Free VST Plugins
-->There are lots of free plugins on the web. Let’s take a look in some of them that are really worth a try. Read more…
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Mastering your tracks
-->In this article we will take a look at the mastering process. But first, bear in mind that if you are not a mastering engineer, you will not get results as good as an experienced professional will get. Indeed, your results will be too far from that. The goal of this article is to explain what mastering is, and how you can get a relative good final product from your own productions. If you have an album and need to master before release it, nothing will work better than pay for an engineer or a mastering house to do the job. But if you want just to show your music to DJs and record labels, and promote it on the web, you can do your own mastering to make your tracks sound more professional. Remember, you get what you pay for. Read more…
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Keeping the Beat with Electronic Drums
-->A great drummer can hypnotize an audience with lightning fast movements, creating an irresistible rhythm and beat. With the use of electronics, drummers are allowed more versatility in pitch, volume, custom sounds, and tempo than ever before. These new instruments are struck with a stick, as a traditional acoustic drum is, creating a sound electronically, which allows for more precision in controlling the variations in the beat.
Graeme Edge, of the Moody Blues, worked with the professor of electronics at Sussex University to create the first true electronic drum. The results of this innovative machine can be heard in “Procession” from the album Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1971). Commercially, this market didn’t take off until the 1976 release of the Syndrum by Pollard Industries. This had multiple models available and a cheaper version of it, the CSM, was produced for hobbyists. Star Industries introduced the Synare in 1977, an instrument which, while a key to disco, was still meant as an addition to traditional acoustic drums. Simmons and Roland V-Drums came along soon after and changed the sound of the 1980’s.
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Horror Music
-->Music for use in movies, podcasts, flash movies and other multimedia presentations with a horror theme can be very profitable. Not just hundreds of productions of this kind are made each month, but when Halloween is approaching a lot more people use it, for commercial purposes or just for fun.
What makes a track be regarded as horror music? I believe there are three elements that make a piece of music be filed under the horror genre: dissonance, suspense, and frights. Let’s take a deeper look on each of these aspects. Read more…
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11 Tips to Improve Your Music Creativity – part 2
-->6. Use different instruments
I’m accomplished on guitar and bass. I don’t know to play keyboard instruments, but I ended up developing some minor skills on it due to the productions I make. And it’s impressive how you can come with different ideas with different instruments. Of course, each instrument has its own language, things that you can ’say’ with one you can’t with another. Specially when working on melodies, you will see how new ideas come with an instrument you are not accomplished. Read more…
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11 Tips to Improve Your Music Creativity – part 1
-->Perhaps the most important element for creating good pieces of music is creativity. No matter how virtuoso you are in your instruments or in your DAW, no matter how much money you spent in your studio, no matter your relationships, if you don’t have music creativity, if you are not someone that can look in the future and come with something new, you probably will not achieve success.
These tips consist of mind games, activities that will make your mind work different when you are trying to compose or product something. It is somehow inspired in Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”, and much of it was grabbed from our own experience working in composition and production. Feel free to create your own games based on these, and let us know if you come with something interesting. Read more…
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Make a Beat
-->Ok, one more ‘how to make a beat’ tutorial, you must be thinking. Fat drums, booming sub basses, crispy synths, spacious mixing, etc.… No, not this time. There is plenty of information over the web about it, just Google it. Here we will talk about one other aspect of producing hip hop besides the technical stuff.
Making a hip hop beat seem to be a very easy and straightforward task. We hear about producers that put up beats in some minutes. Of course, when people say that they forget that these producers have an engineer at their sides, assistants, and sometimes even ghost producers. Also, they spend weeks preparing their selves, collecting and creating drum samples and synth presets. Let’s not forget that also they have the best equipment and software they can put their hands on. But their greatest strength in producing music is creativity. People pay them thousands of dollars for a few hours of work because they are creative, they experiment, and at the same time they are not going out of the style. Instead, they are changing the style. Read more…
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