Music Production

I recently had the opportunity to chat with up-and-coming electronic music producer and DJ, Lucky Date (Jordan Atkins-Loria). He uses Reason to produce these fantastically phat dance tracks and remixes. Plus he regularly shares his production secrets on his YouTube channel, luckydatevideos. The music that he pumps out of Reason is truly inspirational, so I wanted to ask him about how he gets such a huge sound and what other software besides Reason is part of his production and DJ arsenal. He gave a great interview and had a lot of wonderful insight and advice. Watch out for Lucky Date, I predict he’ll be producing many mega-dance-floor hits in the coming years.

I recently had the opportunity to remix a previously unreleased Scatman Crother’s song, “Scoot On Over To Scat’s” (produced by Andrew Melzer in 1979).  It was a lot of fun to work on a track from such an icon of the 70s.  It was also a serious challenge because all I had to work with was an unmastered, stereo mix.  The multitrack tapes had been lost long ago.  But, as the saying goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  Or, at the very least gave me a serious work out using the Pro Tools Elastic Audio’s warp markers, and writing my own music on top of a preexisting disco groove. Whew!

Here’s a video tour of my Pro Tools session explaining how I pulled off this remixing magic.

You can hear the original “Scoot On Over To Scat’s” song here, http://youtu.be/jsXxRFxATaU.  And this is my remix. Enjoy!

Scatman’s Background

Benjamin Sherman Crothers, born May 23rd 1910 in Terre Haute, Indiana (passed away November 22nd, 1986 in Van Nuys, California), started performing in the speak-easy circuit of Chicago in the latter part of the 20s.  In 1931, he got his own radio show on WFMK Dayton, Ohio, billing himself as “Scat Man”. In 1935, he made his first appearance in a film, a short called “Symphony In Black” with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. He would go on to act in 45 more motion pictures including “The Shining”, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Bronco Billy”, “Aristocats”, “The Shootist”, “Silver Streak”, “The Lady Sings The Blues”, “Scavenger Hunt”, “Twilight Zone: The Movie”, and “Transformers: The Movie”.

In 1943, Scatman moved to Hollywood, California and hired an agent. In 1948 he was one of the first African-Americans to land a recurring role on a network TV show, “Dixie Showboat”. Over the next three decades, Scatman appeared in hundreds of TV programs including 65 episodes of NBC’s sitcom “Chico and the Man” as Louis the garbage-man, 18 guest appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”, and “Colgate Comedy Hour”, “The Jack Benny Show”, “Nat King Cole Show”, “The Steve Allen Show”, “Casablanca”, “Hong Kong Phooey”, “Roots”, “The Super Globetrotters”, and “Sanford and Son”. Scatman Crothers received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in front of the Egyptian Theatre.

After returning from summer vacation in Hawaii I needed a little remixing exercise to get me back into a music production mood. The Kerli’s “Army of Love” remix opportunity on www.indabamusic.com looked like just the ticket. I signed up and downloaded the vocal stems. Technically speaking, they weren’t the best vocal stems I’ve ever heard. They downloaded as WAV files but sounded like they had been converted from MP3 files. And, there was some type of parallel effect or headphone bleed mixed in with the backing vocals. You could hear the original music in the backing vocals stem. But this is what everybody had to work with, so I got busy.

I timed the vocals into my Pro Tools session, made a slight tempo change, a few beats per minute faster, and found one of my tracks that sort of matched Kerli’s performance. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this so using one of my already produced tracks made the most sense. With a key and tempo change, a few new chords, and a couple of structural modifications to the drums I was able to get a tight sounding mashup.

Then, I spent a lot of time making the vocal stems pop in the mix. The magic bullet for this job was iZotop’s Nectar, the “complete vocal suite” plug-in, and the always fun Stutter Edit plug-in (which I’ve blogged about previously, Stutter Edit by BT). I also did a lot of automation on the vocals to remove breaths, background noise, and bleed from the original tracks.

Whew, a lot of work, but I think it came out sounding pretty cool. It was definitely a good warm up before getting back into my busy composing and production schedule. Plus, I got to play with Nectar and Stutter Edit. All the synth and drum sounds are being produced by Reason 5, rewired into Pro Tools 9. Here’s the video tour of my remix session.

I also threw together a cool video montage to go with the remix. You can find it on my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/erikhawkmusic. (Like me on Facebook please.) And, if you feel inspired to do so, you can listen to and vote for my remix on the indaba music site.  Thanks!

