The Process For Electronic Music Production

The path to finishing release quality songs consistently in any style

By

Jason Timothy

Table of Contents

Introduction

Step 1: Important Daily Habits

Step 2: Understanding the basics

Step 3: Listening like a pro

Step 4: Know your tools

Step 5: Collecting samples, kits & presets

Step 6: Create your looped groove

Step 7: Add the meat

Step 8: Arrangement

Step 9: Sound Design Essentials

Step10: Create a sound palette the easy way

Step 11: Simple sound manipulation

Step 12: Builds & breakdowns

Step 13: Keeping your song interesting

Step 14: The power of sends & returns

Step 15: Important mixing tips

Step 16: Take notes

Step 17: Shortcuts to finishing more music

Step 18: Promote yourself & Get signed

Introduction

What I am going to share within these pages is an approach to making music that dramatically transformed my music making as well as 1000's of my students over the years. It allowed me to 10x my productive output, while also improving the quality of my music and maintaining my own unique voice.

Lets face it. If you are an aspiring producer making electronic based music, it can seem like an insurmountable task to get from nowhere to creating release quality songs consistently. Nothing I share here is an attempt to get you to copy my particular style of music. The goal is to make you better at sharing your own unique voice. This process should be relevant to you even if you change styles 10 times over the course of your music making journey.

This book was written to give you the foundations & process of music production, so you can focus on being creative without running up against roadblocks. If you always know where you are in the process, you'll almost never feel overwhelmed by the task to creating & finishing release quality music.

If you are reading this book, then you probably feel that there are so many aspects of music production that it's hard to even know where to start. You've got to decide what type of music you're making, pick a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) & then learn the software front and back. Then you need to figure out how to get the ideas & sounds you hear in your head into your computer. Let's not even get started on effects, instruments, controllers, music theory, song arrangement, mixing & mastering. If that isn't enough, you get to learn how to promote yourself & build a fan base that actually wants to support you with their hard earned money.

I know this sounds like a pretty big mountain to climb, but trust me, you can do this & it doesn't have to be so complicated. Is there a lot to learn? Yes. Do you need to know everything to start making great songs? No, you don't. You just need to know enough to be dangerous. My goal is to get you there so you can create with confidence while you slowly pick up on some of the more subtle aspects of music production.

The one thing that is most important for you to know now is that everybody goes through the stage of not knowing. Everybody struggles to figure this stuff out.  Sadly, many potentially great producers give up too soon & will never know what could have been. I want to compress what took me decades to learn into a matter of weeks.

I've wanted to write this book for a number of years & I must admit that I almost didn't write this book at all. Putting into words the monumental task of producing music you can be proud of is not an easy task. Even with 30 years of music making under my belt, there will always be new information, tools & techniques that come along. This isn't by any means a definitive guide to everything you'll ever want to know about music making. That would be impossible.

My hopes are that I am able to offer a process that you can continue to implement, regardless of changes in tools & technology. I want this book to be as relevant in 25 years as it was when I wrote it. Although there will be some technical jargon & you may hear some words you aren't currently familiar with, my goal is to break things down in simple english. I never liked user manuals much & I don't want this book to read like one.

I want this to feel more like a friend sitting down with you having a normal conversation without talking over your head. This is how I have been teaching my 1 on 1 coaching clients for the last 20 years and I've found it much more personable & effective. I am not that different than you & I didn't have any natural gift to music making. I just happen to have tried a lot of things, failed a lot & in the process, discovered what has worked well for me & those I have shared this with. I am here to teach you what I understand from personal experience. Nothing more.

Einstein once said "Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex". He also said “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself”. This has been my philosophy with all the training & coaching I do. I don't want to add any extra confusion to such a broad subject. I want this book to inspire you in very actionable ways, so you can move toward making your best work as painlessly as possible.

I've created audio & video examples to better illustrate some of the concepts in this book. I encourage you to bookmark the page as an extra resource. Just a quick warning though. Don't be tempted to binge the content. You want a balance of learning 1 step at a time & then implementing what you have learned before devouring more information. This insures you are actually integrating what you are learning. I go really deep into this philosophy with my first book "The Mental Game Of Electronic Music Production". Here's the link: https://musicsoftwaretraining.com/theprocess

With that out of the way, let's move on.

Don't bring previous experiences to this process

I am pretty confident that this is not the first thing you've picked up on your journey to creating release quality music. If you are like most aspiring producers, I'm sure you have scoured much of the internet searching high & low for solutions. You may have even invested in a course or coaching.

Many students that find their way to me have been trying to gather as much information as possible to solve their current issues in hopes of getting better results. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, information rarely creates transformation. If information lead to your success, I imagine you would already be exactly where you would like to be with your music making. I am going to assert that there is a missing element that 99% of music courses & coaches seem to gloss over, or skip altogether.

Music is often more mental than technical, so if you have struggled in the past with free or paid information, I am going to ask that you set that aside as you go through this process. Let go of your need to control your process & allow yourself to be guided. Think of it like trying on a new coat. You can always take it off later or tailor things to your liking, but I urge you to allow me to guide you all the way through the process at least once.

Once you start to see results, you can start inserting your own preferences, but for now, allow yourself to be guided. Clear your mind & let go of your fears. I'm going to help you finish songs you can be proud of.

My Story

My music journey into electronic music started in 1996. I had just finished playing guitar & doing drum & synth programming for my band. At the time I didn't have a computer. I was using all hardware, so I didn't have a clue about anything computer related. Lucky for me, I had gotten a job at Guitar Center. It was a terrible job with 1 saving grace.

Music software was pretty new & most programs were at version 1.0. The companies would give free software to employees in hopes we would learn it, love it & sell more of it. I tried all the software available at the time. Cakewalk, Cubase, Studio Vision & later Acid & Fruity Loops. I wasn't great at creating my own electronic music at the time, but I was good enough to record & mix other bands.

Over time I became the go to guy when anyone would have a technical issue. I was a pretty terrible sales person, but I definitely saved a lot of sales for other employees who had sold software to their customers. Regardless, I didn't get paid for saving other people's sales. I got paid for my own sales numbers, which weren't great. I was, however, starting to build relationships with my customers because of my technical knowledge. I had a number of them pay me to get their studios set up, troubleshoot issues & teach them the software they had purchased. I saw this as my way out of a dead end job & in 1999, I quit.

I got really good at teaching people to make music on their computers & at the same time I was getting better at making my own music. Although I went through some slim times, this kept me afloat without the need to get another 9-5 job.

I partnered up with a friend & we started trying to make music together. Our first track probably had 20 renditions & took 18 months. Yes, 1 & a half years! To our surprise, it actually caught the attention of some quite large DJs at the time & started getting big plays. The problem is, we had no idea how we did what we did & got really uncomfortable with making new music. After a great run with 2 songs, we just seemed to run out of creative juice & confidence and had lost our opportunity to capitalize on our early success.

Soon I was back to working on my own. This was a long road & there were a lot of failures that happened along my journey. It took about a decade of hard work to finally find my sound & my flow. I was trying to do everything on my own & my stubbornness cost me a lot of time that I'll never get back. My hope for you is that the following pages will help you skip ahead of many of the challenges I faced (I faced pretty much all of them) and get you to a place of creative confidence.

Regardless of your DAW of choice, the process I am going to share should be completely doable for you. I am not going to play favorites, because honestly, the best DAW is the one you are most comfortable with & able to finish the most songs in.

Get comfortable, strap in & let's get to work.

Step 1: Important Daily Habits

One thing I noticed while coaching my students, was that many of my students were going on to greater success than I had & although I was thrilled for them, it made me question why that was the case. I clearly had more knowledge & technical skill at the time. Wasn't that suppose to be the determining factor for success?

This brought me to a very important epiphany. Perhaps there is more to music making than having all the information & technical skills. Maybe there was a missing element that, if I found it, I could get even better results with less need to for the technical skill & a head full of information. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter how much information you have in your head. If you have poor habits, you are not going to put any of that to use, and thus, you won't get the results that you want.

Defining your daily habits is of utmost importance to anyone trying to do something creative, because you're going to run into a lot of mental challenges, and it's your daily habits that are going to see you through.

Not your technical skills. Not the wealth of information that you have.

It's really going to come down to what you practice daily, because when you practice something daily, it becomes second nature to you. It becomes automatic. You need these habits to be automatic, in order to avoid overthinking. Changing habits can be a very difficult thing. That's why it's so important to practice these every day and devote yourself to a process.

I stole this quote from one of my favorite books on creativity called The War of Art.

"There's a secret that real writers know that want to be writers don't and the secret is this.... It's not the writing part that's hard, it's the sitting down to write."

This is very true with music making. When you think about something in your head, you make it much more difficult for yourself than if you just went to the process of sitting down at your desk, turning on your software and just getting to work. You'll be surprised how you can start off very unmotivated, and just through the process of sitting down every day and being committed to a certain amount of time of the day, you'll find that things just start happening for you.

I want you to believe this. I want you to trust this process, and I want you to experience this for yourself. Even when you don't feel like doing something. Even when you don't feel like doing the lesson that I laid out for you, it's very important that you just go through the process, regardless. Start doing this for a few days in a row, and you'll definitely see a difference in your motivation and in your ability to find the time that you didn't think you had. Your ability to sit down and focus without being distracted is going to make or break your success in this process, so you really want to take this seriously.

It's really important that you commit to this on a daily basis. It can quickly bring you to the top 5% in your field pretty quickly. Think about it. By just sitting down daily and doing your work, you can put yourself in the top five percentile of music producers.

This is going to help you avoid being cast with all the other producers around. Most producers are not very productive. By just putting this practice into place, not only will you be more focused and productive, but your results are going to be better because you are practicing your skills every day. If you want to rise above 95% of music producers, this is a process that's going to get you there.

Lack of commitment and resistance are the enemy of art and the artist. That is really your only enemy. It's not talent. It's not technical skills. It's resistance. If you resist sitting down to do your work, your work is never going to get done. You're also never going to have focus and you're never going to get better.

Anyone who's successful has been able to fight resistance and fear. If you want to be great at what you do, then you need to recognize resistance in all aspects of your life, especially in your creative life. If you could recognize this and put a stop to resistance and do the necessary things, even when you don't feel like it, you're going to find that you have less and less resistance.  When you do feel resistance, it's going to be an automatic trigger for you to get to work instead of resisting.  I really want you to consider that if you can beat resistance, everything else for you is going to fall into place.

What you want to accomplish in the next 30-60 days has less to do with your technical or musical abilities and more to do with your level of focus on the right things in the right order. You can have all the answers out there. It's simply a matter of Googling. The problem is filling your head with a bunch of information without having a process.  It's like reading a whole encyclopedia from A to Z and then expecting to retain the parts that are important to you at a specific moment. That's just not going to happen.

It's much better to search for what you need, when you need it, apply it immediately, add it to your toolbox  and then go as far as you can until you run into your next challenge. If you become a junkie for new information and try to convince yourself that that's part of the creative process, you're really going to do yourself a disservice.

I urge you to not to get ahead of yourself as I walk you through this process. Stay focused on what you're learning right now. By doing this, you're going to retain all the important information without filling your head with a bunch of BS that you simply don't need now and might not ever need. It's really important to get this straight to be successful with your art.

Music making is like cooking. There's certain fundamentals you must understand, but once you have that down, you're free to create your own recipes. That's what we're doing here. My goal is to show you the recipe for making music. Once you learn this recipe, you can start to add your own spices, your own techniques, things that work better for you and things that help define you as an artist. I'm not here to tell you that this approach is the only approach. I'm simply here to show you the recipe that has been proven to work for all that I've shown it to.

Once you have finished this process, you can evaluate what worked for you and what you might want to tweak later. For right now, just focus on what I've laid out for you, okay?

There's a myth that artists only work when they're inspired and that is how great things happen. They're just hanging around doing nothing and all of a sudden some great inspiration comes in. They sit down and they write a great song on the spot. The truth is it doesn't work that way. Inspiration only comes to those who are willing to work when they are uninspired.

Most of the time, you're just doing the work & going through the process. The thing that happens is when you get yourself into the habit of working consistently, the inspiration follows. You will find that you're able to create many more moments of inspiration than you've ever had sitting there and waiting for it to happen.

Once you have experienced this for yourself, you'll understand it fully. I promise you that being uninspired and still working is what leads to inspiration.

Information overload

Repeat after me: "you don't need more stuff. You're fine with what you have. Less it's truly more."

If you want to finish music, the less tools that you have to choose from, the better you get at using the tools that you have. Your DAW of choice almost certainly has all the essentials built in. It might not give you all the things that you want but it'll give you all that you need to start making great music.

You might find that there are certain tools that adapt better to your way of producing or to creating your type of sound & that's fine. The thing is, you want to take the tools you currently have as far as they can go before you go searching for new things. It can be far too easy to become addicted to just making cool sounds & not necessarily learning your tools. Instead you just end up knowing each of your hundreds of tools on a very surface level.

This will take you to a point where you are spending most of your time searching through all your options instead of getting actual work done. Just rest assured that whatever you have right now is perfectly fine for you to create great music.

I encourage you not to go hunting down any new toys during this process. After this process has been completed a couple of times, you can search for specific tools that you think might be more efficient, but for now, we're going to use what we have and make the most of them.

You're going to find that you'll to be much better able to focus on the music making process when you're not spending your time going through forums & reading arguments over what the best compressor or reverb is. There's never going to be one definitive answer.

The best answer I can give you is use what you've got & learn it inside & out.  I'm going to need 100% of your focus on this process. As you go forward, you'll find that you're able to use your tools better, because you've actually learned what those tools do. I personally use mostly internal plugins. Probably 80% of what I use, are the tools that come with my DAW & I'm able to get really great results.

Does that mean that I don't have third party plugins or synths? Of course not. I have a number of tools that I like to use that weren't bundled with my DAW. If you have some 3rd party tools or synths, that's great, as long as you currently know how to use them.

I'm not going to be discussing 3rd party tools, but if you have them and you understand them, feel free to use them. If you've got a bunch of tools that are just sitting there, that you've never dove into, I urge you not to dive into them. Now is not the time.

I know I probably need to lighten the mood here, but it's really important that I tell you this and really get it into your head, because understanding this is going to make the whole process much more fun, much more smooth, and much more satisfying in the end. I'm also certain that you'll get much more music done with this approach.

Keep in mind which tools you need the most, instead of going down the rabbit hole of too many choices. Knowing the tools in your DAW is going to give you pretty much everything you need to get the job done.

Keep this in mind.

Making the wrong choice is the second worst thing you can do. The worst being to make no choice at all. You really can't make a wrong choice, because you will always realize what does & doesn't work and then make another better choice. On the other hand, by sitting there wondering what the right choices are and not doing anything, you're not going to experience failure or success. You don't want to get stuck there. So make quick choices often and learn from every one of them.

Don't be afraid of making the wrong choice & don't be afraid of failure. The ones who know so much now are the ones who have made all the mistakes. When I heard this originally, I didn't really believe it. I thought "Well, that sounds nice, but it can't be true. These guys are too successful."  I made so many mistakes until I started becoming proficient at music making & realized that the only reason I'm more efficient now, is because I screwed up so many times in the past. So don't be afraid to screw up.

I say, "fail hard, fall fast, and pick yourself back up". It's the best way to get to the other side.

The wrong choices you make now will lead to the right choices later. Sometimes making the wrong choice can actually have an accidental moment of magic within it. These happy accidents can actually be some of the most clever things that you do in your music. So don't worry about it. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to learn and you're going to move forward faster than 95% of other music producers.

Ready, Fire, Aim

When you use a "ready, aim, fire" approach, you typically never get to "fire". Instead, you kind of just ready yourself, aim and you're just too nervous to pull the trigger. The ready aim fire approach is a faulty approach. It leads to analysis paralysis & will bring your productivity to a halt.

It's much better take the ready fire aim approach. Spend a small amount of time preparing, and then take action. If you don't hit the target, that's fine. Just re-aim and fire again. That might seem counterintuitive to most of you, but I encourage you to try this on and see it for yourself.  When I learned this, I realized how much time that I had been wasting with the ready, aim, fire approach, because I never pulled the trigger. This small shift will change a lot for you. Try it.

Time management

During this process, I would expect you to be spending around one hour to 90 minutes of implementation time per lesson. Let family and friends know that you need a specific amount of time each day to devote to your studies. Preferably the same time each day.

If you sit down to do your music production at the same time every day, your brain starts to know that at this time, it's time to get into that mode of thinking. There's certainly going to be times where you're not able to do this at the same time every day, and that's okay, but sticking to a schedule will get you better results.

If you can pick a specific time without being distracted, it's going to be huge for you.  It takes a lot more time to get back into the creative mode when you've been distracted. If you can just put all those distractions off for an hour to 90 minutes you'll accomplish a lot more .

Making time

For those of you who you feel you don't have much time, that's understandable as well. You'll have to make extra time by reducing your email & social media time & skipping some time in front of the TV as well. These are things you do every single day that take up a lot of time and you don't even really think about it. By becoming more aware of that time and getting yourself to do less of those things, you're able to open up a lot of time for the music making that you didn't think that you had. 

Batching

There are certain tasks that you're likely doing every day. With some of these tasks, you can instead do a week's worth of work in one day, to free up the rest of the week. Maybe you shop two or three times a week & maybe you can change that habit to shopping once a week which can clear up a lot of time. Maybe it's setting a laundry day once a week instead of multiple times per week.

Usually when you batch things, it ends up taking less time to do it all in one day, than it does over several days. Maybe you only check your email once a day or once every couple days, depending on how important your emails are. Same with Facebook. Maybe you're checking it 10-15 times a day. Is it possible that you can check it once in the morning and once at night? Give this some thought and see what you can batch. 

Just ask the question, "Am I able to knock all this out in one day, so that it frees me up the rest of the week?". I bet you can find at least a couple of things where this would apply to you.

The extra hour

Consider that your least productive hour in the day is the last hour that you're awake. It's usually spent watching Netflix, surfing the net or just spacing out. I suggest that you can turn that less productive hour into a more productive hour by waking up an hour earlier in the morning.

By going to sleep an hour earlier and waking up an hour earlier in the morning, you just freed up an hour. This can even work by waking up before you have to go to your regular job.  You may think that working at night is the most creative time for you, but I would urge you to consider working during the day. I've actually found that working during the day tends to be much more productive for me now, which I never would have expected. I find it feels great to kick off your music making when it's still quiet & the stresses of life are still at bay.

