5 Habits I Had To UNLEARN To Become A Better Music Producer

let say you're working on a sick house banger but your kick just isn't hitting right try to out a little bit of processing why not you put a compressor on there maybe glue compressor I don't know maybe some couple eqs uh Channel EQ eq8 maybe do a little you know little something like that or you know threshold uh there we go and then you do more of this and then like I don't know maybe need change [Music] so [Music] okay so Che it the first producing habit I had to unlearn is avoiding clipping at any costs clipping or going into the red basically means going above zero DB on any track now I'm not saying you got to clip Derek's piano recital but if you're trying to make some stupid ignorant music like [Music] this oh clipping it actually so bad so what's actually going on when we clip well let me demonstrate first with a really basic sound sine wave sounds like this and let's actually look at it with you know oscilloscope here so we got our trusty beautiful round sine wave and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run it through a saturator on the digital clip setting this basically simulates what's going on when you clip or going into the red on any track enablon so watch this I'm going to crank the drive on the saturator and all of a sudden our beautiful soft round sign turns it into an ugly angular Square Wave It's essentially chopping off the tops and bottoms of the waveform turning that sine wave into a square and what that's doing is it's making the sound super bright beautiful and Buzzy by adding a bunch of harmonics to it so we can actually take a look at that with the Spectrum if I put the drive back down we just got that one single fundamental as soon as I crank the drive we're getting all sorts of crazy harmonics over the top but I would argue an even more powerful side effect is how it reduces peaks of a sound so check it out I have this stupid drum Loop sounds kind of like this now let me turn the saturator on and off see how much the green volume bars jump up with it off we're almost at the tippy top there and then back on now check it out it's totally squashed the Peaks the loudest part parts of the drum Loop so it's essentially working as a sort of limiter or compressor by turning down the loud parts of the sound we're allowed to crank up the volume of the drums overall and get a super loud in yourface drum sound modern electronic music wants to be ridiculously loud super inyour face so clipping is actually a great way of getting there the second bad habit I had to overcome is processing the out of my drum sounds you duplicate this chain more chains you know instead of maybe putting a ridiculous amount of processing on your kicks maybe just I don't know pick a different kick sample try finding a not kick put that in the drum rack and get rid of all this suit nny and what do you know it's not all right so we know now not to process the out of our drum sounds anymore let's take it back to that sweet Rhythm track I was playing [Music] earlier now we already discussed that this track sounds amazing but here's the sitch I only have eight bars of this what the heck am I supposed to do now well that brings me to bad habit number three contracting lupias lupias is a disease where you just spend all your creative juices on the first eight bars of your track and you have nowhere to go from there now there's a couple ways you can get out of it for example in my USA drum series I'm always starting with at least four different drum Clips at different energy levels that way we have four different jumping off points to start our song with you can't put your eggs all in one basket there's just too many baskets and finally it's important to understand that with every new song you start there's a honeymoon phase it's fresh it's exciting you're not disgusted by each other's weird habits yet that is where most of the important work can be done so don't squander it by putting a ridiculous number of effects on your drums or perfecting the mix and Master on your first 10 seconds of your track use that time wisely and try to get the broad Strokes in first before getting in on the details wowzers all right so let's say you finally overcome lupias what's next well bad habit number four is not using a reference track a reference track is a song by another artist similar to the style or genre you're going for that you want your track to kind of emulate or sound like for example if we go back to my uh Rhythm track right here I've got a leotrix track in there called follow your heart I'll always put a loudness meter on the master I'm using the Uline loudness meter here it's free and what I'm paying attention to here is the integrated LS that's basically the average loudness of my song versus the reference track and I kind of want them to match because I want my song to be at the loudness standard of the genre that I'm in so if we listen back to my track let's reset this I'm coming in at around minus5 is and then if we listen to good old Leo here all right pretty much on point sometimes I'll turn down the reference track to match the loudness of my song If I not yet at the mastering stage whatever you need to do to make the comparison between the two tracks easier another thing I like to do is have a spectrum on the master I'll usually reset it like this I'll click on auto here to turn that auto resizing function off and then I'll use these sliders to zoom in on the low end that way I can see exactly how much sub is in the reference track and use that information to turn up or down the sub on my song so looks like they're peeking around I don't know minus 4ish DB let's listen back to my track and I'm a little bit higher but sort of in the ballpark so we're chilling there so you can kind of see how useful reference tracks can be from a mixing perspective but even more so they might be useful from an arrangement perspective what I'm going to do next now is use the locators in the arrangement view to Mark the different sections of the song so just right click here add locator intro move that to the left let's go over here okay looks like we're doing the buildup there so we'll add another Lego cater called buildup buildup build up buildup buildup uh even more buildup so let's just call this buildup part two and then finally locator there sick and now I have a map to approach the arrangement of my song If I just follow the blueprint that the Leo Trix track gave me it takes a lot of the guess work out of arranging all right so you've arranged out your track you've completed your mix you've conquered lupias you're finally ready to show off your song to your boys and your friends 2002 Camry so you ask him to pass the ox your song comes on and it sounds terrible I mean there's like no Bas bro well bad habit number five is trying to make your song sound good on every system okay there's just some really terrible speaker systems out there speakers that no matter what you do it's going to sound like so instead of trying to make mixing decisions on a bunch of different systems that you barely even know try to stick to one or two systems that you know like the back of your hand and really only mix or pay attention on those and even if you are trying to mix on maybe not the best headphones that's okay as long as you're using reference tracks if the reference tracks sound terrible all you have to do is make your track sound terrible in the exact same way and you are good so the next time you put on one of your shits songs for the boys in the Camry and it sounds terrible just know that you can always tell yourself it's probably the car wowzers thanks for watching if you like the videos and want to support feel free to check out my patreon or join my Discord to gain access to community of like-minded producers I'm underbelly have a great [Music] day

Channel: You Suck at Producing

Views: 152,178

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Id: wTugkLmMSCM

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024