Hey guys,

 My apologies for it being a bit quiet on here, I’ve had a very busy couple of months.  I’m going to start bringing back my production tutorials on here, as well as expanding them to YouTube, in the next couple of weeks.  Are there any topics you’d like to see covered?  Let me know and I’ll make it happen!

For today’s production tip I want to talk to you guys a bit about how to manage a big session in Logic and some techniques I personally have found very helpful regarding signal flow and routing.  Although I use Logic, this is really applicable to just about any DAW that has busses and flexible routing.

One thing that you’ll find as you progress in your production, and you’ve probably had this happen already, is that your sessions in your DAW become increasingly complex.  More advanced productions that use things like parallel compression, parallel processing, vocal production, and so on, will complicate your projects.  One of the necessary skills for being a really great producer is being comfortable in a complex project, and really having a good grasp of signal flow and some basic good practices.  Since I plan to cover some of those topics like parallel compression soon, I figure this is a good place to start with some basics.  

Click here to download a screenshot of my basic template setup in Logic so you can see what I’m talking about.

The first thing you’ll see to the right of the basic audio/instrument tracks are some effect busses - 3 delays, and 3 reverbs.  In my experience I find this to be a good starting point for just about any project.  Generally you’ll find that something in your project will need a long delay, other elements will do better with a shorter delay, and sometimes you’d like to use a mono-compatible delay.  The same goes for reverbs - I typically use one short, medium, and long, for various elements in the mix.  These are of course just starting points, and a lot of times I’ll change things up during a project, but I just find it helpful to have this all sorted out from the get go.  

A very important thing you should make note of- notice how there is a high pass EQ (logic’s built in EQ is fine for this job) on all effect return channels.  This is really important!!  Reverbs and delays do not need low end frequencies to benefit a mix, and in fact, delays and reverbs in the low frequencies will really cloud up your bass and drum mix.  I typically cut the low end of all these effects below 200hz or so, sometimes adjusting that number just based on sound.

Next you’ll see 4 channels dedicated to parallel processing.  Since I end up doing parallel processing of some sort in every session, again I just find it useful to get this out of the way with my template.  

Moving along to the right, you can see that then I have three busses dedicated to drums - one for kicks, one for snares/claps, and one for loops, hihats, percussion, etc.  I find this to be extremely important as you typically have to layer multiple sounds (for example, layering several snare samples) to get a really snappy, big sound thats appropriate for a good production.  The problem with using multiple samples without routing them to a bus is that they tend to lack some cohesion.  By routing all of your snares, for example, to a common bus, you can eq and compress them together a bit before sending them to your drum bus, and it will make for a better final mix.  This also gives you more freedom to apply effects to certain parts of your drums - like a stereo spreader to hi hats or snares - which would not be appropriate for a full drum mix, as stereo effects will mess up your low end and kick.  

The same applies to bass.  Notice how I have two bass busses- one for low bass, like sub bass, and one for high bass sounds.  Again, by routing my high bass sounds to a separate buss, I can do a lot of extra processing and stereo trickery that is not good for a full bass mix.  For those of you interested in producing electro house, this is really important, as your typical electro bass is made up of a couple of layers, typically one low that really carries the weight of the sound, and some high layers that have lots of effects and processing applied.  

From there, you can see that I separate the entire project into stems - these are labeled with the dash in front and behind the track name - for exporting for mastering.  This is another thing I can’t stress enough - never try to do a final mix in the same session where you composed the track.  You will be amazed how much cleaner and better your mixes come out when you export stems to a new, clean session, and just chop things up and process them from there.  By sending everything to stems from the beginning, its very easy to do this when it comes time for a final mix, and it’s also very easy to solo certain parts of a mix very quickly.  If you have 7 synth channels and everything is just routed to the master output, it takes you much longer to solo your synth section than it does if you’re working with stem busses.

Also, note that I have a stem bus called “-DNB-” where both my full drum mix and full bass mix are routed to.  The idea is just to route your drums and bass - which in dance basically are the whole track, or at least the most important part of it - to one bus where they can be compressed, limited, and sculpted together.  It’s hard to explain this beyond saying that you should just try it, but what you’ll find is that when you compress and limit your drums and bass together, they just work together better than when processed separately.  Groove is a little better, punch is increased, and the whole low end just glues nicely if you mix it well.  