Your most important activities

Pick your three most important activities the night before, to help you know exactly what to focus on. This is pretty important because if you can make yourself a small list of just three things that you need to get done the next day, you're going to be able to sleep on that and your brain is going to be able to digest that while you sleep. When you wake up, you'll be better focused on what you have to do the next day, and you'll tend to get a lot more music done. I think you'll be surprised when you have more motivation & focus than you normally do.

The homework

1. Write down what you would like to have accomplished in the next 30-60 days. I think finishing 2-3 songs your first run through is totally doable. Knowing what you want to accomplish now is going to help your brain focus on exactly what needs to be done through the next month or 2, So really get clear on what you want.

If you have never finished a song you are happy with, just try for 1 song, without the pressure to accomplish more. Find the pace that works for you. Remember, we are playing the long game here & you have decades of music making ahead of you.

2. Figure out how you're planning to carve out the time needed for your daily practice. It's really important that you actually put this in to writing. You don't just want to have this in your head. Get it written down on a notepad or something on the computer.

3. Are you willing to go beyond the point that most people give up?

Think about this Chances are, if you don't give this some thought, you may very well fall into the trap that stalls most producers. You may feel tempted to stop or give up when you've reached a threshold that most other people wouldn't go past. That gives you an excuse to not push yourself as hard as you need to, if you really want to put yourself in the top 5% of music producers.

Do not skip this step, no matter how trivial it might seem now. Also, I highly recommend you not rush through this step to get to the next. Each lesson should be fully digested & implemented. I have found it's best to do no more than 1 step per day. If you need several days on any of these steps, that is fine. Once you fully internalize each step, you can start moving more quickly. Definitely take your time on your first run through though.

Step 2: Understanding the basics

Whether you are somewhat seasoned in your music recording software of choice or have never opened your DAW, it's important to remember that most of what you will be doing when you produce music is not that complex. It's also important to get that complex things are really just a collection of simple things strung together.

My goal it to make producing accessible for everybody & to never talk over anyone's head in an attempt to sound smart. The fact is, I'm not really that much smarter than the average producer. I just happen to have the leverage of time & experience.

So with that said, just remember that although most software can do a million different things, learning a few things really well is enough to start making great music. It's easier than you might think.

No matter how much technology advances, you're still going to be using cut, copy, paste, duplicate and delete 75% of the time. Don't complicate things.

Always keep in mind that the ultimate goal of this process is that you finish songs that you're proud of. It's not to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every possible thing your DAW can do. The need to "know it all" is an addiction that will actually hinder your ability to finish anything, not enhance it.

For now, let's stick to the essentials that you will surely need in order to accomplish your music making goals.

Getting audio into your DAW

With any digital audio workstation that you might be using, there are generally 3 ways to get music into your software.

1. Record audio into your computer from an external instrument (Guitar, Bass, Synth, Drum Machine etc..) or using a microphone to record your voice or another sound.

2. Dragging in pre-recorded audio, samples or loops.

3. Recording midi from an internal instrument like a synth or drum program.

Do you need an external soundcard?

If you are recording your voice or an external instrument, then yes, you will need an external soundcard. This will give you what you need to record at a professional quality. This will also give you the outputs you need to plug into your studio monitors, instead of using your computer speakers. Computer speakers are good to reference on occasion during the mixing phase, but not at all ideal for mixing professionally.

If you are planning to just record one instrument at a time, a soundcard with 2 inputs (phono & mic input) & 2 outputs will be enough. If on the other hand you are planning or recording a live band all at once or a full drum kit, you will need more inputs & more outputs.

If you are only planning on using samples, loops & software plugins & are currently just producing with headphones,  you won't need a soundcard. You will, however, need a good pair of headphones for mixing. Headphones are not ideal, but I have used them for mixing on occasion & as long as I had a good reference track to A/B test my mix, the results were good enough to release. We will get into reference tracks later.

Audio Preferences

Whichever DAW you happen to be using, you will need to set up your audio preferences. This will involve choosing the soundcard that controls your input (what you are recording into your computer) and output (where you are sending your sound to reach your studio monitors or headphones).

By default this will usually be set to your internal soundcard. This means the input would be your computer's internal mic & your output would be your internal speakers or headphones. If you are using an external soundcard, you will need to select that soundcard's input & output in your DAW. If your external soundcard is not showing up, it may require you to download & install a software driver & then restart your computer.

If your software gives you an ASIO option when selecting your inputs & outputs, choose that. It will have much faster latency. If you have too much latency, you may notice a gap between the time you hit a note on your midi keyboard and when you hear the sound through your speakers. If you are recording your voice or instrument, there may also be a gap between when you perform & when you hear the sound in your headphone. Lower latency will be a much more transparent experience & will be almost immediate. This is of utmost importance when recording midi or audio into your computer.

Most programs will label this area as audio preferences, audio or system audio. This will likely be found in your software's main preferences or options area.

Count in

Whether you are doing audio or midi recording, having a 4, 8 or even 16 beat count in is going to be important. You'll want to learn how this works in your DAW, because without this, recording can become a mess really quick. This is like a drummer clicking his sticks together 4 times to count in a song.

There are 2 types of count ins that you'll use.

Basic count in - This is where you just need a count in & then you can follow the song to stay in tempo. In this case, you don't need a metronome to continue throughout your recording. If you are using drum loops or have already laid down the drums, you will no longer need a metronome.

Click track - This is where you want to have a click track continue after the initial count in. For example, if a drummer were laying down a beat, he or she would want something to play along to in order to keep a consistent tempo. This makes any future editing 100x easier.

Typically you will be wearing headphones while recording, so no audio from your track leaks back in to the current track you are recording. The count in will be sent to your output of choice, so make sure it's going to your headphones. If you are recording midi & using an internal plugin, you won't need to worry about any audio leaking in, so you can listen through your studio monitors if you like.

Recording Audio

Recording audio into your DAW should be pretty straight forward, regardless of which program you are using. Generally the process will go something like this.

1. Make sure you have your audio inputs set to the correct soundcard & make sure to choose an ASIO option if given the choice. Mac computers tend to have less of an issue with latency by default, so you typically won't have to worry as much. If you do notice an issue, you will want to go into your audio settings and lower your buffer size.

If you have a PC computer & your soundcard doesn't have an ASIO option, you can download a free program called ASIO4ALL. Once installed, you will choose ASIO4ALL and then under that you will choose your external soundcard. It's pretty straightforward.

2. Create a new audio track to record onto. Most DAWs have a "Create new audio track" option. And there is usually a key command like Control T(PC) or Command T.(Mac) Just check with your DAW.

3. Once you have a blank audio track to record on, you'll want to arm your track. Arming your track let's your DAW know that when you hit record, this is the track you want to record on. Typically there is a button near the name of the track that will turn red when you click it. Once you've done that, you are ready to record.

You also have the option to arm & record on multiple tracks at once, if you are recording a drum kit or multiple instruments in 1 take. Check with your DAW on how this is done.

4. Set your count in (metronome) settings & press record

5. When you are done recording, you will simply hit the stop button. With some DAWs, you can also hit the spacebar.

Recording midi

Recording midi is pretty much the same as recording audio. The difference is that you'll need to create a midi track instead of an audio track. You won't need to worry about audio input settings, because you aren't recording audio.

From there you can record your midi with either a dedicated midi controller or your QWERTY keyboard. The middle keys A S D F G H J K L represent the white keys. The black keys are represented by W E T Y U O. The Z & X keys will usually move you up or down an octave. Check with your DAW, as it may be different. 

I won't go in to your midi controller setup, as there are so many different kinds or controllers. That said, some are plug & play, meaning you plug the usb into your computer and your software automatically recognizes it. Other times you may need to load a driver & do a little setup. You shouldn't have a problem finding a setup video for your controller & your DAW.

If your controller happens to be really complex, you may want to hold off on it until you've gone through this whole music making process at least once. The less you have to learn, the less will be in your way when it comes to finishing songs. Although a simple midi controller can be a bit more convenient, you do not need it to get through this full music production process.

Drawing in your midi

If you don't have great timing when recording midi, you can always just enter in the notes on the midi grid with your mouse. Typically you'll see the piano roll to the left & the area you enter your notes on the right. There may also be a speaker icon of some sort that when turned on, you will be able to hear the notes you are entering.

Notes are usually entered by single or double clicking on the midi grid. If any of this sounds confusing, just search "drawing in midi" and the name of your DAW. You'll learn how to set the grid resolution, enter your notes, extend or shorten the notes, move the notes up or down to play a different notes on the piano roll, or move the midi left or right to adjust when the note plays. I'll also have a video explaining this at https://MusicSoftwareTraining.com/theprocess

Don't forget that you can also drag prerecorded audio, loops or samples onto your audio tracks & pre-made midi parts onto a midi track. If you have a hard time creating good melodic ideas, you can find midi parts of many of your favorite songs online for free. Then you can drag them in & manipulate the notes. Keep in mind that midi parts are only the notes played. You still be assigning the midi parts to your own vst instruments.

Recording a midi loop

Often times you'll find, especially when you are playing midi drums, that you will want to create just 4 bars that you can then repeat & edit later. Rarely are you going to get your full drum part down with one pass of recording. For this reason, you'll want to loop a section and start with your kick & snare drums & then when it comes back around, add hi hats & maybe extra sounds on a 3rd run.

This is pretty easy & you'll do this by setting a looped section with the number of bars you choose. 1 bar is simply a count of 1-2-3-4 (or 4 beats). Once you do that, you want to make sure your midi recording is set to an overdub mode. If it's not set to overdub, then when you loop back around, you will start to record over what you have just recorded. You probably don't want that.

On the other hand, if you are trying to record a 4 bar melody, you would probably not want to be in overdub mode, as it would keep your wrong notes & make recording your part pretty confusing.

Punch in / Punch out

Punch ins were & still are a popular way to fix a mistake with vocals or instruments. So let's say you messed up a vocal note in the first chorus of your song but everything else sounds great. Instead of re-recording the whole part again, you can instead set a punch in right before the bad note & a punch out right after the bad note.

This is most effective if you sing along with your current vocal all the way through the part you'll be punching in. This usually creates a very transparent & natural sounding correction. This is something live bands would do all the time with vocals, guitar, drums, whatever the mistake may be. If you are going for a natural sound, this is going to work much better than a pitch correction tool in most cases.

Some DAWs will allow you to punch in & out manually with the i & o keys.

This usually isn't the approach you want to take when building up an 8 bar loop. This would be more for songs that are generally played start to finish or section by section. Every popular DAW will have this feature & it's usually pretty easy to implement.

Essential Keyboard Shortcuts you must learn

Below are the most used & most important keyboard shortcuts that you will need to learn in your DAW of choice. Keep in mind that in most cases Mac computers use the command key & Windows uses the control key.

For example to copy, most DAWs use command c for a Mac & control c for Windows. Learn these & your life will get so much easier. These are common key commands below for Mac. If you have a PC computer, use control instead. Your DAWs key commands may vary, so check with your DAW if any of these aren't working for you.

Copy – command c

Cut – command x

Paste – command v

Undo – command z

Redo - command shift z

Duplicate – command d

Delete – delete key

Loop – command l (after selecting loop section)

Create audio track – command t

Create midi track – command shift t

Rename – command r

Consolidate – command j

Scissor edit – command e  (Some DAWs have a scissor tool. Once chosen you just click where you want to cut)

Select all – command a 

Play/Stop – space bar

Save - command s

Zoom in / Zoom out - Some DAWs zoom by clicking & dragging up or down, while others might use the up & down arrows. Also selecting & hitting the z key will do a quick zoom in some DAWs. This will be an extremely important feature to allow you to get closer to your work.

Bounce in place - This allows you to render a selected section of an audio or midi track & save it as audio to a location on your computer. Highlighting what you want to render & then hitting command b  is a common key command for DAWs with this feature.

Edit arrangement - This feature is a huge time saver that I use in pretty much every song I am creating. Let's say for example that you want to extend your chorus to twice as long & also cut your breakdown to half the length.

Without this feature, this would require highlighting all the clips within that section. If you have 50 or more tracks, this can be extremely tedious. What this feature allows, is for you to just highlight a section on a single track & it will allow you to duplicate or cut full sections of your song. This allows for pretty painless song arranging.

Different DAWs do this differently. Some have a master arrangement track that when you edit, it will effect the whole song. Other DAWs allow you to just highlight a section on any single track & use the key command to effect all tracks, not just the one you have highlighted. Learn this in your software of choice. You won't regret it.

Your homework

Take the time to learn & memorize your important key commands. Don't freak out if it seems a bit overwhelming. Over time, they will become pretty automatic to you as you use them regularly. Keep coming back & reviewing these key commands as you continue through the process.

Step 3: Listening like a pro

Becoming a good music producer requires improving your listening skills. There's no such thing as a good producer who doesn't have good listening skills. Your listening skills are going to be the way you're able to break down things that you hear into simple enough elements that you'll understand how to reconstruct these ideas into your own work. Even if you don't know how something you're listening to was made, you can use what you know, to recreate it in your own unique way.

If you can define what you're hearing, you're 70% to getting the sound that you want. Everything else will fall into place because you'll understand what it is that you need to do to get the type of result you're looking for.

If you're listening to something and you have no idea how to get there, it's because you can't define what you're listening to yet. This is going to be the real challenge, when attempting to apply those ideas in your own work.

Envelopes

By understanding how sound moves through time, you can much more easily translate what you're hearing into your own work. Any sound you have heard or ever will hear has up to 4 elements. These are attack, decay, sustain & release, also known as the envelope. Most real world sounds are only going to have attack & decay. When listening to music, sustain & release come into play. Let's define each element of the volume envelope.

Attack

We define the attack of a sound as the time it takes a sound to go from silence to its peak volume. Sometimes this can be immediate and sometimes it's going to take several seconds. An example of an immediate attack would be like a kick drum, snare, clap or pretty much any impact sound. If you were to bring a hammer to a junk yard & bang on things, everything you hit would create an immediate attack. This means the loudest part of the sound happens at the very beginning & then the volume fades back to silence.

For a slower attack, you can think of something like strings, pads or something that comes in slowly. These sounds start off low in volume & reach their peak volume over time.

Decay, sustain & release

Decay is the time it takes to go from a sound's peak volume point to either silence, or a sustained volume. For example, if you play a note on your synth and hold the note down, there will be an attack time (how long a sound takes to reach it's peak volume), the decay time, which is how long it takes to go from the peak volume to the volume that is sustained while you hold down the note (called the sustain) & then the release, which is the time it takes from when you release the note to when the sound returns to silence.

The sustain of a sound can be the same volume as the attack volume, or it can be a lower volume than the peak of the attack. With a drum sound, there would be no sustain or release. A drum simply hits it's peak volume immediately & then decays to silence over time.

Transients

The transient of a sound is that sharp point at the beginning of the sound. Usually you're going to notice that with drum sounds. The difference between the transient & the attack is that the attack is a measurement of time from the lowest volume to the highest. The transient is the loud snap or crack of a sound. Only sounds with a faster attack have transients. Sounds like soft slow pads don't have a transient.

Transients are the elements in a song that cut through the mix. Vocals, bass, guitar & lead sounds all have transients. Elements in your song with transients are the parts that define most of the groove. Transients are very important in creating rhythm and helping sounds cut through the mix.

The brain registers sounds that have a transient as being more important than sounds with a slower attack. These are going to typically be your more upfront sounds. Pad sounds with a slower attack are more of a background sound. Background sounds are still very important, but if all your sounds are just background sounds there won't be much for the brain to grasp on to.

Ambient music is primarily made out of background sounds with less transient sounds grabbing your attention, however even ambient music has some transient elements from sounds like piano, bells & synths that cut through the mix. Most styles of music you will want to create, are going to require having a solid groove, and that comes from understanding transients.

Often times when a sound isn't cutting through the mix like you want it to, it's because it lacks a good transient. One trick that works surprisingly well, is to add very sort click or thud type sounds on top of the original sound. It doesn't even need to be very loud to make a big difference. Done correctly, this trick can have a positive impact on the groove of your music. It can also give the illusion of a cleaner, more clear mix overall.

There are also transient shaping & enhancing plugins that can really help give a sound more punch & presence. Using a transient shaper or the layering trick I just mentioned above are going to be an important part of your toolbox.

Layers

This is the idea of putting two or more sounds together to create the effect of one bigger, richer & more complex sound. This is a big secret to those sounds you hear that are really difficult to define, let alone reconstruct.

It's almost impossible to reconstruct some of the sounds you're hearing with a single sound. So it's really important to consider when you're listening to certain productions, that you not only listen to the song as a whole, but really try to break down what is happening with each instrument.

Is that synth actually 2 or more sounds layered together in a way that sounds like 1? Are you able to distinguish sounds that have been layered? Even if you're not sure, you can benefit by breaking sounds down to their separate elements.

When attempting to reconstruct a sound, try to break down & define what is happening in the low frequency, mid frequency & high frequencies separately. It's much easier to create sounds or find samples that have what you are looking for in just 1 of these frequency ranges instead of trying to find 1 perfect sound.

If I am looking for a deep punchy low end for a kick drum, I only listen for that low frequency element & disregard the higher frequencies, because I am going to EQ those out anyway. Same with mids & highs. Defining the transient in a sound is also important. sometimes you hear it in the mids, sometimes the highs or both.

You might find that 1 sound or sample might has both the mids & highs you are looking for. In that case you can just layer that with a sample that has good low end. If less sounds get the job done, all the better.

Frequency Range

If you have an issue defining the frequency range of a certain sound, here's a simple trick. Try using an EQ & rolling off the lows until you notice the sound starting to be affected, then roll off the highs until the sound if being affected. This will give you the range of frequencies you'll be using when you reconstruct the sound.

Reverb

Reverb is a natural occurrence of a sound placed in a specific space. The reverb effect depends on the size of the space and the surfaces that are reflecting the sound. Reverb is the accumulation of all these reflections.

Think of reverb like delays, only much faster. So fast that is doesn't sound separate from the original sound. A reverb tends to smear the sound instead of echoing the sound.

The importance of reverb is giving everything its own natural space. Silence is not natural in the real world. There is always sound & every sound has reflections bouncing off it's surrounding. This is what reverb recreates.