Here’s a common mistake I see over and over, producing and mixing a track with a gain maximizer on your mixer’s main output. Examples of gain maximizers are the Waves L2 Ultramaximizer, Avid Maxim, or if you’re working in Reason or Record, the MClass Maximizer. These devices are designed to limit a signal’s peaks and then automatically optimize the output (called automatic gain makeup), in relation to a given threshold, to a specific level you’ve set (such as 0 dB, or –0. 2 dB). Or, to put it in simpler terms, to make your audio sound as loud as possible.

If you don’t realize that you’re working through a gain maximizer, you’re probably thinking that your production sounds wonderfully loud and full. Indeed, some software programs actually feature default templates with a maximizer on the mixer’s main output (such as Reason). This is a great sales pitch, since it makes your track sound totally bombastic, but it’s not reality. The reality is that if you bypass the maximizer you’ll most likely discover that you’re clipping (exceeding 0 dB) your main output, badly. It’s only because of the maximizer that you can’t see or hear your woefully out of balance gain structure. Instead, the clipping is being rounded out by the maximizer’s brick-wall limiter algorithm in order to sound more palatable to your ear. But, the clipping is still there, your overdriven mixer channels are still there, your poor gain structure is still there.

As a dramatic example, I often demonstrate this mistake in Reason. With the default Mastering Combinator inserted on the mixer’s main output I create a Dr. Octo REX, press Play, and then turn up all the levels to the max: Dr. Octo’s Master Level, the mixer channel’s level, and the mixer’s Master Fader. It sounds great and there’s no clipping indicated on the Audio Output Clipping Indicator on the Transport Bar. But, then, I Bypass the Mastering Combinator and the Clip Indicator immediately illuminates, and stays on nonstop. In fact, in this extreme example you can actually hear the clipping, and this is difficult to do in Reason because its main outputs seem to be pretty forgiving even when you’re seeing the Clip indicator.

So, now, the obvious question is, if everything sounds fine with a maximizer on my main output why should I care? There are a few reason’s why it’s not a good idea to produce and mix with a sonic maximizer on your main output:

• Just because you can’t see or hear the clipping doesn’t mean it’s not there. And, if it’s there, then when you master your mix all you’re doing is trying to smooth out the clips. You’re gain maximizing your entire mix, clips included, and this can only lead to an inferior sounding master.

• If the maximizer is trying to turn up, or turn down, your signals for optimum loudness, then whenever you adjust a level or EQ a signal in your mix the maximizer is automatically countering your move. Consequently, you won’t have the full dynamic range to work in, you’ll be limited to the dynamic range that the maximizer is setting for you. With the maximizer countering every move you make in the mix you aren’t really hearing your work. Talk about counter productive.

• As a rule, maximizers are serious processor hogs. Think about it, they have to look ahead at the digital signal and adjust every upcoming peak according to their Threshold and Gain Output settings. So, with a maximizer inserted on your main output, can you imagine how much latency you’re introducing? The answer is, a lot, in the thousands of samples. Just try monitoring a live signal (such as a vocal or guitar) through a maximizer inserted on your main output and you’ll immediately hear what I’m talking about. It’s a disturbing amount of latency and there’s no reason to be fighting for processor resources when all you have to do is delete the maximizer from your signal path. (When you’re mastering, this sort of latency on your main output isn’t an issue.)

• If you’re already slamming your mix through a maximizer, you’ve pegged 0 dB, and everything is as loud as it can possibly be with hardly any dynamics left in your mix, what’s left for a mastering engineer to do? The answer is, not much. If you’re serious about releasing your music, leave some dynamics in your mix for a mastering engineer to work with.

Having said all this, I think it’s a great idea to fine tune your mix through a maximizer when you’re mastering directly in your multitrack mix session. I do this all the time, after my mix is complete, especially for reference mixes (tracks that need to impress clients), and background music for film and TV. However, if it’s for an album cut that I plan to send out for mastering, the maximizer effect (some maximizers, such as the L2 and Maxim, have dithering and bit reduction that can be used independently of their gain maximizer functions) is out of the signal path altogether.

I’ve received many requests for tutorials on writing/producing a hip-hop or dance beat. In theory, this is a nice idea. In reality, there’s just no way you can encapsulate all of the creative and technical know-how that goes into writing and producing a great sounding beat in a single tutorial. Fortunately, that hasn’t stopped me from trying, because even if I can’t pack all of the relevant information into one tutorial, it’s still worth doing for the information that I can share in about a ten-minute video.

