Hello followers, today I have good news: Doug Beney has written a guest post for this blog, (as you can see) about ways to improve your music production. He’s doing really cool stuff on his blog (midilifestyle.com) that I highly recommend checking out if you like this blog. Anyway, I won’t hold you any longer; enjoy!

Why doesn’t your track sound full? What type of sorcery do professional producers use on their songs to make them sound so powerful? While it take years of trial and error to perfect these skills, I will share with you some quick tips for instant improvement in your music.

Tip #1 – Clean up the lows

Unless the instrument requires a sub bass, it’s lows should contain no sound. Clean lows are what separates a nebbish track from a pro track. All you have to do to fix this problem is to low cut everything but the sub bass. I like to low-cut everything bellow 100hz. On high hats you can cut it even higher.

Tip #2 – Stereo Imaging/widening

With this strategy you can turn flat, boring sounds into beautiful, wide sounds. By now you should know that one way to make a sound wider is with a chorus effect. While this might do the job in some cases, there are more effective ways to make a sound wider. One way is with a delay plugin. What you have to do is set the left delay to 0 milliseconds and then set the right delay to 12 milliseconds. This short delay causes the sound to appear much wider. Just be careful using this method. It could cause phasing problems. The stereo plugin I like to use is Izotope Imager. This plugin comes with Izotope Ozone. I love it! It allows for multiband stereo enhancing.

If you are looking for free stereo widening vsts, checkout the best free stereo enhancer plugins

Tip #3 – Put a limiter and compressor on the master channel when producing.

Doing this can give your track a more mastered sound in the early stages of production. Just make sure to take off the limiter and compressor when you go to export to the mixing and mastering stage. Just make sure NOT to do this when you are mixing down a track.

Tip #4 – Reverb is love, Reverb is life

Almost everything in your track needs reverb. It adds atmosphere and character. It can make flat sounds beautiful. Whatever you do, don’t put reverb on a sub bass. The low frequencies are meant to be mono. Adding reverb to this could easily add mud and ruin your entire track.

Tip #5 – Beware of clashing frequencies!

A lot of the times you will notice that instruments that peak at similar frequencies will clash and sound horrible. This can be remedied by moving one of those instruments up or down an octave. Maybe you don’t want to do this. Another method is making these instruments on different stereo fields. What you can do is apply my stereo imaging tip on one of the instruments. This will make it really wide. Then on the other instrument, make it almost completely mono. Depending on what the instruments are, this can sound really good!

This article is written by Doug Beney. If you are interested in building midi controllers or anything music production related, check out his blog:

http://www.midilifestyle.com/