EDM Tutorial Promotions, Production Techniques

How to Mix and Master Electronic Music From Home!

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In my everlasting search for the next big breakthrough in teaching electronic music tips and tricks, I have found it.

An EDM artist by the name of Kid Zero has made a tutorial on how to mix and master your own electronic music straight from home. I have watched many tutorials, (in case you couldn’t tell), and this one is the best by far in teaching you how to mix and master songs.

While it does cost money, the mere $37 to download it is worth the money. This is nothing compared to the amount of money you might waste on new, useless plugins that won’t improve your sound, never mind the amount of time you might waste finding out everything you will learn in these few hours.

Kid Zero manages to take apart all the steps you need to do in order to create mixes that will sound good on any speaker system and the mastering tips to make your song sound club-ready.

Now before you get ahead of yourself, I do have to say that while this tutorial has many great tips and tricks for improving your sound, it is also all video with minimal text. If you are a visual learner, this video will be great for you. If you are much better at reading than learning through video, this may not be right for you. He also lays out many great concepts and shows you step by step how to create better mixes and masters. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time (just the percussion section is over an hour long!) and he doesn’t go into much detail about how the plugins work. You must be willing to invest several hours into this tutorial in order to get the full experience (I recommend taking breaks in between each section.) The plugins, except for the CamelCrusher Distortion Plugin (which is FREE!), all cost over $100, which, in my opinion, is quite expensive for a beginning/intermediate producer. My recommendation would be to get the CamelCrusher plugin and see how well you can mix with that one recommended plugin.

This tutorial is also a little tough to pick up on if you aren’t familiar with compression and eq’ing, which is a significant part of mixing and mastering tracks.

While he does his tutorial on Ableton, you are able to use the techniques he uses on any DAW of your choosing, including my favorite, FL Studio. If people are having trouble switching between the two programs, I may make a tutorial myself of the same techniques on FL Studio.

Here is the download for the mixing and mastering tutorial!

Cheers!

*Disclosure*

 ProducingElectronicMusic.com is an affiliate of ADSRsounds.com. By purchasing this/these soundpacks/tutorials through this website, producingelectronicmusic.com gets 20% of the sale! Thank you for your contribution!

P.S. If you have any questions at all about affiliate links, what they are, or how they are used by ProducingElectronicMusic.com, leave a comment below, or email me at: [email protected]

Random Blurbs

I have been a little negligent to this blog…

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Hey guys,

I realized today that I haven’t posted on this blog in MONTHS. If you have been following me and hoping to learn more about how to produce electronic music, I am extremely sorry. I have been working on new music and learning new tips and tricks to create better mixes and even try to achieve mastering quality. Unfortunately, in this process, I neglected this blog.

So, to make it up to you, I will be creating a new post relatively soon, (possibly today!), to help you guys with starting off your songs and creating better mixes. I will try and show how to properly eq a track and how to leave enough head room for proper mixing.

Thank you for your patience, and once again, I am sorry for the delay.

Cheers,

Brad

Random Blurbs

My Progress in EDM: Then and Now

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In case you didn’t know, today is the last day of the semester. Technically, I don’t have to continue this blog, but I’ve enjoyed making this blog so much that I am continuing with my blog. I have learned a lot of information including sidechain compression, compression, mixing, and even how to make different genres of music.

Since I have been learning so much over these past few months, I decided to remix and edit a song I had made in March-April of 2012. I worked on it for the past week and am very proud to say that I have completed it. Here is the original track “Tundra” from April.

fl-studio-24

Here is the new edited version of the same song, “Tundra,” which has been mixed down much better for a cleaner sound, sidechained to create that “bounce” feel, and newer, more professional sounds were added to give it a slightly different feel from the first track.

Now, as you may have guessed, this track wasn’t the first I ever created. In fact, I started producing “music” (or whatever it was that I made back then) over two years ago. I’m posting this first song I created on FL Studio because I know how hard it is to start out in EDM production. I can guarantee every great EDM producer started out by making music like this.

So, without further ado, I present my first song I ever created on FL studio, “Madman’s Dance.”

Enjoy!

Production Techniques, YouTube Videos on Music Production

Useful Tutorials and Tips on Creating Dubstep, Drumstep, and DnB

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In my last post, I admitted that while I listen to plenty of dubstep, drumstep, and dnb, I am not very skilled in making these types of EDM. In order to keep up and allow you to start creating your own dubstep, drumstep, and dnb, I will post links to various websites that will explain and guide you through these processes much more effectively than I could.

