The 3 most common music production mistakes (and how to fix them!)

hey it's Andrew Huang in my time on earth I think I've probably heard thousands of demos and songs from people just getting into music production I've had an online audience for quite a few years and lots of people just send me stuff and then I also have started doing this online music production class so I'm in there as often as I can be listening to students work so I've heard a lot of people's early work and there are some things that I noticed in like 95% of these tracks some things that just seem to be the things that beginners do so I thought I'd talk about the top three things that I noticed like this and just knock them all out in one video I'm gonna demonstrate everything with a work in progress a song of mine that you will have heard in the subharmonic on video that I posted recently if you watch to the end of that but if you want to skip it you can just go to this time in the song in the video otherwise I think it'll be good to just be familiar with this music before we talk about these three mistakes and how to address them [Music] they make a trashcan [Music] never gonna share [Music] gonna let you go turn [Music] loser [Music] [Music] by far the most common mistake that I hear a lot of beginner producers make is they put too much reverb on everything and it's understandable I've been there too I feel like when you first start making music and playing with effects reverb is a very common one that comes with almost every program and it is such an easy way to transform any kind of dull playing sound into something that feels really big and lush and special and so everyone's natural inclination is to just use way too much of it to put it on too many things to use too extreme settings and have it too loud if I've got a reverb on a track I'll sometimes have it as low as 5% wet I might go up to like 30 or 40 sometimes maybe a little above that if it's like some ambient piece but I'll definitely never go above 50 I feel like 50 to 99 is useless to me because it's just way more reverb than dry signal at that point 100 is useful I'll talk about that in a second but if you're newer to producing you probably want to have that dry wet lower than where you think you need it that would be the first big change the other two things that you should do with your reverb settings are probably have a slightly shorter tail then your first instinct might tell you and also to have it slightly darker we don't we don't have to come the K there we don't have to come the K there now I'm actually gonna delete this reverb completely off this track because I want to show you sins you should put your reverb most of the time on a send track if you don't know what a send track is you can basically send some audio to it so the original audio is still playing but then on the send track whatever effects you put on there you can kind of adjust individually for instance you could put further effects on them you could automate them independently of the original sound and like I'm going to show you here one really good thing about having a reverb on a send is that you can duck it against the vocal so on the send you're gonna want your reverb to be a hundred percent wet so that it's no dry signal just the reverb here I'm using Valhalla vintage verb probably my favorite reverb ever here's what it sounds like we don't have to come the K Day now as you can hear for the style of this song I opted for actually quite a big lush long reverb and that's what felt right to me but I'm gonna keep that from clashing with my track by turning on this track spacer plug-in I love this thing this is like a sidechain but only for certain frequencies so when I'm sending the verse vocals to track spacer it's going to turn down the frequencies of the reverb while I'm singing based on the exact frequencies that are in my voice we don't have to come the K there you hear when I'm singing the reverb really turns down in volume although it's only in the areas of the frequency spectrum that my voice occupies you can still hear a bit of that higher end shimmer and so that really helps to keep a mix clean because you still want that feeling of the big reverb but you don't need to hear it really all like washed out when I'm actually singing the words and then another thing I sometimes do is just have a normal side chain compressor that's triggered by the kick so the reverb is also ducking during the kicks we don't have to come the K there and then the last thing with reverb that I see a lot of beginners do is they just use one reverb for everything either they have one reverb on a send and they send everything to it or they find one reverb preset that they like and they put it on almost all of their instruments it's so important to dial in individual reverb settings for different elements of your song you might send different amounts of them to the same reverb or you might have entirely different reverbs for different instruments so we were looking at my vocal verb here but I've also got a verb on the snare I've got this mega verb a room verb a big verb don't even remember what those are on verb for the Tom's verb for the gang vocals and then also two different delay tracks because sometimes a delay is great to use instead of or in conjunction with a reverb to kind of create a different sense of space so it definitely takes a bit of time and finessing but it's so worth it to use different kinds of reverbs on different parts of your songs to really create a vibe and create a sense of space that's not just like one cavern in a lot of beginner productions usually the vocals are mixed too quiet speaking from my own experience and maybe this is true for some of you I was not as confident in my voice or in my expression of my ideas when I was first starting recording stuff so I would kind of hide the vocal behind the instruments behind other things in the song that I felt like I was either better at or that sounded cooler I would just really push my vocal down in the mix and I hear a lot of people do this as well when they start out and it is tricky to mix vocals it's something that you definitely get better at the more you do it and I find in a lot of tracks a