I recently played a live set at StereoBar in Montreal for the launch of my album Returning Home and it was very interesting to create a live set from scratch, following the advice of this series I've written over the past few months about playing electronic music live. I'd like...
When it comes to mixing and mastering, my work involves to listening to many, many songs. Some are great, while others need more love, but from the numerous songs I hear daily I can pinpoint one important thing that makes a song stand out the most: arrangements. I believe your...
Every now and then, someone comes to me for mixing or mastering and will ask if I can introduce them to a label. In some cases, I do, but I can't guarantee it will lead to anything in the end; sometimes it works and when it doesn't. I often hear...
You often hear about setting music goals to keep your drive going and to get you pointed in the right direction. I've previously discussed the best ways to set goals and reach them, but as time has gone on, I'm not totally sure if setting goals is still the most...
In the previous four posts about playing electronic music live, I've basically covered everything you need to do before playing live. Now comes the moment of truth, where you're basically ready and booked to play. This post will be covering the last mile of preparations including how to do a...
In this blog, I've already discussed many ways of playing with your track to create new textures and variations and how to keep your sounds interesting. I'd like to discuss another way of colouring your music: transient shaping; something that can completely change the way a track sounds and feels,...
I'm going to be very honest here and say that if you enjoy my blog and want to support me in my goal to share my knowledge, you can buy directly from the links below as this will provide me a little commission in return. Thank you! Due to popular demand...
The idea for a music retreat came from a discussion I was having with my friend Fred about the need to just flee the city with some fellow music producers to spend a weekend making music. I mean, being in the country, being with friends, and then be able to...
Most people enjoy discussing music technically in terms of production as we all wonder where to start and how to handle ideas in order to make a song. I also follow many magazines and articles which cover how the brain perceives creativity, where it starts, and how to invoke it...
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...
