Reverse Reverb Special Offer!!

Reverse reverb is now at your finger tips and can be included in your bangin beats today!  

TESTIMONIAL:

"I have done reverse reverb before and I enjoy delicately placing it on vocals as well as samples, but until now it was always a big hassel with aux sends, recording playbacks, and multiple tracks!"

Andrew Pike
Principle, 4D2D Productions

Not anymore!  With Abelton, and the guidance of this 3 minute video you too can be adding this amazing effect used by the pros to your own music!  Act now and receive approving nods from me, and adoring fans alike.

  

Watch The Throne

Awesome behind the scenes look at one of my favorite albums of the past few years! This is like some of my all time favorite stuff, the behind the scenes look at how an album came to be. Wish all my recording sessions looked this baller.

Dubspot and Ableton 30/30

Dubspot provided me with yet another reason to toute their website. The advice provided in their blog's posts and the youtube tutorials are easy to understand and have expand my horizons in many ways. Dubspot is a music school in New York city that specializes in DJing/performing and all aspects of production. I first discovered Dubspot about two years ago while browsing the internet for production tutorials and have been avidly visiting and watching since. Having just bought Native Instruments' Maschine a few short months earlier, my production progress plateaued to somewhere above semi-terrible. Enter the Dubspot. I watched as many videos as possible, thus developing my current style of music. A video that directly influenced my production stems from a sound design segment about layering synths. Now listen to my beats. My synths now go HARD, like shatter 1 and a 1/4 inch lexan hard.


Fast forward to a week ago. I'm taking a break from my creative destruction using my current opiate of choice, facebook, when this link popped up in my feed: a free course from Dubspot on Live. Are you serious? Normally these course run over $4K. Not surprisingly, I signed up. I've never taken a music class before and always wanted to. The biggest draw to the course for me, besides it coming from Dubspot for FREE(!), is that it covers the basics of Ableton Live, a program I'm unfamiliar with. The other two members of 4D2D put Live to good use and it has a unique interface for music making (clip launching), therefore there isn't really a choice in the matter. This clip launching function gives Live individuality among other, more simple programs *cough*fruityloops*cough*. This allows for slick recording and performance, something I would like to try my hand at so I don't perpetuate the era of "Pressing Play" (more on that soon). After I finish the 30 lessons, a short overview and review will be in order for those wondering if it was worth the investment time. Hopefully, I don't end up like Kevin Durant after the finals - disappointed.

Music Process

My goal with this blog is to provide you tips and ideas to boost your production skills and make sure you stay up on the game.  Today I stumbled upon a great article by one of my favorite producers Blockhead.

http://phatfriend.com/2011/03/22/how-my-music-is-made-fuck-the-bullshit/

Turns out his set up and process is pretty simple.  But one of the key things I got out of the article is that everyone has their own style and work process.  Back in the day I didn't want to waste time learning a new program, or trying something new because I get so set in my ways.  I am glad I finally got out of my 'put 2 samples together and call it good' rut and learned so much more about mixing editing and composition.  But at the end of the day find the process that clicks for you.  Usually that process is the fastest, and there for more productive and lucrative.

While studying Abelton and learning more tricks and tips from online videos or articles I am realizing that almost every step in your music creating process can be done in so many different ways.  Pitch shifting and chopping up samples alone each have 3-4 different ways to get accomplished in Live.  Just remember on your quest for the number one spot, go with what works for you, what you feel comfortable with.  Once you get that base skill set to crank out hits like I did back in the day with just 2 samples you can learn and build and soon be making hits with 20 tracks in Pro Tools with all sorts of routing and plug in's as easy as it was when you first started.   This process you develop helps create your sound, your personality as a producer and musician and is what you can build on to seperate yourself from the thousands of other "hip hop producers" in the world.

-AP

DRUM BREAKS

What up gang?  Its been a min since our last post here and I think its time for a useful little post on drum loops.

So as we all know it was a sad day on Friday with the passing of MCA.  So I was listening to some Beastie Boys on the way home from work and heard some good drums I hadn't made note of in my collection at the end of "Electrify" on Hello Nasty.  I figured this would be a good time to make a post with a few of my favorite loops from songs that I like to use in my production. Here is a couple of the tracks that have the drum samples at the very beginning.  Enjoy!

Asher Roth "La Di Da"

Atmosphere "Struggle Song"

Biz Markie "Return of the Biz Dance"

The Darkness "Love is Only a Feeling"

Eminem "Amityville"

Immortal Technique "The Illest"

I can't give away all of my secrets just yet, but here is a little list to get you started.  Stay tuned for Pt 2!

For downloading the files I recommend keepvid.com, just copy and paste the youtube address and you can download the mp3 to your computer.  Enjoy, look forward to seeing what you come up with.

-Pike

Freq Map

Thanks to Future Music and Dubspot for providing this simple frequency map. Obviously, each person is going to have their own preferences when it comes to all aspect of production. However, a general template or preset to fall back on works well in sparking and perpetuating creativity. A generalist approach, like creating your own default presets for everything from snare reverb to mixing and matching freqs like we have above, really comes in handy when you find yourself brooding over minute details and spending hours on something that's just making you frustrated. Rather than getting caught up in the small details of whether your chorus should mix at 31 or 32%, you can keep the creative flow going. Assign a general preset now, something that's familiar, you know has worked before and sounds good enough, and then coming back and fine it later. The only catch is you have to come back and tweak it to perfection. While there is nothing wrong with presets, what separates good producers from great ones is the attention to the smallest details. That means putting time in for the little things.