BIGGER DRUMS!

Hey everyone so I'm always telling my producer friends the same thing, 'Make your drums bigger' so why not I explain a couple techniques you can use to make your drums, BIGGER!

One technique, very simple, is Mult: If you have a snare you can send the signal to three different aux or fx tracks or you can duplicate the tracks giving you a total of three snare drum tracks. What you are doing now is treating each track differently with some eq and compression to blend the sound together. The first one you can focus and enhance the "attack" of the snare. The second you can add some "body" to the snare. The third you can focus on the "tail" end really what ever you want to bring out and create an epic snare drum. Once you have the three different versions, you really just blend them to your taste, experiment.

Second technique, Parallel Compression: Parallel compression is really fun to do and can really be used on anything and I see it being used on vocals a lot more. what you will do is you can send the sound to an aux track or fx track, or you can duplicate your sound. On the duplicated track you will add a compressor so now you have one dry and one compressed. Next, you use the compressor to get your sound, punchy, smooth, warm, etc. and blend the two together.


#EveryDetailCounts!

hey I make music, you do too?/Vocal Widening

So I've been swamped a bit scheduling meetings, sessions, mixing, sound designing, and a whole lot of other personal tasks so sorry I did not write up a post last week but I promise I will make it up with something very useful and you will enjoy.

This business is a business and a very crucial one I may add. It doesn't have to be like that! Yes it is a BUSINESS and YES you do have to take care of "BUSINESS" but to be honest with you, you can run your music business without the stress, without the worries, and without FAILING!

To start you off, you need to build relationships. That is the most important aspect, your relationships with artists, engineers, producers, song writers and everyone else who falls in the category of entertainment. As long as you are a person who can say "hey I make music, you do too? let's exchange contact information," you are already golden. Networking is a big part and that's what you need to do is network. Go out, have fun, and keep in mind, 'I make music' something that everyone loves!

Ok so enough about all that if you have any questions feel free to send me a message and I'll do my best to address it.

So an awesome trick I have been doing lately to add width to vocals like a chorus or hook, when the artist didn't record multiple takes before sending it to me is to nudge the audio over slightly. You will duplicate the vocal take and move the copy 20ms to the right and another copy 20ms to the left to give it a full stereo effect. That is one way you can do it without any plugins. If you want to use a delay and get just about the same results here are the settings i use and almost every time its perfect.

Here how it will look when you nudge the audio over.

 Duplicate

nudge left and right 20ms

Here is the same effect using a slap delay plugin.

this is the stock slap delay in protools.

Try that out let me know if it works for you and if you have any suggestions let me know i would love to know what you do when you mix.

thanks,

#EveryDetailCounts!