feels like less of a risk in itself. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you know I often refer to our duality as humans to have a analytical side and a creative side. When I work with musicians, I invite them to see this duality as a muscle. Your creative side needs to be exercised; it needs to constantly be fed because it’s a sponge. You want to find the perfect routine and be efficient at it, then break it to pieces to reinvent your new way of making music by re-combining them for a new version of yourself.

The way I see music-making isn’t about trying to be in full possession of your potential, but more about always putting yourself into a state of instability and risk, so new creative ideas emerge. You’ll connect the dots of the past to create a path in the now.

This state of mind is one that is not always technical, and it’s raw. I would invite you not to tame it, but to create spontaneous ideas and raw projects.

This approach is basically the exact opposite of sitting in front of your computer to design and fix a snare. There’s nothing wrong with that if you like, it but like I say to people, artists should become experts at flow, not perfection. They want to be artists, not craftsmen. But I won’t stop you from being both—I just often feel that technical production doesn’t age as well as solid creative ideas. The only thing that stands the test of time is simplicity, and that comes with a mastery of both flow and technical expertise.

If you want to be a master at everything, you’ll be very average at everything as well for quite some time, or potentially forever.

So, imagine you have an amazing idea that you made but you are very average at mixing and new to mastering—you’ll probably be butchering your idea when you try to do either. Yes, you save money and learn by doing it yourself, but I think if you’re aspiring to release something on a good label, to get attention, it might be a good thing to have someone look into your mix, even a friend. But if you really want to do it all yourself, get yourself solid tools to make sure you get the most out of them.

If you want to practice mixing, I suggest trying to find what I call, a swap buddy who can send you their mixes and vice-versa. You both learn by tweaking each other’s work, and going back to your own music after will feel easier, and clearer as well.

Psychological Validation

Now, psychology is an area where don’t get any tools to help that we all have to deal with. It’s that limbo where you maybe made a few different mixes and feel unsure which one is best. You know technically everything is there and in order, but in the last bit you’ll try to label your song into one of these buckets: Good, Not Good, Still needs work, Ready for mastering…etc.

Are advanced, experienced, and veteran producers exempt from this state of mind? Not at all. After decades of making music, I still have no idea if my music is “good” or not, even if got in the top 10 on Beatport or if my friends all love it. Deep inside, sometimes, I’ll doubt myself. However, I came up with some personal rules to help me judge if I think my own work is decent or not.

Deal with technical points first: This is why I started this post with technical stuff. I see in our Facebook group, people giving feedback, and my observation is that it is often biased by their mood or listening situation. What has become clear to me is that when giving feedback, you need a common reference. I can tell you that your kick is too loud, but compared to what? I have clients sometimes who complain about the low end being overpowering but in the same mastering session on that day I had another client who loved really, really loud kicks. The difference was laughable and both had the exact opposite feedback: one had weak low end but he felt it was too much while the opposite was a bass orgy but he wanted more. Could it just be what they hear? Yes, probably, and this is why you need to be able to use a FFT to check, but also, listen to you music in the middle of a playlist that has other songs of the same genre to know if it sounds right.

A client was telling me “It sounds right in the studio, wrong in the car and at home, its a different song… which one is right?”

The one that is right should be your studio version, but it should be cross-validated technically with other songs. If it doesn’t sound right at home, then find a song that sounds good there and then study it at the studio to see what that song has that yours don’t.

Know that you’ll never really have a permanent opinion about your music. Each day your mood might change and affect how you appreciate your music. Down the road, you’ll learn new techniques and then hear mistakes in your song, you’ll hear a better song than yours… all these points will make you doubt yourself. You’ll always want to go fix something. Since you know you’ll never be really satisfied with it, then you can accept to move on faster. Just start another song, apply what you learned, use your new influences and try something new.

Nothing exterior will validate your music. No matter what you think or do with your song, you might doubt it. This means, you don’t need the latest synth or to be on that specific label. “...and then I’ll be happy.” is a fallacy. Knowing that, it re-centres you to count on a handful of friends for feedback.

4. Let things age. Nothing better than taking a few weeks off before listening to know how you feel about it.

What’s interesting is that, whenever I receive criticism, I start see a perspective I didn’t look into enough—super important. Music production and audio engineering is often discouraging and that’s the reality of the art. That said, I don’t think there’s a day where I make music that I don’t learn something new. Accept that everything is work in progress. This is why songs that take too long to finish are often because my perfectionist side took over, and that’s not where I can make magic happen—it’s often the other way around.

