Good pop songs are easy to listen to and sometimes seem very simple, but nothing could be further from the truth. Writing a good pop song is not that easy. It really is an art to make a song sound ‘easy’. It’s the right combination of lyrics, hooks, and production. Text Needless to say, well […]

To become a better songwriter and/or producer you simply must practice a lot. But to find out where you need to improve your skills, you need feedback. Therefore, regularly ask for the opinion of someone you respect in the music field about the songs you are making. You don’t have to take everything lightly but […]

Few things seem to sound so good at first but can turn your track into a bathtub or mud pool in the blink of an eye. Reverb (short for reverberation) is different from delay. Where separate echoes are always audible with a delay, a reverb consists of a huge number of small echoes that follow […]

 Where drum samples are often already fully processed and ready to use, a live recorded drum kit is not.  A good drum sound almost always stands or falls with the recording. Are the microphones in phase, how does the room sound, are the drums tuned and so on and so on.  A typical drum multitrack […]

One of the most important instruments of modern pop music is arguably the synthesizer. This multicolored beast comes in endless shapes and flavors and seems to be able to go in any direction. But what is it? A synthesizer electrically generates its own sound. An acoustic instrument generates a signal by airflow (wind instruments), by […]

As a producer you often have to deal with vocals alongside your instrumental. As a singer or an artist you might also want to know how to proceed when you record your own vocals. It is important to know that no two singers sound the same, no microphone and no track is the same. The […]

The art of sampling dates back to the 1960s. Fragments of music were recorded from vinyl and later tape and placed in other songs. It has been very emblematic of the emergence of genres such as hip op, drum and bass and house. Many lawsuits have been filed for this, but it has become an […]

Your track has been mixed, your tracks are compressed and EQ’d to your liking, you just bought the most beautiful reverb ever on Black Friday, but your track still sounds static. You need to get moving! Life isn’t perfectly aligned, so why should your tracks be? There are many ways to give your tracks extra […]

                If you’d ask 100 music producers which tool they use most 99 out of 100 would mention an EQ. Although equalizers (EQ for short) are the most common used tools, they are also the most commonly misused tools. Which can lead to a bad mix and sleepless […]

Apart from EQ, the second most used tool in music production is probably the compressor. Because unfortunately (or luckily?) we can’t make our music infinitely loud, or because some instruments can go from very soft to very loud in a very short time, we use compressors. A compressor is a tool to control the dynamic […]