So, I threw on some clothes, my Remix Miami T-shirt, didn’t bother to shave, set up the camera (top view down so you could see my hands on the control surfaces), and wrote a hip-hop style beat off the top of my head. It took me around 40 minutes, but I edited the whole process down to about a 12-minute video. Obviously, there are some parts missing, such as playing with MPC backdrops for Kong, or running the hi-hats through a compressor. But, if you watch carefully, it’s all there, because in addition to the techniques I describe as I’m working, you can also see all the device settings and the connections when I flip Reason’s rack over. The video is in HD so you can totally see all the details. I used Reason 5, Kong for all the drum sounds, and Thor for the bass line. Enjoy!

Sorry for the absence but I’ve been busy rolling out a new book and a new Berkleemusic course that I’m very excited to tell you about. During my years of teaching for Berkleemusic I’ve seen many students struggle with a common problem, how to program and produce convincing drum beats. They might be a virtuoso instrumentalist, an amazing guitar player, a wonderful singer, or a brilliant songwriter and lyricist, but when it came to writing a convincing drum beat for their music they had no idea where to start. Literally, no idea. From what I saw, over and over again, from one term to the next, there was clearly a need for some instruction in this area.

It just so happens that I absolutely love writing and producing drum beats. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen and bought my very first drum machine, a Roland Drumatix TR-606. (I wish I still had that thing.) When I was eighteen and saw David Frank, of The System, on stage with a bunch of Oberheim gear, jamming along with the DMX drum machine I knew what I wanted to do. By twenty-one I was in my own Oakland, Bay Area, studio writing and recording beats professionally for aspiring hip-hop artists who would walk in with a song and say, “I want to sound like this.” Talk about a great way to cut your chops. Those were the days when West Coast hip-hop was flowering, full of funky, sampled breaks and fat, Akai MPC beats. What fun! Since then I’ve gone on to record plenty of live drum sessions, write bunches of dance music cues for film and TV, and arrange orchestral percussion for film trailers.

Long story short, I’ve written a book titled, Producing Drum Beats: Writing & Mixing Killer Drum Grooves (Berklee Press, 2010). It’s a guide for aspiring music producers who want to get started programming and producing killer drum beats from scratch. If you have no idea how to begin your own drum beat, if you’re unclear about the tools and techniques you’ll need to use to produce your own convincing drum beats, this book is meant for you. Keep in mind, it’s not a drum recording handbook, I don’t discuss how to mic a drum kit, nor is it written for experienced producers who are already adept at programming and mixing their own beats. This book is for beginners and musicians who have spent years studying another instrument and suddenly realize they need to know how to produce believable drum beats in order to sell their songs.

Beyond the book’s text, it also comes with a CD that’s packed full of cool demo samples. There are drum loops and MIDI files from reputable sound developers including, Big Fish Audio, Smart Loops, KEYFAX, and even a multitrack drum recording from MultiLoops. The exclusive demo samples are worth the price of admission and I can’t thank these companies enough for allowing me to include their material.

Producing Drums Beats by Erik Hawkins

Here’s a PDF of the contents and the Introduction.
Producing Drum Beats TOC and Introduction

As if writing a book wasn’t enough of a monumental task, I’ve also authored a new Berkleemusic course based on the premise of the book. The new course is called, Programming and Producing Drum Beats. In the book I had to adhere to a page count and obviously couldn’t include multimedia and video demonstrations. In the online course I had no such restrictions and was able to build an incredibly intense and comprehensive curriculum focused entirely on producing drum beats. The course contains pages and pages of content that augment the chapters in the book, bunches of informative videos, super cool interactive workshops, and weekly assignments that will challenge you and push your skills to the next level. So, check out the book, if you like it, sign up for the course, and as Janet Jackson said, “Give me a beat!” (from the song, “Nasty”, on the album, Control, A&M Records 1986).

The new Stutter Edit plug-in, conceived and developed over the past fifteen years by pioneering electronic music artist and composer, BT, is pretty amazing. Upon installing this plug-in on my system I feel like I’ve got BT in the studio with me helping to produce stutter edits and breaks in my song. Really, it’s like I hired him as a technical consultant just for his stutter edit production techniques. It used to take me hours, even days to cook up these sound effects, through intricate slicing and dicing of waveforms and automating stacks of effects. Now, I can simply play a key on my keyboard and get the same, if not better, results! I can’t restrain myself from exclaiming, “It’s BT in a plug-in!”

