Tag Archives: Sidechain Compression

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

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

Mixing and Sidechain Compression Tutorial

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I finally got my screen recording software to work, so I was finally able to make a video on mixing and sidechain comnpression. Since I am only able to record 15 minutes of video, I tried to cover as much as possible in that time frame.

Audio could be better, but hopefully it will show just enough to help you start mixing and using sidechain compression.

Remember, the best way to get good at something is practice, practice, and practice.

*Tip* – Make a song to fool around with, no boundaries or holding back. Don’t worry about creating a song out of it, just mess with sidechain compression and mixing in order to see what sounds you can create. You’ll never know what you can do until you expand your horizons and learn what all the different VSTs and effects do to your song.

Sometimes, the best music comes from mistakes and luck.

Cheers!

Production Techniques

One of the Best- (and Worst-) Kept Secrets in Electronic Music Production

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If you have listened to professional EDM and then attempted to make it yourself, you may have noticed that while professional mixes “bounce” and create that urge to jump and dance, yours sounds flat and uninteresting. No matter how hard you try and fidget with your mixing board to get the right levels and just the right amount of reverb, it just doesn’t sound… Good.

For the longest time I had searched for this answer and never realized that it was right in front of me.

So now you ask, “what is this ‘secret’ production technique that almost all professional producers use?”

Well, once I found out the answer, I couldn’t believe that I had skipped over this technique so many times even after reading and hearing about it from fellow producers. This is why I call it the best AND worst kept secret in EDM production: because so many people have heard about it, yet few actually use and perfect it.

So, once again, what is this “secret?”

The answer to the “secret” is:

Sidechain.

Compression.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Now, you may or may not have heard of this technique, but if you have and didn’t explore its potential, you made the same mistake I did: creating flat, uninteresting mixes that didn’t seem to go anywhere, constantly making me frustrated and more irritated as I went.

Once I took into account this so-called “sidechain compression” and started to use it, I couldn’t believe how much clearer and fuller my mixes seemed to be. My song actually jumped and made me want to… Dance!

So, you may be wondering how you can go about and create this using FL Studio. There are a few ways to go about using sidechain compression, some easy, some hard. I am planning on making a video by the end of this weekend to show you how to create and manipulate sidechain compression. By the time you have finished the video, you should be able to effectively use sidechain compression and create tighter mixes.

Oh, and another thing: Using sidechain compression helps A LOT with creating final mixes (which I will elaborate on in a later post).

After learning the basics of sidechain compression, start to use it in your songs and soon enough, you’ll be able to create songs that will make the crowd jump instead of standing there flat-footed.

So, are you ready to use the best- and worst-kept secret in EDM?