Music Feedback: When to Take the Opinions of Others Seriously and When Not to Care

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If you make music, you’ll get what I’m trying to explain here—the head space where you’re fully aware that it’s important to make music solely for yourself, but yet you really want to share it with the world, with other people who could potentially like it. If you love what you do, maybe someone out there also loves it, too?

Where should you draw the line between making music for others versus making it for yourself?

Honestly, it’s a tough question. The voice of reason in most people will answer it with something moralistic, like:

Making music for yourself is the way. Sharing is good, but don’t make a big deal out of what people say.

Unless you have a real mastery of your emotions, if you’re an artist, you will, at some point, want to share your work. If you share your work with “random” people, especially close friends or family, you’ll mostly get random feedback which can be confusing and hard to analyze constructively. Sharing your work is, at its most fundamental level, about seeking validation. Even old fart producers like me who have 20+ albums and have toured, still carry the need for validation. The difference I see between myself and younger artists, is that I carefully pick the people I share my music with—a way of knowing if you’re still relevant to people you trust. In past posts, I’ve explained how to network properly and how to build a circle of solid contacts.

A pattern I often see is artists having a very productive session, and the resulting track feels very emotionally powerful to them. Validation comes in when they seek to determine if the emotions in the session were valid, or if they were hyped over something bogus.

This sort of pattern results in an “they’re right, I’m wrong” thought process that causes cognitive dissonance. Let’s examine this pattern from a technical point of view:

  1. You make music absolutely for yourself, but this is artistic masturbation; it’s normal to want to connect with others to validate these feelings.
  2. The opposite is making music for a label, other artist, crowd, club, or festival, in which an artist is chasing other people’s opinions and lacks control over their own work—they usually end up frustrated.

If you ask someone for advice about music, sometimes people come at it from the problematic position of “I’m right, you’re wrong.” They’ll tell you what they think is good or not, based on their point of view. Sometimes people are not totally open to giving real feedback and will be biased. When most people are given the opportunity to criticize, they’ll find something wrong. It might not always be useful, but sometimes with music, particularly concerning technical aspects of production, there’s value in receiving good feedback.

When Should You Take Someone’s Feedback Seriously?

It’s up to you, but it’s heavily dependent on your ability and accuracy in evaluating your own work beforehand. Here are a few tips for evaluating your own work before seeking external feedback:

1. If your track creates emotion in you, never doubt it, even if it never reaches anyone. Not all tracks need to be released, heard publicly, or shared. You can make a song for yourself and perhaps a few friends—this is a totally valid way of making music. The “need” to release all your music is really a misconception that you’re entitled to be heard because you made a song. Honestly, you aren’t.

2. Listen to your song in different contexts to see what it feels like. For example, listen to it while commuting, in your living room, in your car, in front of a friend (in person!) or in the middle of your favourite playlist. This can reveal flaws in your work. If something feels off and you are limited technically, then you know that asking someone for feedback with a precise request should provide value to your work.

3. Use a reference tool such as Reference from Plugin Boutique which, if you compare your work with a song you like, you can easily see what is missing (tone or loudness). Fixing issues might be a roadblock for some artists, and that’s another reason it might be useful to get feedback.

Once you’ve done these three things, I’d upload a snippet to Soundcloud to get a reaction or share it privately with a few friends. I would never post music in forums without knowing what regular users are like in the first place. I also don’t share with close friends; they never get it and sometimes it can make the friendship awkward. I prefer having two circles of friends: music-related and non-music.

Never forget that it’s important to age a song for a few weeks or months, just like a wine, then come back to it afterwards—this trick reveals incredible details you can’t initially see or hear.

When is Feedback Disposable and Not Worth Taking Seriously?

  • When someone implies that you should change something in the arrangement or sound design based on their tastes.
  • When someone discusses some so-called “unwritten rules” about how music “should” be made (ex. you have to make all your sounds from scratch, you can’t use samples, etc).
  • When their technical feedback is questionable. For example, some people might comment on bass without having access to a sub.
  • When someone who lacks empathy can’t understand the vision of the track and tries instead to see it from their own point of view. For example, my ex never understood that music I made at home would translate differently in a club.
  • When someone tags your music with buzzwords. Sometimes people would listen to a song and say “oh, it’s chill” but not understanding that on a large system, it might groove.
  • When you receive comments such as “X is good” or “X is bad“. As if the person had the universal understanding of some permanent elements in music—such comments don’t mean anything at all. We all know that if person X finds it bad, person Y might think it’s genius.

I hope this helps you understand what type of feedback is worth taking seriously!

SEE ALSO : Common mindsets of musicians who have writer’s block and how to solve them

Changing Genres: Coming to Electronic Music from Other Genres

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Since interest in electronic music really blossomed in terms of popularity, musicians from different spheres have all tried to capitalize on it. 20 years ago, big musicians in rock, pop, dabbled with it. We saw Madonna and some other bigger names venture into electronic sounds, but they sounded mostly like tourists in a country that they were visiting. With the recent victory of Billy Eillish at the Grammy’s for her album, not only it is mostly electronic, but it was also recorded in their modest home (precisely, in a bedroom) in Los Angeles. I’m currently involved in a few mixing engineer groups on Facebook, and while many were laughing at the album, some people took real interest in it—sometimes, less might be better, and you don’t need the latest toys to make something interesting.

Most newcomers to the scene, however, lack the knowledge of electronic music culture, and understanding of what electronic music is or sounds like. For people like me who have been listening to the genre for decades, when I hear someone with a rock background pick up synths and try to make techno, there’s something that always sounds slightly off: it doesn’t sound like what electronic is generally like, or it sounds something like rock, but not in a good way. In the 50s, people experimented with making classical music on synths—most of it was plainly horrible. Same goes for the early attempts of synth presets mimicking very colourful instruments like a trumpet. “Trumpet” presets make jazz musicians cringe, and with good reason.

Should an experienced musician restrain themselves from venturing into a new genre? Of course not. But knowing some tips to make the switch is probably the right course of action.

References and Getting to Know What Works

The biggest mistake I see from people who come to electronic music from a different scene, is not understanding who they are making music for. I can’t speak for how it works in the rock industry, but I think there are fewer fragmented areas of it than there are in electronic music. Electronic music has DJs, fans, labels, media, internet, etc., all with different sub-scenes. Knowing your specific audience can influence how you make music itself. For “musicians”, this is something many have a hard time getting their head around. For instance, if your track is made for DJs, you wouldn’t approach it the same way as if you make music for yourself, or for the general public.

“Why would I do it for DJs?”, a rocker once asked me.

Well, they expose your music to a public that might be interested to listen to it in a specific context. Your purpose is not the same as if you make music for, let’s say, home or even, after-parties.

“Oh, there are different types of DJs?”, he replied.

Yes indeed, I replied, and that’s another level of complexity in electronic music. You don’t make music for opening sets or after-parties, the way you would for peak time—and even for peak time, each genre has their own standards of what constitutes “peak music”. House, EDM (aka Vegas music), minimal, techno, etc., all have different styles. Even ambient and drone, have their own version of “peak time music”, which might sound bizarre if you’re not familiar with these genres, but go to an ambient or drone festival and you’ll know what I mean.

“But I just want to make cool music”, he then said.

Yeah, I know, I do too. But then again, if it’s for yourself and friends, you then know who you make it for and that’s very cool. If you’re aiming for a broader market and want to commercialize it, that approach probably won’t work well. Electronic music is a genre where you are free to do whatever you want and have unlimited resources to make many dream ideas come true, but the whole commercialization aspect of it is really messy, complicated, frustrating, paradoxical, and sometimes counter-productive. I’m aware this is the case in other genres as well, but the “successful” dance-oriented market is pretty tricky.

So what’s the real problem if you don’t follow a certain aesthetic?

Well, the most common scenario I see is enthusiastic people following their current tastes (often based on music that was cool 5-10 years ago) and without any self-criticism or feedback release music, and years later feel embarrassed about how off they sounded, or how badly it aged. Not a big problem, but it’s simple to not fall into this trap.

If you’re familiar with this blog, I frequently discuss the importance of references.

  • One thing that might surprise you is that I often recommend Spotify as an exploration tool. Let’s say you like the Chemical Brothers… Spotify can expose you to similar sounding artists. You can also see the latest releases by an artist and how he or she has developed. Personally, I love that.
  • Another thing I suggest is to spend some time listening to a lot of different artists. That also includes checking online magazines (I love XLR8R), get familiar with DJ charts, see what festivals book them or other artists you like, and get to know the other artists playing.
  • Going out to events is important, too. To hear music in context really gives huge insights to a musician. As an engineer and coach, I occasionally pop in to local events to see what’s happening.

Collaboration, Mentoring, and Networking

I think another very important thing to do when you venture into other genres is to quickly find someone of reference or reputation that you can trust. Develop a relationship where there’s no filter on your discussions or feedback—this can take quite a while to find or build.

Working with friends who have great taste or hiring professionals also, for the most part, provides you with some quality control.

  • Try to get to learn about plugins that are used on a daily basis by professionals.
  • Have some ideas of where to buy quality presets for certain soft-synths for the purpose of learning how some sounds are made.
  • Have a good idea of influential artists behind current trends. For every bigger, commercial trend, there’s a lesser-known artist who started a movement, an idea, or a musical direction that often “inspires” bigger names who commercialize it.
  • Get familiar with festivals that are fun and that could be good hubs for networking.
  • Build a network with media, promoters, and DJs. There are a lot of benefits and opportunities this type of network can produce.

However, when everything is said and done, collaboration is about making music, and getting to know the tips and tricks while networking. These are, in my opinion, some of the best things to know about if you aspire to make your way into a new genre!

SEE ALSO : Making and breaking genres in your music

Does Your Mix Sound Too Clean? Unpolish It.

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If you think about it, it’s pretty astonishing to consider the number of tools that exists to make our music sound more professional. Since the 90s—when the DAW became more affordable and easily attainable for the bedroom producer—technology has been working to provide us with problem-solving tools to get rid of unwanted noises, issues, and other difficult tasks. We now face a point where there are so many tools out there, that when confronting a problem, it’s not about how you’ll solve it, but about which tool you’ll pick. Some plugins will not only solve a particular problem, but will also go the extra mile and offer you solutions for things you didn’t even know you needed.

The quantity and quality of modern tools out there have led myself, and others I’ve discussed this topic with, to a few observations regarding the current state of music. A lot of music now sounds “perfect” and polished to a point where it might be too clean. Just like effects in movies, deep learning, and photoshopped models—it feels like we’re lacking a bit of human touch. On top of the tools, engineers (like me) are more and more common and affordable, which makes it easier for people to get the last details of their work wrapped up. For many, music sounding “too clean” is not an issue whatsoever, but for others—mainly those who are into lofi, experimental, and old-school sounding music—the digital cleanliness can feel like a bit much.

If you think about it, we even have AI-assisted mastering options out there, but mastering plugins are also available for your DAW (Elements by Izotope does an OK job), as well as interactive EQs or channels strips to help you with your mixing (Neutron, FabFilter Pro-Q3), and noise removers and audio restoration plugins (RX Suite by Izotope). We’ve been striving to sound as clean as possible, as perfect as a machine can sound, and with increased accessibility, technology gives us the possibility to really have things sound as perfect as we can dream of.

So where should you stop?

Monitoring

You can only sound as perfect as what you can hear. If your monitoring isn’t perfect, you might not be able to achieve a perfect sounding mix. I know some people who intentionally will work with less-precise monitoring—it could be on earbuds/Airpods (not the Pro version), laptop speakers, cheap headphones, or simple computer speakers. Engineers usually test their final mix on lower-grade systems to make sure it will translate well in non-ideal settings. Starting out mixing this way also works; if you make music on low or consumer-level monitoring, you’ll be missing some feedback, which can actually turn out to be a good thing for your sound.

When producing on lower-grade speakers however, it also means you might not polish parts that actually need fixing. One of the frequency zones that always needs attention is the low-end—not paying proper attention to mixing it can be problematic in certain contexts, such as clubs. In other words, making bass-heavy music without validating the low-end is risky, because compared to other songs of the same genre that do sound “perfect”, your mix might have huge differences, which could sound off. In my opinion, if you want an “unpolished” sound, you should still give the low-end proper attention if it’s an important part of your song.

However, having self-imposed limitations, such as in your monitoring, is a good way to add a healthy dose of sloppiness to your mix.

Technical Understanding

The more you learn, the more you realize you really don’t know much. It’s perfectly fine not to know everything. Each song is a representation of where you are at the moment with your music production. I never try to accomplish a “masterpiece”. The more time and energy I put into a song to make it sound “perfect”, the more I realize I’ve sort of screwed up the main idea I had in the first place. Quickly-produced music is never perfect, but its spontaneity usually connects with people. I see people on Facebook amazed with music I’d consider technically boring from a production perspective, but the emotion these works capture strikes people more than the perfection of a mix.

Every time I search for something music-related, I learn something new. There are also some things I’m okay with not doing “the proper way”. I don’t think my music should be a showcase of my skills, but more of a reflection of the emotions I have in that moment.

