Music Production

Using a motorized fader to write automation is so much better than using a mouse. Sure, you can get by using a mouse. But, for that really professional touch, when automating the levels in a mix, you need to be able to “ride the fader.” This is the technique of shaping the dynamics of a performance through a series of detailed fader moves. In essence, the mix engineer/producer is hand tailoring the drama of the performance to match the flow of the song. For example, on a vocal track, pushing the level of a sustained note up instead of allowing it to fade out naturally, bringing up the level of a word that was a little too quiet, pushing down a phrase that was too loud, removing a lip smack, fixing sibilance, or creating the perception of a crescendo where previously there was none.

After I’ve written an initial level across an entire vocal track, I then enter the Touch automation mode. This mode will only write the automation for as long as my finger is on the motorized fader. I carefully listen through to my vocal track, and as I hear words and phrases that require level adjustments, I simply touch the fader and write the adjustments. This process is infinitely faster than trying to program hundreds of automation breakpoints using your mouse. (Ever try riding a mouse? I don’t recommend it.) Plus, riding the fader forces you to really use your ears and listen to exactly how the part sits in your mix, versus depending on your eyeballs to make level adjustments that you’re only guessing will be correct. When you ride a fader you’re getting real-time feedback about the part’s volume. Mixing is about what sounds best over your studio speakers, not what looks best on your computer screen.

Here’s a typical example of an automation level on a vocal part, written using a motorized fader. Don’t try programming these sort of detailed automation moves with a mouse.

The two big excuses I hear for not getting a control surface with motorized faders are cost and desktop real-estate. Thanks to a couple of innovative products, neither of these excuses holds any water. The PreSonus FaderPort and Frontier Design Group’s AlphaTrack are both diminutive control surfaces featuring a single motorized fader, a handful of knobs and buttons, and both work with all the foremost DAW programs available today (from Pro Tools to Sonar, just to name a couple). Best of all, their street price, $149 and $199, respectively. (Check out Sweetwater.com for those prices.)

A common question that students ask is, “How do I use EQ? What’s the best way to EQ each instrument in my mix?” Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to this question. Unlike a compressor plug-in, most EQ plug-ins don’t have presets—if only it where this simple. Instead, EQ curves vary from mix to mix, and from track to track. Even the same instrument, recorded during the same session, but in a different song, will be treated differently. This is because no one instrument is ever heard in a vacuum, and every arrangement is unique. Consequently, each mix requires its own set of individual EQ curves to make it sparkle and shine.

That said, here’s the rub. The secret to efficient EQ processing is twofold: an ability to hear the frequencies that you want to change, and a working knowledge of the EQ controls with which to do the job. Both of these orders are easily accomplished by themselves, it’s putting them together that can be challenging.

In order to accurately hear your music you must have a good monitoring system, professional studio monitors, and, preferably, more than one set of speakers. (See my earlier blog on Setting Up Multiple Monitors for Better Mixing.) Your monitors must be positioned properly in your room and your room should be tuned to achieve the best possible listening environment. (I’ll discuss how to tune your room in a future blog.) The bottom line is this, if you can’t hear what you’re working on because all you own for monitoring is a pair of headphones and computer speakers, you can’t expect to become an EQ master.

Next, you’ll need to understand all of an EQ processor’s parameters. For example, the difference between Frequency and Q controls, and when to use a high-pass filter versus a low-shelf EQ. Such details are explained very nicely in the PDF document that comes with Pro Tools 7.4, and can also be downloaded directly from the Digidesign Web site, the DigiRack Plug-Ins Guide (version “v74”). (Some versions of the DigiRack Plug-Ins Guide without the “v74” appear to be missing the DigiRack EQ plug-in chapter.) Consequently, I won’t waste space trying to explain all of these parameters here, just read the manual.

Now, let’s jump to the chase, how to go about finding a particular set of frequencies in your signal that you can hear needs help (and you can hear this because you have properly set up monitors and a fine listening environment). My favorite technique is to insert a parametric EQ, and to use it like an EQ magnifying glass in order to find my troublesome frequencies. This is a technique that has been in use ever since the invention of parametric EQ, so I’m sure it has several other names, but I call it the “magnifying EQ trick.” Here’s a video I made on how the process works.

Do you think you’re set with one pair of professional studio monitors? If so, think again. Most home-studio owners purchase one good pair of powered reference monitors and that’s it. However, to truly hear how your music will translate to the outside world, the real world beyond the four walls of your comfy studio, you should be working on at least two sets of speakers: your main near-field monitors and a set of small, inexpensive desktop computer speakers (minimonitors). This dual monitor approach will let you hear how most listeners will be hearing your tracks—over a cheap home stereo system, a television, or computer speakers—instead of the precise, accurate, and “flat” sound of your pricey studio reference monitors.