Most reverbs will have these parameters & they are important to know:

Decay

Decay time is how long the reverb is going to last before fading out to silence. It can be as short as a few milliseconds to several seconds.

Room size

This is how big the virtual room is. It can be the size of a shoebox, bathroom, arena or cathedral. You can hear the difference when you clap your hands in different sized spaces.

Pre-delay

The pre delay is the amount of time before the reverb comes in. This gives the original sound enough time to cut through the mix cleanly before being effected. It's a good practice to use on vocals, leads & sounds that have a transient that you want to cut through the mix.

Pre-delay can be adjusted by milliseconds. Small amounts of pre-delay in the 50-75ms range are pretty transparent & gels well with the sound. If you turn the pre delay up too much, it starts sounding like a separate sound or an echo. This is an effect that can also come in handy, as it creates a reverb echo of the original clean sound.

I encourage you to experiment with reverb yourself. If you run a burst of white noise through reverb, you'll be able to hear what each parameter is doing much more clearly. When you get used to the sound of reverb, you'll hear it in nearly everything you listen to. You'll also hear when a sound has little or no reverb. This is really important when trying to define what is happening in a track you are trying to analyze.

There is definitely something to be said for having little percussive sounds that are completely dry that cut through the mix really well. So, experiment with dry sounds as well.

Delay

Where reverb reflections are fast enough to still sound like one sound, which is typically less than 100 milliseconds, delay has reflections long enough to sound like a separate copy of the original sound or several copies, which is defined by the feedback or the delay. Depending on the type of delay, each copy can sound exactly the same as the original sound or there can be a pleasant degradation of the delay over time.

Wet/dry

The wet/dry percentage is going to be how loud the delay effect is in comparison to the original sound.

If you turn it past 50%, the echo will actually be louder than the original sound initially & then lower in volume over time.

Feedback

The feedback is how long the delay lasts or how many delays actually occur before it goes back to silence. If you turn the feedback down, you get less copies of the original sound.

Delay time

Most delay plugins offer the ability to either adjust the delay time by milliseconds, or by syncing the delay to the tempo of your song. When adjusting by tempo, you are usually able to set it by a number of 16th notes. For example 2/16ths would be an 8th note delay, 4/16ths would be quarter note & so on. 2, 4, 8 & 16/16ths all sound more transparent because they go along with the beat. Odd timings like 3, 5, & 6 are going to create more unique & sometimes interesting timings.

Some delays also allow for different timing setting for the left & the right sides. With experimentation, you'll get the hang of what works best in a particular situation. Due to the nature of there being space between each delay, using a short delay instead of a reverb on some instruments can clean up your mix & make it sound a bit less cluttered. This is not a rule, but just a little tip you can add to your production toolbox.

As you listen to more music with a producer's ear, you'll be surprised by the subtle or the very obvious use of delay. For example, someone like the Edge from the band U2, uses delay a lot on his guitar to take a simple guitar part and make it sound more complex, melodic and rhythmic. Delay can be a really great way to add more groove and rhythm to what may otherwise sound a little bit boring.

As you are listening to songs that you like in the genre you want to create, you'll start getting an idea of which elements create that sound & what kind of effects are being used.

Filter

A filter can be described as an EQ sweeping through frequencies, typically with the enhancement of whatever frequency the EQ is moving through. This can be done in several ways, which I'll describe next.

High-pass

Also known as a low cut filter, will remove any frequency below its cut off point. Think of it like when a DJ removes the bass when he's playing a track, to create a bigger impact when the bass is later brought back in.

Low-pass

Also known as a high cut filter, will remove any frequency above its cut off point. This creates a darkening affect to an instrument or a whole track.

Band pass

This removes, low and high frequencies above & below the chosen frequency range, so the only thing that's really being played is what's in the middle.

Notch Filter

Notch is the opposite of a bandpass, which removes just the chosen frequency range but leaves frequencies above and below that range untouched.

By being able to hear filters happening in certain sounds, you'll be able to recognize, "Oh, okay they are using a low-pass filter on that particular sound."

Filter envelope

Much the same as a volume envelope I described earlier, you can also have a filter envelope, this can create fast or slow movement on a sound from high to low frequency ranges or low to high. A filter envelope has an attack, decay, sustain & release just like a volume envelope, but instead of controlling volume, it is controlling the frequency from high to low.

This is easier understood when seen visually, so make sure to check out my video resource page to understand this more clearly.

Modulation

Modulation is a process of interrupting an audio signal with a waveform, thus changing the sound. Usually you will have your carrier signal (your main sound) and then you'll have your modulation signal, which is a waveform moving up and down at a certain speed (defined as the modulation rate).

At a slower rate, it can sound like waves slowly coming in and out. At faster rates it can sound like vibrato or a stutter. The original sound being modified by a waveform is what creates the effect. This modulator is also known as an LFO, or low frequency oscillator.

Think of modulation as a waveform controlling a knob on one of your synths. If it's the volume knob, the knob will move as the waveform goes up & down. The depth of the modulation is how big the waveform is & this effects how much the volume will be affected. The rate is how fast the waveform moves & thus how fast the modulator moves the volume knob.

The same can be said for controlling the cutoff frequency of a filter, the pitch of a sound or any number of parameters. Vibrato on a voice or tremolo on a guitar are examples of modulation. Some synth sounds have several parameters being modulated at the same time. If you listen for it, you will hear this movement in sounds everywhere.

While we are on the subject of modulation. Let's get into 3 popular effects that use modulation & delay in interesting ways. These are chorus, flange and phaser. They are all similar but each have their own flavor.

Chorus

With chorus the original signal is split into 2 signals. This 2nd signal is slightly detuned and then delayed by 30-50 milliseconds, and added back on top of the original signal. The effect gives a thickening of the original sound & can make it sound fuller. Think Nirvana's Come as you are or Prince's Purple Rain.

Flange

A flange effect happens when the original signal is split into 2 & one is delayed by 20 milliseconds or less and then put back on top of the other. Unlike the chorus, the pitch of the signal is not affected. The amount of delay is modulated at a chosen rate to create the whooshing sound flange is known for. Flange is very prominent in a lot of songs by The Cure. Flanging is said to have been discovered in the studio when 2 reel to reel tapes of the same song where played at the same time & then one reel was slightly slowed down by hand. This effect can be heard in The Beatles' Tomorrow never knows.

Phaser

A phase effect happens when the original signal is split into two & one of those has its phase shifted, meaning when the waveform of 1 is going up, the other waveform is moving in the opposite direction. Then it is slightly delayed. If the sound wasn't slightly delayed, the phasing from both waveforms would cancel each other out, creating silence.

With a slight amount of short delay, the occasional canceling out of the signal creates a jet engine type of effect on more extreme settings. You can hear this effect on Shattered by The Rolling Stones, Mayonnaise by Smashing Pumpkins, Eruption by Van Halen & a number of Radiohead songs.

These popular forms of modulation are sounds for you to get more familiar with, because these are things that you will quite possibly hear in other tracks. Unless you recognize the effect, it's going to be hard to understand what you're hearing.

When you're able to break something down and go, "Oh, that's just running through this effect with this type of delay or reverb on it",  then you'll have more confidence in reconstructing that type of sound.

Octaves

Often times the same or similar sounds are layered an octave higher or lower than the original sound to add energy or impact to a sound. I do this quite often & it can really help beef things up or help things cut through the mix. It can be mixed pretty low & still make quite an impact.

Depending on the song I am working on, I use this technique on bass, stabs, drums, pads or even vocals. It's simple but can be very effective. Definitely a simple technique to keep handy.

Harmony & Dissonance

Sometimes you can layer a sound with a harmonizing or a dissonant note that can create more atmosphere, tension or emotion. Sometimes I'll actually add what you would consider a wrong note, at a low volume, which just hints at something a bit more sinister. It can really make things sound a bit more interesting if it's not overdone.

As you explore this yourself, you'll be able to start hearing these things in other songs. These are the little details that can separate a good track from a great one.

Groove

Groove is the driving force of your song. They are the elements that make you move your body. Get this right & you will have a packed dance floor of moving bodies. Get it wrong & you lose the whole room. When you understand groove on a deep level, the response you get to your music will dramatically shift in a good way.

The best way to understand groove is to learn how to recognize it in other songs. Which elements are driving the song forward and keeping the listener interested moment by moment? The more you do this, the better you'll get at defining what is working & not working in your own songs.

When creating the initial 8 or 16 bar groove of your song, listen for any sounds that might not be contributing to your groove.  Some sounds will push your song forward & some will pull it back. Your job is to know how each element of your song affects the groove.

Really infectious songs tend to be songs where every part is adding to the groove, feel & swing of the track. Great grooves don't just sit on a 16th note grid. That would end up sounding robotic & lifeless. Great grooves play a little ahead of or behind the grid. The slight variation feels more natural & human. Most DAWs make this easier to accomplish by adding a groove or swing feature, especially for midi parts. Look for groove, swing, groove pool or groove quantizing on your DAW to see how it works. If you haven't done this, it can really change your music game.

When adding drum loops to your song, try removing all but the parts that add to the groove, without cluttering the song. Try to only add the elements of your loop that aren't already being played by another drum sound. This will keep your drum groove sounding clean but also intricate enough to stay interesting.

Always mute the added part to make sure the groove is being improved, instead of getting buried in too many elements. When you are trying to get the hang of this, I recommend you try mimicking the grooves of other songs for practice. It's not about getting the exact sounds, but more about the placement of different elements that move you in a similar way.

Of all the things that you will learn in this process, you're listening skills are what everything else is built upon. Don't underestimate this.

Homework

1. Define the style of music you want to create. If you have several styles you are interested in, just focus on 1 style for your next 3-4 songs.

If you want to sign your music to a record label, you want to give them 1 consistent sound. Most labels are looking for more than a single track & are looking for an artist that has a consistent sound. Labels build their brand with every artist they sign, so they want to be sure that you represent their sound well.

2. Find a song that matches your style & break down every sound you can. Don't worry about the time stamp of when each sound comes in, just listen for as many sounds as you can. Write every sound down with as detailed a description as possible.

Is the sound layered? It's it punchy? Boomy? Metallic? Wooden? Hollow? Are there any effects on the sound that you can recognize? Imagine you are describing each sound to a sound designer on the phone & trying to give her enough details to recreate what you are hearing, as accurately as possible.

This may be challenging at first, but remember, you get to create your vocabulary with words that make sense to you. These descriptions are yours, so don't worry about being technically correct. Just do your best & know that you will get more & more accurate with time.

Step 4: Know your tools

Whichever digital audio workstation program you are using, it is of utmost importance that you are at least aware of each instrument & effect that is included. The goal is not to get overwhelmed, but rather to separate the tools you are going to use the most for your style & which are less likely to be used.

There is nothing worse than trying to guess which tools are going to give you the result you want. By knowing your go to tools, your brain can get to work on the task much faster. Your brain likes to work quickly & any delay can break your focus & take you out of your creative flow.

The tools that come with your DAW are going to be in one of 3 categories:

Instruments

These are going to be anything that creates sound through midi. This includes Synths, Samplers & Drum tools. Make sure to figure out what each of these instruments do, so you can pick the ones that meet your needs the best.

Audio Effects

Audio effects can affect both audio & midi tracks. They give you the ability to process your sounds in nearly unlimited ways. Let's dive into the effects that you can expect in any DAW you are using.

These can include:

Compressor

Compressors are used to get the volume of a sound under control. It's also a great tool for shaping the envelope of a sound to give it more punch.

A compressor typically has 4 controls:

Threshold - The volume level that must be reached before the compressor effect kicks in.

Attack - How soon the compressor kicks in after the threshold is reached

Decay - How long the effect keeps compressing after the instrument is no longer reaching the volume threshold.

Ratio - This controls the strength of the threshold. Let's say you have set the threshold to -15db and you have a 2:1 ratio. This means that for every 2 db above-15db an instrument gets in volume, the compressor with allow 1db of volume through.

A 5:1 ratio would only allow 1db of volume through for every 5 db above the threshold. So the higher the ratio, the stronger the compression

Wet/Dry - This allows a compressed sound to be mixed with the uncompressed sound. This can help transients cut through from the original sound, while the compressor beefs things up. To learn more about this, look up parallel compression or New York compression. Not all compressors have a wet/dry knob.

Here's an example:

If we have a 5:1 ratio and a threshold of -15db, and the volume before compression is hitting -5db, that's 10db above the threshold. In this case, the compressor would only allow that sound to go to -13db or 2db above the threshold.

Here's an excellent tip for getting your compressor settings right almost every time. Try this on a snare drum just to hear the effect more clearly. Then once you recognize what it's doing, you can use this technique on pretty much anything.

1. Pull the threshold down really low, like -50db or lower.

2. Set the ratio to it's most extreme setting

3. Set decay to around 250ms

4. Set the attack low. 2 milliseconds is a good starting point. Play the sound

5. Adjust the attack 1 ms at a time & only listen for the snap of the sound. Less attack will have a thinner sharper sound while more attack will have a thicker attack. This is a great way to enhance the transient of a sound. This will probably sound too extreme, but it's a good way to hear what the compressor is doing.

6. Next adjust the decay. The faster the decay, the faster the sound will bounce back up to it's original volume. A faster decay will usually give a fuller sound while a slower decay will usually sound snappier. Keep in mind, this may still sound extreme, don't worry about it.

7. Back off the threshold until things sound a bit more natural

8. Finally back off the ratio until the final result is satisfying.

You may adjust the threshold & ratio a bit to find a happy medium, but this should give you great results.

Limiter

A limiter is like a brick wall compressor. This means nothing goes above the chosen volume threshold. Where a compressor usually has between a 1:1-20:1 ratio, using a limiter is like have an infinity to 1 ratio. If you set your limiter threshold to -5db, nothing is going above that volume.

EQ

EQ truly shapes your mix. Without it your mixes would sound harsh or muddy with little to no definition or instrument separation. Although boosting frequencies can give good results, it is almost always more beneficial to to remove unwanted EQ frequencies from each instrument. This allows everything to sound clean & balanced.

Most sounds that aren't your kick drum or bass can benefit from cutting low frequencies below 120hz. This can help the kick & bass sound punchy & cut through the mix much better.

If an instrument is sounding muddy even after cutting 120hz, look to frequencies somewhere between 250hz-600hz. Just start with a short frequency range (known as the Q on most plugins) and listen for more clarity as you sweep through those frequencies. It doesn't have to be an extreme reduction to be effective.

Delay & Reverb

Delay and reverb can both add atmosphere & dimension to your mix. Delay is also a great way to enhance the groove or pull more out of a simple melody.

Filter

This is like an EQ but where EQ is more transparent, the filter effect is more noticeable, especially when the resonance is turned up, which enhances the fundamental frequency as it sweeps through.

Saturation / Distortion

These are great for sounds that are too clean & have no character. Also great to help a sound cut through better in your mix.

Amp simulation

Exactly like it sounds, it simulates the sound of a guitar or bass amp. Also great for adding some character to dull or lifeless sounds.

Bit Reduction

Bit reduction is popular with people who like old school video game sounds. In the early days of video games, there wasn't enough memory for high quality sound, so they had to reduce the bit rate. It makes pretty dirty sounds at extreme reduction but can also add some interesting harmonics & dirt.

Chorus / Phaser / Flange

These are great modulation effects that can thicken a sound & give it more character. More extreme settings can create a washy or jet engine type whirl.

Panning

This is simply where your sounds sit from left to right. Panning can also keep sounds from fighting with each other to be heard.

There are many more types of audio effects out there but the above are pretty universal across most DAWs. Some of these effects are described in more detail in the 3rd lesson.

Midi Effects

These are tools made specifically for midi tracks and either affects your midi notes or they are tools that give more flexibility & control over instrument or effect parameters.

Some of these effects might include:

Arpeggiator

While you hold down notes or chords, an arpeggiator cycles through each note in different ways creating interesting & rhythmic melodies timed to your song's tempo. It can either play only the notes you are holding down or play several octaves of those notes.

Scale or Key tool

This tool will allow you to choose a certain key scale & will correct any notes you play to the closest note in that scale. Excellent if you don't know music theory.

Chord creation

Hold down 1 note & depending on your settings it will create a whole chord. To stay in the same key, it's good to place a scale tool after it.

Velocity control

Velocity is how hard you hit a key on your keyboard or on a drum pad. Hitting a note harder typically gets a louder response. The velocity amount is how much variance in volume between the softest touch to the hardest touch on a key. Velocity can also control other parameters like filter envelope amount. Velocity control allows you to control the range of velocity intensity or instantly set to a specific velocity. In this case, it will override any velocity settings your midi might already have.

Note length control

This allows you to shorten or lengthen how long notes are playing with a simple knob. really great for easily building some intensity & dynamics on a midi part.

Once you know what your digital audio workstation offers in instruments & effects, you're gong to need to take the time to learn what each tool does. This may take a little time & some tutorial searching, but it's incredibly important to understand which tools are going to be most useful for your style of music & which you don't need to worry about for the time being.

You want to avoid the temptation to try to imagine a use for every tool you have available to you. This will take you away from your productivity really fast. I'll give you some tips later, on how to put some of your lesser used effects to their best use, but for now, just figure out which tools you need the most.

Essential effects

No matter your style, there are effects that you will very likely need to use in nearly every song you make. Your success as a music producer depends on you having a pretty good knowledge of when, why & how to use these tools. I'm not saying you need to complicate your life by becoming an immediate expert at these. That will come with time. You just want to be able to get the result you need in a given situation.

These are the effects that have been used through the ages & can be heard in every song you've ever heard on the radio. Without these effects the sounds wouldn't blend, there would be no depth or space in the mix & would most likely sound harsh, muddy or both. If you want to be a producer, you need to know these. The essential effects that you will want to learn in your DAW are EQ, compression, reverb & delay.

Not understanding these tools will have a negative affect on your music. There is no way around this step. Here are some tips to get you started:

EQ Tips

1. If it's not a Kick Drum or Bass, EQ out everything below 120hz.

2. If your sound is still muddy, you can usually find the offending frequency between 250hz-650hz

3. Consider reducing extreme highs to make more room for your hi hats & cymbals

4. If you are going for a more natural sound, like acoustic guitar ,try not to boost any frequency more than 4db

5. To help a sound cut through, do a small EQ boost at the frequency that gives the most clarity, then reduce the same frequency on other sounds or instruments that might be interfering.

