Post your favorite production tricks!

  • Thread starter Thread starter rpc9943
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On screamy male singers, get overdubs of a lower octave for the whole song. When the mood goes dark, mix them in at 1/2volume.
 
heres one i did on a song that other day... this works good for a very sparce arrangment. do a whisper track of the lead vocals... mix it very low in the mix put 3 delays on it all at different long lengths and pan them -100 100 and center in the mix it sounds really cool and creates a more dreamy/haunting sound
 
Oh.. I like that one.. We did something similar on our last album, but we used really apathetic sounding speech instead of whispers. Got a bit of the "thoughts swarming in your head" effect.
 
another thing i do alot is add very slight distortion to the lead vocals so you can't really notice its there until you bypass it.
 
Yeah, I've done a similar thing with drums. As a brief interlude or bridge, mute everything except kick & snare and aux them to a guitar sim plug-in, like Amplitube or revalver set to a distortion patch. Just for a couple of bars though, not to overdo it
 
breaking all the rules. the best production trick you could ever know (and it's very easy to do)
 
I enjoy good digital silence. None of that fake emulated silence.
 
fakeplasticboy said:
No, you are not the only one who does this. I like to thicken the parts by recording two or three tracks, the main dirty track in the middle... clean, same notes to the right or left.... and then an octave down or up clean, to the opposite ear. makes a nice wide and thick tone.
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I do something similar: Same guitar part, same guitar, different amps with different settings.
 
my favorite trick........in how to EQ the kick drum .....so the bass guitar will fit nicely is......

EQ kick about 5-6db (your milage may vary) in the 50hz area, suck out almost all of the 800hz, and boost 2.5-3k by 5-6db.

this will give it the warm low end thud, and crisp "beater smack", while leaving a nice pocket in the mids and low-mids for the bass guitar to come in and fill the space.....
 
I've been collecting crappy jamboxes from salvation army stores, etc. for a while now. I put an overdrive pedal in front of it, and play my guitar through it. Usually, I stick the whole thing (mic and ghetto blaster) in a big tin box I found. Works good on intros and breaks, and then suddenly (much louder) double the guitar line coming through my real amp. I've gotten some pretty weird sounds. Also, sometimes the feedback you get from the box is kind of beautiful and atmospheric. You have to be careful to turn your headphone volume up very slowly though. Sometimes an awful high pitch blare juts out at you. It'll leave you eating soup and listening to Joanna Newsome for days. :eek:

We also pushed a signal through a 300W amplifier and then into a ghetto blaster with 4" speakers. Then record that shit breaking apart. Cool for outros and such.

We're also working on attaching a battery operated ghetto blaster to a bicycle wheel lying horizontal on the floor. Then we drive the bike to make the entire speaker spin as fast as we can. And mic the thing completely out of phase. Sounds weird.
 
For lead vocals that don't get buried by the instruments:

- Record the lead vocals and copy the track
- On the copied track, add medium compression (soft knee) and a decent reverb
- Leave the primary vocal track dry
- Bring up the copied, compressed, effected track in the mix so it is audible, but not as loud as the dry vocal track
 
I've heard awesome results with natural reverbs, such as recording in a dry room, then placing a hifi speaker in a shower and micing the results
 
TerraMortim said:
breaking all the rules. the best production trick you could ever know (and it's very easy to do)
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I assume you mean after you learn all the rules.....

DarkFriend said:
For lead vocals that don't get buried by the instruments:

- Record the lead vocals and copy the track
- On the copied track, add medium compression (soft knee) and a decent reverb
- Leave the primary vocal track dry
- Bring up the copied, compressed, effected track in the mix so it is audible, but not as loud as the dry vocal track
Click to expand...

Or, just take the one track and smash the crap out of it with a compressor. Produces amazing results most of the time.........
 
NL5 said:
I assume you mean after you learn all the rules.....



Or, just take the one track and smash the crap out of it with a compressor. Produces amazing results most of the time.........
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aaah the good old "New York Compression Technique" raises its wonderfull head.

Tis one of my favourites on vocals and drums.

Also i like to clone or double vocal track then pan one hard L, the other hard R. Send the left to master, dry and send right to master via a delay bus set with a 20 to 30 ms delay with 40% feedback and 30% mix. vocals then sound close up and personal, right at the front of the mix, but have width too.
 
With synths an interesting alternative to reverb is doubling a part with a different sound with different dynamics. For example, take a part done with an organ, elec piano, glock sound and layer in the same part done with slow strings, choir or a shimmering digital pad and mix the layer track at 2/3rds the level of the original track and pan it 15-20% away.

Great for ethereal ghosty goodness.
 
One thing I've been using lately is using the snare to key a compressor on distorted guitar submix. This way I can duck the guitars a bit whenever the snare is hit so that it comes through the mix a bit nicer without having to carve the guitars up too much.
 
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