In this tutorial I’m simply working on an original piece, and wanted to share how I’m cleaning up the click-y noise from the Prophet 08. The result is instantly obvious and very pleasing to my ears. Check it out, and then I challenge you to think about sounds on your own tracks which might benefit from this technique. Enjoy! [Read more]

Compressors’ role in music is to control peaks and overloading signals. As a result, a performance or sounds is evened out or flattened in order to be more consistent. For instance, when you listen to Classical Music or Jazz, you might feel tempted to raise the volume of the music, then lower it, then raise again, and so on. This is because these genre’s are not as compressed as Pop music, where the whole track might pretty much be at the same volume throughout. [Read more]

Check out some cool ideas on how to make 16th note hi hats sound more natural and less machine-y. [Read more]

A cool technique that a lot of people miss when sculpting sounds is the idea of an envelope modulating itself. I’ll explain that in a minute. But this a feature that I learned of by designing sounds on the Prophet 08 by Dave Smith Instruments. The idea is that you can make for instance a filter envelope modulate it’s decay, attack, or anything you can think of that’s available. [Read more]

Everything in music production is closely related to pitch, volume, or time. Think about it, reverb and delay are time effects. Chorus is a combination of time and pitch. EQ is basically a frequency adjustment and frequencies are pitches; 220 hz is the A below middle C. And finally, a compressor is basically a volume-adjustment device. Of course it gest more complicated than that and in this article I’ll give you some ideas on how to think about it without getting too technical. I’m not a fan of technical things when it comes to music. [Read more]