Production Tricks and Useful Tips
This whole world of making music is wiiiide with choices, and there are a LOT of people telling you how you should be using the tools. I think it’s best to understand the tools first, then have a broad palette of different ways to use those tools, and that’s what we look at here; the tricks and techniques we all, eventually, figure out.
All The Side-chains
You will likely have heard of the bass being ducked (turned down) by the kick signal, probably the most used side-chain method. But there are a gazillion more ways to use side-chains and we look at them here.
Parallel Processing
Parallel processing means you are processing a signal more than once, at the same time. For example, heavily distorting a bass sound and playing it at the same time as the original dry bass. There are lots of tricks you can pull here.
Virtual Amps
Most DAWs will have a virtual guitar amp you can send your electric guitar through to get your heavy rock sounds, but had you considered putting anything else, like vocals or drums through them? You should.
Reversing Stuff
People have been reversing sounds since the 1960’s, but it isn’t a trend which is going to die out any time soon! Running the tape in the opposite direction isn’t possible in our DAWs, so we will look at some of the techniques which are available to us, and the control we have over them, to see how we make use of sounds running backwards!
Layering
Layering means when you have multiple instruments playing the same thing. With good instrument and arrangement choices, this can result in a desirable thickening of your material. Let’s look at all the ways we can layer instruments and voices to add depth to your productions.
Tips for Organising
Doing all this music stuff in computer will always create data for you to store, whether it’s project files, recorded audio, MIDI sequences, downloaded samples.. Let’s look at different ways to organise your data and some basic computer healthcare you should probably know.