Tag Archives: Better

Production Techniques

Speakers or Headphones?

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Over the past few weeks, people have been asking me what is better: Mixing on headphones or mixing on speakers?

Now I have already created a blog post about the pros and cons of mixing on headphones, but I don’t believe I ever gave an answer as to what the best headphones are, and what the best speakers are. Today, I am here to clear the air about this issue.

After much research and many hours testing headphones, I have found that the AudioTechnica ATH M50 studio headphones are the best at an affordable price of under $200 MSRP.  Most AudioTechnica ATH M50 studio headphones can be found for around $139, and are a great bargain for the price.

I personally have a pair of AudioTechnica ATH M50 studio headphones and have had them for almost two years.

Using AudioTechnica ATH M50 headphones to mix on CDJ’s

These headphones are built like tanks: they withstand being stepped on, dropped, and whatever else you can manage to do to them. As their name suggests, these are studio headphones, which means they are specifically manufactured for studio settings. The specifications can be read here, but they have a great frequency response. The range that these headphones are capable of are, for the most part, out of the human ear’s range. The human ear’s range is from around 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, while these headphones are capable of 15 hz to around 28,000 hz, which makes these headphones great for mixing.

Of course, there are also cons to any product, and some of the inherent flaws in the design of these headphones is the weight. While the headphones are designed to be as comfortable as possible, (and they are for a while), the weight on your head causes you to have a headache after a while. I have also found that the headphones can cause your ears to bend a little, causing discomfort after an extended period of time wearing them.

In recent years, scientists have also found that wearing headphones for more than an hour at a time can increase the amount of bacteria in your ear by eleven times. This leads to pain in your ears, and can eventually lead to hearing loss (which is a producer’s worst nightmare!). If you use these headphones periodically and carefully, they are extremely well-rounded and exceptional headphones.

Now on to speakers. For almost three years, I had no speakers, which was extremely detrimental to my development as a producer. When I did get speakers, I got very bad ones from one of my friends, which was even worse because they didn’t balance the bass or highs and made my music sound worse than before. The only thing worse than having no speakers is having bad speakers.

This was how I happened to come across the KRK Rokit G3 series. They are the most popular and well-liked studio monitors in the production world at the moment. While there are many, many other studio monitors out there that are worth looking at, (the PreSonus Eris E5 series are REALLY good), I will be talking about the KRK Rokit G3 series since I personally have these speakers.

The KRK Rokit G3 5-inch studio monitors I have in my dorm room. Don’t mind the goofy-looking guy on the right.

The KRK Rokit G3 studio monitors have a great frequency response for studio monitors below $300. A pair of these monitors are usually around $250, but that also depends on the size of the monitors. The series consists of 5″ monitors (what I have), 6″ monitors, and 8″ monitors, and their prices go up respectively.

The frequency response of these monitors is about 40-45 Hz to about 35,000 Hz, which is not as wide a range as the AudioTechnica studio headphones I mentioned earlier. But, one thing that monitors are able to do that headphones can not do, is let you hear what your music sounds like after it passes through air, bounces off walls, and any other objects in your room. With headphones, you don’t allow the sound to pass through air or bounce off the walls, giving you a distorted view of your music.

One of the best things that you can do for your music is to do a combination of both: use your studio headphones for reference, and then switch to your monitors to mix on there, and then switch again. Learn how your equipment responds to different frequencies, how it sounds in different environments, and what things you can do to fix these problems that you have with your equipment.

Hope this all helps! Cheers!

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Production Techniques, YouTube Videos on Music Production

How To Create Growls With Sytrus in FL Studio

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Today I teach you guys how to create growls with Sytrus, a subtractive synthesizer that comes standard with FL Studio. Many producers tend to overlook the power that this synthesizer has because: 1. They think it is inferior to more popular synths like Massive, or 2. They don’t understand how it works.

I bring you through the steps to understand how Sytrus works and how to create growls comparable to Massive and other synthesizers. While the audio isn’t the best, it still covers all the basics and will create a great sound even though my audio isn’t great.

The link to the YouTube video has been posted below. Hope you learn a lot from it!

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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

Tips on How to Create Better Mixes

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In the world of producing music, there is nothing more satisfying than creating a good, clean-sounding mix. It helps exponentially to create a tight mix because it makes mastering (this will be left for another day) a track that much easier (plus it sounds AMAZING).

Now before we get into all of the technical jargon and techniques to use for mixing, I’d like to share a story with you about my plight with mixing in my early producing days.

When I first started to create Trance music, the only type of mixing I knew was DJs scratching and tearing up the dance floors with their mixing boards. I searched for nearly two years, browsing through websites dedicated to music production, only to find nothing. After countless websites searched, one of my producer friends told me about mixing. He told me that mixing was not only related to producing, but that it relied on mixing.

What I mean is, if you want a good song, you have to be able to mix well.

So, how can you start off mixing well? First off, you have to be able to identify all the mixing tools and how exactly to use a mixing board. I am in the process of planning a video explaining how to get started in mixing on FL Studio so that you can use these tools. After utilizing these tools, listen to your track go from a muddy wasteland to a colorful, contrasting work of art.

In the meantime, take a look at this website for some mixing tips you can use to get started before I post the video. Another great video to take a look at is this video, where a blond man with messy hair teaches you how to mix a better bass in your music.

Cheers!