Of course, chances are that your audio interface only has one set of monitor outputs (a pretty standard design). This begs the question, “Where do I connect another set of speakers?” The solution is to add an analog monitor control box to your system. The stereo mix coming out of your audio interface’s monitor output is then connected to this box and split (multiplied) into several monitor output paths, each of which can be sent to its own monitor destination (including headphones). Two of the most popular solutions on the market are the PreSonus Monitor Station ($400) and the Mackie Big Knob ($390). Each of these units is designed to sit on your desktop and provide ergonomic monitor control, making it easy to switch between monitors while you’re mixing without losing your “sweet spot” (the listening position between your monitors that sounds the best).

The point of near-field monitoring is to remove as much room coloration from your listening position as possible. Though it’s no less important to tune your room for better acoustics (a topic for another blog), a proper near-field setup can reduce much of the room tone that you would normally hear if you were seated farther away from your monitors, outside the sweet spot. Today, most well-designed studio reference monitors feature frequency fine-tune controls for tailoring a speaker’s response to best fit your listening environment. For example, to compensate for a room that adversely emphasizes low frequencies, you could roll off your monitor’s low-frequency response by a couple of dB. Foam speaker-isolation wedges (such as the Auralex MoPAD) are also an option and allow a monitor to be decoupled from what it sits on, preventing the speaker from transferring sound to the surface in a way that might adversely affect what you hear.

Now, for the speakers. Keep in mind that the size of the low-frequency drivers (the woofers) determines your monitors’ low-frequency output. The larger the woofer, the more bass you’ll hear in your mix. Consequently, you should stick with a 6-inch woofer or larger for your main monitors. In my opinion, the best enclosure-size-to-bass-output ratio for your dollar comes from monitors with 8-inch woofers (such as the Mackie HR824 or Event Studio Precision 8). Of course, you can add a subwoofer to augment monitors with small woofers, but for most music-production applications, having the bass in your face is preferable to having it under your seat or to the side of your workspace. By comparison, your minimonitors should have a 3- to 4-inch woofer (such as the Edirol MA-7A or M-Audio StudioPro3). And, for the sake of quality and convenience, the minimonitors should be self-powered, just like your main monitors.

How your speakers are set up is also crucial for good monitoring. For the best near-field monitoring possible, make sure that your speakers are upright and level with your head. When seated in the sweet spot between your speakers, your head and the two speakers should comprise the three points of an equilateral triangle. You can place the minimonitors just to the inside of your main monitors. Make sure that the speakers are as far away as possible from any walls to avoid potential low-frequency interaction with your room’s physical structure. Pushing your speakers against the wall or shoving them in a corner is never a good idea. Remove any impediments that might interfere with a clear line of sound from the speakers to your ears (such as plastic figurines and stuffed animals—really, I’ve seen it done). And, watch out for possible reflective surfaces just beneath the monitors (such as a large mixer or laminated tabletop) that may cause high-frequency reflections to bounce off and sully your sweet spot.

Between your main monitors, a pair of minimonitors, and a studio-quality pair of headphones (such as the Sony MDR-7509 or Ultrasone Proline 750), you can construct a clear picture of how your mix will sound in the real world without ever leaving your studio. Plus, with a good monitor controller you’ll never need to move from your sweet spot to switch monitors. Now, with all of this control at your fingertips, the only trick is to remember to get up and use the restroom every so often. Though, seriously, if that’s not inspiration enough, many an award winning mix engineer has been known to walk outside the studio, and down the hall, in order to hear how their mix sounds from a completely different perspective—for real, it really does work.

The stereo master fader in your DAW’s virtual mixer is not for controlling the output level of your studio speakers. This is an all-too-common mistake, but an easy one to make. I mean, it does turn down your speaker level, right? Yes, but think about what’s happening to your mix down level, the waveforms that you’re printing to disk. If your master fader is turned way down in order to keep your speakers low, and your neighbors oblivious to your beats, the mix you’re printing to disk is also going to be low in volume. We’re talking itsy-bitsy waveforms here, a potentially bad signal to noise ratio, and just a plain old poorly executed recording, It’s this exact result that most often leads the inexperienced producer to the puzzling question, “Why the heck are my mixes so low in volume?” (And, incidentally, gain normalization is not the remedy here, because in normalizing a very low waveform you’re also turning the recording’s background noise way up.)

The purpose of the master fader is for setting your mixer’s main output level. Alternately, a monitor-level knob, such as the type found on a well-designed audio interface (for example, MOTU’s 896HD or Digidesign’s 003), is used to control the output level of your studio monitors. This design allows you to set your virtual mixer’s main output to an ideal level, having peaks just below digital zero, and than, independently, adjust the level of your control room speakers. I’m sure you’ll agree that after a long night of mixing the same song over and over and over again, the ability to turn your speakers down while recording your completed mix to disk is a godsend.

