Top 10 Music Production Tips

In an attempt to share and help others with music production i want to share ten tips with you over the coming days to help inspire and help your creativity. I have been producing, mastering and mixing music for 11 years now and have listed ten brilliant tips that will help all levels of producers. If your interested in learning more about music production from how to get started to any advanced techniques and principles please feel free to ask in the comments section and follow the channel.

#1 Starting Point

Sitting down at a blank screen inside your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) with the view of making something fresh, new and exciting can be daunting to say the least, so its a good idea to have building blocks in place and a starting point even if your vision changes throughout the project. Create a folder for your new track and take the time to get together a collection of inspirational samples and patches you have collected, created and modified. Its a good idea to get some fundamentals like drums and percussion that you may want to work with in this folder so that when you feel like you're inspired and ready to start the project, your not held back the initial creativite hours by having to go through this process.

#2 Interesting Rhythm

As a drum and bass producer you learn to understand that anything goes when creating rhythmic patterns as should with any musical genre, this is what can define and innovate. The main thing that defines drum and bass is its tempo (170 bpm - 178 bpm) and its drum patterning as with a lot of other genres in music generally speaking so getting an interesting drum pattern going that isn't static and dry is important to creating a interesting rhythm within the track. A tried and tested way of doing so is with playing around with old breaks and re pattering drum loops to layer over more dry drums hits. Layering of the two can create weight to the drums whilst leaving scope to create interesting patterns and rhythms. Try incorporating saturation, reverb & compression to your breaks to possibly add some sizzle, depth and warmth to the drums.

#3 Bass Intentions

When implementing bass into your track don't just limit yourself to synths to create your bass. Try being creative and pitching down vocals, distorting kick drums adding in orchestral samples - whatever goes experiment and create new textures to layer into a bassline. Try recording yourself messing around with different bass sounds or use automation to create lots of variations of textures and basses that can later be used as the main bass with lots of variations and edits. Even if nothing comes of your bass creation and exploration session you can always put into its own folder and come back to it at a later date. This can help with inspiration at a later date and help you be more original and express yourself.

"As always any questions about specifics please feel free to ask. The main concept within these tips is to be creative and organised. Set yourself the task to become more creative within your production and maybe try just creating bass for a few hours or drums etc. This will help you crate your own sample library that can develop over your production career."