Updates, Tips, etc.

Hi!

Right away, wanna let ya'll know that presets are gonna be a bit later in the day. I usually drop at 6am, I have a few more to finish. I just got home and tried opening Serum but my brain is toast from a ridiculous week. Ima wrap it up in the AM and get them posted ASAP.

Making a promise right here to have at least one, but probably 2 new exclusive tutorials up for you guys later this week. Sorry on the lack of those!

Some tips that I learned or helped me out in the studio this week:

1. Start your sessions with a warmup:

It's been really helping for me to start my day with 30min - 1hr of just producing junk. Maybe it's a hip hop beat, maybe it's remixing a funny audio from tiktok, sometimes I'm just messing around with plugins I don't normally use. Sometimes I'll download a few small free plugins to try and get some juices flowing, or just listen through some 70s-90s music till something inspires me. Watching interviews with musicians, live streams in the studio, etc. also helps. But it's imperitave that you don't just go into the studio cold turkey. 

Your brain is a muscle, like the rest of your body. A professional gymnast won't compete without a proper stretch and practice round, a fighter is in the dressing room hitting pads all day before the fight, football players get a good sweat going before the first kick. You know what I mean. It's actually DANGEROUS for your mental health to try to get to work in the studio cold turkey. As a creative, our minds are susceptible to the creative energy in our environment. Starting a session on the wrong foot could trigger a snowball effect, so stretch your brain.

2. Workout:

If you wanna take the first tip deeper, you should be working out. Yeah, like lifting weights, doing pushups, running, etc. It's pretty well known that working out has a positive effect on your cognitive function. I can't stress enough how much more productive my days in the studio are when I start them with a workout.

The great thing is, you could knock out your studio warmup while doing this. While I workout, I like to watch James Hype's Moving Differently series on Youtube. It gets me extremely motivated for where I want to be in the industry. When I'm out of those episodes, I love watching KSHMR speak in interviews and keynotes, the guy is brilliant. I also watch Disclosure's production streams and other producer videos on Youtube. When I do this, I'm itching to get in the chair and start working.

I was in amazing shape up until about 24. I worked out pretty much every day since I was a child, growing up as an internationally competitive gymnast and transitioning into power lifiting. I let go of it when music and work got busy, and I found a long term girlfriend. That was pretty detrimental, and one of the main reasons why I had a huge hiatus between 2017-2020. After my biiiig surge of music mid 2022 I lost a little bit of my spark in the studio, which was saved by the rekindling of my relationship with the weights. I have weights in the studio, and have been setting aside at least 45min in the morning 3-4 times a week before work to lift. That's definitely going to increase, the results are practically adderall.

3. Multiband Dynamics are ELITE and are not dethroned by Dynamic EQs:

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my Fabfilter Pro Q. Dynamic EQs are definitely my go-to for final polishing on all of my sounds. HOWEVER...

I've been trying to work a multiband compressor into any of my more prominent sounds. Leads, Basses, ESPECIALLY vocals. The reason is because of makeup gain.

Makeup gain, in my recently adjusted opinion, doesn't work the same in a Dynamic EQ as it does in a Multiband Dynamics plugin. In an EQ, makeup gain has a very gentle logarithmic frequency rolloff. And why wouldn't it? That's kind of what an EQ does. With a multiband compressor, you have a bit more abrupt logarithmic rollofs between bands, when you add makeup gain to a high band per say, that shit is gonna be BRIGHT.

It's a great affect for adding air or body into sounds and controlling their dynamics at the same time. Leave the dynamic EQing for more surgically precise compressions. I like to leave my ratios around 3-4:1, and I look for about -3 to -5dB of gain reduction from the threshold. Once I have my sound compressing, I could decide where I need that makeup gain and how much. It's amazing for bringing vocals to a loud PRESENCE (not volume) without sacrificing any headroom. 

Try this yourself, grab a dry vocal and put a dynamic EQ on there. Make a big bell curve from 8kHz to 20kHz. Make the band dynamic and get the gain reduction around -5dB. Then add 2-3dB of gain to that bell curve's EQ point.

Then, turn that off, add a multiband compressor, create a band in the same range, and make it push -5db of gain reduction. Add the same amount of makeup gain and compare the two plugins with device on/off. The multiband should pump a lot more highs into the vocal and keep the output volume on your mixer relative level.

4. Saturators and Distortions are dope with a ton of distortion and an extremely low mix:

I've been doing this for a while but I just have to reiterate. When you're adding saturation or distortion to sounds, try the method of HEAVY distortion with a low mix. If you're just looking for tone, this is the way

5. Start working on having a surface understanding of music theory

I think this is just a culmination of what I've seen in lessons and in the industry recently. Due to the accesibility of production these days, I feel that the concept of music theory is being brushed over too much. As soon as you ask some guys to step a note off that's not the low 10th or the 3rd, it becomes a foreign language.

I actually have 0 music theory training and everything I know about notes and scales, I learned from looking at MIDI. It's really important that you pay attention to the notes you're using and why they invoke the feelings that they do.  The great thing is that Music Theory is something you could learn in abstract. It could be a video or a teacher that shows you the way, but the sheer "this sounds good" aspect of trying new things in the studio will also teach you what you need to know. But the only way you'll learn is by paying attention to it.

6. One last tip for the new guys in this scene: USE REFERENCE SONGS

God I can't stress this enough. You should be using reference songs at all points of your production. When I started learning, it was back in 2012 when there was like 3 people on Youtube doing tutorials, and 90% of reddit production forums was musically uneducated. The best way I had to learn was to drop songs directly into my project and try to copy them verbatim. And still, to this day, I think it's the FASTEST way to learn.

Take a song that really inspires you for your style, drop it in your project, and start reproducing it piece by piece. Take the time to try to dial in the synths, even if you have to use presets and then tweak them to get close, it's a fantastic way to learn sound design. Try to copy their melodies into your own midi using your ears, this is a great way to recognize sequences, scale, etc.

Following the structure right down to every hi-hat of someone who's done it successfully is a secret weapon in knowledge gathering. When you think about these individual parts of the song deeper, it helps you understand them and why they're important. Doing all of this helps you understand how a proper composition should be built.

Once you're able to do this, move onto just copying the structure and sound/sample choices of a song into your own song. The modern Proppa song structure of about 169-177 bars with 3 drops, 3 builds, and 2 breaks is translated directly from my favorite artists—a formula I dialed in only less than I year ago. That said, I still do this shit 13 years into my career.

Big mouthful here, hope it's useful. Love you guys and talk soon <3