Reverb Tips

1. Put a short, medium & long reverb on separate return tracks. Set the wet/dry knob to 100%. These can be applied on any track you like. This will save a lot of CPU by you not using a separate reverb on every track.

2. If your reverb has an EQ built in, make sure to cut the low frequencies. If using a return track, you can use an EQ to cut the lower frequencies. This will really clean up your mix.

3. Use a little pre-delay of around 20-30ms to keep transients sounding clean

4. You often need less reverb than you initially think, so when you think you have the right amount, try backing off a bit to keep your mix from getting muddy. Especially if several tracks have reverb. It all adds up.

Compression Tips

1. Pull the threshold down really low, like -50db or lower.

2. Set the ratio to it's most extreme setting

3. Set decay to around 250ms

4. With the attack set low, play the sound

5. Adjust the attack 1 ms at a time & only listen for the snap of the sound. Less attack will have a thinner attack while more attack will have a thicker attack.

6. Adjust the decay. A faster decay will usually give a fuller sound while a slower attack will usually sound snappier. Keep in mind, this may still sound extreme, don't worry about it.

7. Back off the threshold until things sound a bit more natural

8. Finally back off the ratio until the final result is satisfying.

Delay Tips

1. Try using delay with low feedback instead of reverb, on tracks where reverb is muddying up your mix a bit too much.

2. Put delay on a return track set at 100% wet. Automate the send to delay single notes or words on a vocal.

3. Use ping pong delay to give the delay some stereo movement

4. EQ out the lower frequencies of your delays to keep your low end clean, you can also back off some higher frequencies to keep your cymbals & hi hats sounding clean.

5. Sync your delays to your master tempo to keep from any unwanted irregular rhythms.

6. Try a slap back delay by setting your delay time to somewhere between 50ms-120ms

7. Try dotted delays to fill in spaces between notes played to give a much more complex of interesting sound. Dotted 8th notes are used a lot by U2's guitarist, The Edge.

8. Try using 3/16th & 5/16th note delays for unusual but pleasant sounding delay timings. Great on melodic content.

A volume automation tip

As we will get into later in this book, volume automation is going to be used a lot when mixing your track. If you can use something other than the main volume on your mixer, this can save you a lot of headache later.

If your DAW has a separate volume plugin, it's best to use that for your volume automation. This will allow you to easily adjust your track's main volume without disrupting your automation. Trust me. This is going to save you a lot of time.

Homework:

1. Take the time to get a basic understanding of what each effect in your DAW is used for.

2. Make a list of only instruments & effects you know for a fact will be needed for your style of music.

3. If your DAW allows it, categorize your go to effects and instruments for quick access. If there is a way to save these effects onto your audio & midi tracks by default, I recommend you do that & keep all the effects initially turned off, waiting to be used any time you load a new track.

Step 5: Collecting samples, kits & presets

In this lesson we're going to go through  the process of creating & organizing your presets as well as gathering the sounds you'll need for creating your style of music. This is going to help you focus on what's needed, while getting rid of what's not needed for your music making.

Too many choices leads to overwhelm and procrastination & this is one of the biggest challenges for music makers, especially when you're getting started. It's really easy to get distracted by new synths, plugins, & thousands of different presets or tons of different free effects & samples.

It can be pretty overwhelming thinking that you need to know every one of these things in order to make the right choices for your music.  Luckily, it's pretty simple to put together a basic toolbox that'll allow you to get things done a lot faster & more efficiently.

Your DAW gives you a wealth of choices, but your job is to pick the ones that are actually going to bring your music where you want it to go and disregard everything else. It's too easy to get lost.

Everyone's got a different opinion on what you should be using and you're constantly getting inspired by someone who's showing you a new technique in music production. The problem is that as cool as it is for them, it's probably not going to benefit you at this very moment and very likely can take you off track from your own music and your own musical goals.

You want to make sure that you know exactly what you're trying to make before you do any searching or browsing through music forums and things like that. This way when you come across a new technique you can think "Okay, that's cool, but I don't need it right now. I'm going to move on."

I encourage you to really learn how to focus on just what you need and put aside all the other gadgets and tricks that, at the moment,  will end up distracting you.

Pick wisely

I recommend that you listen to DJ mixes in your style of music and take notes on the common sounds that make up that style of music. Look for things that you're hearing throughout a mix of a certain style & things that grab your attention. Then you want to come into your DAW and try to get as close as you can with the presets that are available to you.

You're going to want to listen for kicks, drums, pads, atmospherics, lead sounds, synths and all the common sounds that make up your style of music. You may need to tweak the sounds a little bit or add effects to get the result that you want, but using presets is a good way to start building your sound palette.

Don't feel like you have to go in a certain direction that ultimately isn't your style, just try to hone in on the sounds that inspire you from the DJ mix you have chosen. I think this is a much faster approach than browsing through songs that might not be nearly as cohesive. Listening to someone who professionally put a number of songs together to create a certain vibe, is a very good way to get yourself started in developing your sound palette.

The next thing that you would want to do, is go to the instrument that you think will get you closest to the sound you are after. You may need to search more than 1 instrument in your DAW & that's totally ok. By taking the time now, you will dramatically speed up your process later. Don't try to rush this.

After you go through your synth presets, you'll want to start creating a collection of drum kits. Personally, I like creating a new kit for each type of sound. So separate kits for kicks, snares, claps, hi hats & percussion sounds. If you have enough space to put all your collected sounds  into 1 drum instrument, you can certainly do that as well but I prefer each part having it's own track to make processing each sound easier.

Try to start off with just 10-15 of each type of drum sound. Good sounds that work for your style are important, but don't over think this process. You would be surprised how many sounds you can get out of the combination of just a few sounds with some proper processing.

000

I like to put 000 in front of my presets when naming them. That way they always rise to the top when I'm looking for my go to sounds. Also by typing 000, it's much easier for you to find your own saved presets. This makes it really easy to block out everything except for what you've created. It's much easier than trying to sort through all your DAW's presets.

Samples

Some of the sounds you create are just are not going to cut it for what you are trying to accomplish. If you need a certain specific sound that you're not yet really good at creating, don't sweat it. In this process that we're going through, we're trying to do things quickly, so that we can get from the beginning to the end of your song as painlessly as possible.

Sound design is something that takes a bit of time to fully get your head around & and we'll dive into it a little bit later, but if you're able to get the sound you need right away, do that. There are some fantastic sample packs that will give you a lot of really great sounds that are created for your style of music. There will still be plenty of room in your song for creating your own sounds, but let's get things sounding professional first. Sample packs will help you start crafting new song ideas much more quickly.

A great resource as of the writing of this book is Splice.com. It is very reasonably priced & allows you to pick only the samples or loops that you like. With sample packs, you are stuck with whatever samples come in that pack. In splice you can choose single sounds from 1000's of different sample packs.

Another good thing about sample packs, is that it gives you an idea of what actually sounds high quality. It will give you something to aim for when creating your own sounds & help you develop your ear.

Stealing

In this style of music, everybody steals little sounds from other music. It's really not a big deal to grab a kick, a snare or a certain sound and then repurpose it for your own style. It's kind of like constructing a collage of sounds that peak your interest. Obviously if you steal from something really popular, you'll want to take the route of clearing the sample. That said, unless your music gets really popular, you're probably going to be fine.

As you work each day in your process of creating your music, this step here will make all the steps later that much easier for you.

Homework

1. Create some presets for yourself with 000 named in front of them. Create synth sounds, bass sounds, pads & whatever types of sounds your style of music requires.

2. Create your drum kits. 10-15 kicks, snares, claps, high hats etc. That way when you're building your track, you can simply drag in your essential drum sounds & know they are all going to work for your style.

3. If you are using samples, make sure to categorize them by instrument & pick out the most usable sounds in advance.

Step 6: Create your looped groove

We're going to be covering two things in this step. The first is going to be the concept of working fast. The second will be to actually start laying down the foundation for your first track. Unlike most music production training, I waited until this point before diving into the actual song creation. This way you were both mentally prepared & organized. You also should have built some momentum working on the previous lessons consistently.

We've gone through the 10% of music making that you need to know & we put aside the aspects of music that,  at this point,  would be more of a distraction. What we want are less choices, so you can make faster decisions. I want you to know exactly how to get each task done without too much trouble.

Let's dive in.

Concepts of working fast

Think of your initial song idea as a launching point. Something that gets you started.  The spark of an idea, however, shouldn't be looked at like a completed idea. You want to be flexible as new ideas come to you. Realize that staying too focused on one particular idea, can close you off from every other idea that you stumble upon through this process.

The things you don't plan on, are often the parts that bring magic to your song. Listen for and embrace the accidents. Let me explain this a little further.

A lot of times you're going to start with an idea in your head. This is great & a totally normal way to begin. The issue is that most producers get stuck spending all their time trying to perfect this one idea. With this approach, you're probably not going to be very satisfied with what you are creating, because it's not going to sound exactly like what's in your head. I am going to urge you to let this go, even if that seems a bit scary.

When you're going after one particular song idea, you aren't paying attention to any of the other sounds that you come across. Your laser focus can be great for the technical aspects of music making, but can hinder your creativity while constructing your song. Instead, be open to everything that's happening during the process. This can really help turn your initial  idea into a more inspired song with interesting & unexpected surprises.

Most professionals will say their song never turns out like they expected it to, when they started.  They realize that the initial idea they had in their head is just a starting point. By trying to focus too hard on one specific idea, you end up missing out on many opportunities that can make your song even better.

Templates

Because of the prep work you did in the previous steps, you'll be able to get right to the sounds that work for your style much more quickly, instead of fumbling around for sounds & losing those fleeting inspirational sparks. Templates are also a huge time-saver.

They give you a starting point, often with drum kits, synths, instruments & effect chains that can getting you started on a new idea right away. Even if you end up changing the sounds later, templates help you get an initial idea out of your head, with sounds that are inspiring & ready to go. Much like the presets you saved earlier, you're able to save a set up with all your producing essentials, every time you open your DAW.

Perhaps you like having certain drum sounds and bass loaded and ready to go as well as 2 or 3 return tracks with reverbs and delay options. You may even have a starter beat ready for you, to just start jamming and change as you refine your idea. As you write more music, you'll get a better idea of the tools that will be best to have ready to go. It's ok if you aren't sure what type of template would work best for you right now. It'll come with time.

Pretty much any DAW you use will allow you to save a template. Some will also allow you to save audio or midi track templates, so your most important effects are loaded automatically, whenever you add a new track to your song. Some will even allow you to save your effect settings, so any time you drag in an effect to a track, it'll take little or no tweaking at all.

Lastly you can often save a group of effects, or what some might call an effect chain, allowing you to have all your drum effects or vocal effects ready to go any time you need it. Templates are going to save you a ton of time & as you get better at producing, you can consistently improve them. Your templates will always be evolving as you continue to fine tune & improve your skills.

Look into your DAW & see what is possible. I'm sure you'll find this saves an enormous amount of time in the future. Just make sure not to get yourself lost in too many options. Template ideas will make more sense after you'll been through this process a few times with several songs.

Don't overthink template building as this very moment, just remember to save great collection of sounds, samples, effect chains or drum kits you create. This may not be completely apparent until later in your song process, so just keep it in the back of your mind as you create & experiment. Look into your DAW to see what is possible.

Start your looped groove

Here's where the rubber hits the road. You're now ready to start a looped groove that will become the first finished song using this process. It's important to keep yourself in a relaxed focused, state. Everything around you will try to distract you and stop you from writing.  You'll need to be diligent to ignore both the outer voices and the inner voices. I know this is easier said than done, but just being aware will help a lot.

Close all distracting browser windows, turn off your phone and let your family and friends know that you need privacy when you are in producing mode. If you get constant notifications on your computer, you'll want to find a "do not disturb" function while you are working. This is most likely going to trigger your internet & phone addictions, so just be aware & stay focused on the task at hand.

Use a timer

This has been really helpful for me, especially when I noticed how often I would get sidetracked while producing. I solved this by setting a timer on my phone for 30 minutes and I would challenge myself to work straight ahead, without distraction for 30 minutes straight.

When the timer goes off, I give myself a five minute breather to briefly check in on whatever I want, use the bathroom & grab some water. Then I'd set the timer again for another half hour and do the same thing. It seems for me much easier to set a timer and keep myself focused for a small amount of time, instead of thinking about working on something for 2 or 3 hours.

If you do these little increments, even if it's only 15 minutes, in your head you're thinking, "Oh, I can do that! I can stay focused until I get a small break."

I suggest you give it a try yourself, because it might help you from the temptation of stopping what you're doing and checking your social media or responding to any type of notifications. All these distractions are the enemy. Make your producing time sacred.

Drum Samples

I already hear you saying "Why aren't you showing me how to create my own kicks and snares?". I get it! You want to know everything you can about producing. That's a good thing, but for the moment, you need that mental energy to be used elsewhere.

There are many ways to create drum sounds, but for the sake of time and to guarantee professional sounds, I'm recommending you use samples for your drums. 90% of big producers who are finishing songs consistently are using drum samples as an essential tool. Don't get hung up on trying to create every sound from scratch, until you've built the habit of completing a lot of music. Remember, our goal is to finish music.

My goal here is not to teach you to be fantastic sound designers. That'll come with time & we will get into some of that later, but I want to help you find the fastest and most efficient way to get your ideas down from start to finish.

Sound design is fun but can be addictive & time consuming. I have many creative friends who make some wild sounds but don't finish very many songs, if any. At this stage in the game, you want to be a person who's top priority is finishing songs. I am assuming this is why you are here. Let's reserve sound design for when you really need it.

Trust me when I say you're certain to hit a couple of walls in the creative process, and that is when you need full focus and all your mental energy.

Know your elements

Before putting together the first 8 bars of your track, you want to know the elements that will make up your chosen style. You don't want to just randomly be picking sounds.  Although many of these sounds might sound great on their own, they may not fit together in the style of music that you are trying to make.

A great way to find those elements is by listening to that DJ mix you were picking out sounds from earlier. This time you want to really know how these elements come together. While listening to each of the sounds, keep in mind how each part plays off the other to create the rhythm.

The presets & kits you've created should work well for you & save you a ton of time, so just check in on your mix to see how these sounds come together. Find grooves that sound like the main part of a song & listen to the drums & bass. We are not copying here, we are just getting an idea of the elements that get you nodding your head.

Keep in mind that we are just building a basic beat with a bassline, then maybe 1 or 2 extra elements that gives your loop a mood or vibe. This can be pads, percussion or an odd sound that gives your groove a personality. Don't feel like you're ripping anyone off by doing this step. There's certain elements that pretty much all songs in a certain style have. It's just like blues has certain chords and a certain way of playing melodies. With any style, you are riffing on a certain foundation. Of course you can break those rules, but learn the rules first. It will help build your confidence to create something similar to songs that are already working in clubs.

Don't be afraid of stealing some of what you're hearing, and then tweaking it to your own liking later. We all do this in one way or another. It's part of any creative craft.  Don't overthink this step & don't try to be perfect. Almost all songs have humble beginnings. We are just trying to get a basic idea that we can build on. All great songs are built from simple ideas.

The Kick Drum

Let's get into creating your kick drum. When it comes to electronic club music, the kick can be the most important element to get right. It's the foundation that the rest of the song sits on.  If you don't have the right kick, your song will suffer & sound less professional.

If you get it right, it will enhance everything else to put on top of it. It's like a house of cards. Without the solid foundation of your kick, the song falls apart. I personally like to have my kick (or kicks) on it's own track. In fact, I like most drum elements on their own track, so I can have full control of each element's effects & midi.

You can always group your drum tracks if you want to, for example, add a bit of compression to the whole drum groove to help it all gel together.  This makes it sound like 1 kit instead of separate sounds coming together. Sometimes a light reverb helps things sit together nicely as well. You can of course do most of your processing on each individual track, but this subtle final touch adds a little extra something in many cases.

I suggest you keep your kick drum outside of this group to avoid the kick getting lost or sounding less clean.

I like having a kit full of just kicks, just snares, just hi hats & so forth. This way I can easily layer or change sounds quickly. You should already have this prepared from the previous steps I have outlined.

If you prefer to start with a full drum kit to get your beat going, that's fine but just make sure you can EQ, compress & process each drum element separately later.  If you go with a full kit, I suggest you create 1 kit with 10 of each of your main drum elements. Most drum or sampler tools will allow up to 128 sounds, so it should be easy to get all your sounds in one kit, if you choose.

Kick Layers

So back to our kick. A good kick is often the result of 2 or 3 separate kicks samples, each representing one aspect of the final sound. It's easier to get all the sound elements you need by layering kicks instead of trying to find 1 perfect sample. It will also make your kick a bit more unique.

When looking for your first sample, search for a sound that has good bite or snap at the beginning. This should be a pretty short sound. If it is a longer sound, you want to reduce the decay time & most likely have no sustain or release.

Next you're going to find a kick with a good low end or boom to it, depending on your style. In many cases, these 2 layers will do just fine for a great sounding kick. Sometimes , however, you might want to add a third layer just to add a little extra body, grit, or texture to the kick.

Next you'll want to EQ each kick separately, so we are only using the essential frequencies from each kick sample. For the low end kick, you'll want to roll off some of the highs, while rolling off the low end of your snappy kick. The texture layer should usually also have the low end removed & then see if rolling off the highs improves the overall sound.

Make sure to adjust the volume of each sound until it gives you the results you want. I usually start with the low end kick at a good volume & then mix the other sounds in to taste.

If the snap of your kick isn't clean, it likely means the transient for 2 or more kick samples are interrupting eachother. You can solve this 1 of 2 ways. The first way is to adjust the start point of the problem sample until things line up below. The other way is to put a slight fade in on the kick samples that aren't your chosen transient sample.

Once it sounds like 1 solid kick, you will want to group all the layers (if they are on separate tracks) and apply a little compression to the whole group of sounds. You can refer to my compression trick previously mentioned to get a good result. Make sure to reference the kick drums from your reference mix or song, but turn the reference track down 15db so you aren't tempted to match volume. Now is not the time for that.  Regardless of the effect settings you use, if it sounds good, it is good, as long as you aren't clipping (running into the red).

Speaking of volume, I like my kick to sit around -12 db. This way the rest of the elements in my song will have plenty of headroom without clipping. There is nothing worse than the volume of your track getting out of control.