In traditional analog mixing consoles, the master fader and the monitor-level knob were both built into the mixer, in adjacent master output and monitor control sections. This made the signal path from the master fader to your mix down deck, or the monitor-level knob to your control room speakers pretty easy to follow. Today, you’ll find these two vital controls living in completely different worlds, the virtual world of your DAW, and in the real-world, on your audio interface. As if understanding signal flow wasn’t already enough of a challenge, now you need to bridge alternate realities!

To make matters even more confusing, most popular MIDI control surfaces give you direct control over your DAW’s master fader. Case in point, the Mackie Control Universal features a physical master fader that’s tied exclusively to your virtual mixer’s master fader. Nice feature, but there you go again, reaching for the master fader to turn down your speakers when you should be reaching over, or under, or around, or wherever your audio interface is stuck in order to grab its monitor-level knob. Clearly, this sort of stretching is great for yoga class but undesirable for mixing, because it moves your head out of the “sweet spot” between your speakers. The solution is to invest in a control surface that features a monitor control section (such as Digidesign’s Command|8 or C|24), or add to your system a dedicated monitor control sidecar (such as Mackie’s Big Knob or the PreSonus Monitor Station).

In the meantime, pull your audio interface to within an easy reach, and the next time you need to adjust your speaker level take a hold of its monitor-level knob and not your DAW’s master fader.

During this season of gift giving and gear lust I would like to remind us all (myself included) that it’s not the gear that makes great music. You’re the one that writes, plays, and produces the music, not the equipment. In fact, I bet, if you put your mind to it, you could write a cool beat with a kazoo and some cardboard boxes, and nary an AC outlet in site. But, instead, you’ve embraced high-tech music gear as your recording instrument of choice.

Sure, quality recording products give you the tools to make excellent sounding recordings. Assuming, of course, that you have some basic knowledge of music and recording engineering. However, ultimately, it’s the quality of the song that matters the most, because no matter how well a bad song is produced, it’s still a bad song. By comparison, a well crafted song that is also well produced has the potential to be a hit.

So, when purchasing your next amazing high-tech music making gizmo, keep in mind that it will not be able to magically make your songs better. If you already own all the equipment to record your tracks (for example, a computer, DAW software, audio interface, MIDI controller, and quality studio monitors), and you imagine that this next piece of gear will make your productions that much better, think twice before you spend your hard earned cash. Sometimes, it’s not a lack of gear that’s holding you back, but a lack of knowledge about how to use the gear you already have to its absolute fullest potential.

Fortunately, there is today a wealth of resources available to help you improve your craft, on both technical and creative fronts. If you can play an instrument and have a decent grasp of music theory and notation, you’re ready to jump right into production classes (such as Pro Tools 101 and Producing Music with Reason). If you’re shaky on the fundamentals of music and have not mastered an instrument, than you should start at square one and study music theory and an instrument (such as Music Theory 101 and Berklee Keyboard Method). If you’re not currently in a position to take Berkleemusic online courses, to start you on your way, treat yourself to a couple of books from Berklee Press (such as Instant Bass and Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools).

Lots of enthusiasm for making music is excellent, and most certainly a necessary ingredient to being successful in this industry. However, along with all that enthusiasm you’ll also need to know which end of a microphone boom to sing into. (See the YouTube video below.)

Happy Holidays! Have a safe and musical New Year!

It’s easy for me to advise you to finish all of your productions, no matter what (see my earlier blog, How to Become a Great Producer), but what exactly are the steps to getting your tracks done? Let’s address the all too common complaint of, “I start lots of cool tracks but can’t seem to finish any of them.”

In my experience, there are two prevailing reasons for not getting your tracks done, you are your own worst critic and never satisfied with your music, and you are uncertain as to exactly how the production process should progress. Either one of these reason’s would be enough to derail your train, put them together (as is often the case) and you have a roadblock that’s a serious challenge to overcome.

Learning the technical skills behind music production is easy to address. Take some courses at Berkleemusic.com and study hard. No matter the area in which you need to improve and acquire proficiency, we’ve got it covered—musicianship, songwriting, music theory, recording, sequencing, mixing, and mastering—it’s all here. Quelling your inner critic so that you can finish your music requires a distinctly different and, most often, a less obvious path. However, no matter the path you take to find your balance and harmony, embracing a clearly defined process (complete with a list of steps you need to follow to reach your goal) can help you to better steer your music productions from start to finish. For me, the process of writing rough drafts, lots and lots of rough drafts, is the key to bringing my productions to fruition time and time again.