Sound Design and Arrangements Series Pt. 3: Repetition

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This post is part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This post focuses on how I approach repetition in my music, as well as how I perceive it when working on clients’ music. While this is a very obvious topic for electronic music oriented towards dance, where patterns repeat, I understand that as an artist, it can be a very personal topic. Each genre has a way of approaching repetition, and if you’ve been browsing this blog, you will recognize some concepts previously covered that I’d encourage you to look into in more detail. I’d like to approach repetition in music by reviewing your workflow to avoid wasting time on things that can be automated.

Tempo

Using tempo to deliver a message is a very delicate subject. Often before I played live in a venue, I would spend some time on the dancefloor and analyze the mood and the dancers’ needs. I’d check out what speed a DJ’s set was, how fast he’s mix in and out, and the reaction of the crowd. It has always surprised me how playing at 122 BPM vs 123 BPM can shift the mood; I really can’t explain why. But when I’d make a song, I’d keep in mind that DJs could speed it up or slow it down—an important factor affecting energy. I find that increments of 5 make a huge change in the density of the sound in the club. If you slow down very complex patterns, the sounds have room between themselves which also gives the listeners to perceive the sound differently.

Whatever tempo you’ll be using, I highly recommend that you look into using gating for your short percussion or use an envelope maker like Shaperbox 2 to really shape the space between your sounds and have some “white space” between each of them. If you go for a dense atmosphere, I would recommend that you use very fast release compression and make use of parallel compression as well to make sure you’re not over crowding your song.

Sound Repetition

Once we find something we love, we tend to want to repeat it for the entire length of a song. This is, of course, a bit much for someone who listens to it. People expect change—for sounds to have variants and to be sucked in with perhaps something unexpected from the sound. Also, John Cage would disagree and suggest that an idea could be repeated for 10 minutes and the listener would be liking it, but I honestly haven’t heard many songs (through experience or work) that kept me that interested for that long.

The question is, how frequently can an idea be repeated?

It depends of a lot of factors, and while I don’t claim to know the truth, there are techniques to keep in mind. I’d like to teach you how to learn the best way for your music. Let me explain some of my own personal rules—my “reality check” for the validity of a song and the questions around repetition.

First impressions never fail: This is really important. 99% of people I work with start losing perspective and trust in their song’s potential by doing extended sessions on production. This means, when you first open a project you worked on, what hits you at first is what you should fix in that session. Once this is done, save it under another name and then close it. If you can space your sessions out by a few days or weeks (best option), then you can check your first impression of the song again and see if there’s something new clashing.

Hunting for problems will haunt you: There’s always something to fix in your song. Even when you think it’s done, there will always be something. At one point, you have to let go an embrace imperfection. Many people fall into the mindset of searching for problems because they think they missed something. Chances are, they’ll be fixing unnecessary things. What you actually think you’re missing will be details that are technically out of your current knowledge. Usually I do what I call a “stupid check” on my music which is to verify levels, phase issues, clipping and resonances. The rest is detail tweaking that I do in one session only. After that, I pass it to a friend to have his impression. Usually, this will do it.

Listen with your eyes closed: Are you able to listen to all of your song with your eyes closed upon first listen? If yes, your repetition is working, otherwise, fix, then move on.

Generating Supportive Content and Variations

In music production mode, if you want to be efficient and creative, you need to have a lot of different options. So let’s say that your motif/hook is a synth pattern you’ve made, what I would suggest is to have multiple variations of that.

In this video, Tom showcases a way of working that is really similar to how I work (and how many other people work). It’s something that is a bit long to do but once you switch to create mode, it becomes really fun and efficient. The only thing is, I personally find that he’s not using repetition enough, and while this is super useful for making short, slower songs that have a pop drive like in the video, it is not great for building tension. Too much change is entertaining, but you really have to flex your creative muscles to keep it engaging. I would rather have a loop playing to the point where the listener goes from “it should change now” to “I want this to change now.” So perhaps there will be a change after 3-4 bars in your loop. This is up to you to explore.

How do you create variations?

There’s no fast way or shortcut, creating good variations takes time and patience. It also take a few sound design sessions to come up with interesting results. To do this, randomizing effects is pretty much the best starting point and then you tweak to taste.