Create your kick & drum groove

Once you have created your kick sound, it's time to create the kick groove.

The first thing you'll want to do, is create your midi clip. 2 or 4 bars is probably good to get you started. Set loop markers so you can just loop the bars while creating your groove. Turn on your metronome & adjust the tempo to your liking, so you have a tempo to play to. You can turn this off once you have your groove started.

You can also drag in a simple drum loop sample to write your beat on top of. Just turn the loop down in volume so it doesn't overpower what you are attempting to create. Then again, if the loop sounds good, feel free to use it.

Set the midi resolution to 16th notes if you are going to draw in your midi notes. Although there are other resolution options (like triplets), 1/16th notes gives you flexibility for 90% of the music you will make. Most of your music will be a combination of 1/16th, 1/8th & 1/4th notes.

Make sure when your kicks are triggered, they play the sounds all the way through. You don't want them to cut off short just because you have a short midi note. Instead you want the midi note to trigger the full samples the way you created them. Just keep that in mind & you'll be fine.

Understand the that with a 1/16th note resolution, each bar will be divided 16 times. 1 bar is 4 beats. Think of a 4 on the floor kick drum. Each kick is a beat & 4 beats is 1 bar. A beat is also known as a 1/4 note.

So to get your timing, you might want to enter your kicks on each beat (or 1/4 note). If you are looking at 16 spaces, this will be the 1st, 5th, 9th & 13th space. If your kick drums were represented by zeroes, the pattern will look like this:

0 _ _ _ 0 _ _ _ 0 _ _ _ 0 _ _ _

With this as a starting point, you can start drawing in kicks in other locations & removing some kicks to your liking. Listening to a reference track can give you some pattern ideas to work with.

If you are using several kick samples from 1 drum kit you've created, you'll need to trigger all 3 samples with midi. I recommend you just write the midi for 1 kick sample until you are happy with the rhythm & then copy the same midi to the other samples in your kit.

You can also record your drums in live, and if your DAW has an auto-quantize function, it can correct your mistakes while you record on the fly. Just make sure auto-quantize is set to 1/16th notes to get the best results. This might be easier if you are using a full drum kit, as you can just loop the section & start with your kick & drum pattern. Then you can overdub hi hats & other parts on top each time the recording loops back around.

Whether you are drawing in your midi notes or recording it in, make sure to add your snare or claps & hi hats at the very minimum until you are satisfied with your basic beat. You can always add more parts, but the basic beat should have you nodding your head. If your style doesn't call for snare, clap or hi hats, work accordingly for your style.

As I mentioned earlier, if you are using multiple drum tracks, it's a good idea to put all your tracks into a group, or send them to a single buss. This allows you to put a gentle compressor or a subtle reverb to gel them all together & make them sound like 1 whole kit instead of separate parts.

Be careful with your kick drum and low toms, as you don't want reverb on those low frequencies. If your reverb has an EQ built in, I would cut all frequencies below 250hz, sometimes even higher.

If you don't have an EQ on your reverb, you can put your reverb on a return track, followed by an EQ. Then you can add the reverb to any tracks you like in any amount you like. Make sure to set your reverb to 100% wet. You don't want any of the original signal on your return track.

Bass

Keep in mind that your kick & bass play off each other & also provide most, if not all of your lower frequencies. Because of this, you want to make sure these 2 elements aren't fighting with each other.

As a general rule, if your kick is big & long, then your bass should be mostly short notes.

Alternatively, if your kicks are short & punchy, you might want some longer bass notes to fill out your low end. Of course you want to listen to your reference mix closely to hear what the kick & bass are doing. That will give you a big clue on the type of bass groove that is going to work best for your song.

Sidechain Compression

Sidechaining is the use of compression to control volume dynamics. Think of a radio deejay talking over the music. You'll notice that every time she speaks, the volume of the music automatically lowers. This is known as ducking.

The sidechain compressor is placed on the track you want to "duck" when another sound comes in. In the case a radio DJ, this would be the music track. It listens for any time the voice comes in. The louder the voice, the more the music is reduced in volume. When the deejay stops speaking, the music goes back to it's normal volume.

When it comes to your music production, you can make the sidechaining effect subtle or really noticeable. The lower the threshold setting on the compression, the more the volume is affected.

If your kick & bass are fighting each other in some spots, you can sidechain the bass to the kick drum. What this will do, is quickly lower the volume of the bass every time there is a kick drum. This keeps your low end from getting muddy & keeps your kick clean & punchy.

Sidechaining will allow you to have both big kick drums & longer bass notes, but I would do this sparingly unless you have a really good reason. This is a very powerful production technique that, if done correctly, can massively improve your overall mix.

Here's a simple way to sidechain you bass to your kick drum:

1. You will need a compressor that has sidechain capability and drop it onto your bass track (or bass group if you have more than 1 layer). A compressor that can sidechain will be able to listen to another track that you choose. In this case you will want to choose your kick.

2. On your compressor, set your ratio high, your attack as fast as possible, and pull down your threshold until it affects your bass volume to your liking. The lower the threshold, the more it pushes down the volume of the bass when a kick drum is played.

3. Last adjust your decay to how long you want the compressor to hold before returning your bass to it's regular volume. A faster decay will be more transparent, while a longer decay will give your bass more of a whomp sound as it comes back up in volume.

Creating your midi drums

When programming your drums with midi, I typically will start with a 1 or 2 bar loop & then I'll duplicate it. Once duplicated, I'll edit the duplicate for little changes. This makes drum programming go faster, instead of having to draw in every note in a 4 or 8 bar loop. The duplicate & edit technique will be really useful throughout your music making & save you a lot of time. This also works when constructing melodic content.

Fills & turnarounds

Often times there is a little change or fill on the 4th or 8th bar, which is often called the turnaround. This helps to reset the listener's brain for the next 4 to 8 bars. It builds some tension & excitement. As you listen to the radio or Spotify, listen to how drum fills give the song momentum & interest. A drum fill is 1 type of turnaround. It's breaks up a steady groove to make sure you're still paying attention.

You'll hear these changes in melodies, chord progressions, drums & bass parts.

Sometimes a new random sound will jump in, to momentarily catch your attention. All of these things are meant to keep stimulating the listener's brain so it doesn't get bored. The brain can typically listen to about 8 bars of the same music before it needs something to reset interest. Be careful not to use the same fills or turnarounds every time, or the brain will anticipate it & once again get bored.

Keep this in mind & you will naturally get a feel for when a little shift or fill should happen.

Bass layering

There are many types of bass sounds, depending of your style of music but what they all have in common is holding down the low end of your song & accentuating the momentum & groove of the drums. Some music uses sub frequencies exclusively for bass. You can hear this in a good amount of hip hop. Other basses are full frequency from low to high & often create both the low end & melodic aspects of the song.

Songs with real bass, typically take up the low & low mid frequencies & don't have as much sub frequencies as most synth bass does. With club music, you are almost always going to want to have a sub layer regardless of the type of bass you choose for your style of music. This is where layering can really come in handy.

What I do, is find a meaty bass sound with good mid & low mid frequencies. I'll then roll off the low frequencies below 100hz. Next I will duplicate the midi track & replace the bass sound with a simple sine wave. Almost any synth can create a simple sine wave. There is nothing tricky that you'll need to do except lower the midi notes by 1 or 2 octaves until you get those deep low notes.

You'll know you're in the right octave when you start to feel the bass tone in your body. Finally, I will roll off all frequencies above 100hz with an EQ & set the sub track to mono. Mix these 2 bass parts to taste & you'll have a big fat bass line.

If you want the bass to really cut through brightly, create a 3rd layer with some white noise & filter out the lower frequencies until you just have a bright high frequency shimmer. you'll probably want to lower the volume so it isn't too prominent, but it will definitely help some basses cut through, if that is what you are looking for.

You can make this layer really short like hi hats just to give your bass transients some bite, or you can have it play the same length as your other bass parts. Once again, it depends of the style of bass you are looking for.

You can also use the white noise trick for almost any synth sound to give it a bit more energy. Just choose wisely what you use it on, or your song will just become a bunch of unwanted noise.

As I'll continue to mention, it's important to study other songs in your genre and see how the bass and the kick play together and how they work to create the type of groove you are looking for.  Having a reference track is going to be a lifesaver in this process.

Obviously we are just creating our starter groove at the moment, but it's good to be able to see how the basic groove fits with the overall song. With practice, you will know the elements that make up your style instinctively, but at this time the reference will keep you on track. I still use reference tracks to this day, as I am always being inspired by new artists approach to my genres of choice.

It's important when using a reference track, that you turn the volume down lower than your own groove, so you aren't comparing things volume wise. Trying to push for maximum volume at this point is a very bad habit that will likely destroy your mix later on. There is plenty of time to worry about volume. This isn't that time. You've been warned. Set the volume of your reference track to -15db & you'll be in good shape.

Adding Swing & Groove

To avoid your song sounding too robotic & "on the grid", you'll want to inject some swing & human feel into your groove. Most DAWs give you tools to add this swing pretty easily. You'll want to look in your quantize settings & you should find a groove quantize or swing function. There you should find some groove templates you can apply or you might even be able to have your DAW analyze & steal the groove of a song you like.

If you like the shuffle of another song, applying it to your own song can improve the vibe of your tune in a big way. Sometimes you don't actually hear what it's doing, but you definitely notice that it just feels better. Those subtle shifts are a big step to a more professional sounding track.

You can also create a more human feel by slightly moving midi notes off the grid. For example you can highlight all of your snare drums & make them all slightly late. To do this you'll want to turn off your snap to grid function, or turn off the grid altogether. This will allow for minute movement of your midi notes. Just experiment a bit & you'll know when something feels right.

Another equally important aspect to getting a human feel is to vary the velocity of your drums. Velocity is how hard or soft a synth note or drum pad is hit. This usually affects the volume of a sound, but can also affect the tone on some sounds. Try this on your hi hats, by accenting certain hats while making others more subtle in volume. You can also make your 2nd snare or clap in a bar a bit louder than the first. All these little details can really push your groove forward.

Listen for these subtle groove elements in your reference track to see what works best for your style. Don't overthink it. This will all become easier with time. You'll start to naturally get a feel for it with time.

Mixing

I suggest you do some rough mixing through the whole process I am laying out. This helps you stay inspired by what you are creating. This is especially true when building your initial drums & bass groove. As we develop your song step by step, You'll want to check how each new part affects the groove & I'll share what to do if a new instrument is affecting your groove negatively.

This will save you the hassle of suddenly finding yourself uninspired by your song & not knowing why. It can be really frustrating to suddenly find you lost the excitement you originally had in your song. We want to avoid this issue from ever coming up. By checking in with each new instrument, you will solve any issues as they come up. This process saves you from most of the issues that come up when you get to the final mixing stage.

Get used to checking your reference track often, not for volume, but for balance & clarity. Your song is not going to sound like your mastered reference track & that's totally normal. This is why we listen to your reference track turned down to at least -15db.

Don't let pre-mixing slow you down. You can do all the micro adjustments during the final mixing phase. Just get close & move forward.

Homework

Your homework today is going to be to build your own 8 bar loop. It doesn't have to be perfect, but just get a basic idea & basic groove. It's just a start, so don't get hung up on everything. Just work with your drums and your bass to get yourself going. If you are feeling another element, like pads or an atmospheric background sound to set the mood, all the better.

All songs have humble beginnings. Don't try to compete with Mozart. Just get some paint on the canvas & enjoy yourself.

Step 7: Add the meat

In this lesson we are going to start by taking our looped groove & turning it into a song arrangement. For many, this is the hardest part of the music making process. My goal is to make this process as painless as possible.

Most beginning producers think they have to create all their song variations before arranging their tune, but from my experience this often leads to mental fatigue & confusion. This is like trying to create all the building blocks for a house before you have a floor plan. If you use this approach, you're going to have a pretty funky looking house. It's going to look like you just threw a bunch of shapes together without any cohesion. This is exactly how your song will likely sound if you use this strategy.

The fact of the matter is that you don't really know where your song is going until you get there. This is why it's best to arrange your song from 1 solid groove idea. This gives your song a central theme & a sense of "home". This is important in most music. As you get into the different sections of your song, it will tell you where it wants to go. It's much easier to edit your original groove as you go, than it is to create a bunch of variations in advance, hoping they will work seamlessly.

Another issue is that once you create a bunch of variations, you're going to start changing your mind on which one should be your central theme. This can take you down a long rabbit hole of trying things 100 different ways & not being able to choose which one works best. Then you become mentally drained & lose motivation. We don't want that.

Instead we are going to take our looped groove as it currently is & add some meat to it. We are building on the groove we already have & getting it to the point where it has most of the elements that make up your style of music.

To get started, you want to find a section in the middle of your reference track that represents it's main groove. Using your reference track will let you know when you have too few or too many elements. You want to find that balance & you want this looped groove to hold your interested with repeated listens. We aren't going for perfection, but we want our groove to feel fairly complete. Some of the elements your style might call for are chords, pads, stabs, arpeggiations, melody, percussion etc.

You don't need to be concerned with leads, until after you've arranged your song, since a lead typically only plays in 1 or 2 parts of your tune. Same with builds, breakdowns or drops. We first need to know what we are breaking down from or building back into before concerning ourselves with this step. Breaks & builds won't make any sense at this stage. At the moment, we are just focusing on the parts that will likely play through most of our track.

Remember to not get ahead of yourself here. Just like with a movie, we need the theme (your 8 bar loop), then the storyboard (your song arrangement) & last comes the little details & special effects. By staying in the moment, you will avoid overwhelm & get a lot more accomplished.

Don't lose the groove

When adding new elements to your track, it's important to check that each new part is adding to the groove instead of hindering it. If the loop starts to lose some of it's impact, consider simplifying the new part or changing the way it plays off the rest of the groove.

Using a "call & response" approach where 1 part plays & then another part responds is a great way to give each part some space, instead or all your parts playing at the same time & getting buried in the mix. The brain can only listen to a few things at once.

Too many different parts can confuse the brain & kill the groove you've created. It's good to check if a new part is working by muting the track momentarily. If your new part is working, you will miss it not being there.

Make sure to listen to all the other sounds & not just the new sound. This will let you know if everything is still coming through clearly.

Creating complex sounds

Some sounds you will want to emulate are going to be a bit complex & seem like an overwhelming task, if you aren't a professional sound designer. Here are some ways to simplify the process.

First you want to realize that you don't have to recreate one crazy sound. It's very likely that the sound you are going for has several layers to it. Even if it doesn't, recreating it with layers will make the task much more doable. This is just like what we did when creating your kick drum. Like with your drums, our listening skills are going to be an important factor. Listen to what is going on in the low, mid & upper frequencies separately.

Complex sounds often have different characteristics in each frequency range, and by breaking a sound down, it's much easier to both deconstruct & reconstruct the sound. You can use an EQ to isolate difference frequency ranges. Simply remove the frequencies you aren't listening for, take notes on what you hear, then move to the next frequency range.

Remember, we are approximating a sound, not copying it. Trying to get something exact will often kill your momentum. It's better to move in a direction, but allow yourself to recognize when something cool is happening that you might not have expected. It's very easy to miss something great because you think you're failing at the exact sound you are going for. Let the moment guide you.

Don't be afraid of presets

Although many presets aren't always the most exciting sounds, they can often be a great starting point. With a few tweaks of the filter & volume envelope, you can really make them your own. Also, layering a few tweaked presets can give you pleasantly unexpected results that sound almost nothing like the original presets.

Don't obsess over perfection. Get a sound to the level of "that'll do" & you can do further processing later. Often times you will realize the sound is working great in your track & doesn't need further tweaking. Don't forget to save your sounds as new presets. They might come in handy later. You could be saving one of your signature sounds without realizing it. You never know.

Samples

I've said it before & I'll say it again. It is not cheating to use samples. Samples are simply another tool to help you get the result you are looking for. If you are having trouble nailing a sound, it is very likely there is a sample that has been made for a very similar sound. Samples can also be manipulated in nearly unlimited ways, so there is plenty of room to make a sample your own, so that it works in your song & style.

Don't let your ego keep you from using this resource. Pretty much any producer who is finishing a lot of work is using samples in their toolkit.

Remember to Stop

Remember that we are just creating the theme of our song. Don't overdo it here. It's important to stop when things are sounding decent. When it comes to the main elements of your track, less is more. Stopping & letting go is something we as humans have a hard time with. This is why casinos don't worry too much when you are ahead. They know it's very likely you will assume you're on a winning streak & stick around long enough to give all your profits back. Don't do this with your music.

It's a good idea to stop working when you still have some excitement with your song. This will give you momentum when you return to it the next day. There are few things worse than working yourself to the point of burnout & then trying to return to it the next day. Leave the session when you feel like you've accomplished something & are excited for your next session.

Homework: Add the meat to your groove. This includes chords, melodies, pads, stabs, percussion & any element that is important to your style. Use your reference track to make sure you don't have too many or too few elements in your groove. Also make sure to mute each new element momentarily to make sure it's improving your groove & composition.

Step 8: Arrangement

Once you have your main groove locked in, it's time to get this into an arrangement. I'm going to make this easier for you than you probably thought it could be. This approach is going to save you tons of time. This is another case of not overthinking things & not attempting perfection. You can always edit things to your liking later.

Duplicate

The first thing we are going to do is simply duplicate our 8 bar loop until it's 5-7 minutes in length. If your style of music is shorter or longer than this, go with your style. There should be a "duplicate time" function on your digital audio workstation that will make is easier to highlight your 8 bar loop & duplicate without having to highlight all the clips. If there isn't, just highlight & duplicate the regular way.

By adding length to your loop, your brain will start to see this as a song instead of a loop. Even though nothing has changed in your loop, it'll feel like a small win. Trust the process.

Add breaks the easy way

Next we are going to add some breaks to this extended loop. Instead of agonizing over this, we are going to borrow the arrangement from another song. This can be the same reference track that we are already working with, or a new reference track. I often prefer to use another track for the arrangement structure just to pull in a 2nd influence, instead of borrowing everything from a single track.

This forces you to be a bit different & since you've already added the meat of your groove, it might be nice for a different track to influence where your song goes from here. By having multiple references, it keeps you from sounding too much like a single track & forces you to go a little outside your comfort zone.

