So for the past year I’ve been focussing mainly on the production of music. I feel like this current unit has tested me a lot. I feel more confident in my music, I’ve learnt a load of different skills and techniques in the past few months that have made my music sound more polished and professional.
This unit has also turned me into more of a perfectionist. The first tracks I ever produced were on the Ipad, and although I could not have expected the same quality in sound that I can achieve now, I do feel that I was too eager to put my sounds up online. I think I’ve become a lot more critical of my work. Roughly 90% of the tracks I start will not make it out of the draft stage. This could be seen as a positive or a negative thing. Occaisionally I feel like I disregard a draft to early and begin a new project. However I’ve accepted that for now it’s the way I work. I have to create something that grabs my attention instantly and then work around it, spending time to develop it into a track.
I’m trying to be a lot stricter with what I export as a finalised track. I’m finding that my project files now have multiple versions, where I have tweaked and re-tweaked different elements. These small changes are often so that the mixdown of the track sounds a bit tighter.
Highlighted, Is a track that is currently under a different name and will feature on my online release. It has 7 different varients (As well as others under differernt names)
I’ve also started to listen through to exports of my tracks through differernt speakers. This has made me realise just how important it is to spend time on mixing your track. It’s still an ongoing battle for me but I feel like my tracks are balanced better than they would have been a couple of months ago. At the moment I use Phils Pre Sonus monitors to produce on, but then I’ll listen through to the track through laptop speakers, my headphones and then through my speakers when I get home. A lot of low frequency detail is lost when music is played through a laptop’s speakers so I’ve started to boost the mids and the highs a little bit in my Bass sounds so that they can be heard through a laptop.
As well as this I’ve occasionally applied a bus compressor to the Master Channel. To tighten all the elements, although I’ve used it very sparingly as it’s so easy to overcompress some elements of the track.
Pars R Us 