While it was hard trying to find videos best suited for you, I chose the best videos that I deemed fit to help teach these style in FL Studio.

Dubstep is created using wobbles and syncopated beats. An effective video to watch on dubstep production is made by howtomakeelectronicmusic.com. It shows the basics on how to create a dubstep beat that hopefully you can elaborate on.

The drumstep tutorial was especially hard to find because it is a generally new genre of EDM. One of the only good videos I could find just demonstrates how to create a drumstep beat. Hopefully later on I can find a better tutorial about this type of EDM.

DnB turned up more favorable results, with a great tutorial and tips and tricks for drum and bass. Another great tutorial on drum and bass is how to create a great piano riff to get ready for a drop in the track. The rest of KevWillow7‘s tutorials are also very helpful in getting started with production and learning tips and tricks in FL Studio.

Once I have gathered more knowledge and the skill set necessary to create my own tutorials, I will post them here. Until then, enjoy these helpful tutorials.

Cheers!

History of EDM

Dubstep, Drumstep, and DnB

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Dubstep

A few years ago, if you asked people about dubstep or DnB, most people would give you a raised eyebrow and think you were making up words. Now, you can hear it being referred to whenever someone makes a half-time beat.

Many people still don’t realize the difference between dubstep and “bro-step.” This small confusion causes much controversy within the EDM community and leads to all-out YouTube wars through the comments sections.

Dubstep is a type of garage music that originated in Southern London, England, during the late 1990’s. Dubstep, or 2-step garage, comprises of a drum kick on beats one and three instead of the typical four-on-the-floor beat of electronic music. It also included triplets and syncopated beats that created a different feel from the house and techno being produced in those days. Keyboards, synthesizers, guitars, and female vocals are among some of the instruments used by dubstep artists, including Distance.

Drum and bass (also known as D&B, D+B, or most commonly DnB) incorporates fast breakbeats with deep and heavy bass and sub-bass lines. Emerging from the dance clubs in the early 1990’s, this type of music is very fast, usually 160-180 bpm, and is generally harder than most other types of techno from the 1990s.

The deep and powerful basslines of this genre shake any dancefloor that you are on (if you have speakers that are capable of doing that). A very popular DnB artist, or in this case, group, is Pendulum. Some of their more recent songs have more drumstep influence than their older songs.

Drumstep is the hybrid of these two genres, incorporating the half-time dubstep kicks with the intense bass and breakbeat rythms of DnB. This subgenre of EDM is fairly new, but becoming extremely popular in clubs and dancefloors across the world.

An exceptional song of choice for drumstep is More Blast by Daenine. At the beginning of the song, you can hear the half-time beat typically used in dubstep. But, at about 3:16, the insane rhythm of breakbeat is used to build up intensity even more than the first drop.

Many people confuse drumstep with dubstep because they mistake the half-time kick as purely dubstep instead of a hybrid between dubstep and DnB. While most people don’t care about the difference, some hardcore fans will point out the differences in style, production technique, and BPM in the song.

Also, since I am not as educated in these subgenres as I am in trance, I am leaving the editing of this post up to you, the reader. If I have left out any information or put up wrong/controversial information, let me know in the comments. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Random Blurbs

The Studio/Radio Station Picture Story

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In the late hours of Thursday night, a radio show takes place in the not-so-busy radio station of 89.5 WSKB: a nice little radio station that many radio personalities on campus like to call home. Not only is it a great place to talk about the different things happening during the day, it is also an opportunity to play some great electronic music.

While the bass is pumping and music fills the room, we contemplate what else we could throw into the mix: perhaps an uplifting trance song? Or a really hard complextro beat to get our blood flowing. It all depends on our mood and what we really want to hear.

The mixer, while looking like an intimidating table of buttons and knobs, is an essential tool in helping our songs (and voices) be heard. Without this essential piece of equipment, there would be no point in doing a show because we wouldn’t be able to control what we want to do in terms of sound.

When we’ve had our share of music and laughs, my co-host and I try and talk about different events that happened during the day, whether locally or around the world.

Last, and most importantly, I perform a mix of songs that I have put together to engage my listeners and portray to them what I consider to be the best electronic songs of the week. This is the highlight of my radio show because it allows me to express myself with all the music that I can indulge myself in. Radio shows, in my own opinion, are one of the most exciting things that anybody could do, and while it can be tough learning all the equipment that goes along with radio, it is simple and fun once you really get into it.

Cheers!

Production techniques in FL Studio and tips on producing different styles of electronic music.

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