So now that we have picked our reference track for arrangement, we are going to want to beatmap or warp the track to conform it to the tempo of your song. This way everything will line up on the grid & be super easy.

Once your reference is in place, you are going to remove the kick drums from your groove everywhere that a break happens on your reference track. This will create several sections to your track & make it easier to know when elements need to be added or removed. Spotting the breaks in your reference track is pretty easy, as it's where you'll see a volume drop or a thinning out of the audio file.

Removing the kicks makes your groove sound like it's breaking down & building tension. We will obviously work out your breakdowns & builds later, but for now this just gives you an idea of where changes in your track are most likely to happen. Often times you'll end up with your intro, outro & 3-4 sections in between. You can always lengthen, shorten or remove sections later, but for now we have created a structure that we can move forward with.

Congrats, you have a basic song structure and you haven't drained all of your creative energy.  Pretty easy huh?

Intros & Outros

Intros & outros are the easiest part of the process, since you already have your main groove. All we are doing here is stripping down the elements to something simple but not boring. Remember, the length of your intro & outro are not set in stone, so don't overthink this.

Think of your original loop with all the “meat” as the peak of your track. Something you are building up to in your song. If you give it all away in the beginning, you are left with no surprises. No surprises equals boring.

Throughout your song your job is to build tension & release it. This creates the excitement in the song and keeps people interested in continuing to listen. The easy way to do this is to remove an element for a certain amount of time & then put it back in. This can be removing the kick drum, bass or hi hat. Anything that drives the energy of your song.

The trick of the intro is to create an interesting groove with as few elements as necessary. Loop your first 16 bars & get to work. I would suggest removing your bass, hooks, leads & perhaps your main hi hat, but it is really up to you. Just strip it down until it feels right to you. Preferably, you should still be able to nod your head to the intro. If your reference song has a shorter intro, go with what fits your style instead of the standard 16-32 bar intro.

Once you have your intro, your outro is generally just the reverse of your intro. This means the final 16 bars is just like the 1st 16 bars of your song (considering you have a 16 bar intro). Your intro will usually progress with new elements coming in around every 8-16 bars on average.

Try adding or subtracting elements after each kick drum break you made so your song feels like it's progressing. Remember not to worry about detailing your breaks yet. We will get to that later.

Congrats! You've got your intro, outro & your breaks located. It's starting to look like a song already & you haven't even broken a sweat!

Homework: Duplicate your groove and then remove kicks wherever you see your reference track thinned out. Make sure your reference track is beat matched to the tempo of your song.

Next create your intro & outro by removing elements of your song to a basic buy interesting groove.

Step 9: Sound Design Essentials

Sound design is a subject that goes incredibly deep. You can spend a decade exploring it and still barely tap the surface. This lesson is going to teach you the essentials without going all the way down the rabbit hole. It's far too easy to get lost there & we don't have any time to waste. So let's get to it!

Waveforms

Waveforms are the basic sounds that make up both simple & complex sounds. A Sine wave is the most basic waveform, which looks like rounded half circles going up & down in a repeating sideways S shaped pattern. This pattern, like all waveforms goes above & below a zero point. Think of it like a line in the middle of the sideways S shape. Volume happens above & below the middle line. The middle line represents no volume.

The speed (or frequency) of the up & down movement determines the pitch of the sound. Faster movement creates a higher pitch & vice versa. Adding harmonics to a sine wave creates different waveform shapes. More harmonics create brighter sounds. The order of the most common waveforms from smoothest to sharpest are: Sine, Triangle, Square & Saw.

By layering different waveforms & running them through envelopes, lfo's, filters & effects (which you will learn), there is no limit to what you can create.

Listening

The best way to get comfortable with how each waveform sounds, is to simply play them by themselves with no filter, a fast attack & the sustain all the way up. Each synth has slightly different sounding basic tones, so this is also a good way to get used to the sound of your different synths.

Once you start to grasp the sound of each basic tone, then you can experiment with layering 2 or more waveforms together. This will help you build your vocabulary of basic waveform combinations.

Waveforms

Sine - The most basic of all waveforms. a sine wave doesn't have added harmonics. This tone tends to be warmer, smoother & deeper. It's the fundamental of most Sub & Bass sounds. Also often used with kick drums.

Triangle – Triangle waves add a few harmonics making it a bit brighter & more complex than a sine wave. Also good for bass tones with a bit more bite, as well as percussion. As opposed to the smooth rounded waveform of a sine wave, a triangle wave is more like a collection of V shapes with sharp peaks.

Square/Pulse – A Square wave is a waveform that is like an on/of switch. Its shape is created using every other harmonic. It can sound like a reed tone, hollow or wooden. It's a harsher sound which can be great for impact sounds. By reducing the width of the waveform, it becomes a pulse wave. Dubstep artists often use 2 square waves slightly detuned from eachother as the basis for their heavy bass tones, before adding filters & effects.

Saw/Ramp – Shaped like a saw, it is the most harmonically rich of the waveforms. This is great for leads, stabs & rich pads as well as brassy tones. Notice the ramp waveform is just the opposite of the saw. Where the saw wave starts at a high volume & declines, the ramp goes from a low to high volume, then repeats.

Noise - Noise is an essential part of sound. By itself can be pretty assaulting, adding a touch to your sounds can create a richer character or a bit of dirt to a sound. It can also help add impact to a sound & help it cut through the mix. As a type of waveform, it randomly plays all harmonics creating a sound you might hear on an old radio when in between stations.

There are 2 popular types of noise:

White - White noise is equal volume across all frequencies

Pink - Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to reduce the volume at each octave, creating a less harsh sound.

Envelope: Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release

Once you are able to recognize a waveform, the next step in unraveling what a sound is doing is to listen to it's volume envelope. Here is a reminder of how a volume envelope works.

Attack – This is the time it takes a sound to reach its peak volume level. A fast attack would be like a drum sound, while a slow attack has more of a fading in sound, like pads.

Decay – This is how long after the attack it takes for sound to reach a certain volume level, decided by the sustain.

Sustain – This is the level the sound will remain at after the sound decays, for as long as a note is held. Sometimes the sustain can remain at the same volume as the attack peak. Other sounds have the sustain all the way down. When this happens release time doesn't matter because the volume is already silent.

Release – This is how long it takes for a sound to go from the sustain level to silence once the played note is released. For example, a piano has a long release time after the note is released while a trumpet has a very short release time, the sound stops when you stop blowing air into it.

Transients - A transient is the loud short spike, usually at the beginning of a sound. It's the click of the kick drum or the crack of a snare. This is very important, to give a sound presence within a song. A sound without a transient, will be pushed to the back of your mix (think slow strings/pads). Often times it makes sense to layer a sound with a really short sharp sample to give it a bit more punch, pluck or click. This is a big secret to getting a better sounding mix.

Synthesis

There are a number of synthesis types which are capable or creating many different resulting sounds. These synthesis types involve the way waveforms are layered or combined, as well as how the harmonics are created or filtered.

Some of the main types of synthesis are: Additive, Subtractive, FM synthesis

Subtractive

This the most common method of sound synthesis. The basis of subtractive synthesis is a simple signal chain of an oscillator (which creates the waveform) running through a filter, essentially sculpting the sound by removing or reducing certain frequencies. This then runs through an envelope to control the attack, decay, sustain & release.

Subtractive synthesis is the most closely associated with most analog synthesizers.

Additive

Additive synthesis creates its sound or timbre by adding sine waves together. Where subtractive Synthesis creates its sound by filtering out full frequency sounds, additive synthesis combines waveforms to add new harmonics to a sound.

The sounds we hear in the real world consist of a sum of pure sine frequencies, each one at a different amplitude. This collection of simple sine waves bouncing off each other creates all the natural sounds we hear.

An example of an additive synth would be the Fairlight CMI. Released in the 80's it was the first to incorporate a computer screen & was legendary in both it's technology & cost.

FM Synthesis

The way that FM synthesis works is that a simple waveform, called a carrier (sine, saw, square, triangle), is modulated by another waveform, called a modulator (think LFO). The result is a far more complex waveform. FM synthesis brought about the first affordable digital synth, the Yamaha DX7. This created sounds that weren't previously possible with analog synths. This isn't a better or worse situation. It's just a different & more complex beast.

Think of FM synthesis like running a guitar into a distortion pedal (or any guitar pedal). The pedal modulates the original clean sound of the guitar to a point that you can't hear the original signal at all. It's not like you are blending the original sound with the processed, sound where you are able to hear both. Instead you only hear the result of the sound being modulated. As you run the guitar through more pedals, you further modulate the original sound. Hopefully this gives you a way to grasp what is happening with this type of synthesis.

Although I encourage you to learn sound design over time, I know it can be frustrating, when you first start. For the purpose of this course, I encourage you to mostly tweak presets & use samples instead of designing sounds from scratch. I'll later show you a great approach to easily design really unique sounds with relatively little effort, but for now, let's keep it simple.

I can attest that sound design can be rewarding, but can also be a huge time suck, often with little to show for the effort. We have songs to finish & time is of the essence!

Homework

1. Practice a little sound design by tweaking a preset. Experiment with filter, resonance & volume envelope. Twist knobs your aren't familiar with to get an idea what they do. When you've created something you like, save this preset so you can reuse it in the future.

Step10: Create a sound palette the easy way

Easy sound creation

In the previous lesson, we looked into some sound design basics to start creating & tweaking sounds. Although this can be important when you have a sound in your head that you want to approximate, getting great at it can be a long path.

Today we are going to take a different approach to creating your palette of sounds by allowing for some randomness & happy accidents. You'll be surprised what brilliant things can come out of this process.

Home recordings

Home recordings are such an easy way to get original percussion, ambience & filler sounds. This can be done by grabbing a microphone & banging on things around the house or even easier, recording yourself doing mundane things around the house with your smart phone.

Try recording ambience outdoors, in the mall or at a local diner or bar. The natural space & reverbs can add dimension to your music & the low-fidelity recordings can help add a bit of dirt as well, which can be a very good thing when layered with cleaner sounds.

I also like to record myself while cooking in the kitchen. I just hit record & go about my business. You don't even have to try to make interesting sounds, they will just come naturally. You'll likely be surprised what you find usable when you listen back.

Synth Jams

When attempting to create that one sound in your head, you often miss 100 fantastic sounds you made along the way, that might be even better. With this tip, we are going to capture all of that accidental genius.

A fantastic way to get interesting sounds is to drag a synth and a scale effect onto a midi track & choose the scale you would like to work in. Most DAWs should have a tool that is capable of this.  If not, just play the same note in different octaves.

Next you're going to record yourself jamming on a synth for 30 to 40 minutes. Twist all the knobs you aren't supposed to & play with reckless abandon. If you've exhausted a sound you are playing with, drag in another preset & keep going.

Also don't be afraid to pull in effects. Use the weird ones you don't quite know how to use & see what happens. Try not to use reverb or delay too often. I like to have dry samples that I can add those effects to later, but it's totally up to you. There is no wrong way to do this. Just explore sound.

This allows you to go wild & have every sound you create work in a certain key, so they will all work within your composition. If the note doesn't fit your composition, just transpose it until it does or save it to use in another composition.

knobs & Macros

Although physical knobs are not required for this process, having a physical controller can allow you to tweak multiple parameters really easily & quickly. Macros can be an alternative or can compliment physical knobs. A macro allows you to assign multiple parameters to a single knob, giving you a lot of control very easily.

Common parameters I like to control from a macro knob are filter frequency, resonance, attack, decay, sustain, pitch & lfo controls.

If you don't have a midi controller, you can move knobs with your mouse while playing. Your DAW may also have presets with macro knobs already set up. If you don't find this, don't worry, just tweak 1 knob at a time with your mouse. It's all good, you'll still get some great results.

Record the jam

To set yourself up properly for your synth jams, make sure to create a new audio track to record everything you do on your synth track. Most DAWs with allow you to send the output of 1 track to another track so you can record it.

If this seems complex, don't worry. You can record your midi track, making sure it is also capturing all the midi notes & automation. Then you can simply solo the track & render it just like exporting a whole song. Then you can simply reimport the audio.

There are no rules from here. Turn all the knobs you can & feel free to drag in new synths & presets during the process. Just have fun with no particular goal in mind. The less you try to control things, the more unique & interesting the results you can expect.

Cut out the good bits

Once you've done your 30-40 minute synth jam, don't worry if there is some stuff that sounds like crap in there. This is normal. What we are doing is mining for the little gems. Trust me, you'll find them. Your job is to simply remove the garbage & keep the gems. Don't overthink things. Just casually listen & pick out the bits that capture your attention.

You can cut out & collect the best sounds, and then drop them into a drum kit. You can also drop melodic sounds onto a sampler instrument so you can make melodies out of your sounds. I've made some really interesting & creative music with this approach. It's great using sounds that you couldn't ever create with a standard sound design approach. These elements give your music a more unique sound & pushes you out of your creative box.

Layering

Many sounds that you love in a song are actually several layers working together to sound like 1 sound. Layering sounds is a powerful way to get those richer, more complex ideas. Through some experimentation, you can quickly come up with surprisingly inspiring sounds.

Octave layering

Octave layering is a fantastic & simple way to give a sound more weight or bite very quickly. I do this often when something is sounding a bit weak & it usually does the trick.

Octave layering is a simple process:

1. Duplicate your audio or midi track

2. For midi, bring the pitch down or up 12 semitones. For audio, you'll want to find the transpose function & raise or lower by 12 semitones.

3. You will usually want to lower the volume of your layer so it's a bit more subtle. A little can often go a long way.

4. You may also want to drag in an EQ to remove some lows or highs, so your parts blend together better.

5. Lastly consider grouping the tracks & adding a light compression to the group track. This will also help the layers gel.

Frequency Layering

Frequency layering is when you create different sounds to represent the low, mid & high frequencies. This technique is often used for Kicks & Bass but can be great for any number of sounds. By focusing on each frequency range separately, it's usually easier to create 1 rich, complex sound.  You would then simply group those layers to add certain effects like compression, reverb or delay over the whole group.

By layering & grouping a few different sounds from your synth jam & EQing each layer, to help them work together, you will almost certainly get some interesting sounds with complex textures.

Sampling

Many music producer's, from the bottom to the top, use sampling other songs to get nice sounding drum hits, bass, and short sounds to use in their own productions. Sampling allows us to get the sounds we would have a tough time making from scratch, while focusing on what we are good at.

It's a huge time saver & can boost your confidence knowing you are using sounds that are already proven to work in the clubs. Of course if you make this too obvious, you will need to clear these samples, so try to avoid sampling big artists.

Sampling tips

The best way to get clean samples is from the intros and outros of songs, when things are more stripped down. Other times you'll want to EQ out what you don't want. For example, EQing out highs to remove a hi hat from a sample or removing the lows to get rid of a bass sound.

Sometimes it's a good idea to automate a filter. Let's say you have a long kick but a hi hat interrupts the clean sound. You want to keep the brightness at the beginning of the kick but filter out the hi hat that comes in a bit later.  By automating a filter frequency from the highest frequency, to just low enough to remove or lessen the hi hat sound, you can get a pretty clean kick sample.

If what you are sampling sounds too noticeable, you can always layer it with another sound to give it a slightly different character.

Sample Packs

This section wouldn't be complete without mentioning the value you can get from a great sample pack. Often you can get samples made for your particular style of music that can really speed up your songwriting process. This can be great for building your own drum kits with high quality sounds & most other instruments you may be looking for.

With some eq, pitch shifting & other effects, you can really make these sounds your own. Splice.com has a very innovative way of giving you access to hundreds of thousands of samples. Remember the goal is to create your own unique sound quickly with whatever is available to you. Don't slow yourself down with limiting beliefs. Let the world be your sound palette!

Step 11: Simple sound manipulation

There are many simple ways to manipulate audio to come up with interesting & usable sounds and rhythms that don't require sound design skills. There's even a couple midi tricks. When looking for something interesting, you very well might already have the source material staring you in the face. These are the sounds already in your song that you can copy, manipulate & repurpose into other sounds, to give your song more detail & character.

Here are some incredibly simple things you can do to repurpose your sounds:

Transpose – We've already gone over transposing the pitch of a sound, in previous lessons, but it can't be understated what interesting results can come out of subtle or drastic settings. Especially when layered with the other sounds.

Reverse - This simple tool almost always gives interesting & usable results, especially for transition sounds & breakdowns (we will get there in a future lesson). It's also cool to flip around a drum sound to create interesting additional rhythms. This can be great on kicks, hi hats, snares & claps.

Time stretching - Most DAWs make it easy to stretch a sound to 1/2 or 1/4 it's original length or it can be stretched beyond recognition. I like to experiment with half time, quarter time & double time, especially for drum loops or melodic parts. It can create some really interesting & unexpected layers to give your music more depth & complexity without too much effort.

Many DAWs have different stretching algorithms that give different tonal results. Some sound more natural & others sound really otherworldly. If you have these options, definitely experiment with them.

Midi tweaks

Just like with audio, you can easily manipulate your midi parts to get some creative results, that will typically layer well with your original parts. This is because the results will be in the same key. One thing to understand, is that tweaking midi is not the same as tweaking audio. Whatever you do with the midi notes, the sound is not going to change, just the way the notes are played.

Reverse - Reversing the notes in a melody can give you really cool ideas that can often compliment your original melody. Sometimes I'll remove the notes that don't interest me & just keep what is working.

Double speed / Half speed - I love to experiment with double time & half time to see how it layers with my original part. There is almost always something worth keeping. Definitely try it for yourself.

Invert - This is really interesting to play with. What it will do is flip the notes that you are playing, while still using only the notes in your melody. It determines the highest notes, the lowest notes & everything in between. The result is that it switches the high notes in your melody for the low notes & vice versa in proportion to it's distance from the note closest to the middle. You'll have to try it to really hear the interesting counter melodies you can create.

It's also fun to steal a melody from another song & then see what it sounds like inverted or reversed. It's a really easy way to create new original melodies. Give it a try & it'll all make more sense!

Grain delay

Grain delay & grain synthesis can create some of the most interesting results, be it dreamy, lo-fi, or glitchy. Grain delay samples incoming audio in very small chunks, called grains, and emits each grain after a delay, which you can set in milliseconds or sync to tempo. Most grain effects allow you to control grain size, pitch-shift amount, pitch, time & randomization.