A rough draft is a sketch of your intentions. It’s a process that helps to bring the music you’re hearing in your head into the physical world. It lets you find the balance between what you can imagine and what is actually possible given your skill level and the tools at your disposal. It is a wonderful way to quickly build the framework for a song, because without this framework you would have no structure on which to hang your musical ideas. It’s about getting the big picture recorded first, so that you can focus on the details later. Writing drafts has become a truly essential part of my creative process, and without it I would most certainly get stuck in the details, lacking a clear direction for my song.

Of course, writing rough drafts, like any other discipline, takes practice. You’ll need to accept that your first, and possibly second drafts will probably suck—mine certainly do. But, like any discipline, with regular practice writing rough drafts will become easier and more fluid over time.

Here’s a list of the rough drafts I write each time I do a track:

1) The Basics: A starting point for your song. This might be a beat, a bass line, some chords, a melody, or any combination of these ingredients. It might be two bars or sixteen. Get it down quickly and without second guessing yourself.
2) Put It In the Pot: Record every idea that you think might work. Throw it all into the mix, to be sorted out later. Again, do this quickly and without second guessing yourself. Remember, hard drive space is cheap and MIDI sequences require hardly any storage space at all.
3) Song Structure: Rough out a basic song structure. From all the parts that you put down in the last step, arrange a working song structure. Slide the parts around, mute regions, slice and dice, whatever works to create distinct song sections using the parts that you’ve recorded so far. Keep in mind that it’s easy to add or subtract bars later on should you need to alter the song structure.
4) Produce Transitions: Now it’s time to get detailed. Produce your song section transitions using techniques such as drum fills, synth rises, arrangement builds, musical crescendos, chord inversions, etc. Take your time and really work out the performances. You may find yourself making some significant song structure changes at this stage of the production.
5) Bells and Whistles: The final stage of the music production. This is the time for you to add those last production touches, the ones that will have listener’s saying, “Wow, that was cool!” This is also a good time to begin your rough mix, the first mix pass where you begin finalizing levels, panning, EQ, compression, and group effect settings. (After this step it’s onto the final mix down and mastering.)

Is Reason 4 Cool? Is Tony Hawk a good skateboarder? The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” But the question I inevitably hear is, “Why do I need to update Reason if I just use it as a virtual sound module.” Now, that’s an easy answer, the Thor Polysonic Synthesizer and the RPG-8 Monophonic Arpeggiator.

You’ve heard of Thor the Norse God of Thunder, right? Initially, I thought the guys at Propellerhead were just being silly, but this new synth is aptly named because it does produce some thunderous sounds. Take for example the Moog influenced Fat Boy bass patch, or the endlessly entertaining sequenced and rhythmic patches (such as Elastic Overdrive or Modular Funk Machine). Thor has a built-in step sequencer for some amazingly complex and funky sounds. And, if designing sounds isn’t your thing, the Reason 4 Factory Sound Bank comes with a dozen folders packed full of earth shaking Thor patches: Bass, Fx, Lead Synths, Pads, Percussion, Poly Synths, Rhythmic, Sequenced, Textures, Voice and Choir, Signature Patches (patches created by well-known artist and producers), and several uncategorized patches in the Thor Patches parent folder.

At the Reason Producer’s Conference in San Francisco, just before the Release of Reason 4, I distinctly heard Propellerhead product specialist James Bernard answer a question on the possibility of having an arpeggiator function in Reason with, “There will never be an arpeggiator in Reason.” Clearly, he was pulling our collective leg. The RPG-8 is dope! It is a comprehensive arpeggiator with a load of parameters for shaping arpeggios. For example, Hold, Octave Shift, Velocity, Gate Length, it can generate up to a four octave arpeggio, and there are controls for introducing random and sequenced variations (such as the Pattern Steps with which you can mute specific steps in the arpeggio). Better still, the RPG-8 can be controlled by your ReWire master application. For example, in your ReWire master, assign a MIDI track’s output to the RPG-8, send it a chord (or even a single note) and it will play an arpeggio using the instrument device that it is connected to in the Reason rack. Talk about cool!

For those of you with Pro Tools 7.3 and Reason 4, I’m attaching a ReWire session to show you how the RPG-8 can be controlled from an Instrument track in Pro Tools and sending an arpeggio to Thor at the same time. In the Zip folder you’ll find the Pro Tools 7.3 session file and Reason 4 song file. Remember to launch the Pro Tools session first, then the Reason song file. (For those of you without Pro Tools 7.3 and Reason 4, I’m also attaching an MP3 so you can at least hear what I’m going on about.)

1) Session Zip

2) MP3 Audio File