The final thing to notice is that everything in the session is routed to Bus 64, or a “submix” bus in Logic, which is then routed to the master channel.  In my experience I find it to be very helpful to have a submix bus in dance music, particularly for filter effects.  As an example, let’s say as you’re working on your track you want to use a high pass filter to sweep up just as a break or transition in the track is coming to an end.  Although you could just put a filter on the master channel, the problem is this forces you to filter everything in the track - sometimes a filter effect will sound better if it just is applied to certain elements, like maybe vocals and synths, and a few elements remain normal in the mix.  Using a submix allows you to do this without needing to put a filter on every channel you want the effect applied to.  In practice, to follow along with this example, you could simply route anything you want filtered (synths, vocals, and fx let’s say) to the submix, and have all the other busses routed to the master output.  Now you can apply effects for transitions or whatever just to certain busses, without needing to duplicate plugins over and over and re-draw automation.  

I hope this template and these ideas at least give you a few things to try out with regard to keeping your sessions clean and manageable.  You should use a template that suits exactly how you like to work, and there’s no need to view anything I do as the “right” or only way to do things.  As always you can keep up with all my news and updates on my Facebook or Twitter.

For today’s production tip I want to pass along a brief but very helpful bit of advice I got last year concerning how you can improve the groove and impact of your low end (drums and bass) in a dance mix.  This is incredibly easy to do and one of the quickest ways to improve the overall sound of your track.

Once you progress to an intermediate level of production, you’ll likely get in the habit of routing similar tracks to a bus or group channel, for example, routing all of your drum tracks to one bus.  Aside from keeping things organized and making stems easy to export for a mix or mastering session, this is generally just a good practice to get into for a number of reasons.  Generally, it’s a good idea to lightly compress these bus tracks, EQ them, and so on, as you will get a more full and cohesive sound when compressing all of a certain kind of track together rather than doing so individually only.  

This particular tip is simply about routing your drum and bass subgroups or busses to one track before they hit your master channel.  So, the signal flow is route all drums to one bus, all bass tracks to another bus, and then route those 2 busses to one final bus.  Once you have your drums and bass on one bus/aux channel in your DAW, you’ll want to compress and limit them together.  This is where the magic happens.  I’m not sure if there’s a technical explanation I can give beyond this: it just sounds really good.  A few dBs of compression, and adding a few extra dBs with a limiter on this bus will simply make your low end more cohesive, full, and often it will help the entire thing groove just a bit better.  

You can also take this tip a bit further by using a plugin like Sonalksis StereoTools, Vengeance Sound Stereo Bundle, or Brainworx M/S EQ to make the very low end of this track even more powerful.  Although all of these plugins work in slightly different ways, they all offer one very powerful feature: the ability to set a crossover point (frequency) below which all material is forced to mono.  Back in the days when all dance music was cut to vinyl, this was essential: stereo bass information will actually make a proper vinyl pressing impossible.  

Now you may be asking, why does this matter since we no longer (typically) press to vinyl?  The simple answer is that anything below 60-80hz just should not have stereo information.  It’s fine for your kicks and bass to have stereo information above this range, but any stereo sounds in this area or below will really decrease the impact of your kick and bass.  You can apply this mono-making tip to either your drum and bass bus, or simply to your master track - I’ve yet to do this and have a track come out sounding worse, so it’s something I generally recommend doing.  Do be careful not to cut above 80hz or so, as this will thin out your stereo imaging on an overall mix.

Once we have a good sounding sample for our kick, there are a number of ways we can enhance its clarity and punch in the mix.  

The first thing to do is to use an EQ to remove any excessive sub frequencies.  Depending on the EQ you’re using and the sample, you should cut anywhere from 15hz and below to 30hz and below to remove excessive sub rumble.  Frequencies below 20hz are not even audible and unfortunately subs in this area have a nasty habit of distorting your frequency balance and eating up massive amounts of headroom unnecessarily.  