In technical speak, the grain size is set in Hertz (Hz) using the frequency control, which you can think of as grains per second. Higher frequencies are created from smaller grains while larger grains create lower frequencies. You can calculate the grain size in fractions of a beat at your song's tempo by dividing the tempo by 60 times the frequency.

Like a regular delay, you can effect the amount of delay time & amount of repeats. When using grain delay, the results can sound much different than the original sound. Combine this with Transpose and/or Reverse & you are sure to get something usable very easily.

Slice to midi

This is another great way to get deeper control of your audio. Essentially you are slicing a longer sample or a loop at all of it's transient points. For example, if you sliced a drum loop to midi, it would recognize all the separate drum sounds & cut at the beginning of each sound. Next it takes those slices & puts them across the keys of a keyboard. This way you can rearrangement the way the audio is played back, to create totally new patterns or melodies. You'll find this technique used in a lot of modern music to really good effect.

Midi to audio

Another cool thing to do, is to render some midi parts to audio on another track. This way you can manipulate a part as both midi & audio to get completely different results. Some DAWs let you resample whichever tracks are playing, by recording it to a new audio track. Otherwise you can solo the midi part & render a section just like you would do a mixdown of your full song. Once rendered, you can reimport that audio to a new track.

Homework:

Go through the sounds you already have in your song, whether it be audio or midi & copy it to a new track to manipulate in new and interesting ways. Keep the parts that are interesting & discard what doesn't work. You can also put the sounds you don't use into a folder, to possibly use in another song later.

Step 12: Builds & breakdowns

Besides the groove itself, breaks & builds are an essential part of any type of electronic music. It's the place in your song where you build up tension to a peak, before releasing it. It helps create the big moments in your song.  A break can be anywhere from 4-32 bars long. You can also create mini-breaks as short as a 1/8th or 1/16th of a note, typically removing some or all of the song's elements, before punching back into a new phrase of your song. A lot of people find this part of song creation complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Let's go through some simple ways to get this accomplished.

We have already created locations for our breaks earlier by removing the kick drums in certain locations of our track. Now we are going to explore what to do in these breaks, that makes sense for our track. If you have your reference track, it could give you some clues on the types of elements that could possibly work for your own track. With this said, you get to decide what works best for your music. You are not attempting to copy another song. You are simply looking for some inspiration.

Breakdown drums & bass

Since your breaks currently don't have kick drums, you can now decide if you want to keep them out, or bring some of them back in. It's totally up to you & what you think works best.

Your drums & bass are most often the elements of your song that will be effected in your breakdowns the most, so let's focus on these elements first.

The easy way to do this is to simplify or remove your kick drums, which is what we did earlier. Another approach is to use a filter effect to remove the low end from your kicks, creating a sharp pulse through your break. Adding some resonance to the filter or a little saturation can give it more impact.

Next you probably want to simplify or remove the bass. Just like with the kick, you can simplify, filter or remove the bass during your breakdown. Give a listen to other songs in your genre, to see the approach they take in their breakdowns. You can also drop a filter or EQ on your master track & get rid of all low frequencies in your song at once. Just make sure the effect is off when it isn't being used.

Rising & falling sounds

Adding sounds that rise or lower in pitch over time is a pretty universal technique for building tension & excitement in a song & it's really easy to do. Here are a few methods:

Pitch bend - If you have a hardware synth or a controller, you can use the physical pitch bend to slowly pitch up your sound 1-4 octaves over the length or your break. If you want to pitch bend audio, you'll either want to automate the pitch in your DAW or drop the sound into a vst sampler, which should give you the ability to pitch bend the sound.

Pitch envelope - Some synths & samplers have a pitch envelope, which is the same concept as a volume envelope. It has an Attack, Decay, Sustain & Release. At each stage in the envelope you can control the pitch amount. If you wanted to create a pitch rise sound, you would start with the pitch change at zero & then set your decay time to the length of your break. Then you will pitch up 12, 24, 36 or 48 semitones. This will give you the rising sound you are looking for.

Transpose - Most DAWs have the ability to automate the pitch of any audio by semitone. Instead of a smooth even rise, you can shift note by note in the scale of your song, ending 1-4 octaves higher than you started. You'll want to either understand the notes that work in your particular scale, or listen to make sure none of the notes sound off as you go from note to note. You should be able to hear what sounds correct & what doesn't.

Hi pass filter - By running a sound or group of sounds through a hi-pass filter (removing the low frequencies), you can create a rising effect. This works best when the filter resonance (also known as Q) is boosted. You can choose the frequency you want the filter to peak at. You usually won't want to go all the way to 20khz, as that will make all your sound disappear, so adjust to taste. You may want to filter all the way up until you want your song to kick back in, or you may want to quickly bring back the low frequencies over the final 1/4 or 1/8 note of your breakdown.

Noise sweeps - This can be the same as the hi-pass filter approach, except you are filtering white noise on a synth or a white noise sample. You can also do this with a bandpass filter instead of a hi-pass filter. Adding some delay and/or reverb can really bring this effect to life!

Reverse - Reverse sounds are a fantastic way to build tension, especially toward the end of your break. Higher frequency sounds like reverse crashes work great for this.

Impact sounds - Impact sounds like a crash, an explosion or other high energy sounds work great to introduce a break, to punctuate a middle point, or when the song kicks back in. Adding reverb or delay can add to its impact as well.

Effects, delays, reverb - Breaks often benefit from increasing the intensity of effects, creating a bigger wetter build. You can increase the reverb of delays over several bars then quickly bring it back down when you want everything to kick back in. It's a tried & tested technique that is used in many styles of electronic music.

Here's some quick tips for using effects:

1. Add a reverb to your hi hats, slowly increasing the decay & wet/dry as the break comes to its peak. Make sure to return the settings to their previous positions when you kick things back in.

2. Long delays on voice parts, pads, stabs etc can also help to build tension.

3. Other effects can be used to make your sounds become almost unrecognizable & allow the listener to feel a bit “lost” before returning to normal when the groove resumes.

4. Make sure to remove low frequencies from your reverb & delays so your breakdowns don't sound muddy.

Depending on your style, some will build all the way to the end of the break, while others will leave a bar or 2 for the effects to quiet back down before kicking things back in. Even giving a ¼ note rest can give more impact to the return of the groove, so experiment & see what works best for you.

Fills - With rock bands, a drum fill is like a short break in the song, creating a change in the groove before crashing back into the main beat. Drum fills work well in club tunes as well. Little fills throughout the track can keep things interesting, but they can be especially effective when coming out of your breakdowns.

There are many live drummer sample cds that will give you all the fills you could want. This is a stylistic thing & this works for some music genres more than others, but never be afraid to try it out for yourself.

The breather - Like I hinted at earlier, many songs benefit from quieting things down just before the return from the breakdown. If done right, this can create a huge sounding release back into the groove of your song.

As you are creating your build ups, make sure to ask yourself “should I give this a breather before the song jumps back to life?”. You'll want to decide on a case to case basis.

Finalizing your arrangement

As you dial in your builds & breakdowns you want to check in with yourself & make sure you are liking the length of your breaks & the sections of your song. If everything feels right, you're golden, however, you may find you either want to shorten or lengthen certain sections of your track.

Perhaps your song has a section that feels like it's going on too long, or maybe another section feels like it wasn't given enough time to be fully expressed. This is a pretty simple fix & something I do with a number of my songs.

Most, if not all, DAWs should let you highlight a section and globally duplicate or cut your whole arrangement in that range. This will easily lengthen or shorten your whole song, without having to move all your clips to make room for the edit. It also saves you the time of having to highlight every track in the range you want to edit. Once you have 20 or more tracks in your song, this will seem like a real lifesaver.

Homework:

Fill in those breakdowns for maximum impact with your style. Start simple, listen & try to figure out what is missing before adding another layer. Make sure not to overdo things here. You don't want a world of mud.

Step 13: Keeping your song interesting

This lesson gets into those little details that can make all the difference. This is going to be similar to yesterday's lesson. Some of the things that help a breakdown sound interesting can also be used to keep your song as a whole interesting. The difference is that today we are going to be building up instead of breaking down.

The goal is to keep the energy and interest throughout your song. Keep in mind that you should already have a solid groove that you can nod your head to. If you start off with a lifeless or boring groove, work on that before moving forward.

8 bars

Generally speaking, the brain has a very low threshold for sameness in music. Typically your brain can handle about 8 bars of music before it gets a bit restless. Luckily, very minor things can reset that threshold for another 8 bars. Crashes, Impact noises, percussion sounds, delayed bits. almost anything "new" can spark new interest.

16 bars

After 16 bars of hearing the same repeating part, the brain wants to hear a new element added to the groove. Maybe a pad sound, a vocal bit or an extra bit of percussion. Where the 8 bar reset sounds are generally 1 shots, think of these additions like adding a loop. It doesn't have to be a busy loop, just something new that repeats. You can also keep things interesting by removing an element to create a bit of tension and then bringing it back in 16 bars later.

Feel

This isn't an exact science, so you will have to develop a “feel” for when something is needed & when it isn't. Use the general rules & then follow up with your own instinct for what sounds correct to you. This comes with practice & over time will become more or less automatic. You'll just know when something is needed. Don't force this, just let it come when it comes.

Transition sounds

Transition sounds are those sounds that give your song more of a flow & glues together the looped blocks that make up the structure of your track. It helps your song sound like a song instead of a collection of repeated loops.

Transition sounds reset your “loop tolerance” so your song doesn't sound boring. They create a bridge from one 8 or 16 bar loop to the next. Transition sounds are usually sounds with a slow attack and a long release. In other words, the sounds rise & fall in volume. Reverse sounds with long reverb work really well to make transitions, as do short pad sounds.

Fillers

Where transition sounds typically bridge together blocks of 8 or 16 bars, fillers are those little added sounds that happen within your 8 bar blocks to keep the loop itself sounding interesting & new. Fillers can be a quick drum hit, voice bit or effect sound that stands outside your basic groove to pull attention away from a repeating groove for a moment.

These sounds can make the difference between a boring track & one that consistently stimulates the brain.

Evolving sounds

Evolving sounds are an incredibly powerful way to keep your song interesting & tell the brain that you're on a journey, not just a predicable repeated pattern. Little changes in timbre, filter, EQ, lfo, pitch or send effects can all help a sound to evolve. Pads can be great evolving sounds that can give your whole song movement, but it can be almost any sound that changes over time.

In rock music, it was usually a lead part that worked as an evolving sound, because it was the part of the song that kept the groove from sounding boring & predictable. It took you somewhere new.

Ambience

Ambience is used to add subtle texture to your song & make it sound more natural. In real life there is no such thing as silence. There are always sounds in the background. Cars, wind, airplanes, birds, the low buzz of the refrigerator or your computer fan all break the silence in your environment.

It can be important to break the silence in your music by sitting it on top of some low ambience sounds. Ambience creates an evolving feeling even at very low volumes. The brain detects silence as unnatural & ambience can be the missing ingredient that makes your song work.

I like to make field recordings on my iPhone. I'll record out my window, in shopping centers, at a diner or out in nature & use these as background ambience in my songs. Sometimes looping some ambience you recorded can add an unusual but pleasant rhythm in the background of your song. Experiment & see what works best for your song.

Headcandy

Headcandy is a word I use to describe sounds that move around your head from left to right. I like to run percussion sounds through an auto pan, delay & filter to give random, ever evolving movement around the headspace. This is a stylistic technique for me, but headcandy is any sound that pulls your attention away from the center of your mix. It can make your song more spacious & 3 dimensional.

Keep in mind that you don't have to use every type of filler in your own song. Think of each of these elements as a problem solver. If your song no longer has any issues to your ears, there is no reason to add needless stuff "just because". Consider what your song might be missing & what it needs to fill that hole. Don't feel the need to add something, if it isn't essential to the improvement of your song.

Homework:

1. Add interesting new sounds & fillers, when you notice parts of your song that sound too repetitive or boring. Make sure these sounds are enhancing your groove instead of hindering it. These little additions can bring new interest & professionalism to your music.

Step 14: The power of sends & returns

What are returns & sends?

A return track is a track that's specific purpose is to hold an effect or chain of audio effects, that any sound in your song can be sent through. Every track in your project can be sent through any of your return tracks, using each instrument track's send controls.

You are able to apply one common effect across many tracks instead of loading 20 of the same effect onto individual tracks into your song project. Also each track can have a different amount of the return effect . Some standard uses for sends and returns are for several reverbs (short, medium & long) & delays. With that said, you can get some other very interesting results by exploring more experimental effect chains on your return tracks.

Why use send/returns?

So what is the point of using a send/return for an effect instead of just dropping an effect directly on your instrument track?

1. To save your computer's resources by lowering the amount of effects required in your song.

2. To make multiple instruments sound like they are in the same room or space.

3. The ability to easily set the amount of an effect you want on each track separately, while still only using 1 effect.

4. To easily affect only a small part of your instrument while leaving the rest unaffected. For example, running 1 word from your vocal through delay or enhancing a few chosen drum sounds with a bit of delay.

5. You can make an effect continue even after you dropped the volume of your original instrument track. This can't be done from within the instrument track itself. With a send/return track, the effect volume is independent of your instrument track volume. This can really come in handy.

6. The ability to put the effect only on the left or right side, while the original sound keeps its current position.

7. The ability to EQ the effect or chain of effects separately from the original sound.

Send/return effects

Here are some suggestions for effects that are great for send/returns.

1. Delays

2. Reverbs

3. Saturation/Distortion

4. Harmonic enhancers

5. Compressors

Since all or these effects are generally added to the original sound, they work very effectively as send/returns. The compressor, although normally used directly on the instrument track, can be used as a send/return to create parallel compression (aka New York compression). This gives you the benefit of a ballsy compressed sound, layered with the snappy transients of the original sound.

Convolution Reverb

Convolution reverb is a sample of a sound running through a real world space, whether it be in a cathedral or inside a small metal pipe. We call this an impulse.

Most convolution reverbs can also trigger a sample instead a reverb impulse, giving you an unlimited variety of ways to process an instrument. It could be a lions roar, rain or sand hitting a metal bowl. Your imagination & sample library is the limit.

With a send/return you can create some incredibly exciting soundscapes. Add several convolution reverbs each as a separate return track & get inspired as you run different instruments through them.

Effects not to use

While there are a number of effects that work well as send/returns, others aren't very effective. While send/returns “add to” your original instrument sound, the effects you put directly on your instrument track changes the original sound. Think of a distortion pedal on a guitar. The original tone is no longer there after it's run through distortion. If you put distortion on a send/return track, the distorted sound would be added on top of the original sound, allowing you to hear both. This isn't usually the desired effect.

Here are some effects you most likely won't want on a send/return track.

1. Filter

2. Distortion

3. Flange/Chorus

4. Autopan

5. Vocoder

All of these effects need to manipulate the original sound itself to be effective (in most cases). In this case, a send/return just adds a layer on top of the original sound. For example, an autopan return track would still have the original sound sitting front & center, defeating the purpose or panning. Only when you want an effect “added” to the original sound, should you use a send/return.

Send/returns that break the rules

In some cases, you can create complex effect chains that break the rules. In this way the original sound is still intact, but it can trigger an interesting effect that sounds very little like the original sound. In this case, it is treated like a separate sound that can run through filters, delays & panning even though they aren't recommended in most normal situations.

This would be effective in creating those headcandy effects that I discussed earlier.

Homework:

Set up a few return tracks & use automation to add a little variety to sounds.

Step 15: Important mixing tips

Let's get into some mixing concepts & techniques that can both simplify the process & give you better results. All the EQing & layering we have done up to this point, should make mixing your song much easier, however this is where we really want to focus on the big picture. There is a big difference between getting your individual instruments to sound good on their own & having them all compliment each other in a well balanced mix.

I suggested when you started your song that you do some rough mixing as you go. This saves you the hassle of suddenly finding yourself uninspired by your song & not knowing why. If you followed my suggestions, you should be fairly happy with your track & mix so far.

Monitoring

A good reference track is more important than which headphones or monitors you use (within reason). You certainly want something studio worthy, but you don't have to agonize over it. If your monitors are a bit on the bright side, for example, your reference track (that you know is a good mix) will also sound a little bright. Knowing that, you just have to aim for the tone you are hearing from your reference song, instead of worrying about having the most perfectly accurate sounding monitors.

Mono Mixing

The benefits of mixing in mono are pretty substantial. Most aspiring engineers might think of mixing in mono as a good way to find out if there are phasing issues in your song. The best reason for checking these possible phasing issues is in the event that your song is played over a mono sound system (which many clubs have). When a stereo mix is converted to mono, stereo effects, extreme panning & ping pong delays may sound weird & need to be corrected in the mix. Although that is a very useful technique, there are many other great benefits to using mono to create a better stereo mix.

Now when I say mono, let’s be very clear. I’m not just talking about using a mono plugin and running it through both of your speakers. I’m talking about turning off one of your speakers and running your mono signal to just one speaker. Preferably you would have this single speaker front and center, but as long as the speaker is directly facing you, this should work just fine.

When mixing in stereo, as you move your head and body around in your studio, you begin to lose the stereo illusion and detail of your mix. In mono you don’t have this problem. You’ll be able to hear everything in your mix no matter where you are.

When mixing sounds to opposite sides of the stereo field, you may find it a little tricky to find that perfect balance so your mix doesn’t start sounding lopsided. When the sound of both speakers are superimposed on each other in mono, it’s easy to hear which of these instruments is dominant or louder and balance that out.

 After getting your basic panning done in stereo, it’s a great time to switch to mono to fine tune things. If you are looking for the “sweet” spot to put an instrument in the stereo field, switching to mono can help. As you make minor panning adjustments in mono, you will sometimes hear your instrument get a little more clear. That is the probably the spot. Mono also reveals when an instrument is fighting for position or frequency much more easily than in stereo.

Reverb settings are also easier in mono. If you are questioning whether you have too much or too little reverb, mono reveals the mud or the holes in your mix. As you start to tweak your reverbs in mono, you’ll notice a whole new depth to your sounds. When it sounds good in mono, it’ll sound even better when back in stereo.

Aside from the occasional switch to stereo to check your sub levels, you’ll find mixing to be easier at lower volumes and thus you’ll be able to trust you ears for longer periods during a session. Nothing is worse than mixing for 8-10 hours straight and realize your ears stopped being reliable after the 3rd hour. So with that said, make sure to take ear breaks often. I suggest at least a 10 minute break every 45 minutes.