How It W-w-w-works

Here’s how it works, simply insert Stutter Edit on the audio track that you want to stutter. Then, set up a MIDI track to send MIDI note and controller data to the Stutter Edit plug-in. Now, play your song and whenever you want to hear a stutter effect press a note on your keyboard to trigger one of the preset stutter effects. It’s that simple, and the presets sound great! Plus, to add more dynamics and enhance your ability to really play the effects, Pitch Bend is assigned to the plug-in’s global, resonant filter effect, and the Mod Wheel let’s you control different real-time dimensions of a preset. For example, moving the Mod Wheel could alter the speed of a preset’s stutters. You can record your MIDI performance and automate Stutter Edit directly from the MIDI track.

Sutter Edit comes with a ton of ready-made stutter effects spread out across the entire keyboard, right when you open it, so you can get to stuttering immediately. It also includes banks of stutter effect presets from BT himself, and a other electronic music luminaries, such as Richard Devine. If you’re not into the presets, you can certainly program your own stutter effects, from a simple eighth note stutter to crazy lo-fi distortion with delays and noise sweeps. Its many controls—Quantize, Delay, Gate, Filters, Buffer Position, Bit Reduction, Pan, Lo-Fi, Stutter Matrix, and Arpeggiator—combined with its Generator noise synthesis section gives you the ability to cook up just about any cutting edge stutter effect that you can dream of. Way too much fun!

Imagine the Possibilities

Sutter Edit is incredibly useful in the studio, but what I’m equally impressed by is its live performance potential. For example, stutter effecting loops in Ableton Live, in real-time right from your MIDI keyboard. Obviously, BT is deep into such things. He didn’t just dream up this plug-in in the studio, he wanted to take his stutter effects to the stage for live performances. And, clearly, he’s done exactly this, giving Stutter Edit plenty of beta testing during his Laptop Symphony shows. So, even though this is just version 1.0, it’s reassuring to know that it’s been out on the road and thoroughly tested by a pro, in high-profile, real life gigs. We know it works for live shows, not just in how it’s designed, but that it’s reasonably stable as well. How many software companies can say this about their newest software?

I’m already seeing and hearing grumblings on discussion threads saying, “I’ll never use Stutter Edit. I take pride in programming my own stutter effects one edit at a time.” Well, fine, I’ll have an entire track of stutter effects produced in the time it took you to do just one. And, besides, given a little time and patience—I know stutter edit producers have plenty of this—you can program your own unique stutter effects in this plug-in, assign them to keys on your keyboard, and save them in your own bank of presets. You don’t have to sound like the factory presets, you can develop your own unique stutter effect sound. Then, you can perform your stutter edits live, whether in the studio or on stage. This most certainly isn’t something you can do with that one stutter edit you just spent all day programming in your DAW. OK, enough said.

In the coming years, I predict that Stutter Edit will be massively overused, not unlike the AutoTune vocal sound (you know, Cher and T-Pain). Hopefully, the effect will be used tastefully, artfully, and without going completely overboard with it. Though, admittedly, I’ve probably already failed in this department—it’s just too much fun to play with. In fact, after about six instances of Stutter Edit in my Pro Tools session I managed to crash hard, several times, eventually completely freezing my Mac. Fortunately, after a quick reboot I was back in business and everything was running smoothly again. I also had problems controlling clipping at the plug-in’s output, because some of the effects pumped out serious amplitude spikes. A soft clip limiter section in the next build of Stutter Edit would be greatly appreciated.

Stutter Edit is distributed and supported by Izotope. There’s a lot of wonderful information about Stutter Edit on their Web site,
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/stutteredit/index.asp
But, the best way to really appreciate Stutter Edit is download the trial version and take it for a test drive yourself. Also, check out this video tour of how I used Stutter Edit in a remix of my song “Delicious People”, for which the remix stems are available on my CD, Erik Hawk & The 12-Bit Justice League.
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/erikhawk

Sidechain compression is a wonderful production trick. Originally, it was used to duck music behind an announcer’s voice on the radio. Each time the announcer would speak the music’s volume would be automatically lowered. Today, it’s widely used in dance music to create that “pumping” sound in the mix.

Sidechain compression works by using another sound to trigger, or key, a compressor rather than the signal on which the compressor itself is inserted. For example, you could set up a bass line to be compressed each time the kick drum plays. The compressor is inserted on the bass channel, but the kick drum keys the bass compression. This is how you create that ubiquitous pumping bass sound heard in dance music, where each time the kick plays the bass is automatically ducked so that the kick drum isn’t drowned out by the bass tone. It’s a great effect that sounds like the bass line is breathing with the kick drum.