The second thing to consider is the relationship of kick and bassline.  Typically, we want the kick to peak around 55hz, as this is precisely where large club systems have their most powerful low end.  The bass should sit around 90hz and up, and because of the frequency overlap that naturally occurs with these two elements, you really have to be smart about the composition of the track in general.  A long subby kick will not mix well (regardless of punch enhancement) with a big, subby, long release bassline.  The push and pull between the kick and bass is one of the most crucial elements in dance music and is something you should always consider before trying to enhance punch, as a proper kick/bass relationship will naturally allow more room for the kick in the mix.

The most obvious and easy way we can enhance punch in a kick is the proper use of a compressor.  It’s important to remember that proper compression will not only shape the attack of the kick we’re using, but also the body and tail of the kick as well.   To enhance the snap of a kick’s attack, we want to use an attack time on the compressor which can range anywhere from 5 to 30 miliseconds.  This will allow the initial snap of the kick to pass through the compressor relatively untouched, which helps us preserve and enhance punch.  If you’re using a compressor with an internal sidechain feature that’s tied to a highpass filter, use it.  One major problem you’ll run into when compressing kicks is that heavy compression can really kill the sub element of a sound- using the highpass filter built into your compressor can help reduce this.  Also, it’s usually good practice to blend some dry signal (assuming your compressor has a dry/wet mix knob) back into the kick after compression: this helps us preserve transients, keep some sub frequencies intact, and avoid over-compressing the kick, which will actually suck all punch out of the sound. Below is a clip of the uncompressed kick, followed by the same kick compressed with the Klanghelm DC8C compressor (70/30 dry wet, 3db of gain reduction).  

A quick but essential point to make here: use your ears, always.  This kick is sampled from the intro of a commercial track, so it’s already had a ton of processing applied and been mastered.  Kicks like this not only don’t need much further processing, but too much will actually degrade their punch and quality.  Go easy on compression if the kick is already processed!

Another excellent way to enhance the punch of the kick is to use a transient designer plugin - the best on the market in my opinion is the SPL transient designer, although many built in plugins like Logic’s Enveloper work just fine as well.  The SPL is an extremely simple but powerful plugin, so long as you don’t overdo things.  Simply increase the attack knob by just a bit, and you’ll hear the initial snap and punch of your kick slice right through the mix.  Below you can hear the original kick, followed by the SPL transient designer.  It’s followed by a clip of the kick with slight compression and transient enhancement.  Notice how you can really hear added snap and punch on the kick’s initial transients.

In a post coming up later this week, I’ll be going into great detail about another technique we can use to enhance punch - parallel compression.  It’s a bit too much to go into here but definitely stay tuned for that tutorial as well if you’re interested in this topic.

One warning: be careful not to overdo things.  As you will quickly see when experimenting with compressors and transient designers, there is only so much punch you can add before the kick starts to sound strange, distort, or completely loses it’s low end to an unacceptable level.  If you’re using Vengeance samples, or samples from commercial tracks, again be very careful here: these samples have already been highly compressed and additional compression will likely do more harm than good.  

Finally, be aware at all times that the most important thing with any mix is it’s balance and overall structure.  I might have a kick sample that sounds great in a properly balanced mix without any compression or transient enhancement, because the levels of it’s surrounding elements are correct and not overpowering the kick.  If I put the same kick into a cluttered mess of a mix with no frequency or level control, it’s likely going to sound like it doesn’t have nearly as much punch - but this has nothing to do with the quality of the kick.  If there’s one technical thing you guys take away from this or any of my tutorials, let it be the following: always, always be aware that when producing music, you are working with a fixed and limited amount of headroom.  There is no plugin, transient designer, or trick that lets us produce over 0dB without clipping or needing to lower the master.  Because we’re working with a fixed amount of headroom, this means that we can only fit so many elements at a certain level into our mix before we start crowding the mix, leading to masking, distortion, loss of punch and clarity, and a whole host of other bad things.  Always remember that less is more, and even the punchiest kick in the world will lose it’s power if it’s placed in a bad mix.  

Hey everyone!  My apologies for the long wait for this new tutorial but I’ve had an extremely busy past few weeks.  I’d like to thank everyone for their support on the Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” remix which peaked at #8 on HypeM’s most popular chart and #2 on We Are Hunted!  Next week I have another great tutorial coming, featuring an interview with my mastering engineer, multi-platinum producer Holger Lagerfeldt.  This month will be exciting as I have a bunch of new tutorials (including a very detailed YouTube tutorial on Sidechaining), a new remix, and my first podcast in my new monthly mix series which are all coming soon.   As always you can keep up with my latest news on Facebook or Twitter.  

