GET MORE MUSIC PRODUCTION TIPS ON YOUTUBE!  Hey all! We got more music production tips coming at ya! This week’s post is all about creating strong transitions in your music, specifically with modern electronic music productions. We’re going to go over the following techniques I use that hel ..read more

GET MORE MUSIC PRODUCTION TIPS ON YOUTUBE!  Hey all! Today’s video tutorial is all about gain staging. This has been the hot topic at the studio for the last couple of months, just revisiting the idea and drilling down further into the concepts and applications. What is Gain Staging? Gain staging is the effective management of your audio levels ..read more

Hey everyone, it’s Brad Simons here. In today’s video blog, I want to show you some of the ways to make the chorus have more of an impact in my productions. Why does this matter? Well creating a song is like telling a story, it has ups and downs, conflict and resolution. We need to take our listeners on a journey and help them see where they are in the plot line. In music, this means we want to help the listener feel the big moments. It’s these moments that make a song more memorable. Take a look at the video below to get some ideas on how to make your choruses more impactful. Thanks for watc ..read more

Reading Time: 4-5 Minutes Time is money! Or so they say. Today, I want to talk about the importance of taking your time when recording. We hear it all the time as engineers and producers, work quickly, work fast, don’t slow down the session. While I agree that all of those are important factors to being a good engineer, I want to explore the other side of the coin. The advantages of being deliberate in our recordings. Balance The first thing that I’d like to discuss on this topic is finding the right balance. Working so quickly that you make a barrage of mistakes is incredibly detrimental to ..read more

Reading Time: 4-5 Minutes I was working on a mix this week that I couldn’t quite get sounding right. After working for a few hours without much luck, I realized I was on autopilot. Adding processing and reaching for EQ’s with no real reason, I wasn’t really listening and reacting. Instead, I was just blindly making my usual moves. The next day when I came back to the song, I reset every channel, dropped the faders to zero and started over. This time I didn’t reach for any plugins, instead I simply focused on the balance and in no time I had the track feeling much better. Here’s a couple quick ..read more

Reading Time 6-7 Minutes I love mixing pop vocals. Even when working on the production end of a track, my brain tends to make decisions with the mix already in mind. Often, the biggest challenge in the mix stage is getting the vocals to sit in the right place within the music. The sweet spot tends to be crisp sounding but not too thin. Leaving an abundance of lows/mids can create mud but removing too much can make things sound brittle and harsh. For me, it’s all about finding the perfect balance between the highs and lows for each unique vocalist to get the perfect end result. Over the years I ..read more

Hey Everyone, This is Randor from Velveteen Audio. Today, I did a quick little video regarding kick and snare transient design through editing. The point of this video was to share a little technique to help our drums sound a little punchier and poke through the mix a bit more. This can be done in a number of different ways such as drum replacements, using midi, or using transient design plugins. I find that all of theses are good tools and all have their positives and negatives. Depending on the context of what you are doing, this is hopefully another tool to add to your toolbox. Take a look ..read more

Hey guys! It’s Brad Simons here, and today I’m going to dive into the way I use a program/app/website called Splice to build electronic sounding tracks. This one is for the producers out there! I’m going to use the phrase “electronic” in a pretty general way, as it can mean quite a diverse range of genres. Regardless, Splice is a super useful tool in creating any type of synthetic and electronic sound. So hit up the video below where I get creative and build a track from scratch with no real direction, just let it flow out organically. Thanks for watching! Brad You can find more tutorials in ..read more

Reading Time: 3-4 Minutes On this blog, I decided to do something a little different and fun. Let’s play desert island plugins! I’m hoping this will spark some conversations with everyone out there on the interwebs, as I’m sure we’ll all have very different opinions on what is necessary on our desert island studio. So, you’re trapped on this metaphorical island with nowhere to go but you have great mixing monitors and an awesome control room built out of driftwood and coconuts as diffusers. You can only bring 3 plugins, what are they?!? Here’s my desert island plugins: Waves SSL E-Channel A c ..read more

Reading Time 7-8 Minutes 5 steps to check yourself before hitting the studio. What does Record-Ready mean? Much like all things in music and art, there are many ways to describe this concept. Personally, I would describe record-ready material as being effective in intent, emotive in nature and thus ready to be completed in the studio and released out into the world for your audience to receive. You wrote it, so it should express something you’d like it to express. It’s art, so it should also elicit some sort of response from people (positive or negative, engagement is never a bad thing), and ..read more