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20 quick and easy tips that will improve your productions (part 3)

20 quick and easy tips that will improve your productions (part 3)

You can read the second 20 quick and easy tips that will improve your productions here!

Quick tip 41

On a vocal try using one compressor with a fast attack to control the peaks and a second with a slower attack for tone and character.

Quick tip 42

Try closing your eyes and listening to your mix every once and awhile. We mix with our ears not our eyes!

Quick tip 43

Try using a predelay with your reverbs to help with clarity. This lets the dry signal through before the reverb tail is heard.

Quick tip 44

Learn how to troubleshoot! Don’t expect other people to solve your problems for you.

Quick tip 45

The higher the mic preamp gain, the more sensitive the microphone will be.

Quick tip 46

Use delays, vocal effects, and other ear candy to fill in the empty spaces of a song. This keeps the production interesting and the listener engaged even when the lead vocals aren’t in.

Quick tip 47

If frequencies are clashing and panning isn’t enough, try using a stereo width plugin to spread out a track even further.

Quick tip 48

Try using a high pass filter on the sidechain input of your compressor to let the bass frequencies pass through without affecting the amount of compression.

Quick tip 49

Start to maintain a favorite samples folder. After you finish a song, take your favorite sounds and export them to a separate folder.

Quick tip 50

You have to try a lot of things that won’t work before you can know what things will work.

Quick tip 51

Finishing the project should always be your number one goal. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds if you never finished it.

Quick tip 52

Mastering is always better left to a professional mastering engineer that has a fresh set of trained ears in a finely tuned room.

Quick tip 53

Try lightly tucking a quarter note delay into a lead vocal to thicken it up.

Quick tip 54

Track vocalists with compression, reverb, and delay to help yield a better performance.

Quick tip 55

Try not to spend too long working on a single instrument, remember to constantly listen to the big picture and not the individual parts.

Quick tip 56

Don’t be afraid to stack multiple plugins and don’t be afraid to leave a sound untouched.

Quick tip 57

You really don’t need that piece of gear! Spend more time learning about the gear you have and actually using it.

Quick tip 58

Louder always sounds better. Make sure when A/Bing two signals that both are being played back at the same level so you can accurately judge what sounds better.

Quick tip 59

Every DAW offers the ability to write notes directly into a session and on specific tracks. When you hear something that needs to be fixed, make a note of it so you’ll remember what you wanted to do later.

Quick tip 60

Set aside time for experimentation where you try new processors, effects, and techniques that you wouldn’t normally use.


Related articles:
20 quick and easy tips that will improve your productions
20 quick and easy tips that will improve your productions (part 2)
5 mixing mistakes that I used to make… and how to avoid them
Things I wish I learned sooner about audio engineering

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