  1. MIDI Tools – The best way to start editing, is to start by tweaking your MIDI signal with different options. The MIDI tools included in Ableton at first are really useful. Dropping an arpeggio, note length change, or random notes and chords are pretty amazing to just change a simple 2-note melody into something with substance. One plugin that came out recently I’ve been very impressed with is Scaler 2. I like how deep it goes with all the different scales, artist presets (useful for a non-academic musician like me) and all the different ways to take melodies and have templates ready to be tweaked for your song. One way to commit to what you have is to resample everything like Tom did in his video. Eventually, I like to scrap the MIDI channel because otherwise I’ll keep going with new ideas and they’ll probably never be used. If you resample everything, you have your sound frozen in time, you can cut and arrange it to fit in the song at the moment it fits best.
  2. Audio Mangling – Once you have your MIDI idea bounced, it’s time to play with it for even more ideas. There are two kind of ideas you can use to approach your movement: fast tweaks or slow. When it comes to fast event, like a filter sweeping or reverb send, I used to do it all by hand; it would take ages. The fastest way out there is to take a muti-effect plugin and then randomize everything, while resampling it. The one that I found to be the most useful for that is Looperator by Sugar Bytes. Internally you can have random ideas generated, quick adjusting, wet/dry control and easily go from very wild to mellow. It’s possible to make fast effect tweaks (common to EDM or dubstep) but slower too. Combine this with the Texture plugin to add layers of content to anything. For instance, instead of simply having a background noise, you melt it into some omnipresence in the song so it can react to it, making your constant noise alive and reactive. The background is a good way to make anything repetitive, feel less repetitive because the ears detect it as something changing but it constantly moves its focus from foreground to background.
  3. Editing – This is the most painful step for me but luckily I found a way to make it more interesting thanks to the Serato Sampler. This amazing tool allows, like the Ableton sampler, to slice and map, and rearrange. You can combine it with a sequencer like Riffer or Rozzler (Free Max patch) to create new combinations. Why Serato instead of the stock plugin? Well, it’s just easy—I just want to “snap and go”, if you know what I mean, and this demands no adjustments.

Editing is really where it you can differentiate veteran from rookie producers. My suggestion to new comers would be a simple list of different ideas.

  • Decide on internal rules: Some people like to have precise rules that are set early in the song and then that will be respected through the song. I do it because it helps me understand the song’s idea. If you change too much, it may fall in the realm of “experimental” and maybe this isn’t what you had in mind. Every now and then, when booked for track finalization, people have a problem with the last third or quarter of their song. They lose focus and try to extrapolate or create new ideas. If you create enough material in the beginning, you’re going to make the last stretch easier. But when people are lost, I usually listen to the first minute of the song and go “let’s see what you had in mind at first” as a way to wrap it up around that logic. Basic rules can be created by deciding on a pattern and a series of effects that happen, more or less, at the same time, or a sequence of elements or sections. Pop has very precise rules for sections, while techno “rules” are more related to the selection of sounds and the patterns created.
  • Process, process, process: If I have one channel of claps or a different sound, I want to have variations of it, from subtle to extreme. Why? Because even simple ones are going to make a difference. It’s what makes a real human drummer feel captivating (if he or she is good!), because their playing slightly changes each time, even when playing a loop. Looperator is a good tool but you could also use the stock plugins and just use the presets to start with and resample, move knobs as you process and you can get some nice effects already.
  • Duplicate everything: Each channel should have duplicates where you can drop all your wet takes. You can put them all on mute and test unmuting to see how it goes.
  • MIDI controllers for the win: Map everything that you want to tweak and then record the movements of yourself playing. Usually will give you a bit of of a human feel compared to something created by a mouse click. You want to break that habit.
  • Use your eyes: I find that working with the clips visually and making patterns is a good way to see if you are using your internal rules and see if you use too many sounds.

Now, after all this, how do we know if a song’s repetition is good enough, and how do we know if it’s linear?

Validating with a reference is quick way to check, but if you take breaks and distance your sessions, that would be effective too. But the internal rules are, to me, what makes this work properly. I think the biggest challenge people face is that in spending too much time on a track they get bored and want to push things, add layers, change the rules and what perhaps felt fresh at first will be changed to a point where you’re not using the repetition principle to its full potential. The best example of someone being a master of repetition is Steve Reich and his masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. There’s nothing more captivating of how one can create so much by playing with repetition.

Some effects in here would be reproduced with delays, phasers, the delay on the channel and such. You can also use the humanize patch to add a bit of delay randomly. I would strongly encourage you to listen to this a few times to fill yourself up with inspiration.

