Top Creativity Tips for Producers

To cel­e­brate the new home­page, I’ve decided to share a few pro­duc­tions tips & tricks with you!

What fol­lows are a few tips for expe­ri­enced pro­duc­ers, so the lan­guage may be a bit too chal­leng­ing for those just start­ing out. I’ve writ­ten this tuto­r­ial so that it applies to any genre, in the hopes of mak­ing it as use­ful as pos­si­ble.

Fold­ers
When mak­ing your tracks, make good use of fold­ers. Per­son­ally, I use 5 fold­ers: effects, vocals, drums, synths, unused.
In the effects-folder I’ll have any­thing that I con­sider to be an effect (except for vocal effects), like sweeps, ris­ers, hal­l­kicks, oneshots, etc. In the vocals folder I’ll have a dif­fer­ent track for main vocal, har­mony, effect-tracks (i.e. a track with a delay with feed­back or any other “spe­cial” effect). In the drums folder I’ll have any per­cus­sive sound. In the synths folder I’ll have any synthesized/tonal sound. In the unused folder I’ll have any­thing that I may not want to use for this par­tic­u­lar project, but may use in other projects (such as 303s or sam­plers).

Buses
Buses are a god­send since you can cut down a lot of CPU-power by using them and they give you even more con­trol over the over­all level of the mix.
With basses, I’ll usu­ally have one bass-layer and one or more other lay­ers with the lows cut out, so as not to inter­fere with the bass fre­quen­cies of the first layer. This I usu­ally do by hav­ing all addi­tional bass-layers routed to a bus called “Bass Layer” which uses one EQ to cut out all the lows which in turn is routed to the “Bass” bus where my first bass is routed to. That way, any addi­tional bass-layer will be low-cut and added into the mix at the right vol­ume (most of the time). I’ll do the same with pads, because I don’t want the bass-layer of the pad (or sub­pad) to play at all times. The sub­pad is also bused and nar­rowed so that the sub­pads are in mono. In the end, all my tracks are routed into a bus of some sort.

Melodies
Melodies are quite easy to cal­cu­late, in case you ever get stuck. You can reverse engi­neer most melodies and see that there’s a pat­tern to it. Most melodies revolve around a 1 or 2 bar pat­tern and make use of root, 3rd and 5th notes with the odd step or skip note. Find this pat­tern and you can use it in any key that you want by trans­pos­ing it. Sim­ple, yet extremely effec­tive and guar­an­tees results. Once you have your basic pat­tern for the melody laid out, you can spice it up by intro­duc­ing step and skip notes.

Sounds
The most impor­tant thing in the mix is the sounds that you use. Every sin­gle sound you use should be care­fully selected and serve a pur­pose. If you can, recre­ate the sounds from your favourite tracks or ask for help on forums, if not, try to rip the sound directly from the track. If you can’t do that either, try find­ing a sound that comes as close as pos­si­ble to it and EQ it to make it fit. A/B all the sounds you use to the track you’re try­ing to learn from.
A word of warn­ing, because legally, you’re not allowed to rip the sounds. There’s also the moral aspect to it, but ask your­self if you really want to sac­ri­fice the qual­ity of your music because of morals.

Effects
Delays are often very short last­ing and usu­ally will only be heard once or twice to fill up the space, so using a pre­set like MegaFeed­back­De­lay may not be the best deci­sion for your mix. Remem­ber: The goal of mix­ing a track is to have 100% con­trol over each ele­ment.
Use at least 2 reverbs. One short and one long. You can use the short one on shorter, less improtant ele­ments (like claps, closed hihats) to give them depth and the long one on things like vocals, leads, pads, etc.
A lot of peo­ple will cite “If you can hear the reverb, you’re using too much” which I used to believe myself, but if you lis­ten to your favourite tracks, you’ll notice that they use quite a lot of reverb and it sounds really good!
Put the reverbs on their own send-channels and put the delays directly on the chan­nels where you need them. You don’t need to put delays on a send chan­nel.

Fil­ters
Fil­ters work won­ders for tran­si­tions. You can choose to filter-sweep a sound n² bars before the next part and it is guar­an­teed to sound great. Using res­o­nance can help the sound to be louder through the fil­ter and using dif­fer­ent steep­ness on cut­offs will help your res­o­nance to be more promi­nent, so exper­i­ment with those. You don’t have to have your fil­ters going from absolute min­i­mum to absolute max­i­mum. In fact, I never do this. The trick is to have the fil­tered sound clearly audi­ble, but obvi­ously fil­tered. Exper­i­ment with it and see what sounds right for your spe­cific track, in your spe­cific mix at that spe­cific moment.
Delays can often inter­fere with the orig­i­nal sound. This is not uncom­mon in vocals and leads. A trick to get it to melt bet­ter with the orig­i­nal sound is to use a fil­ter. Many delays offer a high-pass and low-pass fre­quency knob, which you can tweak to your lik­ing.