You can also set up sidechain compression using a key sound that won’t be heard in your actual mix. For example, if your kick drum pattern isn’t four-on-the-floor (all quarter notes), but you still want the bass line to have that pumping four-on-the-floor feel. To accomplish this, set up a MIDI track that plays a drum sound (such as a kick drum sample) playing only quarter notes. Then, use this signal as the audio that keys the bass compression, but don’t send this audio to your main mix. In Reason, it’s a snap to set this up using Redrum’s step sequencer to loop a four-on-the-floor pattern, and then send Redrum’s audio directly to an MClass Compressor’s Sidechain Input. I’m attaching a Reason 5 song file for you to check out how this is set up. (You must have Reason 5 or higher to open this song file.)

Most professional DAW programs feature at least one compressor that has a sidechain input. For example, Pro Tools has its Compressor/Limiter Dyn 3 plug-in, Logic has its Compressor plug-in, and Record features the MClass Compressor. While setting up a keyed compressor will vary a bit from one DAW program to the next, the basic operating concept is always the same. You want to send an audio signal to the compressor’s sidechain input, and you may need to enable this input function. Often, you’ll use a bus to send signal to the compressor’s sidechain input. And, you’ll want to set the compressor’s parameters for heavy compression to achieve the most dramatic effect possible. For example, a high Ratio with lots of gain reduction. Here’s a video of how to set up sidechain compression in Pro Tools using its Compressor/Limiter Dyn 3 plug-in.

Click to hear sidechain compression on synth bass.

Reason_Sidechain.zip

Contests are a cool way to promote your songs and get your name out there. Here’s a good one that I’m in right now, the www.indabamusic.com Nightclub City Original Song Contest. The song I entered, “Super Star”, is a killer track from my new album that has already been heard on Ugly Betty (ABC), in a great scene with Vera Wang and Posh Spice.

Here’s it is in Ugly Betty, along with a montage of a couple of my other songs in popular television shows.

But, back to the contest at hand. This contest is for some potential airplay that could really help get my song out to a wider audience. Please take a moment and vote for me, it would mean a lot. I would love to finish in the top 25, right now I’m hanging out around number 60, out of over 1,000 entries. Please vote before October 7th, because that’s when the contest ends. Thank you!

If you like the song, and as a special thank you for your support, “Super Star” is available as a free download on my facebook page,
http://www.facebook.com/erikhawkmusic

A few nights ago, at RSPE Audio here in L.A., I had the opportunity to hear R&B and hip-hop mix specialist Dave Pensado talk about his mixing techniques. Pensado has worked with a who’s who of name artists: Mary J Blige, Beyonce, Keyshia Cole, Christina Aguilera, Black Eyed Peas, Justin Timberlake, Destiny’s Child, Pink, Brian McKnight, Ice Cube, Warren G, Lil’ Kim, Mya, Elton John, Sting, Seal, Kelly Clarkson, and others. It was a pleasure to get an inside look into his mixing process, check out one of his Pro Tools sessions (an Aguilera song), and even ask him a few questions about parallel compression and how he uses it. (I’ll discuss what he said about parallel compression in another blog.)

While he was talking, he alluded to the fact that he had done a lot of articles where he talked about his mixing techniques. So, when I got home I googled him, and sure enough, there are some excellent articles available on the Web where he talks about most of the stuff he covered in the seminar. One of the best articles I found is from Sound On Sound, where he shares his actual plug-in settings from a couple of The Pussycat Dolls’ songs that he mixed, “Beep” featuring will.i.am, and “Buttons” featuring Snoop Dogg. The article is part of Sound On Sound’s inside track series, Secrets of the Mix Engineers: Dave Pensado. In fact, I think this is such a juicy article I don’t want to take a chance that it’ll be pulled off the Sound On Sound site so I’ve archived it as a Zip, along with all of the plug-in screen shots, and I’m attaching it to this blog. I hope you find it informative. If you do, be sure to thank Sound On Sound and Dave Pensado (he’s on Facebook).

Download the Zip: pensado_soundonsound

Now, here’s something that Pensado said in the seminar that stuck in my head. It’s not something that I’ve seen quoted in any of his articles. You know how I’m always going on about the importance of checking your mix on different speakers? I even wrote a blog awhile back on how to set up multiple monitors for checking your mixes, Setting Up Multiple Monitors for Better Mixing. Here’s what Pensado said, I think it’s excellent advice and totally hits the nail on the head.

“Probably 80% of consumers are listening to music on their computers and iPods. So, if you’re not checking your mix on ear buds you’re missing the boat.”

And, on that note, here’s the video for “Beep”, listen to it on your ear buds.