Sound Design and Arrangements Series Pt. 2: Balance

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This post is a part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2

Balance in mixing—and in music in general—is one of the main aspects of healthy sounding music, mostly because it is a reflection of space, and perhaps, our life as well. While this post is mostly about my philosophy of work, I’ll still discuss some technical tips that can be applied to your mixing strategy and arrangement work.

Let’s define what balance means in design and see how this translate to music:

Balance is the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colors, texture, and space. If the design was a scale, these elements should be balanced to make a design feel stable. In symmetrical balance, the elements used on one side of the design are similar to those on the other side; in asymmetrical balance, the sides are different but still look balanced.

Source: Getty Edu

While this comes from visual design, you should already able to see how this is applicable to the world of sounds. When I first read this definition, I could understand how I was already applying it to mixing music, as I get very conscious of space and the distribution of the frequencies. One of my favorite tools at the moment is Neutron, which I use on all my groups and sometimes, all channels, so I can monitor all of them visually. I can also apply EQ flipping, where if you boost on one channel, you’ll do the exact opposite cut on another channel that is battling the first one to be heard. Using the Visual Mixer tool, you can then place each sound in space. For people who struggle with panning, this is a precious tool that will also help you see if you have distributed your sounds properly.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of mixing I see is the volume difference between elements. Thinking that everything should be loud is a not only a misconception, but it creates imbalance. The volume difference represents the space use and you need some that are further away otherwise the louder one won’t be important, they’ll be lost.

Same goes for textures. Not all your sounds can be textured simultaenously, otherwise you won’t be able to notice their differences. However they can all be textured at different times. I like to split the arrangements timeline in 3 parts and will let sounds have their moment in each; it keeps the story evolving.

Regarding the stereo spectrum, we often relate this to left and right panning, but one important part a lot of new people to mixing don’t see is the importance of the mono section. If you want your song to have a backbone, you need that part to be dead solid. One trick I like is to have a compressor in a return channel and add a mono utility there. I’ll send a lot of my groups to that mono’er channel that will beef up the mono signal of the track.

As for the frequency spreading, I find that your whole spectrum can be divided in 5 sections: low, mid-low, mids, highs-mid, highs. You can technically have them all loud, but that’s not really good balance, and your mix will probably sound harsh if you don’t control resonances and transients properly. I think having 2 out of those 5 frequency ranges slightly lower than the others will give some room for your mix to breathe. When people book me for mastering, they can select a coloured or transparent master, and if they ask for coloured, this is basically what I’ll do. Re-adjusting 2 of the bands will give a new tone to the track and most of the time, mixes I get are already unbalanced as there’s often a band that is way too loud (most of the time, the lows). If the lows are too loud, then I will lower them.

Now, when it comes to arrangements, this is where it gets fun.

I find that there’s a lot to say about the significance of arrangements. Arrangements come in many forms: short stories, edited experiences, live jams, etc.—but I find those three types are a good starting point. A pop song can be a short story, and a piece of minimalist techno music can also be one, but with a different purpose. The reason we apply a certain methodology to arrangements is to maximize the potential of the sounds, as well as the patterns. In the previous post in this series, we talked about contrast and how it can be used in a specific sound—balance, on the other hand, can be exists on multiple levels.

How Do I Know if an Arrangement is Well-Balanced?

The idea of using balance to leverage creativity is not a rule, but an idea and approach. There are countless pieces out there that have no balance and it work perfectly. I find that balance in arrangements is a method of regulation, but it’s not something I’d focus on alone as the main approach.

See balance as tomato sauce. It can be a really great base for a lot of dishes and yes, it can be used as-is, but it does a better job when it’s combined with other ingredients. This is why it works well on a pizza and pastas, etc.

So It depends what you listen to and of course, some great songs are totally unbalanced and that’s what makes them special. I like to say that rules are made to be broken, but you need to know the rules first. A balanced song has a better chance of creating a quality that we all strive for in music: timelessness. In visual arts, minimalism aged well. The logo of Mercedes has basically remained the same, compared to Google’s original disaster brand. Same for music, in general. What I see is that music which is balanced, has a number of sounds playing at a time and has an organization and internal self rules that are set to keep a clarity and easy understanding.

I find that balanced arrangements usually feel easier to understand and are not too destabilizing. But if you go in the opposite direction voluntary, it can be a good way too create contrast.

A song with a balanced mix has a full presence and usually doesn’t have one element stand out. So for percussion, I like to have a balance of numerous sounds but you can then have one that pop out, in contrast (refer to part 1).