difference of a decibel or half a decibel can even make a lot of difference and so something that I'll do on a lot of tracks is throw on some kind of volume automation device I don't like doing it on the actual track fader I like to keep that free for mixing but if we click here on my vocal you can see I've done a bit of automation like this line happens when there's like a big impact sound so it needed to be a bit louder to sit over top of everything that was happening but by the time that impact fades away I bring the vocal down and it's got a very slight growth all the way through the verse because throughout the verse all of the instruments are kind of building up [Music] we don't have a car okay so you can hear when I play it back there it doesn't sound like the first line is a bunch louder than the second line but it's because it has to compete with more in that moment so ultimately that feels more natural to have them to decibels different and this song isn't even complete yet this is something I made in a day and a half for that subharmonic on video that I dropped recently so there might be even more finessing that I would do with this and a lot of tracks my vocal automation ends up being just a whole bunch of squiggles because you really want to get it right and that's something that takes time and it's something that you get better at with time [Music] now finally mistake number three and I would say this is the trickiest one to remedy is parts being too static when you're starting out you'll be focusing a lot more on bigger ideas on your writing and structure and you know coming up with what your instruments are playing and rightly so those are very important foundational elements to any track but the next step to that is to make those parts come alive to have them be more dynamic than just playing the same thing all the way through a section or even all the way through a song I see a lot now I said this is a tricky thing to remedy and that's because of course it's really dependent on what your track needs so I'll just rapid-fire through a bunch of the things that I did in this track that I would say are different from how when I was starting out I would just kind of like put my instruments down and be done with them these are some additional finer detail changes that I made that really helped the track come alive so we've got this bass and chord part that are pretty consistent they're actually the same in the verses and the chorus is because the way I wrote this song you just happen to use the same chord progression in both the verse and the chorus as I play these parts you can hear they're constantly changing they're always growing a little bit more in intensity so in this bass I've got the filter envelope growing and changing in different sections on the sub harmonic on part as I was recording that I was playing with the filter cutoff and the envelope I believe both the filter and the amplitude envelope so even though those parts are constantly playing the same notes they are never playing them the same way with the snare drum you can see here I've got some effects I've got spiff and an EQ a that only turn on during certain sections I'm also automating the reverb send on the snare to be on and off in different sections so let's hear what some of these differences sound like it almost sounds like two completely different snares but it's the exact same samples going through different processing the kick again is doing the exact same thing in the verses as the choruses but in the verses I've got it turned down by two decibels I've got the saturation a little bit lower than in the chorus and in the chorus I also turn on this waves our bass plug-in just to give it a bit more oomph there's a difference between those two first kick chorus kick and then the other thing to keep things alive is ear candy you can see I've got a whole bunch of parts here that just play like every once in a while most of their tracks are blank so we've got some risers [Music] Tom pills this thing in the chorus that I called twinkle and that's what kind of stuff you don't even consciously notice in the chorus but if it weren't there the atmosphere would just be a little drier I hope you're seeing there's a lot of stuff you're gonna do in your songs that no one's gonna know is there except you they won't know it on a mental level but they will definitely feel it little chime part that only comes in once in a while here it's just playing one note so hopefully this inspired some strategies for you there are really infinite possibilities when it comes to this stuff but the important thing to remember is for most instruments and Mo's don Rah's you want to avoid your parts being static if his video was helpful for you there's a ton of stuff like it in my online course we go way longer way deeper harder better faster stronger a class walks you through finishing three tracks of your own in 30 days it's a intensive process but I think really worth it if you have some time to put into it I think you get a lot out of it you can use any DAW I do teach in Ableton but I try to teach the principles so they're applicable and pretty much any music software and that's really all you need to take the course although it can be helpful to have a MIDI controller maybe a microphone headphones just a few basics like that but you can do it if you just have any DAW there's a frequently asked questions at learn monthly calm slash Andrew so hopefully any question you might have about the course is answered there but if it's not you can email support at learn monthly calm or like tweet me try to respond to all of those and yeah that's pretty much it thanks for watching hope you got something out of this video and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 850,562

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, ontario, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to, how to make music, music producer, making music, ableton, how to write a song, making a song, sing, songwriting, learn music, reverb, music production tips, music tips, mixing vocals, mixing, mix, music class, tutorial, plugins, valhalla, vintage, verb, vst

Id: BzN2uM4ke-0

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020