I often see people over-using high-pass filters in their mixes, which makes their music feel thin or cold, or using EQs side-by-side that could introduce phasing issues…but does fixing these things actually matter? I’ve made some really raw music without any EQs at all (Tones of Void was recorded live without any polishing), which sounded really raw and was my most complimented work in the last 10 years of my productions.

Similarly, a lot of producers know very little music theory—how important is it? I’ve never gone to school for music and it’s only recently that I started wanting to learn more about it. Clients often ask me questions like “is it okay if I do this?” To which I reply that there is no right or wrong. Following rules might actually lead you to sounding too generic, if you’re technically-influenced.

The resurgence of tape in production and the rise of lofi love is great thing for music. People on Reverb are buying more and more old tape decks, four-tracks, and recording entire albums on them. One thing I love is the warmth it brings and the hiss as well (note: I get sad when clients ask me to remove any hiss). Some even have a shelving-EQ that can create a nice tone. Using an external mixer for your mixes can also create a very nice color, even on cheaper ones. Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking for the best sounding piece of equipment to improve your sound!

References

If your usual references are music that is really clean-sounding, you’ll be influenced to sound the same. I like that at the moment I see younger producers who are interested in uncompressed music, and like to have as much of a dynamic range as possible in their work; this is the opposite of the early 2000s when people thought loudness was the way to go—a trend that made a lot of beautiful music sound ugly as hell. Now some of the top producers have been passing their love for open dynamics on to the people who follow them, and that opens up a really large spectrum for exploring the subtle art of mixing.

When music is too clean and safe, it also becomes too sterile for many peoples’ tastes. If your references are only the cleanest sounds possible, perhaps you should explore the world of dub techno, lofi, and strange experimental music on Bandcamp—you’ll start to understand how music can exist in other ways.

SEE ALSO : How to balance a mix

Make Music Faster: Self-Imposed Limitations for Expanding Creativity

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“I think we need to go backward now”, is what I said to a friend who was asking what was ahead for the year—referring to a view I had years back about recognizing when it’s time to go with the flow, and when it’s time to reverse or deflect it to move in another direction. I was thinking back to the mp3 revolution of 2001; geeks downloaded all the music they wanted thanks to Napster or other software. There was a continuous debate about music being copied and shared. Back then, it was mostly pop and commercial music taking the biggest hit from file-sharing. In underground culture, Netlabels became a mysterious movement, sharing music for free. Now free music is common, but back then it was really seen as a nonsense approach to a label, “backward thinking” even, and often talked down and ridiculed.

Back then, Dennis De Santis (who now works for Ableton) and I were approached to be part of a compilation for a German Netlabel called Thinner (which eventually became fairly well-known netlabel). Why did I do it? There were two main contributing factors:

  • I wasn’t putting releases out at that time, and I was a yes-man to whatever would come my way.
  • There was a huge new audience flow of people who wanted music for free…so why not just give it to them?

I decided to go with the flow. In doing this, you get pushed in a direction and accept that you might not control where you’ll end up. In my case, I’d say it only led me to great things—meeting people, getting gigs, and a lot of attention.

It was no surprise that when I started my own label, Archipel, in 2004, I kicked it off as a netlabel as well. But in 2006, I decided to go against the flow and do what many didn’t really approve of, which was sell music on Beatport. It was the beginning of digital music sales and many people thought it wouldn’t work, but it did really well.

My point is, there are times when it makes sense to keep going in a certain direction, and there are other times when changing directions is more sensible. Keeping this in mind, being flexible is something that can applied to many spheres, such as your music aesthetic, or even a song itself.

As I’ve mentioned, I recently joined Weeklybeats—a challenge to create one song per week, for the entire year, and I’ve experienced a great feeling of freedom. Normally, I impose a very rigorous workflow on myself when I make music, and often it can take me months to finish a song. Switching up my approach to a faster pace forced me to think less. Yes, there’s a risk of reduced quality with increased speed, but at the same time, with the experience I’ve gained over time, I know I can at least make sure that the production is solid.

I also realized that my number one distraction is that I’m constantly bombarded with new music tools promising tons of new features and spend a hell of a lot time going through them and waiting for a sale to buy them, but never really pushing the stuff I already own to its maximum potential. With this weekly challenge in mind, now that I have self-imposed limitations, I feel like I’ve exprienced a huge breakthrough.

Time

Deadlines make you creative and productive. A friend who is a father of two told me recently that he realized that he was creating his best ideas in moments where he’d squeeze a quick session of music, knowing that he’d be limited to maybe 10 minutes. So, let’s say he had to go to the grocery store; while people were getting ready, he’d open Ableton and would test a new macro he made, or would try to make temporary arrangements. The time-constraint made him more efficient than when he’d have a full evening to himself to make music, which often led to nothing interesting.

My theory is that with too much time, you can spoil what you make. This is why I think 5 hours of studio time spent on one song is not the best idea—a thought I have proven to be correct for myself while taking part in this weekly challenge. Now, I take a few hours to create an idea, save it, and later will expand it—the next day I add a layer, and so on. I’m limited in time and I do multiple things at once, but I’ll squeeze in 20 minutes here, 40 minutes there, then 10 minutes before going to bed.

Try this fun Max patch that will time your work and give you an idea of how much time you’ve spent on things.

Tip: Give yourself a due-date for wrapping up a song and accepting that it is what it is, once you hit it. It’s more important to move on than to try to reach some illusory perfection. Use your agenda alarm as a reminder.

I decide the length of my song before trying to speed things up. This is a tip discussed many times in the blog but I will insist that doing this is a strong limitation that clarifies a lot of things.

Tools

If you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll remember that for one song I encourage you to focus on one main idea supported by two minor ideas. It’s really easy to get lost trying to find an idea to start with. My take is to try to use what comes out fast.

Synths: Know what you have—cycle through synths that came with your DAW, and some that didn’t. I encourage people to get at least one synth that is an analog emulation of a classic model (Arturia does a great job at these) and another that is focused on a wide range of sound design options (I’m a big fan of Rob Papen and encourage you to test his products).

Samplers: Honestly, Ableton Live’s Sampler does the job for me. There are a few more alternatives out there but in the end, they all do a similar job except some have more bells and whistles. I always come back to the stock sampler because it’s simple and extremely versatile.

Once you have decided if you’ll generate a sound or use a sample, it’s time to play with it. Mapping a MIDI controller is very useful for playing different notes. Sometimes I see people in front of their keyboard and they are not sure what to do. This might sound obvious but when jamming, I test:

  • different pitches by playing higher and lower notes.
  • harder or softer hits to see how the velocity influences things.
  • listening to the sound a different volume. Sometimes a sound at very low volume is much more interesting than loud.
  • alternating between short and long notes. Depending on your preset, it can play differently.
  • playing fast and slow notes to see how they feel.

Keep in mind that you can make a song out of any sound if you how to use it. The reason why we discard sounds is because we’re after something else. We’re not paying attention to the sound and its potential. Limiting yourself of only one tool per song eliminates a lot of exploration time. It also forces you to do something with what you have.

Same goes for reverb, compression and EQ. I’ll only use one or two, max. When I’m in mix mode, I usually explore different compressors.

Composition

If you use a modular, or hardware, you have your gear in front of you and you’ll just start working with what you have. This limitation forces you to be creative. But on a computer, you’ll have many ways to make music.

Templates. To speed up my work, I created a main template that I use to create macros and techniques, while recording everything. I mostly jam and will not spend too much time going into detail—raw on purpose. When I have something potentially interesting, I make a channel called “ideas” and put my clips in it. Later, when I start working on a song, from the left side browser, I can open the template and import the “ideas” channel in my new song to select from it. Have multiple templates that you import your sounds to, and in that other template, create sound modifiers. For instance, I have a dub template filled with tons of reverb modulators and delays. I can drop anything through it and something dubby will emerge.

Jam. I try to invite people to jam their song as much as possible. Whenever I have a loop as a main idea, I’ll automatically start recording and will mute it, play it, change volume and try different combinations. This lets me explore ideas I couldn’t discover if I just mouse-edit the clips in arrangements.

Sound

For the longest time, we wanted to have access to as many samples as possible, but now that we have them, we’re completely lost. Try to decide which snare or clap you want. Swapping out a sound isn’t super easy but I found this amazing step sequencer that fixed this problem. It’s made by XLN and it’s called XO.

If you want to make music quickly, you need to find your favourite sounds and create drum kits. Import them whenever you start a new song. Back in the day you’d have a 909 or a 808, and that would be your drum kit, end of story. So create a good main kit, then add a few different ones, and that’s it.

And for crying out loud, stop thinking that you need to do everything from scratch, all the time! Yes, it’s cool, but it slows you down a lot.

I mentioned that I’d “go backwards” this year. What I meant by that is that all my habits have to be upgraded or changed. Habits keep me safe and comfortable, while feeling uneasy forces me to be creative and think outside-the-box. Join me in this approach; I’m sure there’s magic waiting for you too!

SEE ALSO : Reverb Tips to Boost Your Creativity

When life is hard, make more music

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If you’ve been following the news since the beginning of 2020—what’s happening in Australia (the fires and political situation), Iran and USA, etc.—it’s clear that our lives are all effected by things we feel like we have very little control over. For many, global events and news may increase feelings of helplessness, anxiety, or frustration.

Feeling a lack of control is not alien to musicians, who constantly deal with the feeling of not being able to control their path or destination. Notable situations are, for instance, not knowing if a label liked your demo, not knowing sales figures of a release, waiting for news from a promoter that booked you, not knowing if people are really enjoying your music, not knowing how to really have the mix you want, etc.

“Not knowing” becomes an uncertainty that musicians face daily, and it can haunt their thoughts. Some people also feel like the world is spinning out of control, so what, exactly, can we do about it?

For those of you who are musicians and going through a tough time, once piece of advice I can give you is make more music. To people who complain that they don’t have time, I say, find and make time for it as if your life depends on it. I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but I’d like to explain you why, in my case, it really, really helped, and I wouldn’t be exaggerating in saying it almost saved my life. As a musician or creative person, making time for making music is incredibly important.

Grieving, mourning

In a span of 3 years, I lost both my parents. My father passed away first in 2016—a huge shock as he was very healthy. I was left completely destabilized and felt a deep void which I couldn’t see the end of. The only thing that was really helping was to listen to ambient music when I’d be home. I would play music by William Basinski, which is lofi and loopy as hell, but very comforting in a way. In 1998, just before I decided to make music as Pheek, I had a rough separation from my girlfriend at the time and I was basically invalid, at home, not doing anything but listening to the same CD over and over. Music was the only thing that made sense at that moment, and made my path through life seem less negative. Listening to familiar music was a need for me, and my brain demanded that I listen to a specific sound. Nowadays, with the power and reach of what Spotify can do (or even YouTube), you can get suggestions based on what you listen to, and while being soothed, you also discover similar music. There’s an endless amount of music, and as a musician, you have the power to add to it, and to be inspired by it.

That break-up and these intense listening days led me to want to make my own, healing music. Plastikman’s music led to the creation of my Pheek moniker. The loss of my father caused me to make ambient music for 8 months, mostly creating soothing loops that I would listen while commuting or at home. What’s the use of making music if you don’t do it for yourself first?

I find that this is something people I work with sometimes seem to miss. It becomes more of a dispensable thing—the focus becomes where your song will end up instead of making music for oneself. I don’t mean to be judgemental, but this is something I often see.

Now, when it comes to immersing yourself in music creation and dedicating time to spend on it, it gives your brain something to focus on. To combat my own fears about climate uncertainty, I decided to register to this website called Weeklybeats, where artists are asked to make one song per week, for the entire year. I feel that I need to completely push myself to do more music for myself. I’ve been at the service of others for the last year, but recently I felt like my music was too low of a priority in my life and that my skills as a producer had suffered.

When the brain is on a mission, it will focus on resolving problems, being creative in new ideas, and finding inspiration everywhere. If you can swap the hopelessness with a creative flow, even if it doesn’t bring any solution to the world’s problems, at least you’re not being a problem yourself: you are making music and music brings people together.

Making time for making music

“I don’t have time” is the number one excuse I hear when I talk about making more music. I make it myself regularly, and also suffer also from the “I don’t know how I’ll do that” excuse. You get a better sense of free time when you become a parent. When you have a child, all your time and energy is focused on the family and you’ll forget about yourself and your own needs. A 5-minute moment of free time can feel like gold. I felt a shift in my music production when I had my son in 2010. I couldn’t just wake up and make music anymore, there were other responsibilities to manage, and everything felt out of control. I managed to use every 10-minute moment I could find to have some work done on music projects.