As for having balanced arrangements, I’d recommend the following:

Set the rules of your song in the 1st minute (or first part). This can be the tempo, time signature, density, motif preview, etc. The rest of the song is a balance of contrast operating in the rules you’ve set. By balance, we can agree that it’s about not placing all your tricks into the same thing.

Distribute your ideas evenly across your song. I’m talking about the motif for instance, that could reveal one variant more per section. Balance predictability as well unpredictability by having your sounds come in and out at times the listen gets used to.

Use repetition to create patterns that support one another. The famous call and response technique is a good example.

The best way to leave annotations in your arrangements is by adding a empty MIDI channel and creating blocks that you can stretch over sections of your song and leave notes accordingly. This can be very helpful if you have a hard time seeing how sounds are distributed once a channel is flattened.

I like to have colours for each genre of sounds. This usually tells me if there’s too many percussion blocks compared to another group, for example.

Background sounds are often a good way of helping everything work together. Songs that feel full have a background, a noise floor. It can be a reverb, noise, or it can be field recordings. People often ask me where you can find sounds like that. Archive.org, Freesounds.org, Loopcloud, and Soundly are all super useful for finding these as well as odd and out of ordinary ideas.

This post is a part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2

Improving Your Workflow to Prevent Decision Fatigue

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What makes on 30-minute block of music making painful versus some other 30-minute block where everything flows organically? The choices you make can make a huge difference in how you use energy. If you use all your energy in the first 30 minutes of a session, you likely faced too many decisions and ran out of gas.

This overwhelming feeling often comes about when you’ve worked on a loop and mess around with arrangements for a moment before getting discouraged. You’re pretty much burning your brain out and then expect a second wind, but that doesn’t happen right away so easily.

What I’ll advocate throughout this post is a reminder of multiple things explained on my blog that push people to dive into music production and thrive in how they make music instead of being stuck. Strategies to facilitate an easier flow of your music-making are fairly easy, too.

Let’s dive right into the 5 different prerequisites to reach a state of flow.

  1. Risk
  2. Novelty
  3. Complexity
  4. Unpredictability
  5. Pattern recognition

One of the things that I didn’t list here which is important to focus on is the intention to spend a moment making something you know well. By venturing too deeply into something that is difficult (something that is, however, sometimes necessary for self-education), you’re acquiring some new information and achieving a good state of flow is not possible. Once you’ve learned a new concept/theory by practicing it multiple times, you’ll get good at it.

Hence the importance of making yourself:

  • Start a lot of new projects.
  • See most of your songs as lessons where you practice. Forget the aim to create masterpieces or to release all of your songs.
  • Spike time where you actively rehearse something you love doing.

When I teach music production, I explain to people that I can teach them everything their DAW can do, but then they’d sit in front of their computer with the idea of making a song and they’d be lost. The approach I encourage is to start by creating a strong base and then modulating each new skill into lessons. The idea is to focus on what’s useful to get from A to B in order to go to C and not try to go from A to Z in one shot.

A strong base means that you know some essentials, but beyond that, you know what you enjoy doing and what you seem to do naturally.

Once this is set and clear, we can approach the first take in my list above—taking risks. To know what taking a risk means, you need to be at ease with something. By risk-taking, I mean to try something in a different way. This can’t be really done if you can’t do the thing first. For example, you can’t take beat programming risks if you don’t know the basics of how your sequencer works (well, you can actually, but just diving in, chances are, your beat may come out with too much risk).

What’s a Risk in Music-Making?

Is it trying a new technique? Is it finishing a song? Is it learning a new software?

Let’s classify it as a single question: “What if?” This can and often imply a notion of risk. So let’s say you’re making loops, perhaps you can ask “what if I extend it to a whole minute instead of 2-bar loops?”

If you observe how we live, we often will do something we love doing and that usually is because we’re flowing in it; we don’t think—things just roll. You don’t have to make a lot of choices because you already know what you have to do. Taking a risk is a way of elevating what you’re doing a notch.

It’s a personal affair, and it’s something to be asked once in a while. But this gives rise to a second point which is novelty.

Self-Learning, Novelty & Complexity

Another thing I’ve been advocating for in past articles is the importance to see the majority of your music projects as lessons. A cycle I often notice is:

  1. Getting interested in a specific sound, aesthetic, idea, genre direction.
  2. Research and exploration on how to reproduce or imitate it.
  3. Struggle.
  4. Acknowledging a new concept.
  5. Practice and expression.
  6. Perfect it.

