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.

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.