How did I do it while raising a child? I’m not totally sure, but I can recommend some ways to dedicate more time to making music in your own life that helped me:

  1. Move a “lighter” setup of your studio closer to your routine. This one might be difficult to figure out, but 100% of the people I talked into doing this came back to me with positive feedback. Most of the time, people have their studio in a far-off portion of their life. That means, studio either out of their apartment or in a room that is in the back of it. It’s slightly disconnected physically from you and it won’t have a place in your life, apart from being a image in your mind. I often encourage people to bring a simpler studio in the living room, kitchen, or the place they hang out the most. I also suggest to leaving your computer or gear on so that you can, without any delay, just pass by and play with music. You can leave a loop playing while cooking/cleaning. Having music as a physically proximal part of your life is a huge eye-opener for new methods of production.
  2. Go mobile. This might sound a bit weird, but making a bit of music on the go is quite fun. Don’t forget that a lot of people use Airpods to listen to music or will listen to it while commuting. I’m not saying that you’ll make a masterpiece this way, but if you can start a few ideas on your way to school or work, then you have something that keeps you busy and creative. I would also recommend to record some moments of your life. We see a lot of pictures on social networks, but not enough audio; recording moments and listening to them later is a surreal experience, plus you can use parts of those for songs, too. There’s nothing more surprising than adding a bit of random conversation into a song.
  3. Don’t wait on perfect conditions to work. The number one procrastination excuse that comes up for a lot of people is that they need certain “acceptable” conditions to make music. It can be with regards to the setup they have, missing gear, missing software, or time of day. Some people believe they can only make music at a specific moment of the day. If you are giving power to these conditions, you are not in control of your creativity and believe that external forces influence you. Sorry, but not sorry, this is false. You, and only you, can make it happen, and it starts by sitting down and just doing it. If it feels overwhelming, then commit to 5 minutes of music and see where that leads you.
  4. Commit. This is why I decided to take on the challenge of doing 1 track a week for 2020. Instead of making an album this year, I’ll make tons of music, on a regular basis. You can commit in many other ways. It can be by partnering with friends to swap music, or making music for local DJs or for your Bandcamp.
  5. Let yourself and your process be free-form. The biggest enemy of creativity is a mold or formula, and if you always follow the same patterns, you will forget that music can even be a simple few notes repeated. Try to listen to 60s-70s neo-classical, minimalist music to redefine how you perceive what you do. Let yourself explore random ideas. A song can be a simple idea and you don’t always need to make a template or a track. It can be something imperfect, recorded out of the blue. There are no rules, be free!

SEE ALSO : Music Making Is Problem Solving

My Music Production Tips and Tools for 2020

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As 2019 comes to an end, I’d like to discuss some of the most important things that went on, things I’ve talked about the most, plugins I loved, topics discussed in coaching, and so on.

Productivity and Writer’s Block

I was pretty busy in the first half of the year. I released my 22nd album and two EPs. While these achievements look great on paper, I can tell you that it was probably one of my least productive years of the last decade. I had a writer’s block (on-and-off) since May, and was unable to really finish a song, so I mainly focused on working on collaborations or engineering. Being hit by writer’s block at this point of my life was unusual, but reminds me that no one is really immune to it.

Signs of Writer’s Block:

  • Everything you do feels or sounds like crap or is uninspiring.
  • Other people’s music is not really hitting the spot either or feels old.
  • Being unable to make music for more than 20-30 minutes. A feeling of discouragement comes in really fast.
  • Mostly unable to turn a loop into a song.

If you’ve been making music for more than ten years, the signs are slightly different:

  • Feeling like you’re repeating yourself over and over.
  • Not feeling satisfied with the techniques or gear you have.
  • Unable to finish music in general or not able to start.
  • Mostly struggling to polish existing songs.

My solutions to resolve writer’s block are not necessarily going to work for everyone, as there’s no cure-all. Everything passes at some point, but you can’t resolve writer’s block without going through it—you can’t get around it.

Suggestions for Resolving Writer’s Block

  • Completely change how you work by trying a new DAW.
  • Test tons of presets from your synths and learn how they’re programmed.
  • Learn about modular synthesis.
  • Try online sound banks such as Archive.org, freesound.org, or even YouTube’s obscure archives.

But more importantly, figure out what the block is in your writer’s block. Is it linked towards your expectations? In my case, it’s simply a question of finding the next concept to build an album upon. The way I discover concepts is by trying to reverse-engineer sound design. The quest to make something similar with the use of different tools to shape the sound is more important than the result itself. I see many people getting writer’s block from trying to identically replicate a sound they want and discarding other techniques.

The difficulty in replicating a technique comes from the “early beginnings of a new producer“, in which someone starts on the wrong foot. I’m always happy to have someone who wants to start producing come to me to make sure he/she will start off well.

How and Where to Start Producing

In 2019, new producers have infinite access to information and tools. Too much information means a few things:

  • Giving you the wrong first impression that everything is easy and doable.
  • Misleading you into investing into things sold as being essential, while they’re not.
  • Having so many choices makes the task of picking one overwhelming. If you have access to all the sounds you could ever dream of, where would you start?

Counter-Productive Tips New Producers are Often Told

  • If you work hard enough, you can learn anything.
  • You can learn and do everything yourself.
  • Not watching tutorials or reading articles is better than education because you learn as you go.
  • Make all your sounds by yourself so you can be original. Hello, down the rabbit hole.

I see people coming into production with the wrong intentions/goals. Of course, if you come with the idea that: a. things are easy and that b. you can learn everything yourself, people set unrealistic goals for themselves before they’ve ever created a loop.

In the last five years, I have been frequently reminded of a client who once came to me with an artist page on Soundcloud and Facebook with thousands of followers, a logo, professional photos, etc., but not a single minute of experience in music production. He had to make some music that could match the image he had been selling, and the first step felt huge.

The other side to early production is the artist who finishes a first song quickly and gets signed. With no experience, keeping up the pace of releasing is difficult, and the quick rise can be a situation that might be difficult to handle.

My Suggestions for People Who Want to Start Producing

  • Listen to a lot of music when you have the time, and attend shows. This is super important for multiple reasons: you’ll learn the relationship between what you hear on your headphones vs. a venue. This is important to develop your mixing skills—learning how people react to sounds and how artists perform music in a live context. This is valuable information for music-making.
  • Try to befriend people who make music as well, a mix of newcomers and older producers. This is super important for building a network of contacts to ask questions, swap music with, share gear, get a bunch of info that you can’t find yourself, and also to break-up periods of isolation.
  • Ask as many questions as you have. No shame, just ask. Ask a lot of how do you do this or that? What is the name of that sound? What effect can create that impression?
  • Have studio jams. This is the best way to learn. You’ll learn so much because you’ll run into so many problems that you’ll have to troubleshoot them, and that’s useful. Jamming also puts music-making into a context that is impossible to replicate—alone in a studio.
  • Try to make loops everyday. You can make them all into one project file or start a new one each time. It’s important to make many because it’s good to first practice how to start making a loop. If you make a lot, you’ll get more efficient, develop tricks, and get faster at finding your way through a new tool.
  • It’s more efficient to do 10-20 minutes everyday than a five-hour session on a weekend. The optimal focus time for your brain is around 30 minutes, so you get the best of yourself. Working for five hours isn’t recommended at all: you’ll feel like you did a lot but after that time, your ears can’t really judge what you’re doing. You can do five hours in a day, but on multiple tracks. I just feel that it’s not the best of yourself that will come out of long sessions on a single project, but you’ll learn.
  • When you can start a loop in 10 minutes and feel great about it, then you’ve leveled up and you can now go back to all the loops you made and practice turning them into a song. Next level comes when you can finish them in a breeze.
  • One song, one idea. If you make a decent loop, it’s probably the middle part of your song. How many layers do you have? What is the main idea? Can you, or a friend, sing that idea?
  • Don’t make a big deal about not finishing songs. It will come naturally if you take things one step at a time.
  • Forget releasing your music or getting signed by a label. If you focus on that, you’re just distracted from doing what you have to do which is to have skills to make music like you want.

Common Issues Other Than Writer’s Block

People often share other struggles in music-making with me like:

  1. A loop or idea feels boring or repetitive at some point in the song. First, don’t reveal your main idea too quickly. Second, create multiple variations of that loop (ex. changing the timing or adding effects). Third, add modulation to the sounds so they’re constantly changing.
  2. A song feels like something is missing. This might be because you’ve heard it too many times. Try leaving it alone for a month. Otherwise, here’s the a quick checklist: percussion, bass, pattern or melody, background, and a supporting idea. If you have all those, you should be more than okay. Otherwise, try to compare your song to a reference, concentrate on all sounds and see if you have about the same number.
  3. A track feels empty compared to references. Often resolved by creating a noise-floor. Try a reverb or a hiss at low level.
  4. Sounds never feel right. You might have bad samples. If you are convinced you should do everything yourself, you’ll indeed sound off, for a while. Try buying and using pre-made sounds. If you can’t make them, find some, and learn how to make killer loops and songs. As you go, you’ll eventually train your ear on how these sounds are made and will be able to make them. Honestly, even after 20 years, there are plenty of sounds I’m slightly not sure how to make even though I know, in theory, how to… it’s harder than it seems!
  5. Creating original ideas and not cheesy ones. If you listen to a lot of music, this will train your ear. If you listen to a lot of music before making music, it will put you in a mood. If you use a reference track, or even try to compose music over it, it can greatly help with this issue.

Essential Music Production Tools From 2019

EQ

Even though it was released in 2018, Fabfilter’s Pro-Q3 has won many prizes this year and has gained prominence with many major engineers. I’ve been watching a lot of tutorials from Mixing With The Masters, and Pro-Q3 is often the EQ of choice. You can use multiple instances to see how each channels are interacting between one-another, do some side-chaining, corrections, and shelving. You can turn any points into a dynamic filter too, which is very useful. If you have the budget, try to get an analog inspired EQ such as the PSP E27. These types of EQs aren’t parametric and can add a musical colour.

Compression

The compressor I loved the most this year was the Avalon from Universal Audio. So badass, so powerful, so useful…no need to say more. If you don’t have a UAD, I always turn to PSP Vintagewarmer 2. Not only does it compress well, it adds warmth—people want both.

The Do-It-All Utility of the Year

No doubts, it comes to Shaperbox 2. It is perfect for resolving many, many issues like modulation, side-chaining, movement, variations, creative ideas on the fly…it’s so good that I blindly bought it when I received it in my newsletter from CurveGuys.

Reverb

If there’s one effect to have on top of your stock plugins is a good reverb. There are many out there such as this gorgeous reverb by Fabfilter but I suggest the Convolution by Melda—it’s fantastic and will be useful for years.

Quote of the Year

We make music to come together, and yet spend so much time alone. Reach out to others, create new concepts and see how viewing music as something fun will build things organically.

SEE ALSO : Design Thinking for Music Production

The acoustic-electronic combo

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In the last 5 years, I’ve been seeing more and more projects that combine the use of acoustic sounds, samples, and recordings with synthetic, analog sounds. What’s interesting is that in the 90s, this combo wasn’t very popular, and in the eyes of many purists it was a huge no-no. The benefits of an acoustic-analog recording combination is what I’d like to discuss in this post.

There are a huge number of amazing musicians we could point to as being good references of this combination. For instance, in 2011, ECM asked Ricardo Villalobos to remix some songs from their catalog.

I remember that Ric had been playing many tracks from the jazz-influenced label mostly because he loves to create these epic moments of weirdness, where he’s play something totally unexpected in the middle of his sets. Sometimes even in a peak moment where most people would be expecting a bomb song, he’d drop some weird jazz music and layer it with some of his own techno songs he recorded in his studio, mostly from his modular. Seeing him play some of that during a few events circa 2005-2009, I saw how the acoustic-electronic combo always brought some magic into a very electronic set, but you’d have to be happy. I remember some people being weirded out by it but that, as he’d say, is not his problem.

In the 90s, this combination wasn’t always welcomed, mostly because people were really wanting to dive deep into pure electronic music, as in, if it was techno, it had to be techno and there was no room for anything that wasn’t on that agenda. I’m sorry to say that I was one of those guys as well! Especially when I entered my minimal techno era around 1996, I wanted the purest electronic aesthetic and anything acoustic would make me cringe, especially guitars.

I find that ever since Ric explored the ECM catalog, it really opened a lot of doors for people to combine the two worlds to unite them. One person that jumps to my mind as one of the artists that explored that the most is certainly Petre Inspirescu, who was really known for bringing classical vibes to techno—in his mix for Fabric or in his work with the Pi Ensemble. It’s important to note that it was an exploration, yes, but it also worked really, really well. Sometimes people explore something and it doesn’t really work, but Petre, in my humble opinion, brought it to a more refined result than what Villalobos did.

So, what should we take from this history exactly? How can one get into the acoustic-electronic aesthetic and make it work well?

Reverb and Room Acoustics

It’s crazy how a good reverb can bring life to anything, and since acoustic instruments are recorded in a room, organic reverb added to a sound brings a whole new world to it. The more realistic the reverb, the more warmth it can bring [to a mix]. This is what influenced me the most to start my own reverb collection, and my lust for finding the most realistic reverb. I did many tests with mastering, asking artists who have great reverb in their productions what can make a difference.

