BIG Post: Production Tips And Techniques
PDF:
http://rapidshare.com/files/282482497/A ... on_TAT.pdf
1. Buying Equipment
• Never sell, never upgrade. Buy middle of top of the range (brand new or second hand) first time around and keep it for life. It will become a classic, and if you look after it, it will last forever.
2. Sampling
• Repeat after me... The sampler is simply the most versatile instrument ever invented and it is limited only by the sounds you can find to put in it.
• Sample everything: aerosol hihats, pingpong snares, press record, flick the radio channels for a couple of minutes, edit what you get into discrete hits and autotune the funk out of it.
• Hit salvos and get some records to rip. Go for the non musical ones (spoken word et)
• Grab the syllables Sebastian style to colour songs without adding words
• Record your studio session and sample it. Youll gets lots of clicks and stuff
• With stereo samples of ambient or melodic sounds, try reversing one channel for a more unusual stereo image. Then funk with panning
• Make a loop slowly go out of time over 4 bars, be careful! Taste required.
• Have a melody play at normal speed, then put a pitched up and sped up 1 otve copy over the top. Edit both copies for crazy appregiator style madness.
3. Panning
• first of all, get your mix sounding great in mono
• The lower the frequency, the less you should pan it
• Pan from 9 till 3 only
• To reduce blurring of the stereo image: use a prepanned mono reverb on a sound. Will sound solid in the mix
• Faking stereo: Split the audio file, apply chorus to one side. Also a better way to chorus any sound you still want up the front of teh mix
• Or, Pan before you mix your levels because panning can cause a drop in db. Might be better
• In techno, the only panning seems to be channel delay or fx’s panned around. All the drums and bass are at centre.
• Bass kick and snare in the middle. Check out some hard panning on a shaker sometime.
4. Reverb
• Basically, Reverb is 2 processes: short delay like reflections and a cloudy tail. Eq plays a big part: all real life sound reflections are eq’d.usually the tops are cut. Having said that, each company has a different way to achieve this.
• Look into ambience: reverb but only the early reflections not the tail, keeps mixes clean. The best bet is to get some decent IR’s for 80’s lexicon units. Ambience rocks on artificial and close mic’d sounds, make them sit nicely in the mix
• The spacing between initial reflections is a dominant factor in perceived room size
• The main paramaters to tweak are early reflection pattern (ambience), pre-delay time (longer = larger room), overall decay time (helps reinforce the idea of large areas) and high-frequency damping (more you add, the less the reverb sounds like a prison cell and more like a forest). And Reverb density: sorta means the amount of voices in the tail of the reverb. Low density tails are a little grainy and good for vox and long sounds but bad on percussion. High density tails are good for percussion. Sometime you also get the diffusion parameter. Its like “attackâ€
