The Friday Share A Production Tip Thread™

[deadly_habit]

if drinking while producing keep the beverages away from the gear.
or you could have an expensive paperweight if it's powered on

[rendr]

How to get super fat drums in Logic Pro!!!!!

Step 1,
Get 3 Kicks and a closed Hi Hat
Step 2,
Layer them up so they all play at once, make sure they all begin at the same point to to millisecond!
Step 3,
Remove unwanted frequency's from thee hits, using EQ, high pass & low pass. adjust their volume levels to sound good
Step 4,
On the master channel add an EQ, that has a high pass on 48Db/oct set to 90 Hz.
Then add the Sub Bass plugin and set it to 'deep club kick'
Then add the Bass Amp, plugin and set to 'Top Class DI Warm' adjust output to 0 Db.
Then add the gain plugin, and set the mix to 'mono' nobody wants a kick drum in stereo, YUK!
Finally add the standard compressor (second one down in dynamics) and select 'kick drum compression' then set the circuit type to 'ClassA_U'
Now adjust the master fader so that when played the drum hit comes in at around 0.0 Db without showing up in the red. Otherwise you'll end up with a digitally distorted drum hit. When rendering do not select normalize.

And that is how to get fat drums in logic pro 8!

Great tip but its probably best to route all of those hits to a seperate bus therefore you can keep your master fader at 0 and not have to use all of those plugins on the whole tune. Just use the bus fader to adjust your levels.

Sorry, to clarify, don't use my guide on a mix that your making in your DAW. That guide was for making custom kicks, not making them in your tune. Simple bounce your new drum hit out then use in a tune, less CPU usage that way that customising drums inside your project.

[deadly_habit]

Likkle finishing off tip..

Get ur tune just right with the mixing and make sure it never hits the red (i.e. +0db) and no unnecessary distortion..

Render/make the best quality file you can mp3, wav, whatever..

Take that single file and put it through a compressor, make sure all those peaking sounds get cut down.. set the threshold at about -18db and the ratio at 2.00:1.. use ur attack and release to fit the peaks.. u got long peaks; then push ur attack/release to fit the whole peak wave.. you got short peaks then lower the attack/release time so you don't compress too much of your lower waves.

Now you got a compressed single file tuned that won't ever reach -5db.. so... pump! pump! pump! it up...
Get the volume up so again it doesn't reach anything over 0db. Now you've just raised the volume without causing distortion or stripping too much off your original tune..

Render it again and you should have a pretty good home-made professional sounding track.. It's not professional mastering but it'll do!

peace

or do 0 red and use a lil psp vintage warmer with mod of presets a bit to taste tape saturation/overdrive presets

[fiziks]

This might be obvious to some but to get idea's up and running quicker...keep a 'Master Project' file where mundane things are already set-up (like drum busses for example, with EQ, compression gate plug-ins already set-up)...then all you have to do is sequence drums accordingly.

This is wise. Saves tons of time. Plus, if you do different genre's, you should set up a Master file for each style.

[wub]

- Spend at least one weekend a month doing nothing but sampling.

[RandoRando]

when sound designing, make new patches in your synth about 2 bars long of random modulations, then bounce all kinds of different ones to wavs, and put them in january sound design, february sound design etc. so you can see how much you have progressed, and also choose what type of sound your lookin for. Im not sure about others, but all my early sound designs are like dark wobbles, very kromestar-ish, and all of my newest bounced wavs (this months folder) are all spacey destructo robot noises.

helps me.

[wub]

^^ I like that.

I have a seperate folder on my desktop just called 'Bounced' which I have set as my default Edison save location for when I'm just doing nothing but sound design

[RandoRando]

^^ I like that.

I have a seperate folder on my desktop just called 'Bounced' which I have set as my default Edison save location for when I'm just doing nothing but sound design

how did you change edisons default location,? that would save me a whole lot of time from navigating from its stupid default from the developers. the folder is in way too deep in the imageline folder and not even accessible from the browser.

[wub]

Can't remember off the top of my head, will check when I get home.

In the meantime, you could always create a desktop shortcut in whatever folder Edison is currently saving to, and just use that to jump to it?

[Turnipish_Thoughts]

A tip to get instant fat drums:

Make your beat as you would normally and once you've got it as you'd like make a copy of each track, the kick, snare, hats, shakers e.t.c.