Each time I’m interested in something specific for music, I spend a lot of time trying to acquire the knowledge and techniques behind it. I spend a lot of time on YouTube on several How-tos, read some blogs and forums, and then test what I have. For instance, when I was obsessed with Dub Techno, I was searching a lot about it, which led me to acquire a lot of information about filters, reverb, chorus and delay, but also something I didn’t expect—noise. When you dig for information, you’ll find one thing you didn’t know or may not have been searching for, which is the novelty that is precious. In the state of flow, the exploration, in a context where you already feel comfortable but are on a quest of expanding, feeds you with a lot of creative energy that makes you get lost in what you do. But usually just before this happens, you’ll have a moment of struggle and it’s important to go over it to really get to the plateau of full creative force.

Once you practice and work on really handling a new skill, you’ll perfect what you do more and more. You’ll be more able to express yourself properly and eventually, you’ll want to perfect things. To get back to my example of Dub, I started to learn about delay techniques, tried many delay plugins and started understanding their personality and types. Same for reverbs, where I really got into plates and how they sound. The new trick I learned was about noise and started to get very much into the different types of noise: pink, white, blue, brown and red. Which then led me to get really interested in random generators, LFOs and modulation. Always adding a layer of information, precision and personality was a way to feed myself with novelty and complexity hand in hand. They’d play ping pong together.

Imperfection and Unpredictability

Choice fatigue roots in the quest of perfection. When you have more than two choices, you have a moment of not knowing. This clicked one day as I was reading a silly article that a lot of CEO in Silicon Valley will start the day with simplifying how they’d dress to make the least number of decisions possible. They’d have a work wardrobe of only a few things and they’d pick one without thinking. I find that flow starts with the yes-man attitude, as well as the why not. So it’s enemy would be a no, without trying.

Being in the flow, in a certain way, is almost the straight opposite of searching perfection. That is, you’re in the moment and you’re grasping something real and spontaneous. In a way, that is a form of perfection. When you begin searching for problems and feel doubtful about your work, I usually suspect you’re not in the flow, at all. You’re trapped in your analytical mind, the ones that questions and doubts. That part is really important much later, but I don’t give it too much importance in how to improve your flow.

A good routine for improving flow includes the following music-making tasks:

  • Explore, play, improvise.
  • Record everything.
  • Tweak to improve, not to perfect.
  • Consider the future of what was done. Release or not?

I find that I prefer to record 2 or 3 new songs instead of trying to give one a new life by working on it for 10 hours. I could even recycle the best part of a song that’s not working. Making more tracks makes you practice being more spontaneous but also more accurate in what you do, just like a DJ would get better at mixing, transitioning or doing tricks. As you go, your results need less polishing. For years, I left some imperfections in my work as I felt it was part of what made my music unique and human. It received a lot of positive comments and with time, if I listen to my older tracks, there will be things I don’t like, but I don’t know what was left there purposely or should be considered as a problem. That issue is itself, is part of the soul of the song.

As a mixing engineer, I do get in the zone as well. This is why my first mix of the day is crucial for the rest of the day. I usually start with all corrections, and try to do them in one shot, otherwise I start fixing stuff that clients like. I noticed that with time that if it works, don’t change it.

Now, unpredictability is something that feeds all the other ideas I’ve listed above that help to improve flow:

  • Taking risks by not knowing what will happen.
  • Discover new ideas you maybe have filtered out.
  • Making your routine more complex by including new items.

To me, adding a dose of unpredictability starts by making all your elements dynamic with your sounds and effects used. For EQs, I would make sure they’re dynamic (like the Pro-Q3). Compression is dynamic, but I’d link an LFO on the threshold. Adding LFOs, randomizers, and reacting envelopes to the incoming signal would make everything reactive, yet you never are really sure of where it’s going. This is partly explaining how people get addictive to modular synths because it’s all about modulation and unpredictability. A good way to check that is by trying VCV (free) or Softubes’ Modular that is a lot of fun. Reaktor is also an excellent platform to experiment.

Having separate sessions where you prepare an environment for making music is quite encouraged. By opening Ableton Live and launch a starting template that doesn’t take an hour to setup, you’re allowing yourself to be in the zone. Types of “setup” sessions include:

  • Sessions for setting up your future sessions. I’d encourage you to make themes instead of having templates that have all the bells and whistles.
  • Record sessions and sound design moments. These will be precious if you want to make music later.
  • Tweak, arranging and polishing sessions are helpful, but do them later.

