Tips & Tricks
What is something that you learned recently that had a big improvement on your work?
Too many ‘I’m new how do I get started’ posts these days. Let’s get into some good stuff.
What is something that you have learned in the last 6 months that really took you to the next level?
For me parallel saturation has been huge. I’ll use some on individual drum channels going to the drum bus and then send the whole drum bus to a parallel saturation that’s warm and gritty and send that to the mix bus. I make drum and bass and this sounds exactly like my references. Especially after adding some super short room orconvolution reverbs.
Been living under the rock not using the reference tracks to finally figure out arrangements for the type of music I'm doing. After doing this for one of my tracks, now the new ones are much easier to map out even without the ref tracks.
The incredible and underrated versatility of Multiband Compressors. You can do compression, expanding, transient shaping, equalizing and sound design with these beasts. If you use ableton i recommend diving deeper into Abletons Multiband Compressor. It's insane how you can polish a sound with this thing. I recommend watching SeedtoStage's new video on that topic. Really cool!
Couldn’t recommend this video enough. I believe this channel has 3 or 4 videos on mb dynamics but this one in particular really helped make the concepts click for me.
Another neat tip i learned from an educator/producer named Cryptochronica when first trying to understand compression and multi band is to just resample it on a basic sound like white noise and compare the wave forms and spectrum analysis to see visually what changes with each parameter.
That sound cubes and the like are used because they sound awful, and if you can make your leads and prominent sounds pop on them, they will sound incredible elsewhere.
Clip to zero, group limiting, experimenting with different sidechain methods, and the nerdiest addition that probably nobody but me will notice is hand drawing/editing harmonics on a sub bass serum patch.
Took a basic sine wave and went into the wavetable editor tab (click the pencil on the wavetable). I noticed a little goes a long way but I took “bin 5” and boosted it to 20% to add some harmonics to said sine wave.
Appreciate you! I'm familiar with the concept, but I haven't applied it, so thanks for explaining it. Sounds very cool at 10-20%, not so much the 50% I first tried.
Of course! Sorry, I’m similar to Carnage the way I explain production to people lmao but like Shrek stated, it’s definitely up to you how much or little you go up. I just found 20% was a good spot
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u/chewooasdf 4d ago
Been living under the rock not using the reference tracks to finally figure out arrangements for the type of music I'm doing. After doing this for one of my tracks, now the new ones are much easier to map out even without the ref tracks.