  • Convolution: If you can, always use the convolution reverb by max for live. One thing I noticed about stock plugins is the grain that comes out weird during mastering; this is never the case for convolution. If you’re not familiar with what convolution means, it’s basically taking the “image” of a place’s reverb and applying it as a preset for your plugin. You can then have special places such as a specific studio, concert room or even, a restaurant. It’s used in movies for creating proper atmospheres but it does such a great job on percussion. One of my favourite convolution reverb plugins is the one by Melda called mConvolutionMB—it’s multi-band, giving you a lot of options for creating really special spaces. You can also browse the internet in search of free impulse responses that you can load in your plugin. I also encourage you to randomly put sounds in it to get the reverb that is used in the sample to apply it to your song so you get a feeling that it’s all part of the same place.
  • Record your own: I know some people who buy pieces of drum kits separately to have the real thing then can play with. They’ll then record themselves playing percussion over their song. You’d be surprised about even with a cheap microphone, you can create something pretty interesting to layer your sounds with. It will catch the reverb of your place which is also unique. Snares, hats, cymbals are cheaper to buy than you think, and having them physically with you is pretty fun too.
  • Binaural recording: You can buy a binaural microphone that allows you to record sounds based upon your head, which is ideal to create stereo impression on the listener who uses headphones. If you record percussion at your ear level, it will give the listener the idea that the percussion is right in front of you. It really creates a special aesthetic for whatever you record and also some stereo placement that is unique. There are all kinds of tricks you can do with recording random things. Since it’s very precise for stereo, some people use frequency modulation using binaural technique to induce the brain in different states of mind like relaxation. I won’t get into that but there’s plenty to read on the topic if you’re curious.
  • Hardware reverb: This is hard to beat. If you can invest into a hardware reverb unit such as a pedal or a rackmount effect, you’ll get some really next level results. Something like an old DP4 by Ensoniq or Alesis, Lexicon ones can be a dramatic improvement. You can also look into a multi-effect pedal like the one by Big Sky.

Preamps and Other Tools

While the idea of acoustic layered over analog is magical, you’ll have to agree that the highest quality recordings will make a huge difference. This is why when you look for quality samples, you’ll look for the highest sample rate possible and something like 192khz will be the holy grail. This means you can re-pitch it with the least compromise, and you’ll get a lot of what we call the air-factor, where the complexity of the high end will be crystal clear.

Something else people overlook, especially when it comes to samples that were recorded, is the use of preamps. I’ve been shying away from this topic for years until I really saw how using them can completely change the quality of your sound, adding not only beefiness but also, a special texture, depending of the preamp you’re using. Ones by Neve will sound different than API, for instance, and using them on certain things will change the character of a sound. Plugins that emulate them are pretty solid at it. I tested all of the preamps this year, from Universal Audio, and found that the ones by Neve are the ones that feel the suitable for the music I want to do. I also saw a considerable amount of enthusiasm from clients when I used them on their projects. So, recording your own, even with a cheap microphone, if you use some nice preamp, you’ll get something pretty solid out of it. Cheap microphone can even be a source of coloration for your samples but nowadays you can find really nice, affordable microphones so it might be worth investing a bit more so you get something useful for years ahead.

Virtual drummers are also something you can look into. There are many out there but Slate Digital makes really high quality program that can help you have highly realistic percussion. Otherwise, you can look at Addictive Drummer that has a range of different drum kits to get sounds from. It’s very realistic as well and layering it over a rigid drum machine sequence can provide a lot of depth!

SEE ALSO : Integrating a modular setup with your DAW

Making Digital Synths Sound Analog

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In exploring online electronic music production groups and forums, you’ll see a lot of hate around the use of presets. Some people think it’s a lazy way to get things done, and others that it’s just less creative and adds to the pool of music that all sounds the same. I have no shame saying that I myself use presets. I use presets to help myself understand concepts, how my tools work, and to give myself ideas that are outside of my normal routine. However, I don’t use presets “as-is”; generally—at the very least—I’ll run the sounds through a hurricane of colouring tools. I’m mostly drawn to very, very bizarre sounds that presets are usually not made for, except for some made by Richard Devine (but he usually goes too far).

Personally, my biggest pet-peeve with presets comes from cold-feeling digital synths or pads—they sound like Kraft Dinner served cold with canned peas; plain and horrible. Not only do I dislike these sounds themselves, but I can’t get over the fact that very simple things could have been done to enhance them, which is why I am writing this post.

Why Digital Presets Sound Cold and Bland

Analog equipment involves slight, microscopic, ever-changing modulations. Digital plugins and presets do not have these variations—they operate in a linear way. Think of an analog watch—the hands slide from one number to another without pause. A digital watch jumps sharply from one number to another without anything in the middle. This is the simplest analogy I can think of to help you understand why digital synths often sound surgical and cold, and inversely, why analog synths sound round and warm.

There are things you can do with tools to remove a digital or cold feeling, which mostly involves embracing the world of subtleties and tiny modulations. Don’t be afraid to push things to the point of feeling slightly “ugly”. Let me explain:

One of the things that’s become more obvious for me lately is how a tiny bit of distortion and clipping can bring a lot more of precision to a sound in a mix. I’ve always been a fan of saturation (sometimes my clients tell me to reduce it a bit); in case you didn’t know, saturation is a mild form of distortion—wave-shaping that you can really push in a very subtle way. Subtle distortion sort of breaks a signal’s linearity, or coldness. Recently, I was in a studio with my friend Jason—a brilliant sound designer—and asked him how he turns something cold into something more analog sounding. While he could have applied a bunch of effects and processing to a sound, he said he was more interested in creating multiple layers around the pad or digital sound.

A good way to combat the cold side of digital sounding synths is to add a good dose of acoustic samples, field recordings or other organic sounding findings around it. The combination of digital and organic really guides the perception [of the listener] away from the digital aesthetic.

What makes some acoustic recording samples feel warm is a combination of a bunch of things. The quality of the microphone, for example, can translate a lot of the details and capture more depth. The sample rate of the recorder will also make a huge difference. Microphones are often overlooked, but they basically determine the level of precision in your recording; if it’s extremely precise, with a lot of high-end information, it will contribute in the definition of the sound quality. Another thing to consider is the preamp of the recorder. There’s a world of difference between preamps, and having high quality one will certainly add a lot to sounds. If your sounds are thin and lacking substance, you can also use preamp plugins. Some of the best out there are from Universal Audio, but you can also rely on Arturia’s preamp emulation for something quite impressive as well.

I had a talk with someone who was saying that one of the things that made Romanian techno so good was the combination of the acoustic kicks with the analog ones, to which I added that without good preamps, the acoustic kicks would sound like garbage.

If you have raw synthetic sounds, you can also pass them through some convolution—this helps create a space around it. The mConvolution Reverb by Melda is quite spectacular. It also has some microphone impulse response which mimics as if the sound had been recorded in a space. You can make it multi-band so you can assign specific bands to have a specific reverb type(s). This allows you to be very creative, and if you leave it at a very low wet rate, it will infuse the sound with a nice, warm presence.

Regarding warm presence, again, with distortion, I’d encourage you to look into trying various distortion plugins and use them with a wet factor of about 3-5% max. Depending on the plugin, you’ll see how they add a little bit of color to a sound. My way of using distortion is usually bringing it up to about 20% and then rolling down until I barely hear it. You want to hear it a bit, but not much.

Some nice distortion plugins I like include Decapitator by SoundToys, mDistortionMB by Melda, Wave Box by AudioThing, Saturn by Fabfilter.

Get Out of “The Box”

There’s no doubt that moving outside your computer will infuse your sound with some texture, presence, and some analog feel.

Use a little mixer for summing. If your sound card (audio interface) has multiple outputs, then you can send them to a little mixing board where you can group your channels into different buses. For instance, you can split them into a channel for kick (mono), stereo channels for bass and melodic elements, and another one for percussion. If your board has more channels, you can experiment with different things, but just these sound groups are a great start; the mixing board will give you a rawer feel than your DAW alone. For simple, affordable boards, look into Mackie’s latest series—pretty impressive and absolutely affordable.

Use external saturation. People love Elektron’s Analog Heat. It’s a good external distortion and does a pretty solid job of adding colour to sounds, out of the box. You can also look into using distortion pedals, reverb, or invest in a 500 series lunchbox and get some saturation modules—there are many to look into.

Use VHS, cassette, or tape. Some of my friends have been searching local pawn shops for cassette decks or old VCRs; they offer a static saturation that you can explore. There’s a whole world of possibilities too when you compress the recorded result—you’ll create something weird sometimes, but it will give you a lofi feel.

If you have other suggestions, please share!

SEE ALSO : “How do I get started with modular?”

Inspiration and Risk: Returning to FL Studio and Reason

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As 2019 is comes to and end, I realized that it will be the 4-year anniversary of this blog. For the first time, I’ve had a hard time finding inspiration and motivation for writing, but also for music in general. After releasing an album this spring, I really felt like I’d explored techno inside-out, in terms of what I can bring to the genre. Motivation and drive are something that rise and fall for many people who make music—many try to find novel ways of keeping it going. 2019 also marked 20 years of releases as Pheek for me; I realized that I’ve kept this alias going for a long time. However, in 2009 I took a big break from music-making, before I became a father and after touring for 8 years—I felt like I had seen enough. The thing about being a musician, is that you may call it quits or feel you’ve had enough, but somewhere down the line, the drive to create something will always return.

You need patience—this was probably one of the things I said the most to others this year, and I also had to take this advice myself.

When you need a break from music—or anything that usually makes you happy but isn’t anymore—it’s mostly because you’ve created some lofty expectations that are very difficult to achieve. For example, maybe to feel satisfied with your music, you expected a release on a specific label? Or perhaps that after releasing music, that you should get more recognition, more gigs, or be more demand?

99% of people who come to me with writer’s block have lofty expectations. These expectations usually have nothing to do with reality and create a dissociation from the pleasure of making music. This issue often comes up when setting goals—we set goals too high and are hard on ourselves when we don’t meet them.

I’m no stranger to unrealistic goals, and have experienced this dissociation deeply myself. It’s a good thing to go through every now and then; I can relate to anyone who’s also stuck in that uncomfortable space.

However, I think I’ve slipped into the other 1% of causes of writer’s block, which is, in my case, boredom and being jaded. I mix and master music all day, so it’s hard to disconnect from my critical voice. Teaching Ableton Live and knowing it inside-out leaves me with fewer angles to explore to discover unknown territory (although I do love finding YouTube videos with new techniques to try; even if I was already familiar with a technique, people will often do things in a different way).

This boredom brought me to a tough decision which involves taking a risk: get rid of everything that makes my way of making music safe, easy, stable, effective, productive. Creativity is about problem solving—challenging your brain creatively will push it to become more flexible, alert, and open to new ideas.

In my case, I decided I’d go back to my very first DAW, FL Studio. I missed its awkward design and logic. It’s a bit of an odd-ball in the world of music because it wasn’t made by-musicians-for-musicians, but more by-nerds-for-nerds who wanted to make music, which is suitable for techno nerds like me. Honestly, I didn’t really understand what I was doing when I made my first few albums with FL Studio; I was doing my best to make things work and sound okay. The limitations created some interesting results; some people wondered why or how I did some things, to which I replied that it was because I didn’t know how to do them otherwise. FL Studio is often regarded as a toy or a not serious DAW, but it’s actually really badass, if you can learn to understand it.

It took me some time to sync it to Live because on the OS X version, Image-Line decided to not include the ReWire function. ReWire was something I heavily used circa 2002-2009. If you have this issue, here are some tips on how you can record audio/MIDI from anything in Live:

ReWire Alternatives

Many people love Soundflower, but I hate it. I find it frustrating and confusing. A really lovely alternative is Loopback by Rogue Amoeba. It’s not free, but it’s worth every penny—it can do a lot of internal routing to record audio from your internet browser or other software (very practical for audio artists). Loopback solves audio routing, but not MIDI sync.

On OS X, there’s a built-in tool called Audio MIDI Setup; here you can create a virtual MIDI channel to be used. Then, in FL Studio, in the MIDI out, you pick that channel as your out while selecting the “Send MIDI sync” option. On the other side, in Live, set it as slave, then in the preferences, set the MIDI channel to Track/Remote—this should work.

Things I love about FL Studio

  1. The automatic piano roll on all channels. You can drop a sample into a track and instantly play with its pitch, but what I love the most is the number of options to randomize sequences, quantize, slice and alter the notes. I have not seen anything like it in other DAWs, and in less than 5 minutes, I can have a solid groove going.
  2. Swing & quantization. FL Studio’s swing simply kills it. Logic has good swing also, reminiscent of classic MPC swing, but FL Studio has a killer, killer swing for techno.
  3. Automation, LFOs, and modulation. In FL, these are really a pleasure to use—not only do you get exactly what you want but often things come out even better than you expect.
  4. Native effects are solid. FL Studio has really high quality native plugins.

However, there are also many things I don’t like FL Studio, but they’re not the point of what I am discussing in this post. To put it briefly, I can’t see myself having a speedy workflow with arrangements in FL Studio; I tried for 10 years and eventually wanted to knock my head into a wall.