The last aspect of improved workflow I’d like to discuss in more detail is pattern recognition—the moment where you realize that you’ve had a good or bad session, and are able to reconcile what happened in order to prepare the next session.

I like to tell my students that if you struggle in a session, it’s mostly because your preparation wasn’t adequate. If you struggle to arrange your session, start small…like, really small. Start from bottom to top: low end, percussion, mids, highs.

If you also fail to finish a jam, maybe you get distracted—a crucial thing to fix. Try to mute all notifications on your phone. Close social media, have snacks and water nearby. Avoid anything that can make your body and mind leave the moment to be elsewhere. If your session lasted at least 20 minutes, you’ve succeeded. Sometimes people feel sessions have to be long, but 20 minutes is sort of the key to get in the zone (unrelated, but this is also why I believe 1 hour DJ sets aren’t fair for the artist).

Personal Rules and Studio Attitude

  1. Be a yes-man to any idea that comes up until tried in context.
  2. Avoid maybes. It’s either a hell yes, or no. A maybe is a no, by default.
  3. Save all rejected ideas for future use.
  4. If it doesn’t feel good, stop everything. After a pause resume, or change tasks.
  5. If something feels like a lot of effort, take a pause and come back later.
  6. If you only have negative points of view, do something else.
  7. If an inner voice insists that you can’t do this or that (music-wise), I suggest you do it anyway to see what happens. Sometimes we stop ourselves from doing things that are creative.
  8. Collaborate as much as possible.
  9. Each session should have a session of listening before or after.
  10. Stay curious and open!

Let me know your experiences with decision fatigue and improving your own workflow!

Sound Design and Arrangements Series Pt.1: Contrast

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I’ve been wanting to do a series of posts about arrangements because I’m passionate about this aspect of music production, but also because I noticed many of the people I work with struggle with arrangements in their work. There are so many different approaches and techniques to arranging—everyone has their own, and that’s sort of the goal I’d like to drive home in this series. I invite you to make a fresh start in developing a personal signature, aesthetic, vocabulary, and personality.

This post is not for people who are just beginning with arrangements, but if you are, it still contains information that could be interesting to consider down the road.

What do I Mean by “Contrast” in the Context of Arrangements?

In design, contrast refers to elements (two or more) that have certain differences, and their differences are used to grab attention or to evoke an emotion. When I teach my students about contrast, the easiest example to understand and summarize this concept is a difference of amplitude (volume). In movies, to create surprise, excitement, or tension, the amplitude will be low, and then rise either quickly or slowly, supporting the images in the emotion that is present.

In many electronic music songs, we have heard (too often) noise used as a rising element to create a tension. Noise builds became a caricature of themselves at some point given their overuse—but it’s a good example, nonetheless.

How is Contrast Used in Sound Design?

I spend my days working with musicians—contrast comes into play in different circumstances.

Within a single sound, it can be fast or slow changes from one extreme to another. I like to visualize this by analyzing a sound through different axes to help me understand what can be done to it.

  • Attack: Does it start abruptly or slowly?
  • Decay/Amplitude: Does it get really loud or is it more subtle?
  • Frequency/Pitch: Is it high, medium, low?
  • Release/Length: Short – Medium – Long – Constant?
  • Positioning: is it far or near? Low or higher in front of me?

Good contrast, generally, is to have two extremes in some of these domains. Think of a clap in a long reverb, as an example of how a super fast attack with a long release can create something unreal, and therefore, attention-grabbing. A sound that changes pitch is another form of contrast, as we go from one state to another.

Another way of thinking about contrast is to think about how pretty much all complex sounds are the combination of multiple sounds layered. When done properly, they feel as one, and when it’s done with contrast, the contrasting layer adds a movement, texture, or something dynamic that revives the initial sound. Of course, short sounds are more difficult to inject contrast into, but if you think of a bird’s chirp, which is basically the equivalent of a sine wave with a fast attack envelop on the pitch, it’s sounds are short but incredibly fast moving, too.

If you think about using contrast within a sound itself, the fastest way to make this happen is to use a sampler and really take advantage of the use of envelops, mod wheel assignment, and of course LFOs, but it’s really through the use of the envelops that you’ll be able to produce a reaction to what’s happening, sonically.

As I mentioned, the easiest way to produce contrast is by using two sounds that different characteristics, for example, short vs. a long, bright vs. dark one, sad vs. happy, far vs. close, etc. When you use two sounds, you give the listener the chance to have elements to compare, and the ear can easily perceive the difference.