Equal­iza­tion
While hav­ing the best pos­si­ble sound to start off with is the best approach, some­times you’ll find that for exam­ple your kick doesn’t have enough bass or too much mids. You will only be able to learn this by doing and ref­er­enc­ing to other pro­fes­sional tracks, but try to keep the changes sub­tle. There’s plenty of guides on how to EQ on the net, so make use of those, but remem­ber that extreme set­tings will most likely only cloud your mix and make you lose con­trol over it. I tend not to go above or below 9dB, but pre­fer to keep it between –3 and +3dB.
Use a low cut on every­thing that you don’t want in the bass-frequencies. Use a slight lower mid cut wher­ever you can to make space for the mids as these parts will get filled quickly any­way.

Stereo Image
Try to keep focal sounds in the mid­dle but wide. You can do this by using delays, reverbs and uni­son. Always check how your mono-image sounds.
Some­times you really can’t cen­tre the bass-frequencies of a sound (for exam­ple, when using a reverb on a kick), but to aid this, you can use plu­g­ins which cen­tre your bass-frequencies or split the sound into two buses, one with a low cut and one with a high cut and nar­row the high cut chan­nel.
Pan­ning non-critical sounds will also help free up space in your mix, which would be much bet­ter used for vocals, kicks, basses and leads. When you do, try to keep both sides equally busy (prefer­ably at all times). Don’t hard pan your sounds unless it’s as a spe­cial effect. The trick is to make it sound cen­tred but actu­ally being panned.

Mas­ter Chan­nel
A lot of the time you’ll hear that you’re not sup­posed to have any­thing on your mas­ter chan­nel, which I see as a half-truth. It is true that the unin­formed pro­ducer shouldn’t process the master-mix, but rather go back into the mix in order to fix what’s caus­ing prob­lems. In real­ity, I have my mas­ter bus jammed with plu­g­ins, but those are merely there for analy­sis.
A lowpass-filter to hear if I have any instru­ments inter­fer­ing with the bass-frequencies.
A stereo imaging-plugin to be able to mon­i­tor my mono and stereo field quickly. If I hear any bass fre­quen­cies in my stereo field, I know I missed some­thing and can go back to fix it. If my focal sounds are too weak in the mono field, I know I have to go back and fix it.
A lim­iter after that to get my songs as loud as com­mer­cial tracks, so I can get a feel for what the end prod­uct will be like.
A mas­ter­ing suite which I will turn on once I’m done with mix­ing.
A spec­tral analyser to see what my wave­forms look like. Espe­cially help­ful when try­ing to get the bal­ance between the kick and the bass right.
A fre­quency and stereo analyser to see how my stereo field is behav­ing and to make sure I get a good fre­quency dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Arrange­ment
If your song is too hard to mix into other tracks, it won’t get played by untrained DJs. There­fore, always, always, always make your intros and out­ros the same amount of bars that other cur­rent tracks are.
Intro­duce your basses only after the amount of bars that are com­mon for the genre. The trick is to make the track so that the next DJ the­o­ret­i­cally shouldn’t have to EQ. Don’t intro­duce melodic ele­ments before the pre­vi­ous track’s outro is fin­ished, oth­er­wise your keys may clash and the DJ ends up with a hor­ri­ble sound­ing mix.
Make your intros as inter­est­ing as pos­si­ble with­out break­ing those rules. The rea­son for this is that it shows the DJ AND the audi­ence qual­ity imme­di­ately. A lazy intro won’t be rec­og­niz­able and home-listeners are likely to skip it, unless you have some­thing good to offer, which makes you seem lazy. If you want to sound like a pro, you have to be a pro.
Apart from the intro and outro, you have your usual struc­ture of break­down (pads, pianos, tex­tures), buildup (rolling drums, fil­ter­sweeps, sound effects), drop (cho­rus with lead vocal, drums, bass), break­down, buildup, drop.
Make sure that your sec­ond break­down is as inter­est­ing as pos­si­ble, because if it isn’t, it’s likely to be cut short. This holds true for DJs AND com­pi­la­tions. If the DJ only has 60 min­utes and tries to cram as many songs into it as pos­si­ble, he’s likely to cut your track short unless there’s some­thing spe­cial about it.

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