For today’s tutorial I wanted to address something that someone asked about on Facebook, which is how to avoid muddiness and get a kick to really punch right through a mix.  In dance/pop production your kick is truly the anchor of your track and in my opinion it’s the single most important element, so this is a very good topic to get into.

Before I get into the various methods we can use to enhance the punch and attack of our kicks, it’s first important to consider the kick sample that we’re using.  When I was starting out with producing, I would constantly struggle to understand how the producers I was comparing myself to were getting their drums so huge and punchy in the mix.  I constantly read compression tutorials, eq methods, and all kinds of things thinking that the problem was in my compression techniques or something technical like that.  It wasn’t.  The real problem was, my samples were crap.  When I began to track down stems of major artists such as Kaskade, and I listened to their drum stems, I realized that while they were certainly better than me at compressing, their samples were just infinitely better than mine were to start with.  This taught me a valuable lesson, maybe the most valuable  tip, that I can possibly pass on to you guys: the quality of your sounds and samples is a thousand times more important than your processing techniques.  There’s a lot of reasons “pro” productions sound so good, but no single thing is as important to the pro sound as picking amazing samples right from the jump.  There’s only so far you can go in trying to turn a poor sample or sound into a good one with effects and processing.

So what makes a good kick sample?  To put it simply, great low end power, snappy mid/high range punch, and proper enveloping/release time.  The low end (the sub component) of the kick is obviously responsible for the weight and body of the kick, and it’s what makes a kick thump on a big club system.  Equally important is the snappy and punchy mid or high range element(s), which can be hi hats, click sounds, cowbells, or any number of samples that have a nice sharp attack and mid range punch.  Many young producers leave out or don’t focus on the mid range component of their kick enough, assuming that if the sub is powerful it will cut through a mix regardless - unfortunately this could not be more wrong.  If you listen carefully to your favorite dance records, you’ll notice that the producer almost definitely used a very powerful hi hat or mid range layer to the kick which allows it to slice through the often congested 1k-4k area of a mix.  

The final element of a great kick is it’s enveloping - its attack and release characteristics, or to put it simply - it’s length.  The part of this where I hear a lot of mistakes made (and where I used to make many mistakes myself) is on the release part of the kick.  I cannot stress enough how massive of an impact on your track the release and length of a kick will have.  The duration and release slope of your kick will have more of an impact than anything else in your track on the groove, the feel, what kind of bassline will fit in the mix, and many other things.  As a general rule, when making my own kicks (I use the Metrum plugin by Vengeance Sound), I start enveloping by setting the kick to end at 235ms or somewhere around there (this is an eighth note at 128bpm), and then start playing with both the release time and the release curve.  For snappier, french house style kicks (like those used by Madeon) you often want a very short kick, often as short as a sixteenth note, or with a sharper release curve at 1/8th.  These types of kicks are very short, snappy, tend to have less sub content, and are enveloped very precisely to cut quickly in and out of the mix.  For kicks that are more common in electro house (Mord Fustang comes to mind here), I often hear kicks with a more generous release time (1/8th note and a pretty full release).  These kicks consequently carry more low end weight and occupy far more room in the mix, which means there’s less room for other elements.  

In the audio clip below, you can hear two different versions of the same kick: one with an un-enveloped and quite long release, and one with (to my ears anyway) a more preferable shorter release time and sharper release curve.  You can also hear quite clearly how even without compression or manipulation of the kick aside from it’s envelope, the whole groove of the kick and top loop changes.  Notice how when the end of the kick is trimmed shorter with a quicker release, there’s a nice push and pull that emerges between the kick and snare.  The final point to make here is that there is no right or wrong, as the duration of the kick is completely up to you and what kind of track you’re making, and what you want the mix to sound like.  I merely want to point out that getting a punchy kick and clear low end starts with using the proper kind of sample and realizing the impact that this sample will have on the rest of the mix.  Clearly, if we use the super long version of this kick, there’s going to be very little low end room left in the mix for a bassline, and so on.  

In part II, I’ll move on and discuss some techniques we can use to actually enhance the punch of our kicks and make them sit better in the mix.  