If you’ve missed out on all the hype about Reason, its latest version is making it the DAW of the year to me. Reason basically turned its effects and instruments racks into a VST, which lets you open it in any DAW. Reason does not crash—that’s the beauty of it; but don’t forget the power of the sound it makes as well. I’ve often done patching in Reason (the visual UI triggers my inspiration right away) and people weren’t sure if it was from my modular or not. 90% of my last album was done in Reason 10. What I loved doing was opening one of its native synths, and patching some LFOs, or envelopes to do some intricate routing and create a bunch of sounds that motivated me to turn them into songs right away.

Opening Reason with FL Studio, connected to Live, really felt like science fiction as I would have never imagined this trio 15 years ago. But, not only does it work like a charm, it’s absolutely a thrill to use! One thing I love about Reason is its feature to be able to rent plugins. They have an internal line of modular inspired tools that let you patch similar setups as you would with a rig.

The reason why I still route everything to Ableton is to be able to record all the tweaking in real time, with the mistakes as well as the good moments that might not be replicable. I still like to do my arrangements in Live, as it is the most efficient. I could export stems from FL Studio, but I find it more fun to grab things imperfectly.

If you work with multiple DAWs, I’d encourage you to create a folder where you save all your recordings, projects, and tests. Export everything as you go, and go fishing and build a mothership.

I wrote this post spontaneously, not really thinking of where it would lead me to. Spontaneity feels good, and so does music production these days.

SEE ALSO : Spending Long Hours in the Studio

Make Music Faster: Some Organizational Tips

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We are constantly bombarded by information and it can be difficult to focus on anything properly. Making good music requires slowing down and a high level of focus—often people rush when making music and it comes out poorly. How can you make music faster while still giving the process the attention it deserves?

In terms of file and project organization, there are a number of things you can do to speed up your workflow.

Backup, Backup, Backup

I’ll never say this enough, and I’m sure you might shrug at this first tip, but you have no idea how many clients come to me telling me their computer crashed and they lost everything, hoping I saved their projects! Luckily, many times I have been able to help them with my own backups. After many of my own crashes, I’ve learned to have a number of external hard drives for all my projects, and I have an online backup for my main system that syncs multiple times a day, and I also use Time Machine (from Apple). Generally, I have to use one of these back ups at least a few times per year, because of corrupted data or other issues. Clients email me about issues of their own about once a week! No joke, if you do just one thing to improve your pace-of-output, make sure it’s taking backups of your work.

On backup drives, I keep everything organized by year, label, and project name. Having organized files and folders helps me find things quickly.

Personally, some brands I trust for reliable hard-drives are Western Digital, Samsung, and Seagate. If you can get an SSD, it’s a huge plus—you can work directly from it, without any noticeable decrease in speed. When it comes to online backups, I like iCloud (I personally hate Google Drive), but I recently discovered iDrive and find it pretty impressive and affordable, too. If you don’t have an account with Splice, it’s a good idea to back up all your projects online. Having multiple back ups on different systems can be quite useful.

File-Naming Conventions

All my song files have a title, but they also have a bit more information. On OSX you can use tags—I like to tag files as released/not released, and finished/not finished, for the most part. Avoid project titles like “new song” or “1”. As time progresses, chances are you’ll have many new songs, and titles like those are counter-productive.

I keep very few things on my primary computer hard-drive; I love to discard projects that I’m done with or that I haven’t touched in a while, so I can make room for new material. If you aren’t familiar with my creative process (see my series of videos on Youtube), I create a lot of source material to work with, but it takes up a lot of space on my hard-drive. I don’t like to re-use the same material twice, so cleaning up my hard-drive on a regular basis becomes a safety net against redundancy in sample usage.

When it comes to samples, I buy multiple loops and one-shots, as well as packs, and like to keep them organized in a sample-focused folder. Nothing too complicated, as I use multiple other tools to organize those in my DAWs, so I don’t spend much time on organizing samples into folders. I simply backup the sample folder and that does the trick.

Project Organization

Many producers work in an awkward way when it comes to managing their project(s)—their creative process is often irregular and they are easily distracted. It’s very hard to be completely organized when making music and balancing creativity with efficiency, but there are some approaches you can take to make things flow more easily. When it comes to making music, I work with “motherships“, which is a technique I covered in a past post and often refer to to make things productive again when I lack ideas. It’s basically one big Ableton Live session, where I drop-in all my current ideas. Recently, I found that I like to create multiple ideas in a single column in this project file. For example, I make all kind of grooves and percussion sequences in a column called “groove ideas.” If my mothership has multiple, well-separated content types, I can import an entire column from the mothership into another project and improve upon it. So let’s say I’m working on a dub project and feel like I’m lacking groove, I can simply go dig up whatever I have in the mothership by importing a full column filled with numerous grooves into my current project.

I think that working in a modular way (not in terms of using modular synths)—saving ideas by category—helps to import them faster later on, when they’re needed.

Leftovers & Going to the Store

Finished a new track? Create a new column called “leftovers” and place any unused ideas in it. Import that column into a project named “leftovers” and you’ll have all the leftovers from all your songs, which can easily be recycled in the future.

“Going to the grocery store“, is a phrase I use for days I spend recording noise, sounds, bleeps, and random jams from gear to my computer. I’m not a gear guy in general; I find using a lot of gear multiplies the risk of running into technical issues, which limits creative time. I usually record tons of sounds, or “audio produce”. I then work with that material for weeks or months, or even years. These types of sessions are super useful, but need to be organized as well. I cut down recordings to “moments”, which I identify as specific ideas or concepts. I also slice sections down to one-shot ideas, for percussion elements. Additionally, I like to have tons of low-end material with analog saturation, and analog transients I can use in digital percussion. Both add a very simple twist that can make a world of difference. I also like to use the mothership concept with the grocery store. I’ll create one template project with all my recordings and then slice them, then put them in different columns that I can use to import in any ongoing projects that need something.

Time

Time is precious. If you have a family, it’s even more difficult to find time to make music. How does one organize time given the obligations of social relationships, work, partners, hobbies, and Netflix binging?

My solution to not having enough time to work on my own music is to dedicate blocks of 30 minutes to work on music and try to get the most of them. Your brain can produce high-quality work for about that amount of time. This fact is liberating for parents—you have a human need to create, so you feed it what you can, and then move on. In the early years of being a dad, I thought that having a way to save ideas for music by leaving myself audio notes was the best way to calm my brain down from the restlessness of not making music as much as I wanted to. Sometimes I would have the computer nearby and I’d leave a loop playing and adjust as I could, between changing diapers. Part of who I was a musician changed in those years. The music I wanted to make was completely different, mostly because I was using music in a different ways.

Limiting your time to periods of intense focus is something I learned from the Pomodoro technique. I would make sure to listen to music for 10 to 30 minutes before working. Ideally, I would also exercise or stretch to have my body “activated.”

Since time is crucial, I recommend you eliminate any hindrances of the mind that can disrupt the flow: hunger, need to check phone, energy, thirst, discomfort, etc. A good studio has the phone at the entrance with minimum check-ins on whatever alerts it can send you. Have a water bottle and snacks on hand, a quality chair…make things comfortable.

I also encourage new students to create precise goals and deadlines. For instance, “next Saturday I will dedicate a moment to video tutorials on compression, then do some tests on kicks.”

References

If you want to make music without losing your sense of direction, you need references on hand. I’ve covered references in many past posts, but this is a reminder that having a Spotify playlist is a great idea to give yourself drive. Speaking of drive, it’s not a bad idea to leave your house before making music—go for a walk, jog, or drive around. Have you ever noticed how moving along with music stimulates creativity? If this doesn’t do it for you, try to find an external activity that involves music and that inspires you.

A self-education activity that is also essential is to have a personal YouTube playlist of videos that are reference tracks, mixed with tutorials of techniques you can try. I have a to-do list of videos that I go to for experiments.

That said, references should be archived eventually, too. I like to keep some for a while but change them regularly. It’s a good idea to have a folder on your backup drive for all the references you’ve used.

Plugins

It’s easy to get lost in the sea of plugins out there, and if you’re a collector like I am, once you have many installed, it’s also easy to forget about older ones. Ableton Live 10 has a classification for plugins where you can put them a category with a color—I use it all the time. In my case, I have these categories: Sound design, Compression, EQ, Saturation.

I have a rule that I don’t buy anything new unless I’ve already used what I have bought previously. I don’t mean just having played with it, but actually used it in a project—this also applies to gear and any gizmos I could potentially use. The crave to get something new happens every day, as I’m constantly under fire by ads and emails that promote something.

Networking

If you want projects to get finished, you will have to do some networking at some point, and it can be pretty hectic out there as everyone has an agenda of their own. I’ve discussed the importance of networking before, but here are some basic reminders about how to do so efficiently:

  • Never take any conversation personally, as well as any pauses, silences, or delayed conversations. This is something I sort of have to remind myself daily, as sometimes I get triggered by certain things. Think of networking like you’re chasing someone for something, and he or she is doing the same thing with someone else. Everyone’s chasing each other and yet, we don’t pay much energy to people who are there for us.
  • If you send demos or if you are collaborating with someone, expect no communication or long silences. The music business world attracts people who are full of anxiety and often change their mind. Finding the right moment to poke someone takes time to master.
  • Use an agenda to keep reminders of who to follow-up with.

SEE ALSO : How Long Does it Take to Make Professional Sounding Music?

Creating Depth in Music

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I don’t know many people who took theatre in school, or aspired to become an actor or comedian. For me, having a background in theatre has shaped my vision of music, performance, and storytelling. In Québec, we have a “theatre sport” called Improvisation, where teams meet in a rink to create stories and characters, out of the blue. After practicing this for 20 years or so, it’s shaped how I perceive songs and sets. There are so many parallels to music in theatre: how a story develops, the use of a main character, supporting roles, etc., all of which can be applied to the use of sounds in a track.

A story is never great without quality supporting roles. Support adds depth to any story, and richness to the main character. Think of all the evil nemeses James Bond has faced—the more colorful they were, the more memorable the story, and the same goes for songs.

You might have a strong idea for your song, but if it has a good supporting idea or two, then you’ll end up with a song that keeps you engaged until the end.

I’ve been really into minimalist music lately; I like music that has a solid core idea that evolves. I was reading a really nice post on Reddit about Dub Techno where one of the main criterion discussed was the importance of simplicity. Simplicity doesn’t make something dull or dumb—in music it can be a reduction of all unnecessary elements, in dub techno resulting in a conversation between the deep bass and the pads and other layers.

If you’re immersed in electronic music, you’re generally used hearing multiple layers and often multiple conversations between sounds. Percussion layers will be often related to themselves, but the main idea is usually supported by a second layer. I often hear this in some indie rock songs too, especially ones that have some electronic elements in them. The way the human ear works, is that we will always hear the main component of a song as the centre of attention, but attention will shift back-and-forth between different layers. The advantage of having depth in music is that it encourages repeat listening. For a listener to replay a song and hear something new is exciting; some songs will grow on them even though they may have felt overwhelming during the first listen.

How can you create secondary ideas and “supporting roles”?

There are multiple ways to do to add depth to your songs.

Negative Space

The most important part when you program or write a melody, is to leave some empty space in it, which I call “negative spacing.” This space is where your secondary ideas can appear, supporting or replying to the main idea. I usually start by writing a complex melody, and then will remove some notes that I will use elsewhere, either in a second synth, bass, or percussive elements. Here are some suggestions as to what you can do with the MIDI notes you remove from the first draft of your melody:

  • Use the same MIDI notes from your melody, but apply them to multiple synths or other sounds to create variations and multiple layers that all work together.
  • Use the MIDI tool chords and arpeggios to build evolving ideas that come from the same root.
  • Look into some MIDI-generating Max for Live patches that can give you alternative ideas. I’ve had some fun with patches like Magenta, but also with the VST Riffer or Random Riff Generator which are really interesting.

The “Fruit of the Tree” Exercise

This is an exercise that is a bit time-consuming that I have a love/hate relationship with. You spend time playing the main idea through intense sound altering plugins. So, if your main idea is a melody, imagine you send it through granular synthesis, pitch-shifting, a harmonizer, random amplitude modulation, etc.—you’ll end up with a bunch of messed up material that can be shaped into a secondary idea while still being related to your original idea. The idea is to transform what you have into something slightly different. There are multiple plugins you can look into for achieving this:

  • Vocoders, mTransform, mHarmonizer, mMorph: These all work by merging an incoming signal and with a second signal. So, let’s say you have your main idea or melody—you can feed it into something completely different, such as a voice, some forest sounds, textures, or percussion, and you’ll obtain pretty original results.
  • Shaperbox 2 is the ultimate toolbox to completely transform your sound by slicing, gating, and filtering it, with the help of LFOs. This is pretty much my go-to to create alternative tools quickly. One thing I like to do a lot, is to run two side-by-side on different channels, and then use them to create movement that answers one another. For instance, one will duck while the other plays. You can also use side-chaining in the newest version, which can create lovely reactivity, if you use it along with the filter to shape the tone by an incoming sound. This allows you to do low-pass gating, for instance, which isn’t really in Ableton’s basic tools.