When you select sounds to express your main idea, think of the characteristics in each sound you’re using. Myself, I usually pick my sounds in pairs, then in batches of four. I’ll start by finding one, and the next one will be related to the first. I’ll keep in mind the axis of both sounds when I select them and usually start with longer samples, because I know I can truncate them.

In the morning I usually work on mastering, and in the afternoon, I’ll work on mixing. The reason is, when you work on mastering, you get to work on all kinds of mixes; they have issues that I need to fix to make the master ready for distribution. By paying attention to the mix, I often deal with difficult frequencies and will spend my time controlling resonances that poke through once the song is boosted.

When I’m mixing, often I deal with a selection of sounds that were initially picked by the producer I am working with. The better the samples, the easier will be the mix and in the end, the better the song will feel. What makes a sound be great comes from different things:

  • Quality of the sample: clarity, low resonances, not compressed but dense, well-balanced and clear sounding, open.
  • High resolution: 24 or 32-bits, with some headroom.
  • No unnecessary use of low quality effects: no cheap reverb, no EQ being pushed exaggeratedly that will expose filter flaws, no weird M/S gimmicks.
  • Controlled transients: nothing that hurts the ears in any way.

You want to hunt down samples that not too short, because you want to be able to pick it’s length. You won’t need a sample that covers all frequencies—you’ll want to feel invited to layer multiple sounds all together without any conflicts or have one shelf of frequencies to be overly saturated.

When I listen to a lot of mixes, the first thing that I look for is the overall contrast between the sounds. If they lack contrast, they will be mostly mushed together and difficult to mix, and harder to understand.

In theory, a song is a big sound design experiment that is being assembled through the mix. If everything is on one axis, such as making everything loud, you lose the contrast and make your song one-dimensional.

How is Contrast Used in Arrangements?

If contrast in sound design is within one single sound, it’s through and entire song or section that we can approach contrast in arrangements. A song can have different sections—in pop, think “chorus”, “verse”, etc., which are very distinct sections that can be used in any context as moments through the song. You can move from one to another, and the more of a distinction between one another, the more contrast your storytelling will have.

Is this type of contrast essential? No, but it can engage the listener. This is why, for a lot of people, the breakdown and drop in electronic music is very exciting, because there’s a gap and difference and the experience to go from one to another, is intense and fun (especially on a big sound system).

In techno, linearity is a part of the genre because songs are usually part of a DJ set and made to be assembled and layered with other tracks, to create something new. Huge contrast shifts can be awkward, so it’s avoided by some—tracks emit contrast very slowly and subtly, instead of a sudden drastic change.

So, what makes a song interesting, to me, or to anyone, is the main idea’s content, based on the listener’s needs. What do I mean exactly?

  • A DJ might be looking for song of a specific genre and want its hook to match another songs he/she has.
  • Some people want to have a song that expresses an emotion to be able to connect with it (ex. nostalgic vibes).
  • Some other people might want to have some music similar to songs they like, but slightly different, while others, to be exposed to completely new ideas.

When I listen to the songs I work on, my first task is to quickly understand what the composer is trying to say/do. If the person is trying to make a dance-oriented, peak-time song, I’ll work on the dynamics to be able to match music of the same genre and make sure all rhythmic elements work all together.

The precision in the sound design is quite essential to convey a message, whatever it might be. Sometimes I hear a melody and because of the sample used, it makes me frown—a good melody but weird selection of sounds results in an awkward message.

It’s like you trying to impress a first date with a compliment/gift that doesn’t make sense—you wouldn’t tell someone his/her nose is really big…?!

The combination of good sound design and supporting your idea, is executed by arrangements. The whole combination of multiple sounds through a mix is what creates a piece.

Some examples of contrast use within arrangements could be:

  • Different intensity between sections, either in volume or density.
  • Different tones, emotions.
  • Changes in the time signature, or rhythm.
  • Changes in how sounds move, appear, or evolve.
  • Alternating the pattern, sequence, or hook, adding extra elements to fill gaps, holes, or silences.

One of the biggest differences between making electronic music 30 years ago and the present, was that back then, you’d make music with what you could find. Now we have access to everything, so how do you decide what to do when there are no limits?

I find that when you remove all technical limitations like sound selection from your session, you can focus on design and storytelling. Same goes for if you feel like you have managed to understand your technical requirements and now want to dig deeper—then you can start with contrast.

To summarize this, use contrast within a sound to give it life, either by slow or fast movements. Create contrast in your arrangements by having differences between sections of your song—play with macro changes vs. micro changes.