10 Tips for music producers.

Want to produce great sounding tracks? Well the good news is that nowadays it's possible to achieve at least 90% of the quality of a professional studio with expensive equipment in a home studio using only vsts and your computer, what is the most important is to develop the habits that are considered the best practices and also to learn the basic mechanics of the art and science of mixing. You can start out with these simple tips.

Take your production abilities to the next level with these simple tips.

1. You don't need expensive hardware to achieve that fancy sound.

Are you looking for a fancy sound that your Vst's are unable to achieve? Have you tried layering several synths to create one single big fat sound? You can even group them together as a single channel and compress, eq, and apply effects to al of them together.

2. Make consistent mixes with the use of send effects.

While mixing, many people tend to load their channels with insert effects, this not only consumes a lot of computing power unnecessarily but it also makes mixes inconsistent, you can save a lot of computing power and glue all your sounds together by the use of global reverb and delay effects applied to all the channels in different intensities.

3. Think of your mix as a three dimensional field where you can place all your sound objects anywhere in the space.

This is called imaging and it's done by using several techniques to achieve deep and spacey mixes, engineers use stereo panning, and other techniques such as stereo image manipulation to work with the X axis, engineers use EQ to work with the Y axis, and Volume faders, Compressors, Reverb and Delays and other plugins to manipulate the Z axis.

Panning is the key to the X axis with the pan pot you can place your sounds to the left or right, with the use of plugins and techniques you can also make your sounds wider or narrower.

Frequency is the key to the Y axis. Sounds with low frequencies sound in the bottom while sounds with high frequencies sound in the top, this is because of the way how speakers are set up, the tweeters are in the top and the woofers in the bottom, you can use EQ to make a sound appear to the listener in a higher or lower position, yet you can only work with the information that's already there, either by boosting or attenuating it, so you can't place a hi hat in the bottom or eq a kick drum all the way to the top, at least not without radically altering the sound so that it looses it's originally properties anyway.

Volume is the key to the Z axis, with the use of volume you can place your sounds nearer or farther away from the listener, as volume is something dynamic and is constantly changing, the use of dynamic reduction plugins such as compressor can make sounds more stable thus giving the feeling of being "nearer" the listener, Reverb and filters can also change the perspective of a sound, usually sounds with heavier reverb effects sound "far away" and sounds that have their higher frequencies filtered by a high pass filter will give this effect too.

Try messing around with the settings of the different plugins, volume faders, pan pots, etc for some interesting mixes for your music.

4. The use of reverb make your sounds more natural.

In real life all sound generated in a closed environment will be reflected by walls or other obstacles present, this creates something called "Ambience" because of the reverbs and echoes generated by the collision of the sound waves with the reflecting materials, because of this fact sounds without reverb sound "dull". When you apply reverb to a sound is like putting it in a "special room" you can have "multiple rooms" in your mix if you want to give perspective and dimension or have a "single room" with the use of a few sends for a big, solid and consistent mix.

5. Are you having trouble with colliding frequencies, try stereo fattening.

When you apply a delay into a sound and the time is really small (less than 30 ms) the sound is stretched between the speakers. This effect is called fattening. The primary consideration for using fattening is the duration of the dry sound. Fattening is rarely used on staccato sounds. They just seem to take up too much room for something so quick. On the other hand sounds that are longer in duration, are often planned completely left and right in stereo with fattening.

6. Create more space in your mixes and more consistent sound for the rhythmic instruments by narrowing them out.

Most modern sequencers come with plugins that let you widen or narrow the stereo image of a sound source. Professional audio engineers narrow the base rhythmic sounds such as the kick drum, baseline, low frequency percussions, snares, main hi hat or rides. They do this because when you narrow the stereo image of a sound it sounds more and more in the center and the sound becomes less diffused and much more solid as well. Usually the base rhythmic sounds lead the other sounds in a track and for that reason is good to put them in the middle, with higher frequency sounds you can do the opposite and widen them or apply stereo fattening to create a nice contrast between sounds that can be clearly felt in the centers, and others that give you that amazing feeling of openness. Narrow sounds use less space so if you have two different tones sharing the same frequency space you can try to narrow one of them and widen the other to make them fit in.

7.  Less is more.

Often times, when musicians want to make a better track they add something, more detail, more features, the track gets bigger and better with every feature they add.

While the instinct is to add more features you can actually increase the creativity of your track by subtracting items. This will also give your sounds more space to breathe and more possibilities for creative mixing. So when you are designing your next track try and find something that is in every track and then take it away.

8. A clean and arranged environment is always best to work.

When your track starts to get busy with sounds is important to pre-mix them on the fly otherwise it'll become a confusing mess of sounds that will be hard to work in, there are many unfinished tracks that started out great but were lost in this way. So try to keep your track simple and well arranged with all the sounds on it "well groomed" that way it'll be much easier for you to mix and finish the track. Sometimes it's hard to get rid of a sound because you worked on it and you've grown attached to it, but if it's a sound that make other sounds collide or is something that isn't really making much for the track is best to say goodbye.

9. Everything in it's place.

Every sound has it's own personality and character, they also occupy different parts of the space according to their frequency, it's usually good to have one kind of sound in every part of the spectrum instead of having only one or two regions of your available space cluttered with clashing sounds and other parts totally empty.

10. EQ and effects are really powerful and can radically change the way something sounds, just don't overdo it.

They are like the spices used in food, they can make food taste great and smell incredible, but they should be using sparingly, otherwise they will completely mask the food instead of highlighting it's features, the same can happen if you overdo with effects, the details of the main guitar, of the lead singer, of the awesome solo drum riff will be muffled and dulled by an excessive use of effects.

I hope you find these production tips useful, and remember the more you do anything the better you get at it so make this affirmation your mantra: Everyday I get better and better on what I do.