Background Sounds

The lack of background sounds, or noise-floor, always leaves people with the impression that there’s something missing in a track. This can be resolved with a reverb at low volume that leaves a nice overall roundness if you keep it pretty dark in its tone. Low reverb creates an impression that a song is also doubled, or wide. Another good way to make background sounds is to load up a bunch of sounds that can be played multiple times in different sections of your song, at very low volume. I was checking out this producer who does EDM/festival music, and he would use sounds of people cheering at a very low volume in moments where the chorus of the song would hit, to create more density and excitement. However, at a high volume, this approach can conversely create a “wall of noise”, so it should be crafted carefully.

If you simply drop a background sound into a project, such as forest sounds, you’re missing out on one of the most enjoyable activities in making music, which is to create your own live sounds. A forest has a bunch of—what seems like—random sounds. You can alter this, and say have a basic 5-second background of noise-floor and then decide when the bird chirping comes in via automation and perhaps have them sync to the tempo. This creates a bit of a groove too. A good exercise is to try to create sounds that emulate nature as you’ll have a bit more control over the sounds (and you’ll learn more about sound design in the process).

Ghost Notes

Ghost notes are mostly discussed as they relate to percussion, but they can be used, as a technique, with anything. A common example of ghost notes is their use in hi-hats, as a bunch of in-between hats at a very low volume to fill up space, which stretches the groove and but avoids too much negative space. Aside from using this technique on the low end—where sounds need a lot of space and room to breathe—make sure everything doesn’t sound mushy. The use of a delay in 16th or 32th notes can be a good way to create ghost notes.

A tap delay, where you can program where the delays fall, is also super fun in terms of creating ghost notes, as you can use one to make complex poly-rhythms. However, I suggest cutting some part of the high-end from the delays to avoid clashing with the main transients, and make sure the volume is very low. Using a AUX/Send bus for delays can be quite useful.

SEE ALSO : Improving intensity in music

Are all Electronic Tracks Starting to Sound the Same?

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Recently, I noticed someone on Facebook post something like “why are you guys all making the same track over and over? All the tracks are sounding the same and you’re killing the genre I love.”

I think he’s partly right. As a label owner and mastering engineer, I hear a lot of tracks, and many do sound the same. I remember that in the mid-90s, there was a moment when I was playing some hard techno at a record shop—listening to a pile of records I wanted to buy—and half-way through, I noticed they all started the same: they all had a break at the exact same spot, used the same rides, etc. I left the entire pile without buying anything. I was really into minimal, but back then it was much harder to find music of that genre, let alone anything interesting enough to buy. In that moment, I lost total interest in hard techno and got into other genres. At that time, everyone wanted to sound like Adam Beyer—10 years later, everyone wanted to sound like Minus/Richie Hawtin—and now, 10 years after that, everyone wants to sound like artists who could play Sunwaves in Romania.

We love genres for certain reasons, but as time passes, we might start disliking them for the same reasons. Somehow, we hope that a genre can be constantly reinvented in a linear way, so we never get bored. If a genre gets popular enough—and people see that learning how to make it can give them some sort of recognition or return on their work—you get a whole bunch of people repeating the same ideas that got the genre popular, over and over. The genre is then flooded with a crazy amount of songs that are all made up of the same basic ideas, just arranged differently.

So, how can you make sure you’re not falling into this trap? To start, you might want to read my post about how to reinvent your sound.

That said, what makes a genre stagnate? What makes a genre feel like it’s lost its soul? I could go on and on about this but I’ll try to keep it short.

Formula-Based Techniques

Before writing this part of the post, I went on Beatport and had a look at the “minimal” section. I’ve been very familiar with this section since 2006, when I joined that platform. I find that if you want to hear the common denominator of a specific genre, just listen to the top 10 sellers of it on Beatport. Recently, it seems like things have changed—I was happy to see that the top 10 minimal tracks didn’t all sound the same (but the same can’t be said about some other genres I checked out). However, even in the minimal category, I can tell that shuffling and swinging of hi-hats, and breaks all seemed to follow the same kind of formula. The top 10 best-selling tracks on Beatport are, in my opinion, never the most creative songs. The majority of DJs who buy tracks for their sets want transitions to feel smooth, so their sets feels seamless. Approaching music production this way results in a couple of issues:

  • What gets popular, and heard the most, becomes a standardized form of expression. The genre gets characterized by standards of production based on what people play, and this causes new and old artists to conform their music to fit the mold.
  • Seeing formulaic music sell positively reinforces artists to repeat similar ideas.
  • Production-wise, formulaic music does not age well. Down the road, it will have no personality, and it might just sound gimmicky or bland.

As you can see, this becomes a pretty nasty pattern for creativity, as things that are slightly outside “the norm” might get rejected unless they’ve been charted by bigger names (which is why DJs get bombarded with promos).

For example, here are some formulas that a genre might have:

  • Use of a specific sample. It can be a type of kick (i.e. 909 for techno, 303 bass-lines for acid).
  • An effect (i.e. lush reverbs for dub techno).
  • A swing type (i.e. the 65% MPC swing in house).
  • Programmed sequence (i.e. trap has a very recognizable way of using hats and snare, minimal techno has a particular way of using backgrounds).
  • Structure (i.e. the use of long breakdowns and bass drops in some genre that have become the norm).

Potential Solutions

To be aware that formulas exists is already a huge step forward, as you are mindful of the potential trap you might have fallen into. Some people often say to me that they just want to make the music they like, and not worry so much. That’s great, but there are also other options, such as:

  • Take the common denominator of a genre and add something new. This is a good way not to throw people off too much. For instance, in the “deep minimal” section, I noticed that the hi-hats are all quite similar—these types of hi-hats could be your anchor to build from while adding something new. If you really care about your sound, I’d encourage you to spend some time listening to the top 10 of whatever genres you’re interested in to see how people are working. This way you won’t repeat the same thing (this is the opposite approach some people will outline if your goal is to make a “hit”).
  • Do you have a personal signature sound? Some artists like to record themselves making a specific sound, or will design something that they use for each track they make. This is usually a good idea to make yourself a bit more personable.
  • I often discuss the use of reference tracks while producing, especially in the arrangement section. You can see and hear how a track is built, and make decision to counter certain recurrent use of a structure. For instance, if you notice that multiple tracks are often taking a kick-pause around 1 minute before bringing a bass, perhaps you might want to do the opposite by bringing the bass before 1 minute and do a kick-pause at 1:15, for example—mess with expectations.
  • One of the pitfalls people tend to fall into is thinking that adding elements will create a new style, but I find that removing is often the key. Stripping down what you have and really working existing sounds might create better results and can point you in new directions. For instance, when I work on a clap, I like to have 4 different variations total; that’s all.

The Availability of Samples

Online stores offer quality samples based on what’s in demand from producers. Sometimes, they’ll even approach successful artists to propose using a sample pack of a certain type. While you can use samples as they are, if you create a few loops of your own this way, you’ll automatically sound like a trend. It should be no surprise that I encourage you to tweak all your samples at least a little.

The best way to tweak samples quickly generally follows the same few types of tweaks:

  • Pitch-related: You can alter the pitch by loading the sound in a sampler or using a pitch-shifter. I really like using an envelope that will modify the sound which makes it a bit less static, compared to simply altering it.
  • Effect-altering: Reverb, chorus, and phasers are always helpful. A multi-fx plugin like Movement (by Output) is a really easy shortcut to new ideas. You can also use presets from different effects in your DAW and quickly swap presets to find a starting point, then play with the knobs to see what comes out.
  • Transient/Decay: If you can play with an envelope that alters the length of the clip in a sampler, it’s always interesting, as you can discover “hidden” parts of the sound. Sometimes, I like to start the sample later, when it’s less loud, and then add gain, then shorten it. You can get some really off-sounding results, especially with kicks and percussion, where you create a nice surprise.
  • Multi-band is to me the solution to approaching sound design in new ways. Whenever you have a sound, you can split it into 3 bands, and treat each of them independently. This can be done by quickly by using a multi-band effect or by duplicating a sound 3 times so that each channel has a band in solo, and the sum of 3 channels is the sound itself (tip: use the Fabfilter EQ3). One of my favorite tools in Max for Live is the Shaper. You can create an LFO, and then apply it to any knob of an effect, like the Utility Tool from Ableton. Modulate the gain or panning for example or bring saturation only on the highs or add EQ changes in the mids.

Structured Predictability

When you listen to a specific genre and can predict when certain elements will happen, you know that the artists making it have fallen into the trap of predictability, which is one of the most common issues in music production. To keep the listener interested, you need to create a balance of new ideas alongside a world of known territory. This usually keeps engagement with the track going, because it’s not entirely predictable. Again, a reference track is helpful to spot moments where there are elements of predictability. In your references folder, perhaps you have a sub-category of case studies where you can have a few “generic track structures” so you can use those do the last polishing of your arrangements.

Also, I love to save my project (eg. Ableton’s .als file) on the desktop without any samples. When you open a lost file like this, Live will be display an error messages that some samples are missing and you’ll only see ghost clips in the arranger. From there, you can import new clips of your own and distribute them into the structure that’s already in place. However, with using pre-made arrangements this way, you should pay attention to avoiding repeating yourself, in the ways I’ve described in this post.

SEE ALSO : How to maintain consistency in the quality of your productions

Improving intensity in music

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Intensity in music can be a tricky balancing act. In our Facebook group, one member recently asked about how he could improve the intensity and excitement of his tracks. He makes electronic music, and feels that compared to some producers he likes, his music doesn’t match in terms of excitement. After asking him a few questions, I realized that the tracks he shared as examples he wanted to emulate were mostly songs with high levels of density, and perhaps not the levels of intensity I thought he was referring to. The term “intensity” is very different from one genre to another; in this post, I’ll try to cover some of the different ways we relate to intensity, and also some tricks and tips as to how to make your tracks more intense-feeling.

Loudness

One of the main aspects of intensity is the loudness or volume of a song. Humans are often tricked into thinking that loudness directly correlates to the intensity of a song. Concerts at high volumes give music a physical sonic experience that people like. Artists often try to replicate the live experience through volume levels or even compression.

However, when making music, there are a lot of other things one needs to pay attention to in the process—loudness should be the very last thing to worry about. Volume/loudness levels can only be adjusted once your mix is proper and flawless. Some people play with mastering tools such as Izotope Ozone 9 as a mastering assistant to help push songs up to a higher level, but if you think loudness is the key to intensity, you might run into issues. Heavily boosting the loudness of a song ruins all the finer details that were worked on so much, via too much compression.

If you want to play with the perceived loudness experience, one thing you can do is make sure that your mid-range frequencies are mixed at sufficient levels, or even perhaps a bit louder than what you’d usually do. Humans will always hear something with a good mid presence as “louder”, even if the overall loudness is lower. A plugin like Intensity by Zynaptiq can really help bring intensity to a song, but can also do subtle wonders at lower levels.

Another thing you can do is play with saturation. This gives a gritty feel to your track’s sounds, adding textures, depth, and relative power as well. Harmonics by Softubes is often my go-to plugin when it comes to applying saturation to mids. It really brings out an organic brightness in sounds that almost always sounds good. Saturation also creates the impression that something is louder, but not in a compressed way.

Density

Similar to loudness, is density: how many sounds you have in your mix at a given time that have very little difference in volume. You could have multiple percussive sounds, for example, and all of them equally loud. Doing this occupies a lot of room in your mix and makes sounds feel more like they’re at the forefront. The denser a mix, the less room there is for depth, but a dense mix can have a lot of immediate power.

For certain techno songs, density is often in the form of a wall of machine-gun type hi-hats which are always going. This creates excitement in the highs. In tribal music, density comes from percussive sounds, but in the mids, and in dubstep, it’s pretty much all about the low end (although dubstep tends to overcharge the full frequency spectrum).

An interesting genre that people often simply refer to as ambient, is drone music. Drone, in a loud venue, becomes a pure noise show so intense, it can give you very powerful body sensation. At MUTEK, I almost puked after a drone show.

If you want an alternative way to create density, other than simply using a lot of tracks, you can also play with the decay of your sounds. Longer hats, kicks, claps, and other percussive sounds will add intensity via density. If you have certain sonic limitations, decay can also be “created” with a gated reverb which will add a tail, but I’d encourage you to use a darker tone.

Background and noise floor

If you go to the most quiet place you can think of and record with a field recorder, you’ll still hear noise in your recordings at a very low level. In general, there’s always some sort of noise surrounding us. It can be the fan of your computer, a car passing by your apartment, people talking in the background in a quiet coffee shop. When you put your headphones on and make music, you might have the impression that your music feels empty and that usually comes from a lack of noise floor. In Dub Techno, songs are often washed in a sea of reverb, which creates a space that feels comforting. Using a long reverb can create a low level of noise that is naturally pleasant to the ear, but there are also other ways to create a noise floor:

  • In many minimal tracks, people will mix in field recordings. You can find a lot of field recordings for free online. They can be from anywhere, but you can event record noise from where you live and use that (some producers love to have a microphone in their studio to pick up noises of themselves as they work). You can also spend time creating your own invented field recordings using day to day sounds that you mix with a white noise and reverb, then lower the volume to -24db or lower.
  • Use hardware equipment and use a compressor to bring up the noise.
  • Take a synth and use a noise oscillator to create a floor. You can then add volume automation to it to give it life, like side-chain compression.