 Stereo mixing can be complex and pretty daunting. Move your head too far in any direction and you lose that magic spot. Mono mixing puts everything into one simple box that will always sound the same wherever you move your head and body. Problems and solutions can be revealed much easier in mono. If you can get things sounding good in mono, they will almost always sound great in stereo.

More mixing tips

A couple things that have helped me get better mixes are as follows:

1. When trying to dial in the volume of a specific instrument, instead of mixing from a low volume to high volume, to do the opposite. Turn the track up a bit too loud & then see how low you can make the sound without it losing it's impact in the song.

2. When mixing an instrument, switch to listening to everything but the instrument you are mixing. This let's you know how this instrument is effecting the rest of the parts in your track.

When you focus solely on the instrument you are mixing, you tend to turn it up too loud in an attempt to give it noticeable clarity. The problem is that with each new instrument you mix, you continue to turn each part up too loud, leaving you with the last parts you mixed being louder than the first tracks you mixed.

Many newer producers can get stuck in this phase for years & not understand why their mixes are always sounding subpar. Hopefully this tip will save you a lot of frustration.

3. If 2 parts are fighting each other to be heard, try a bit of panning before going straight to the EQ. Sometimes this alone can solve the issue.

4. Don't be tempted to crank up your sub & bass frequencies too loud.  I know in the moment it will sound like more is better but when you play the song in your car or a club system, the song will end up sounding like mud.

I used to run into this problem & my bass levels made my otherwise good mix sound awful. I was literally mixing my bass frequencies about 7db too high. This can have a lot to do with the low end response of your monitor speakers or headphones. Most speakers are going to have some inaccuracies, giving you the illusion that your mix is great, when it still needs work.

Make sure to compare bass levels to your reference track & check the lower frequencies visually between the 2. Your reference track is going to tell you where your highs, mids and lows should be sitting. Your speakers might lie to you, but your reference track never will. If you know a song already sounds great in a club, your phone & in your car, trust how it sounds in your monitors & mix your song accordingly. I like to use a free plugin called Span by Voxengo to visually check the low frequencies, as well as the overall frequency curve of my reference track & my song. This can help you see possible frequency issues that you might not be hearing.

5. DO NOT get tempted to try to create a mastering chain on your main output. Your job is to make a great balanced mix. Leave the loudness for a professional mastering engineer. If you sign your songs to a label, they will usually take care of the mastering.

You want the volume of your track to sit around -6db & never peak above -3db. Those are the levels a mastering engineer prefers & can give you the best results with. Delivering a mix that you tried to master yourself will greatly limit what a professional can do, because they can't undo your amateur mastering job. You have been warned.

How to recover from a mix you aren't happy with

If you find your are not satisfied with your mix, do not stop. Try to finish what you started, no matter what. It's always a good habit to move beyond where you would previously give up. If you aren't happy with your composition, it usually has something to do with the building blocks that make up the groove. Use the following techniques to recover your track.

1. Mute everything but your basic drums & bass.

2. One by one add parts & see how the groove feels to you. If you add something that loses the groove or vibe, consider what about that part is interfering with the groove. It could be volume, EQ, too many effects, or the timing of the part. If you can't quickly fix the problem, take note of it & mute again the track until later.

3. Keep adding parts back into your song, listening for how the groove is effected positively or negatively & check your reference track for clues on what may work better when something doesn't sound quite right to you.

4. Once you have all the sounds that are working well in your song playing, you can focus on the ones that aren't working. If volume adjustments, EQ, reducing effects or adjusting the timing doesn't work, consider removing or replacing the sound.

Through this process, you should be able to recover songs pretty painlessly.

Panning

I think many people might be over complicating panning & it doesn't have to be so difficult. It's really a balance of common sense & intuition. Certain things typically need to be in the center. Kick, Bass, main hi hat, main snare/clap. From there, panning is a bit like frequency. Just like you want all of your frequencies represented properly in a song, you also what your song to fill the stereo space in a balanced way.

You want everything balanced between left & right with each sound having it's own breathing room. You may have a main hi hat at noon position, a shaker at around 2, & maybe another hi hat layer panning wide left & right in stereo. You always want your sub bass in the middle. Never pan your sub frequencies. In fact, set all frequencies below 120hz to mono. You can, however add stereo width to bass frequencies above 120hz.

Sound effects and hits can be sprinkled through the panning field, filling in empty spaces. “Call and Response” parts work well at around 2 & 10 or 3 & 9. There really aren't many rules here, but you will find that some positions sound good to you & some don't. Use your intuition & your reference track.

Homework:

Go through your mix with the above lesson in mind. Make sure your Sub frequencies are in mono. After making some of these final additions & tweaks, you should feel your song is very close to done, but we still have 1 more important step.

Step 16: Take notes

Congratulations! You've come a long way & we are in the final stretch. This is where we are going to put a final ear on our work & make some final tweaks. Now that we have our song mostly dialed in, we are going to take it out of the DAW. Although having the visual aspect helped to get you this far, it can often hinder the final process.

Mixdown

1. Our first step is to render a mixdown of our song. Make sure you are selecting the whole song to be exported. Some DAWs recognize this automatically, but many require you to choose your start & end points. Also make sure to leave an extra 4 to 8 bars at the end so you don't cut off any final delays & or reverbs.

2. Your DAW should have a mixdown or export audio function in your menu. Find it & go through the process of rendering to audio. For this process you can export your audio at 16 bit/44.1khz.

3. Choose where to save the file & name it "Test mix 1" or whatever makes sense for you. I usually just save to the desktop, since we will later be deleting this file.

Notepad

Now you will want to grab a pen & paper or open a note taking app on your computer. Depending on whether you are using a Mac or PC, Textedit, notepad or Evernote will all do the trick.

What to listen for

Levels - The 1st thing you'll likely notice are your volume levels. It should be fairly easy to determine anything that jumps out too much & what might be too quiet. Write down the specific minute & second for each part that needs to be raised or lowered.

Boring spots - As you listen through your song, listen for a groove going on too long without anything new happening. Unless you have a really good reason for keeping that tension, you want the whole song to keep your interest.

Extra drum hits, hi hat layers, fillers or an added loop in a certain section can create new interest. It doesn't have to be overly noticeable to still be effective. The brain is really good at detecting little changes. Make sure to write down where your song needs an energy boost or a slight change.

Effects - As you build your song & have many instruments with reverbs & delays, you can run the risk of it muddying up your mix. Listen for any spots that you can back of an effect to make your mix a little cleaner without taking away from your song's atmosphere. Backing of a few delays or reverbs just a few percent can really clean things up.

Checklist

Once you have gone through the process of writing down each necessary change, it's time to go back into your DAW & tackle each item on your list. Be attentive to the process, but don't overthink things. Just go through your checklist 1 by 1 until you're done.

Let go

Before over analyzing things, remember that nothing is ever perfect & that it's the imperfections that give your music personality. Don't agonize over 1/10th of a db. If it sounds good to you, trust your gut. You'll be having to rely on it a lot in the future.

2nd Listen

After you've gone through your checklist, render down your mix again & give it a few listens in different systems. Listen on a home stereo system, your car & through your phone. Listen to how your mix sounds on multiple systems & take any final notes if something sounds off to you.

Listen to each instrument & also listen in terms of low, mid & high frequencies. Understand that your song is not mastered, so don't compare the volume to other songs, just listen to the mix itself. If you find you need to make some final tweaks, go through the note taking process again, and go through your checklist 1 last time.

Call it done

By this time in the process you have dialed in your groove, filled out your song with enough elements to hold the listener's interest & arranged the song to your liking. Next you went through the steps of mixing your song & did a final run through.

Depending on your prior experience with music making, getting this far may have been challenging at times. That's totally ok. The more you repeat the process, the better you will get at it. This is not a "one & done" process. This is meant to be an approach you can repeat for decades to come. Don't sweat the little hiccups along the way. We are playing the long game.

I know that calling your song done can be the scariest part of the process. You put yourself at risk of people not liking your work. This is normal, even for the pros. The only difference is that the pros know that they get better with practice & there is no such thing as perfection. Do the best you can & call it done.

Sharing your art with the world is what separates an artist from an amateur.

Take a moment to appreciate how far you have come. It's quite an accomplishment, and if this is the first time you've taken a song this far, you should allow yourself to enjoy this moment. Once again, I want to hammer this home. This is not about perfection, it's about making noticeable improvements each time you go through this process.

Prepare for mastering

When it comes to rendering your final mix, you aren't going for volume. Instead, your goal is to prepare your song for the mastering stage. Here are some things you'll want to do.

1. Make sure the highest levels in your mix don't exceed -3db at any time.

2. Render to 24bit, 44.1Hz or higher (but this should be fine).

3. If you have Dithering options, set them to “No Dithering”.

4. Do not put any compression or limiting on your master channel. If you have been using either of these during your songwriting process, turn them off now.

Homework:

1. Listen to the track you mixed down from the file (not your daw).

2. Take notes of anything that seems off to you & the time that it happens. You can stop & replay parts so you are accurate on the time.

3. Give it a 2nd run through just to double check your notes.

4. Take a 15-20 minute break & then dive back into your daw & tackle each issue quickly. Don't overthink. Just knock them out. Then do your 2nd mixdown & repeat the process to make sure everything is sounding dialed it.

5. Check your mix on multiple systems (phone, car, stereo etc)

6. When you have no more problems with your song, you're done.

Congratulations!

Step 17: Shortcuts to finishing more music

Finishing a song is quite an accomplishment & you should give yourself time to enjoy it, however, we don't want to lose any music making momentum. Most of the time, if you want to get your music signed, the labels will want 2-3 original songs from you that are consistent to the label's sound & style. They also want to know that if your music goes over well, that you can deliver more music to them for future releases.

This is a process I developed to quickly build on the momentum of a good track that I am hoping to release. It will almost guarantee that if the label likes the first track, they will also like the others you are offering.

As you should now be aware, a great song starts with a good groove. From there, the song can go in 1000 directions. A starting point is just a starting point, but that starting point is what is going to get your excited. There is nothing more daunting than finishing a great song & then having to look at a completely empty project file and start the process all over again.

This process I am going to show you is a bit like asking your drummer to play a similar beat to a song you've done before so you can jam to it on guitar until something interesting happens. From there you can take the new idea in a totally different direction, but every song needs a starting point. The following is how I make songs quickly when I need to finish an EP for a label. It's lead to several number 1 releases.

New bass, new groove

Now that you have completed your 1st song, we will be using the same basic drumbeat from the song you just finished. Just get the kick, snare & hi hats. You will also be using your bass sound, but you'll be writing a completely new bass line. Since these sounds are already produced well, this will save you a lot of time that it would have taken if starting from scratch.

Differentiate

Remember that although this new song is starting of with the same elements, you are free to change any sounds that are too similar to your last song. In fact, I encourage you do so. Think of it like a band, everyone plays the same instruments but can make 100's of songs that are completely different. You can too.

Here are some things you can do:

1. See if your bass line works better at a faster or slower tempo. Tweak the sound a bit if it sounds too similar to your original song.

2. Switch out sounds like snare, clap & hi hats if they are too distinctive to your previous song. Also remove any signature sounds that are too similar to your last song.

3. Everything you add from here will be new, so your song will inevitably sound a lot different, even though the seed of the song is the same.

A new reference

A great way to change the vibe of your new song, is to use a different song as a reference. This is sure to inspire different grooves, song structure & introduce new ideas. This is the easiest way to avoid the trap of your songs sounding too much alike. Obviously you want a similar style that sounds like it belongs on the same EP, but enough difference to still stand alone as an original piece of work.

Similarities

Remember that it's totally ok to use similar techniques for your new songs. The similarities are what develop into your own recognizable sound. Never be afraid to borrow from yourself. Singers only have 1 voice & aren't worried that it's the same voice in every song, don't you worry about using similar or the same instruments (as long as you can differentiate between songs). Every artist does it and it is actually a good thing to have a recognizable sound.

Everyday

Keep your writing process up everyday, even if you only think you can spare 30 minutes. Sit down and do as much work as you can each day. By daily practice of taking songs from start to finish, step by step, the things that seem hard now will continue to get easier & your process gets faster. You will consistently be improving your techniques & your listening skills.

The better you are able to listen, that better you will be able to make your own music.

The music production meltdown

About once every 10 or so songs, I find I go through a bit of a meltdown, where I feel the song I am working on is absolute shit. I start to internalize this as "I am a crap producer, who has just gotten lucky, and my luck has ended".

This is normal & here is why. Music production is largely problem solving. As you get better at producing, you expect more from yourself & your listening skills become much better developed. You will never reach the pinnacle as a producer. You will just continue to notice new levels of production to aspire to. It's endless, and this is a good thing. You are always evolving.

What I find happens when I have a music production meltdown, is that it takes 3-4 sessions to work through this. The silver lining is that breakdowns are almost always a precursor to new insights & inspirations. The breakdown is you having to think beyond your current skill level. This type of creative thinking can be mentally exhausting but if you can just persist through it, you will almost always have a breakthrough that moves you to a new level of music making.

The good thing about this is that once you've worked through these meltdowns a couple of times, you recognize the pattern & stop worrying that you won't be able to move past it. You will know that all you have to do is persist. I know this is easier said than done, but trust me on this.

I want to personally congratulate you on how far you have come. You should be pretty clear on what you are now capable of & that should make you pretty ecstatic. Remember that perfecting your craft comes with time & you will never reach perfection.

The better your production, the more you will recognize even better producers. All pros go through this. Always focus on how far you've come & try not to compare yourself to producers that might be years ahead of you. You will get there & with the techniques you have learned, it'll be faster than you expect.

Homework:

1. Open your previous project file & rename it so you are working with a new project, & delete everything except the basic drums & the bass.

2. Get a new reference track for inspiration & write a new bass line.

3. Switch up your groove & try some new sounds or manipulate them differently. Feel free to use your saved instruments & effect presets to make the process go more quickly.

4. Go through the process in this book once again, to get your new song fleshed out. The more you do this, the more automatic things will become. Over time you will develop musical instincts that will become part of your signature sound.

Step 18: Promote yourself & Get signed

Disclaimer

Although I have several releases under my belt, I don't claim to have all the answers when it comes to signing your music. What follows is an outline of what has worked well for myself & other producers I have coached.

When it really comes down to it, it's as simple as this. If you respect people's time & intelligence, you should find a good home for your music.

Getting signed

For those who have yet to sign one of your songs to a record label, this can be a big step for you in establishing yourself as a recognizable artist. For those who have already signed & released songs, you know it's not as difficult as you would have imagined.

There are literally 1000's of digital record labels & they all have a need, new music. There is no shortage of places to present your music. Your job is to find the labels that match your sound & your experience level. Obviously smaller labels will be easier to communicate with, at least until you've had a few releases under your belt.

With the age of digital music, signing you is pretty low risk. A digital only label doesn't have to pay for studio time or any upfront costs. They aren't paying to print vinyl, cds or physical products, so aside from mastering & record sleeve art, releasing music is pretty close to free for a digital label. The only real barrier is being a good fit for the label's brand & having quality mixes that are up to par.

They are just regular people

People who run digital labels are mostly regular people like you & me. They just happen to have a big enough passion for music to create an outlet for what they think is good. Money usually isn't the great motivator, because most labels don't make much of it. The real motivation is attaching their brand to quality music.

Although some artists get signed simply from blind submissions, you run a much better chance of being taken seriously if you've build some sort of acquaintance with the person who runs the label first. This first conversation shouldn't be you pimping your music. Instead, show support & understanding for what they are already doing. Like & share their posts & keep in the conversation. 

Finding labels that fit your sound can be as easy as a search by genre on Beatport, Spotify, Bandcamp or anywhere else that labels tend to post their music. When you find a couple songs you like, check out the label that signed them, as well as other labels in the “You might also like” section. Next, search the artists you like & see all the labels they have signed to. This can take you down a rabbit hole of 100 labels in no time. Make a list of a few that strike your interest the most, while keeping in mind that smaller labels will be easier to get a response from.

Making contact

These days, getting in touch with people who run labels is as simple as a google search. You will usually find a Facebook page for the label & the label owner as well as a soundcloud page. Make sure you follow each of them.

Next, get in the conversation. The best approach is to get involved in their posts & show your support. interact with others that are commenting as well. You never know, they might be close with the label or even an artist who has signed with them.

Do not pimp your music or broadcast that you are an artist at this time. Wait until you have developed a bit of rapport & have people interacting with you. You always want to give, without any expectation in the beginning. You want to be a supporter & an ally & also show that you get what they are all about artistically.

Pretty often label owners are artists themselves, so make sure to check out their music & show your support there as well. You want to be a contributor without offering any unsolicited critical feedback.  If you don't genuinely like something, keep your mouth shut. Trust me on this.

When the time is right, send a friendly message of your support of a specific song or artist. Always start with words of support before sharing your own work. Once they consider you a friend & a supporter, then you can share that you are also a music producer.

My approach would be to share that you make music & although not all your music is a good fit for their label, you have 2 or 3 songs that you think would work well. Then simply ask if they would mind giving you some feedback.

Since you have built that rapport, they are already on your side & want to help you, if the sound fits. Also, even if they don't feel it's a fit, they may tell you labels they have a relationship with that might be a better fit. Lastly, any feedback you get on your music is a step closer to understanding what you might be able to improve for the next time you share music with labels.

I've found this friendship first approach to be the best way to get acquainted with artists & labels you like. From there you are able to build your reputation & get the attention of bigger labels.

Final thoughts

You are so much more creative than you thought you were. My hope is that this process gives you the ability to focus on 1 task at a time & to avoid overwhelm. By funneling your creative ideas through this organized process, you should find music making to be more fun & fulfilling.

Use this process often until it becomes 2nd nature & you should begin to notice yourself finishing release quality songs much more consistently & quickly.

Don't get discouraged when you hit a creative wall. It happens to us all, no matter how much music we have made. Just realize that you have gotten through these challenges before & you will be able to do it again. Also understand that these moments are a blessing in disguise, as creative flow states often follow these creative challenges.

Remember, if anything in this book isn't clear, you have the video resources page that can give you a visual walkthrough or many of the concepts I've talked about. You can find that page here:

https://MusicSoftwareTraining.com/theprocess

Happy Music Making!