Music Production Insights

1. Stay organised and think of your future self 2. Walk away more! Come back, but walk away! 3. Listen to other mixes whilst mixing 4. Find a way to solo the bass end 5. Songs are everything, really

The original 7 steps mastering formula

Routine

When you are working with crazy short deadlines, it’s good to be as efficient with your time as possible. As much as I’d love to instantly be in the zone when I get in the studio it doesn’t always work out that way. One huge thing that I have learned is to have a daily routine that I follow. It doesn’t have to be strict but it does help to at least start your day the same way before even setting foot in the studio.

Environment

Having a tidy, vibey, and intuitive work environment is key to efficient work—if your studio is messy and chaotic, your work will reflect it. Start off by simply cleaning everything: get rid of clutter, dust off everything, wipe your screens down, take out the trash, and vacuum if you haven’t done that in a while. Now take a look around your studio. Do you have synths piled on synths that you haven’t used in months? If you don’t plan on using it today, get it out of the way. Find a good place to store all your equipment that doesn’t get used so it’s not in your face. I know it looks pretty and impresses your friends when they come over but we are trying to get some real work done here!

Play Time

Once you’ve gone through your morning routine and have made sure your studio is ready to go, it’s play time. If you’ve done your best to clear your mind, prepare your studio, and not distract yourself from the task at hand, it is much easier to get inspired. That being said, inspiration still doesn’t always come easily. Let’s say you have a two-day deadline to write a brand new song from scratch. You may be thinking, “I’ve just spent the past three hours being grateful, meditating, eating, cleaning, and setting up my studio. How does this get me closer to my goal?” It may seem like wasted time but trust me, it’s all worth it to make sure you get in the right headspace to do the best work you can do.

What is play time? This is where your work must start and you must start by having fun. Don’t think about the looming deadline or how much work you have ahead of you. If you’re not having fun then you’re doing it wrong. Start out by playing your instrument, the instrument you feel most comfortable with.

Break Time

Once you’ve got a good sketch going, it’s time to take a break. Taking breaks and stepping away from your work is essential to getting the best results. If you spend hours sitting there listening to the same loop over and over, chances are that you are probably going to burn out on the track quickly and it will result in an overworked sounding track. One way I remind myself to take breaks is by turning over my hourglass when I’ve started working. Yes, you can easily just set a timer on your computer or phone, but the aesthetic of seeing the sands of time falling somehow adds to the momentum of my process.

Get Detailed

After you have a good sketch going and you’ve stepped away from your work for a short moment, it’s time to get detailed. Normally, what I do is take that loop that I’ve been working on and duplicate it multiple times. Now I’ve got two to three minutes of the same loop in front of me. This is where the arrangement starts. Think of it like a sculpture: you start off with a huge block and you need to chip away at it to make sure the whole thing takes its true form.

Take Notes

When you feel like you’ve got your track nearly to the finish line it’s time again for another break. Once you’ve stepped away from the track for a few minutes to an hour, it’s time to take notes. I like to use Evernote because it saves my notes on all my devices. This comes in handy later when I’m listening to the track in the car or on my headphones while walking so I can just add to the notes wherever I’m at. Whatever your preferred method of note taking is, have it ready to go and start listening to the track from the top.

Educate and Practice

When you don’t have a crazy deadline and have some free time to work in the studio but can’t seem to find inspiration, it's a good idea to educate yourself and practice. I love watching tutorials on multiple subjects such as mixing techniques, plugins, and songwriting. I also enjoy watching interviews with producers and composers that I respect highly—there's also a bunch of books out there that are also quite inspiring. I love reading about the history of certain genres of music to help give me perspective on what I do. After over 20 years of producing and writing music, I still find vast amounts of inspiration through learning.

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#inspirational Duet for leaves and turntable

Getting your synth bass sounding just the way you want is only the first step. Next, you have to fit it in your mix. In some cases, it might just sound great without any processing. However, it’s likely that you will need the extra ‘shaping’ to make it work.

Here is Audiotent’s 5 tried and tested techniques that work for processing synth bass:

1. Use a high pass filter to remove any unnecessary sub frequencies. This is helpful when you have a low/subby kick drum that clashes with your bass. Higher tempo (BPM) or busier pattern usually requires more cut to keep the low end sounding tight.

2. If your bass seems to get lost when playing with other elements, saturation might just be the perfect tool to fix this. It adds additional harmonics and makes your bass more present. In this example we used FabFilter’s Saturn to saturate mid and high frequencies, whilst leaving the low end unaffected.

3. Adding a delay to your bass seems a ‘no go’ according to a lot of conventional mixing recourses. However, 2-5% of wet delay signal might be exactly what you need to glue it inside the mix. Not only that, this could add additional groove and space, making your synth bass come alive. We find it to work best in a less busy mix. Also, make sure to high pass the delayed signal, so the sub frequencies don’t become smeared. Keep them under control! In our example below, we high passed the delayed signal at around 270Hz.

4. Making your bass mono can be really useful. However it’s not always necessary. Sometimes you might only need to make your lowest/sub frequencies in mono, but the midrange can stay wider. Nonetheless, if there are other elements occupying your stereo space, hit that mono button and make your bass centered.

5. Sidechained Bass (frequency specific). Most of you are probably aware of the side-chain technique that is used to duck the bass every time the trigger (usually kick) is played. A lot of times, there is no need to duck the entire signal, as it will reduce the impact of your bass transients. The solution is to use a frequency specific side-chain to target only the frequencies that clash. [link_open=https://www.xferrecords.com/products/lfotool]LFO Tools by Xfer Records[/link_open] allows you to do so by splitting the frequency and allowing to process one half of spectrum only.