In the tracks the member of our group shared which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the noise floor was just as loud as the main sounds, which then created an impression that the song was really, really dense, loud, and busy.

Powerful low end

One thing people often do for intensity is create really powerful kicks or basses. They’ll have them mixed way louder than the rest of the track, but this often results in a muddy mix, as the details will then feel covered or too low. But in many genres, the importance of a solid kick is often directly related to the intensity of the song. A tip—the clap or snare, should also be equally intense, with a presence in the mids; this relationship will make the track feel very assertive and punchy.

Creating a powerful kick is not an easy task, but you can achieve better results with a combination of Neutron‘s transient shaper and multiband compressor. This will allow you to shape your kick so it’s fat and round. But even if you end up with the most powerful kick you can create, a mix can still feel like it’s lacking intensity unless the kick is properly mixed. Proper mixing of a kick’s low end can often be done by high-pass filtering or EQ’ing some parts of the bass so it doesn’t mask the kick. You can also use a tool like the Volume Shaper or Track Spacer to give clarity to the kick.

Exciting effects

Transitional effects, fills, and rises/falls are always a popular way to create excitement in your track. These are often effects you can use straight from presets and simply apply them on random sounds that are already in your project. I usually like to have two channels per percussive sound I use. Not only for layering, but sometimes the second channel of a percussion will have an effect that I’ll use once or twice. You can have dedicated channels that are effects only, and then drop sounds from your song into that channel. This can be done with a send/aux channel too, but I like to have a FX-channel on its own, as it’s more visually clear.

Popular effects that can help create intensity and excitement include delays, panning, reversing sounds, and reverb, but if you’re looking into something out of the ordinary, I suggest you look into unusual multi-effect plugins such as SphereQuad, Tantra, Fracture XT, Movement, and mRhythmizerMB.

Dynamics

A lot of people don’t seem to understand dynamics, and what they mean in music. Dynamics are often simply interpreted as compression, but if you really use dynamics in an exciting way, you need to think about it as the contrast or range between two levels. Imagine someone whispers something in your ear, and then, all of a sudden, starts talking really loudly; it will create a shock or surprise. Differences in sound are a good way to create surprise and intensity—the greater the difference between the two sounds, the louder or more intense the second sound will feel, or vice-versa. You could have section or certain sounds in your song that are quieter for a moment and then get louder. Dynamics don’t necessarily always refer to volume, however. For example, you can create a moment in a song in mono, and then go to full stereo mode—this difference is also surprising for the listener.

Finally, one thing to keep in mind about intensity in music: if you immediately give away everything your song is about in the first few seconds of a track, you’re mostly likely going to screw up the ability to create intensity, tension, and excitement in the entire work—it will be really hard to keep a listener interested for the entire duration of a song if he or she has already heard your “climax”.

SEE ALSO : Textures Sample Pack

How Long Does it Take to Make Professional Sounding Music?

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For people who are just getting started with production and recording their own music, many wonder how much practice is involved before they can create professional sounding music that they are happy with. I often get asked questions like this:

“I’ve been making music non-stop for 6 months. Why am I not happy with how it sounds yet?“

In terms of life experience making music, 6 months is nothing. You’re basically a toddler in the world of music, but being a toddler is also a once-in-a-lifetime experience and has some advantages as well. In comparing yourself with people who have many more years of experience, it’s normal that it might feel like you’re still far behind. You’re not really being fair to yourself; you can’t expect to squeeze in so much knowledge in such a short time. Most people who make music for a long time usually have also worked in the company of other experienced artists, learned some valuable tips from their experiences, and many have also spent a lot of time at events or working with live sound. All these details are often overlooked by newcomers who often have the misconception that making professional sounding music is something that’s relatively easy to do. Making quality music takes a lot of time—it usually takes many years. However, the difficulty in being satisfied about what you do doesn’t decrease as you gain experience.

Each time I learn something new or that I understand that a type of detail is actually a mistake, I start hearing it everywhere in my past music and it drives me crazy. If you think that with over 20 years of production I might be more easily satisfied with what I make, then I have bad news for you—I still get frustrated, get writer’s block, and most of the time, I’m not entirely happy with how my songs sound. The difference between myself and someone new to making music is that in 20 years, I’ve learned something you’ll learn too: imperfection is a part of the process.

I met a DJ once who told me:

“All quality producers I love are full of self-doubt, but the ones that sound like crap are so full of themselves.”

Not being satisfied with your own work also means you’re willing to learn. So, what are the options available for someone just starting out? Is it just a matter of time?

There are a lot of paths one can take, and unfortunately, sometimes friends or other music producers send new artists down the wrong one. Generally, people will advise others to take a direction that worked for them, but this might not necessarily work for anyone but themselves. I say this before I get into more detail about how long I think it takes for a new artist to make art he or she is satisfied with; the advice below is what has worked for me and what I have seen work for others.

Understanding a sound

If you’re not happy with your sound, you should first ask yourself what sound you’re after. There are a few things to really grasp to understant what’s “wrong” in how you perceive this sound.

Sound monitoring: What monitors are you using? Are you using KRKs? Genelecs? Yamahas? Some people have poor equipment and it’s a handicap in how you’ll “understand” your sound. The clearer and more reliable your tools, the easier it will be. Before buying anything else for your studio, monitoring should be where you invest the most of your budget. You can buy very expensive gear, but if you can’t hear it properly, you’ll always be on step behind.

People will recommend certain speakers or headphones, but monitoring is extremely personal—I encourage you to go to a store and spend a good amount of time comparing different brands and models. I swear, when you hear your favorite track on a specific system and it triggers goosebumps, you’ll know that system is for you. Prepare to invest in good speakers—there’s nothing professional about buying cheap monitors just to save a bit of cash.

A/B referencing: Cross-validating is one of the most important things to do when you make music, and though a lot of people seem to have reservations about it, this is how professionals and people who want meaningful results will work. This goes for not only audio, but in pretty much any craft; you need a model, a reference, and something to guide your vision, or to keep track of your progress. As you work, you need to constantly check what’s going on. You might hate it at first, but that’s how it’s done. In terms of audio, having good headphones and other output systems to cross-reference with is very beneficial.

There are many tools out there that can help make doing A/B checks easier and more pleasant. For instance, Reference is a great tool to see if your levels are right. Magic A/B is also great, but doesn’t have the precision of Reference. Levels is also another great tool to analyze the technical requirements of your song. But more importantly, I recommend a good FFT such as SPAN by Voxengo (free) or Izotope’s recently released Ozone 9, which is a good overall bundle of tools to have that can really help make a difference in what you do. Ozone comes with an “assistant” that listens to your music and can propose fixes, enhancements, and overall adjustments, while comparing your work to a preloaded reference track—it can be a big investment, but it will be a tool you’ll use every time you work on music.

Listening volume. The worst way to listen to music when you want to understand it is at high volume (eg. 85dB+). I try to keep my listening levels low so I can easily hear what’s wrong. You’ll be able to tell that the highs are too sharp or that the low end is too low at lower volumes (something that’s barely possible to do at high volume due to the Fletcher Munson Curve which says that after a certain volume level is reached, the human hear stops perceiving things in a neutral way). Make sure you keep the volume low and don’t touch the knob as you work. Take pauses every 20 minutes too—you’ll notice problems more easily.

Sound preparation and “mental jogging”. When you actually sit down to make music, you shouldn’t just start right away; you need to do some “mental jogging” first. Forget shortcuts like smoking spliffs or drinking beer. Just sit there and listen to music at around 65dB (I use my apple watch to monitor decibel levels). Listen to music for a good 30 minutes to an hour, then make music. Never touch the volume knob. Your ears need to adjust to the right levels of highs, mids, and lows. If you touch that master volume knob, you’ll screw up the exercise.

Learning

To get better at anything, you need to educate yourself. Perhaps you love to learn by yourself (like me), but I swear, it only takes one video or a bit of reading to feel like you’re improving, and you’ll feel silly you didn’t look for that information before. I’m personally always on the hunt for tutorials, even on matters that I know a lot about already, because I want to make sure I know as much as I can about each subject. You’ll often realize that a problem has many ways it can be solved, and it’s important to learn multiple different approaches to achieve a certain result. Why? Sometimes, a certain approach will reach its limits and another one might be a better fit. This also applies to plugins and gear. You might have 3 different compressors, but they all have their own persona and might work better than one another in different contexts.

However, I wouldn’t worry much about tools to start. It’s more important to create conditions where you can properly understand sound, develop healthy habits towards your work, and constantly allow for time and resources to dedicate towards self-improvement.

Tools come and go—what really makes a difference in going from an amateur to a professional is how you understand and use them. Understanding how audio engineering works and how you perceive sound is hugely important.

Good Quality Schools and Learning Hubs

Point Blank Online Music School. I only hear good things about Point Blank, and their tutorials on YouTube always are quality.

Noisegate. I’m currently testing it and got a few tips from there but it’s mostly for new comers.

Puremix. For advanced users and mostly oriented towards Protools. Even so, I’ve learned a lot from them.

Loopmasters. They sell classes and they’re very good; a favourable ratio of get-what-you-pay-for.

SEE ALSO : Make Music Faster: Some Organizational Tips

EQing Resonant Frequencies and Harsh Sounds

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EQing resonant frequencies can be a very difficult task. Once in a while, I see ads in my Facebook feed that claim to reveal some “secret” EQ tips. Recently, I clicked on one just to see what they had to say, and was very disappointed to read stuff like “if your track sounds honky, you need to cut at 500hz…blah blah blah…”, as if a simple cut at a specific range would easily solve everyone’s EQ problems. The thing about EQ’ing music is that one simple solution cannot apply to every case—it’s more complex than that. Yes, there are things that you can do consistently that will make a difference, and yes, in some cases, cutting at a specific frequency can help, but there are other ways to EQ, too.

In this post, I will provide a very high-level outline of how to identify resonances and to fix them with surgical EQ’ing. If you’re an advanced audio nerd, I recommend you carry on with your online searches for EQ tips.

In past articles, I’ve referred to the benefits of shelving EQs in certain cases to fix tonal issues in a song. Using shelving EQs to correct tonal issues is one of the most misunderstood concepts in mixing and it is also, in some ways, probably the easiest to fix. Surgical EQ cuts are the exact opposite, as they are difficult to really explain—especially through a simple blog post—and can be a bit of an esoteric subject.

Training your ears to detect resonances

Ear training is the most important part of EQ’ing and it is also the most difficult to develop; it demands practice and guidance. I’d say roughly 90% of my clients’ projects have bizarre EQ correction(s). I often see multiple cuts, very sharp and very low. When I remove them, I hear no difference in my studio. Why? Probably because of how they hear things at home with their speakers/headphones. Bad referencing is counter-productive, as you might expect. It’s like wearing glasses with a stain on them; you’ll see it everywhere. Problems can also arise from the acoustics of the room which might overload certain frequencies, creating resonances that aren’t in the mix itself, but from the room, which results in people cutting valuable frequencies from their mixes and sounds.

I find it useful to mute a problematic sound and listen to an oscillator on its own, to train your ear to recognize that kind of frequency.

One trick I found useful in developing my understanding of resonances is the use of a keyboard and a simple oscillator (note: Ableton’s Operator will do). When I hear a resonances—which sound a bit like a delay with too much feedback—I would try to play the note on a keyboard with a sine oscillator to mimic what I hear. With the help of a FFT or a great EQ plugin like Fabfilter Pro-Q3, I can then “see” the frequency of my note and compare it to my sound. You want to play them roughly at the same level to see exactly where the resonance is in the spectrum.

Another way to identify a resonant frequency is to take your EQ, starting with a wide Q of about 1, and boost it by 5dB then scroll through the frequency spectrum. This will amplify what you hear in certain ranges and you might notice a resonance. Once you spot a sensitive area, leave your boost on that spot and slowly increase the Q to 2.5, then adjust the covered area to pinpoint where the resonance might be. Once you get to about 5 on your Q, then you can cut down on the problematic frequency, starting by cutting 3dB off. Toggle the bypass on the EQ to see how much of the frequency you removed.

Sometimes resonances are the sum of multiple incoming sounds that have similar frequencies that overload on top of one another. These are nasty because you might want to EQ one sound, but you can’t really pinpoint where the problem is coming from. It’s best to group similar channels and EQ them all together.

I usually tell people to group channels by “sound families” such as all metallic sounds, organic percussion, synths, etc. Grouping can be great for fixing issues, and also to place sounds into a specific spot in the bubble you’re creating in the mix (ex. fore front vs background).

Visually speaking, resonances are often difficult to see on the FFT. Sometimes people believe it’s a simple peak rising, but that might not actually be the case. This is why on the Pro-Q3 or Ableton’s EQ8, you can monitor what you’re altering. But before searching for a resonance, it’s important you hear it first. Otherwise, you’ll go hunting for problems that might not exist, which will create “holes” in your mix (a frequent problem I hear in mastering but luckily it’s easy to fix). If you’re checking for little peaks poking out only visually, sometimes those can actually be pleasant frequencies, but because of a poor listening environment, you might interpret them as bad ones.

