One step production hacks (Part I)

               Irrespective of being an experienced producer , or just a fresher , often we get stuck up somewhere in between the masterpiece we made up in our mind and the technical complexities. We try to tweak virtually anything to make the thing work, but still it sounds crap. The thing that we do not realize is that to have that brilliant spark, the things should not have to be the most processed or most complex thing, rather a simple and solid thing. Below we discuss the 1^st part of some of the smart ways to finish off your tracks faster and in a better way.

               Check out the next part of this blog right here : One step production hacks (Part II)

• Distortion  before  or  after  reverb

While it may seem that this is almost pointless to say upon , but the interesting fact is that the way of processing of the reverb plugins are almost different.Every plugin manipulates sound in their own way , but one common trait is found.It is that even the colour of the signal is set to be warm , still the plugin manipulates over some of the top end of the spectrum.Imagine Applying distortion over a signal that have an active spectrum above 16kHz.

Therefore as a rule of thumb , try distortion first.Then do reverb.In that way you will get rid of the hollowness and jitters in the output.

Bonus – Apply a LP filter at the end of the chain to cut down some harshness ;)

• Swing

                Getting stuck at making a percussion loop for tropical house, or having problems with your future bounce melody to have that bouncy vibe?!

                                                          SWING it !!

                If you are an FL studio user, you absolutely just need to play with the swing fader in the step sequencer. For other DAW users, you can manually add swings by slightly varying the starting and ending time of your notes by 1/6^th note.

                That’s it. No mystery involved. This is how the famous artists infuse a bouncy vibe to their melodies that a lot of newbies find difficult to program.

                P.S – Important tips for future house/deep house producers too. You can also try out swing on the claps and other drum elements(excluding the kick) to bring out that smooth flowing vibe found in many of the tracks of Oliver Heldens and Calvin Harris.

• Automations

                While automations are really very useful during productions, sometimes an overwhelming amount of automation lanes do make a mess to work freely. Also, subtly it does jam up CPU a bit even if it is not in use. A good solution for this is to multilink some of the parameters that you want to automate in the same way, and then draw the automation.

                For example, the synced sidechaining of the bass and sub-bass at the drop can be multilinked. If you want the lead to be sidechained, that too can be multilinked.

Suppose the automation you draw for the sidechaining of the sub-bass in the drop is always set to 127(mind it, values are calculated in a range of 0 to 127), it will tend to take up a bit more CPU. Rather draw the curve in such a way that the values are maximum only during the drop  and the rest of the time it goes back to zero. IN this way you can save up a more of CPU by commanding the compressor/plugin to not process any signal(even no signal also takes up processing place in CPU).

In this way you will end up freeing more space for tasks like mastering plugins or soft synths and also can get a visual feedback of what will happen when.

• Not-so  compulsory Compressions

                I guess that even you have felt disgusted while being stuck up in a loudness war like many other people. Many YouTube tutorials will tell you that throw in a couple of limiters/compressors (though they both are almost same and do almost same job , yet they are very much different in their working as well as in their usage needs. It will not be enough to discuss it in this post, so I will dedicate a whole long post to it later) and you will get that loudness. To fatten the sound up throw a Sausage Fattener.

                This is absolutely pointless and a waste of time. Compression of a sound refers to the balancing of level between the points of lowest loudness and the highest loudness (this is known as the dynamics of the sound). We choose a comfortable threshold value, above which the signal will get attenuated, according to the attack time set and the value of the ratio knob. This is the small theory behind the working of a compressor.Simple enough to understand.

                But if you get a well to do sound at the beginning, then why do toughen up the job and in turn mess with the mastering at later stage by compressing the sound?! Sometimes over compressing of a signal makes it sound thinner instead, or completely sucks the life out of it.

                Therefore learn to see which sounds needs compression. If the signal you have doesn’t have much of dynamics , then it is absolutely okay to skip compression . In practical, compression amount depends on the amount of dynamics present in the signal.

                So you became a lot smarter with this super small secret  ;)

               Also check out this article if you new to productions

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Best wishes from the team.