Make a reverb aux send and send the reverb to each of the copy tracks, also add some compression to taste. The idea is to get the copy tracks to sound unrealistically big and squashed and washy.

Next insert a gate on each copy track that's keyed to open as the hits from the original track for that instrument's amplitude goes over a threshold (basically side-chained), mess with the timings/threshold on the gates.

This immediately fattens up the drums as the overly compressed/reverb version are only outputting audio in keeping with their non reverb/compressed counterparts. The effect is almost inaudible but adds considerable punch and width to hits without sonically altering them to an overly noticeable degree.

Of course mess around with wether you actually use reverb or compression and to which degree for each, or more of course, add different effects to the copied versions and mess with them as you see fit.

The central idea of keying the copied counterpart track to open in keeping with its unaltered version keeps the timing tight for the hits, so within that envelope you have room to screw with the dynamics of the audio to get some interesting effects.

Its like side-chain compression, in reverse...

check it out.

[GRAYSKALE]

Spend a day slicing up all of your favourite breaks and loading them into your drum machine of choice. Only recently did this and it has increased my workflow speeds tenfold! Gives you a much easier way of creating new breaks on the fly etc, and way more flexiblity and ease for programming new and interesting patterns and comparing different patterns. Learnt this one off of the most bizzare CM Masterclass with Toddla T!

[IC0N]

As you're producing, periodically turn off or don't look at the computer screen (or even close your eyes) when playing back something. I do this mostly when doing final mixdowns and stuff but it helps in many other situations. In my opinion, you'll hear different things when you're not staring at a bunch of blocks.

[victor w]

As you're producing, periodically turn off or don't look at the computer screen (or even close your eyes) when playing back something. I do this mostly when doing final mixdowns and stuff but it helps in many other situations. In my opinion, you'll hear different things when you're not staring at a bunch of blocks.

I do this too its crazy how it works. I just look off to the side and pertend that i'm hearing the track for the first time and that it's not mine. then i'm able to pick things out that I wouldn't catch because I'm focusing on them too much ie white noise level, hi hat, anything that i want to be very particular.

[SLASH]

when remixing a song find all the original accompanying notes and notes that go with the tune with a piano first. you will drive yourself crazy if you try to start out finding the key with a synth.. and like somebody said, start with a personalized template with everything already routed and bussed and continue to modify it and make a new one every so often.

*edit also the tip about turning your stereo tracks to 2 mono is HUGE. I've been meaning to do that again and you can slightly offset them and get a FAT sound. I always do this when recording an accoustic guitar

[lightshapers]

if you have filtershaper copy these settings and stick it on mid rangey/lead bass etc for pure filtered awesomeness have a play with the length. automate the bypass etc to keep it interesting

[Eridu]

using FL studio: let me blow your mind by saying that numbers 1 to 5 on your keyboard adjust your view if you are in playlist or piano roll... no need to scroll with your mouse anymore.

second set of ears : when you are making a track, its important to have a second set of ears. I once went out of my studio and found some random person of the street and asked him if he would like to join me in my studio...surprisingly he was more then happy to join me. I played him a few of my tracks and he liked most of them even though as he said that most of them remind him of a bad trip he had when he was 16 doing acid. After implying that the most recent track I did lacks in the bass department he took out his swiss pocket knife and asked if i would mind lend him some of my equipment. Naturally i agreed.

fl studio again: slicing audio is fun! in the audio clip`s menu chop it to a regular time interval the use the slide tool to shift audio as you see fit. great tool.

shakers! shakers! shakers! I could listen to a track consisting of nothing but a shaker loop going on for 12 minutes! make sure its slightly off beat though.

[Manic Harmonic]

when remixing a song find all the original accompanying notes and notes that go with the tune with a piano first. you will drive yourself crazy if you try to start out finding the key with a synth.. and like somebody said, start with a personalized template with everything already routed and bussed and continue to modify it and make a new one every so often.

*edit also the tip about turning your stereo tracks to 2 mono is HUGE. I've been meaning to do that again and you can slightly offset them and get a FAT sound. I always do this when recording an accoustic guitar

Yes on the tip for guitar. This is related to that - what I do is just record 2 seperate left and right tracks a bunch of times until the rhythm is as close as I can get it. For those of you that don't know, this is what Billy Corgan did on the Pumpkins records. Some of the tracks on Siamese Dream had up to 40-something guitar tracks, all recorded separately.