For today’s production tutorial I want to pass along a technical tip I got a little while back that I’ve found to be extremely beneficial to my mixes.  It’s simple and easy to do, and will generally raise the level of your tracks up significantly without much time investment.  Also you can now stream the full instrumental of my new single, American Girl, which will be released late next week!  

Many producers don’t realize that even percussive sounds - kickdrums, snares, tonal percussion- have a fundamental frequency and pitch, just as any normal pitched sound (synth, piano) does.  Although the relationship between the fundamental pitch and it’s overtones is quite different in drum sounds, they nonetheless have a very definitive pitch and location in the frequency spectrum.  

In dance music, this is particularly relevant with the kickdrum.  In all kinds of music, kick drums have pitch- but in house music, the pitch of the kick has a much greater impact on the track because of it’s heavy sub bass content.  Sub bass on a kick is in essence no difference than sub bass being played on a sampler- it’s a pitched sound wave, which, if out of key with your track, will sound very odd.  One of the interesting things about producing dance music is that there are no rules that are right 100% of the time- but what you will find if you listen carefully is this is followed on just about every good commercial track you listen to, and unfortunately it’s something many inexperienced producers don’t know to do (or how to do).

In general, you want to tune your kickdrum (or at least it’s sub bass component, if using multiple kicks or an oscillator/synth to drive the low end) to the root key of your bass (the tonic note of the scale you’re working in).  There are times where doing so will pitch your kick too high or low, however, so you’ll also get pretty good results tuning it to any key of the scale that is being played by the bass- the key here is to at least pitch it to the scale, so the sub bass isn’t hitting a note outside the scale your track is in.  

So, enough talk, let’s get down to how to actually do this!

I’m going to outline this in Logic because (as with many things) Ableton makes this quite a bit easier and it will be self-explanatory how to apply the steps from Logic to Live, or most other DAWs.

The first thing you need is a nice kickdrum sample and either an EQ with a big frequency analyzer, or a good frequency analyzer plugin.  I’m going to use DMG Audio’s excellent EQuick for this application.  Let’s look at the kick I’m using with the EQ first:

Notice how the kick (sampled from an Axwell track- this retuning tip is especially important if you sample from other producers!) has a very definitive peak at 48 Hz.  If we use a handy free app called Note2Frequency, we can see that this is G1 on our keyboard.  Now, if our track’s root note is G, then we have no problem here.  But let’s say our root bass note is A…

The next thing we want to do is load the kick into a sampler such as EXS24 or Ableton’s Drum Rack/Simpler.  When you load your kick into the sampler, be sure to enter the correct note of the sample- in this case, G1- so that your sampler will pitch things accurately.  Now you have a pitchable kick, which will accurately play whatever note you’re hitting.  If we move the kick up to A, we’ll now see this on the same frequency analyzer: 

The kick’s sub is now hitting at 55hz, which is exactly A1.  If our bass root note is A, this will (usually) sound a lot better than it did before.  In the context of the full track, the odd overtone that would have been there from the out of tune bass before now sounds consonant harmonically with the rest of our mix, which will be much more pleasing to the listener- and make it sound like our kick is punchier and hitting harder.  

A small tip to go along with this- many people assume when they start producing that kicks should peak around 40hz, for sub bass, but this is not accurate.  The speakers used in almost every large club in the world have their peak frequency for bass at exactly 55hz- A1 (one of the reason so many songs aimed at club play are written in A Minor/C Major).  You want to shoot for a bass peak right around 55 hz, either slightly above or below.  

The most important thing to gain from this tutorial is an understanding of how to pitch any sample you have in a track using a spectrum analyzer and a sampler.  Although it won’t impact the thump of a track as much as tuning a kick, tuning percussion is equally important melodically, if you’re going for a clean melodic track.  

First off I want to say I’m glad these tutorials have been getting good feedback on Twitter and Facebook and I’m very happy you guys are finding them helpful!  Also, my new original track featuring Silver Medallion is nearing completion and will be mixed by the end of this coming week.  If you missed it I put up a brief preview of the drop which you can hear at : American Girl Preview

Now, onto the mixing stuff!  Today I want to pass along a piece of mixing advice that I got a while ago but didn’t really apply to my work until fairly recently, and it has made a world of difference.  That advice is simple- filter (high and lowpass) every track in your mix.