My general tip on cutting frequencies is: never too sharp and always start with -4dB. Often you’ll hear resonances from 200hz to 800hz, mostly because a lot of melodic content and ideas have a fundamental note within that range, so some sounds might clash. Also, if you feel you need more than one EQ to fix a problem, just trash the thing you’re trying to fix. It might be garbage and if you need to really alter it that much, there’s something fundamentally wrong with it. Using too many EQ points might also result in phasing issues. Same thing goes for using more than one EQ plugin…it can be risky!

Optimizing your listening conditions and environment is a hugely important thing to do.

Detecting Harshness

Harshness or other difficult frequencies that aren’t resonances can be found at any level of the frequency spectrum. Most of the time, harshness-related issues are around 1-5khz. The human ear finds this range sensitive, and when there are too many sounds in it, it brings confusion, muddiness, and unpleasant feelings.

Harshness can also be a result of the sum of multiple sounds. It’s important to hear everything on its own—specifically similar groups of sounds—then mute them one by one to find out which ones are causing an issue. Once you find the problematic sound, I suggest you try the following corrective techniques:

  • Start by lowering the volume to see if that can help.
  • Try the EQ’ing cut method explained above to see if you can isolate a resonance or something annoying. Try cutting it by 3dB. Cutting along with the volume drop can sometimes be enough to fix a problem.
  • Try panning it to the opposite position. I often see that sounds that are crammed in a same location will clash.
  • Add subtle reverb. This trick can help smooth things out. I’d suggest a reverb at a 10% wet/dry.
  • A chorus effect can sometimes do wonders on certain sounds.
  • Controlling a transient can fix wonders. Instead of cutting with an EQ, just spot the problematic frequency and then use a multiband EQ like Melda’s mTransient to remove some of the attack of that band. Isolate the frequency. If you don’t have a transient shaper, you can create your own with a compressor that has a fast attack.
  • On higher-pitched sounds, a de-esser can really help. If you don’t have one, make sure to grab ERA4 De-esser as it’s affordable and super useful.

Harshness is easier to fix than resonant frequencies—it’s often simply the result of noisy sounds at wrong levels that need adjustments. With practice, your mixes will be clearer and smoother. Train your ears!

SEE ALSO : Creating Depth in Music

The legal pitfalls of underground music

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You’re about to sign a release with an unknown label? You want to do an edit of a track by Billy Eilish? You want to start your own vinyl only label?

We got you covered with this video.

This long interview with lawyer, electronic music expert, Mark Quail who also worked with artists such as Hawtin and Mathew Jonson, will provide you straight and surprising answers you didn’t think of. But I’ll point out a few highlights too as well as personal thoughts.

Ever since I started my coaching group on Facebook, I’ve seen a good number of people turn their home production into a release, which is a great thing but it also opened a can of worms, as in, what does it legally implies. For some reason, many artists feel like the underground is either a safe, no man’s land because it is a place of development and good vibes but it’s not always the case, of course.

Signing your first release or releasing on an unknown label

This is typical for new, emerging artists as bigger labels have their eyes on the bigger names, it’s rare that you’ll see them be interested in investing on younger, less known artists. There’s a reason why and that is clearly because a lesser known name demand a lot more leverage to push it’s release on various channels. Magazines are also less interested in covering them because they might not attract the same number of viewers and the return on your investment is most likely going to be a deficit. Does that mean that releasing on a small label is a bad thing?

No, not really. Building your profile by piggy ridding little labels is a great way to get your name out there. Also, small labels have sometimes a lot of passion for what they do and as Mark points out, a white flag to look for in the label you’ll work with, is how much they can promote your music. If they work their social medias properly and have a following, that’s usually a really great start.

TIP: This is why it’s crucial that when you submit to a label, you can showcase who you are and what you can bring them, plus also be clear on your expectations towards them.

In the video, we also discuss how less known labels often don’t offer a contract. This is so common and cause insecurity among artists so what does it implies? Is the risk big? The answer is grey on that one. In a way, it’s more for the label that a contract is useful. Mainly because if they don’t have a signed agreement that the artist accepts to work with them, they could be in hot waters. But a contract doesn’t mean you’ll get paid though as some labels aren’t the best with numbers and getting your money for sales might be, even with a contract, a pricey process that might not be worth it.

Mark’s tip: Be cautious to not signed multiple track unless you know more of what they can do for you.

A term we sometimes use in the music business is when you “sacrifice” a song for the sake of doing an experiment or to test something. This is something you can do with some labels, new streaming sites, give a free download or any other ideas that you want to test before going all-in. This goes along with what Mark says and in the end, it’s to see where you are fitting the most. It’s basically impossible to know if you’re a good match for a specific label until you give it a go… so does the label.

Starting a label from scratch

This one has been covered in the past and I questioned Mark about the essentials behind this kind of project. Well, as a label, there are all the elements of starting you own business, but also, you need a network, at least 6 releases beforehand to show you’re serious and be prepared to release on a regular basis. This is usually the most important part.

Comes in questions about Publishing, contracts and all that. You don’t need to have long, detailed documents, but it’s important to have something that all parties can understand and know what it means if they sign it.

The advantage of being on a label is the reach it can do for you. So if you want to start one, keep in mind that your main goal is to offer a platform and community for joining artists to expand, be known, reach people who love their music and ultimately, provide a significant income. When it comes to give artists a voice, it will be important to give a space space for the artist to come back over and over for more releases. Usually this is also a good sign that if you see one artist releasing multiple times with the same label, it often means the label can have healthy relationships with their people. As for artists who releases everywhere, it sometimes also means the artist might be hard to work with or that he’s constantly trying to expand.

As a label owner speaking, I can tell you that the last thing you want is to try to control your artists, both in their decisions, in their music and in their requests. This is where an agreement is important and one by email will not be enough. If you have something on paper, it is what you agreed with.

I invite you to read more about my blog post on how to start a label for the right reasons and listen to what Mark adds to that.

TIP from Mark: While some sites will provide you pennies, it’s collecting them that will eventually make dollars. In the penny economy, you need to run after all the crumbles to eventually see something coming out of it. If you don’t take care of that, someone else might collect it (eg. Publishing done wrong).

The limits of sampling

Mark comes up with a known case of where people think that if they sample less than a few seconds, they can get away with it but it doesn’t work that way. Some people do edits of known songs (Billy Eilish was very popular over the summer) and put it as a free download on their Soundcloud and think that’s no big deal. Well, not so fast on those ideas because there is a risk and being in the underground scene is not making you less vulnerable to some backfire.

Well, one important thing to keep in mind that platforms such as Soundcloud, Youtube and Bandcamp are using algorithms that improve really fast and can pinpoint the use of copyrighted material. A few years back, Soundcloud was made fun of because everyone kept getting warnings over material but they got better and we see it happen lesser than before. Youtube is more advanced on that topic and while some people post edits of tracks on there, they’re putting themselves at risks because there’s potentially some bot that might find out. Labels get a notification if that’s the case to which they can check if there was some substantial money made out of it, and then possibly can make legal action. All those clips people make at festivals can, at some point, even make a backfire as that can be a proof a song was performed and publishing could be raised. In Canada, clubs and festivals have to pay an amount to a royalty collecting company on the behalf of artists… who can claim that money later on.

As for people simply using another artist’s music to make it theirs, that can be a bit more complicated but according to Mark’s view, although we didn’t go far on that topic, there’s not much you can do about it and while you could potentially do something, it would become way more expensive than what you’d get in return. But between you and I, the person who doesn’t have morals and does such thing is shooting himself in the foot; he is publicly showing that he’s too creatively limited to do something on his own, also he should know that people will eventually know and that will play against him in his networking attempts.

As for giving away music for free, using other’s samples, a label could claim this does harm to the original track and come after the artist who did that. This is, to my experience, very rare. It was something I’ve seen in the days of mixed CDs where some labels weren’t consulted and that ended up being really bad for the label and artist in the end.

If you perform the known melody of a song and record it yourself, you keep the royalties but the original artist has the publishing rights over it.

In some cases, everyone can be a winner in such scenarios if it’s done right. That means clearing the rights to use the samples. It can be sometimes surprisingly affordable. It’s worth asking and in some case, the original artist might even like what you did and who knows, work with you in other ways.

SEE ALSO : Sending demos to record labels as an “unsigned” artist—an online experiment

Integrating a modular setup with your DAW

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Using modular in Ableton or another DAW of your choice opens up a range of possibilities—from simple multi-tracking where a modular is just one part of the musical whole, to MIDI style sequencing, and to the exchange of complex control voltages between the DAW and modular system.

I’m going to run through the three basic methods of integrating a modular system with your DAW:

  1. Basic synchronization with a clock signal
  2. Sending MIDI from the DAW to a MIDI to CV converter
  3. A purpose-built CV tool to output CV directly 

Clock synchronization

The simplest method of integration is simply sending a clock signal from your DAW to a clock module in your eurorack. That can be as straightforward as sending a regular 1/16th rimshot (or any short sound with a fast attack and sufficient volume) pattern to a clock module. With the volume as high as possible (Euro levels are higher than line) it should work. However, not all clock modules are the same—some might not respond at all to a line-level signal, in which case you’ll need a signal processor to boost your clock signal.

Syncing a clock is computer-modular integration at its most basic. With a clock signal you can record into your DAW and keep things in time with your plugins or other hardware. You don’t have transport controls or any sequencing options.

If the appeal of modular is escaping the computer and your DAW is a necessary evil just for recording purposes, this is the way to go.

MIDI to CV converter

Most synths and all DAWs use MIDI as their main control method. MIDI information includes pitch, note on and note off, and velocity. With the right MIDI to CV module you can utilize all of this information and convert it into CV and gate signals. For flexibility and price, I highly recommend the Mutant Brain module from Hexinverter Electronique, or the CV.OCD from sixty four Pixels (essentially the same thing but in a standalone box).

Unlike CV, which is a continuous signal, MIDI is made of discrete digital signals. These signals have a fairly low resolution, which means they  cannot express a smooth curve. Smooth LFOs and pitch slides—portamento—are beyond MIDI’s capabilities, except through cunning workarounds. So, portamento messages in MIDI simply tell the instrument when to turn on portamento and how long the oscillator should take to slide to the next pitch, but if the MIDI device controlled the oscillator directly and tried to implement portamento, you would hear distinct stepping of pitch. Similarly, you can send MIDI LFOs to some MIDI to CV converters (including the Mutant Brain) as CC messages, but they will be stepped audibly, depending how you are using the LFO.

Still, the ability to tap the vast world of MIDI sequencing—from your everyday piano roll in the DAW of your choice, to ingenious little Max for Live devices, to dazzling iOS apps like Patterning—will be enough for many people.

Custom software and hardware, or a DC-coupled interface

For a long time this section would have included only one company: Expert Sleepers. Their suite of plugins, Silent Way, in conjunction with their ES-series of modules, have offered high resolution integration between DAWs and analog equipment for around ten years. They support both the output and input of control voltages using either one or more of their own ES modules, a DC-coupled audio interface, or a non-dc-coupled interface and some pretty basic DIY circuitry.

What is DC-coupled?

All audio equipment deals with two types of electrical signals—AC and DC. All audio signals are AC (Alternating Current)—they alternate between a positive and a negative polarity. A DC (Direct Current) signal alternates between 0 and a positive voltage, never going into the negative. A DC current should never go into a speaker. Speakers work by pushing the speaker cone in and out/ When the cone is pulled backwards, into the speaker, the voltage is negative; when the cone is pushed outwards, towards the listener, the voltage is positive. A DC current would only push the speaker cone outwards, without letting it spring back equally far—you can probably imagine how this could damage a speaker.

So…in order to send CV signals from your computer you need a device that can output DC voltage. Expert Sleeper’s hardware fills this role. Or you can use a module to provide a DC-offset, such as Doepfer’s A-183-2 or A-138. You might already be using an audio interface with DC-coupled inputs; most notably, all of MOTU’s audio interfaces feature DC-coupled interfaces.

Once you have a means of outputting DC signals, Silent Way offers perfectly smooth LFOs, envelopes, pitch perfect sequencing, smooth portamento directly out of your computer, and lots more.

As I mentioned, for a long time Expert Sleepers was the only company offering this type of product. However, in the past few years a couple of other offerings have appeared. First, in Bitwig Studio, then Ableton came out with a suite of CV Tools in Max for Live. These all offer similar features to Silent Way and which one you prefer might come down to which DAW you’re using.

I’d like to finish by outlining one feature that’s found in all of these products—Silent Way, Bitwig and Abelton’s CV Tools—and which might just be their “killer feature”: automated frequency calibration. With the high resolution control voltage they can output, coupled with your DAW’s ability to analyse audio, you can calibrate your CV signals so that your oscillators track perfectly in tune, over the full audible frequency range–even if they don’t intrinsically track well at all. All those weird, characterful oscillators that are never in tune, the analog drum circuits, the self-resonating filter that sounds amazing but doesn’t respond to anything like 1v/octave – all of these can now be played in tune! This feature makes these products very tempting….

SEE ALSO : Live recording with the Ableton session view