It's been a while since I promised a post about one of a number of music production techniques I use: non linear music production. The very first album I did using this technique and really sticking to rules of it was Intra; and then I recently went deep in to...
One of my favorite things about making music is to combine recordings of random things I find or field recordings to include in my music - a great, simple way to do that is with an iPhone microphone. Since this is a topic I often cover in this blog, I...
Creating movement in electronic music One of the most misunderstood concepts in electronic music is movement. By movement, I am referring to the way that each sound constantly evolves throughout a song. I was once talking with someone who is very into modular synthesizers and he was saying that he cannot...
Following up on the previous post in this series, I'll outline some final tweaks and advanced clip settings for your live set. There's a lot to cover here but I'll try to condense it down to the essentials. Final Tweaks As your set is likely now taking form, you should have different...
Since starting my label, and after years of dealing with large numbers of demo submissions and artists, I've noticed that most of the time new producers and musicians make the same kinds of errors when they are early in their audio producing years. When I started my studio full-time I...
The 2-minute Soundcloud preview method, as I call it, is about creating tracks previews that are 2 minutes long. Why that length? If you look at most track previews labels and artists are sharing online, they're about 2 minutes in length. This unofficial standard got popular during the early days of...
If there's one thing that haunts all artists, it's entering a phase where you're not getting booked for shows, or not getting any attention in general. Perhaps you were enjoying a phase of being booked frequently that's now coming to an end, or perhaps the music ecosystem is changing and...
Around 2008, as I was coming back from the doctor's office, I felt completely lost. He told me that I had to change what I was doing because I was heading straight for creative burnout. At that time, in my career, I felt like it was in its peak: I...
After the first two parts on this series of posts about playing electronic music live, we arrive at our final topic: clip arrangements, song organization and sound preparation. Clip Preparation I hope you did your homework from part two where I asked you to take your arrangements and turn them into an...
Lately I've been working on a live set, and I realized that I have a personal checklist I use to see if I covered everything to help me decide if a particular song is finished; from little details to bigger things, sometimes it's easy to overlook important factors. Just like...
After deciding the direction your live set will take, we will now discuss how to prepare a live electronic set in terms of how we approach each individual song, or moments as I call them. This article is the follow up to Playing Electronic Music Live – How to Prepare...
Playing electronic music live is a huge topic and I could dedicate an entire blog to it; this is the first in a series of posts outlining some advice to help electronic and computer-based musicians perform a live set. My goal here is to cover everything you need to know...
I'm a father and have a family of my own. I'm often asked how I can still manage to find the time to make music amidst the chaos of all of the moving parts of my life. There's no perfect way to balance everything life throws at you–balancing music and...
This post follows a previous one I made regarding the minimum equipment needed to make music; due to the popularity of that post and the number of questions I had afterwards, I wanted to dive deeper into my thoughts on this. I'm often asked what matters the most between equipment, experience,...
cover photo by Emma Simpson It's interesting that somehow, music making has become a competition. If you think about competition in music and take the time to really examine this viewpoint objectively, this trend seems quite ironic. Before I debunk this common musical syndrome I often see in people I work...
I've put together a free Ableton template after receiving feedback that it was very helpful for many people I've worked with. The template available on this page is aimed specifically at mixing. I've noticed that many aspects of mixing are often misunderstood; I've assembled a starting template that has bundled...