Some of you may already do this, and some people may disagree with this advice, but I have found it to produce excellent results when you apply it across a whole mix track by track.  The principle is basically this: especially with soft-synths, there is a lot of unnecessary frequency information in a track- most AU/VST synths produce a lot of high frequencies that go well beyond 20,000hz which is the upper limit of human hearing.  The problem is, these frequencies (even the ones that are not audible) eat up headroom in your mix.   You will also find that when using typical chord voicings, synth leads will produce frequencies below 150hz, which begins to interfere with your bass section.  When you have these frequencies building up across every channel going into the master, that’s a lot of headroom you’re losing.  

Additionally, it becomes more than a headroom issue for dance music.  If you’ve ever been to a club and heard a poorly mixed track, you know it’s not fun.  One of the worst things you can have is a track which is searing and overly bright in the high frequencies, because on a main room sound system this will get harsh to people’s ears very quickly.  Low frequencies are a big issue too.  The key to a great low end is not every track in the mix having bass in it- the key is that you have a very focused and powerful bass section and your chords/vocals/synths sit above it without excessive frequency overlap.  I personally try to highpass every non bass instrument around 100hz or so, unless it really removes power from the sound or makes it sound weird.  Even in that case, I will usually try to reconsider the arrangement and layering of sounds, because a well produced track should rarely have chords/leads/vocals that are interfering with the kick and bass- I’ll talk more about how this applies to songwriting and chord voicing in a future tutorial.

When applied across a whole mix, this technique will greatly reduce frequency buildup in the very low and very high areas of your spectrum.  Frequency buildup is what happens when a certain part of the frequency spectrum is overpopulated by numerous sounds in a mix- remember, the goal when mixing is to put each sound into its own frequency space, because otherwise we get buildup and masking.  

Below is an example of this principle at work using a basic chord track sequenced with Sylenth 1.  This is a basic chord progression (vi-I-V-IV) played in C.  You’ll notice in the untreated sound that it has a lot of power, which might be nice for a breakdown where there’s less competing instruments, but let’s consider plugging this sound into a drop or busy section of the mix:

Although this sound doesn’t have a ton of extra bass information, it has loads of high end buzz which will not help us attain a nice mix and will eat up headroom.  Now I’ll use the DMG EQuality EQ (Analogue Phase Mode) to strip out the lows and highs:

This aggressively takes out some of the bass, which in this case is a good thing because if we’re putting this instrument in a drop or busy section it will have a strong bassline and kick below it.  I’ve cut the highs above 20k to save headroom and remove a bit of harshness, and as the mix goes on I could easily roll off the highs some more as the sound is still a bit bright.  The big thing to understand here is that this is just one channel of our mix.  If our drop has 20 sounds, between drums, fx, bass, leads, vocals, whatever, competing for space, imagine how much of a difference you get if each channel is filtered so it’s at least somewhat isolated in the frequency spectrum.  Dealing with full on overlap in instruments and sounds is a much bigger topic, but this begins to address the issue.

One further application of this is to things like sound effects (sweeps, white noise, etc), hi hats, cymbals, and lots of instruments or sounds that have a very specific frequency range.  You can be even more aggressive than I was here when filtering such sounds: I often highpass hi hats or cymbals well above 200hz (depending on the sample, you can sometimes lop off everything below 2,000hz and still have a solid sample), and again, the more unnecessary stuff you cut out, the more easily every sound and track can gel together for a wholesome mix.  Sound effects like risers, sweeps, and the like are also very good targets for cutting highs or lows depending on the sound- it’s all about asking yourself what’s the point of this sound in the mix (like, ok, this sub impact is here to accentuate a drop off on the low end) and cutting everything in the sound that doesn’t contribute to that goal.

Also, experiment with different EQ’s/Filters as each has their own sound and sometimes will just work better for a certain instrument.  I like EQuality a lot, as well as FabFilter Volcano and Satson Channel by Sonimus for more gentle filtering- Satson has by far the most analogue and incredible sounding filters I’ve ever heard in a plugin.

You can hear the untreated sound, DMG filtered sound, and the Satson version here:

http://soundcloud.com/davedwards/sylenth-eq-test