New Music Friday Minus One

Rather than spend all my entire night studying for a physics exam, I'm going to tell you about the music that's hot on the SBlock playlist right now.

Aesop Rock - Zero Dark Thirty: a standard Aesop Rock track. Off his most recent project, Skelethon, Zero Dark Thirty uses the Tragedy of the Commons to illustrate a theme that's been common to many of his songs: the clash between "unsigned hype" and the beast that is the music industry.

Yonas - Drive It like It's Stolen: this dude came on the radar a few days ago from a friend (props Brad). He's got a free mixtape on datpiff, which is pretty dope; this song's beat is from the Glitch Mob, Brother Ali is featured, and there are some other familiar covers. He's got a great flow, some wit to go along with it, and makes good use of cultural references without being over the top most of the time. Oh, and anyone who takes shots at hipsters is a-okay with me... "RIP hipsters I'm a backpack killa". Not that I hate hipster, they're just easy targets.

Tornado - Kill the Noise (remix): found this near the top of beatport's dubstep chart this week and have been bumpin it ever since. I really like the use of the slow attack bass to signal a change in the song is coming. The percussive, bell at the high end/organ at for the lows synth is what makes this song awesome - great sound design indeed. My one dig is it does have a very stereo typical intro and outro (so friggen long), but it's still a great track.

Next week look forward to some scotch and more Scott Block.

Upping the quality

Composing most of my music using a pair of Shure SHR440 head phones has left me wanting more. While I love the head phones and think they're a steal at around $80-90, they have their short comings. Mainly, it's the low end.

They have killer mids and highs but try to give justice to my 808's though and you're left feeling like Dostoevsky in the face of a Tzar - sentenced to death. This means I have to turn to my Panasonic ear buds and cheap Altec Lansing speakers for a cross reference. Even then, it's difficult to ensure the warmth and punchy-ness that's associated with bass.

This juggling act between two sets of head phones and speakers is annoying and isn't the best way to ensure sound quality. Enter the KRK Rokits. I found a set of them on clearance from Guitar Center and what a difference they've made. A set of monitors, like the Rokits, are a necessary things for every home studio to get at some point. The sound quality they provide allow your production to move up to the next level. This is especially true for my low end production. A test run on the hardest hitting dubstep and hip-hop tracks I have in my library did not leave me disappointed.

The underlying principle for production here is sound depth and quality. The higher the sound quality, the more detail you can put into each track. The depth of sound that monitors provide allow a degree of fine tuning that you just can't get with headphones or cheap speakers. This translates int0 better over all production quality. Again, it's the great little things the make great producers.

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.