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Top 5 things beginners miss in music production
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Hey, it's Andrew Huang!
I've seen a lot of beginner music projects in my time.
Obviously, I used to be a beginner myself.
Now that I have an audience, a lot of people send me stuff,
and I also have an online course
where I'm hearing beginners do their thing.
So I thought it would be helpful if I made this video
about the top five things that I've noticed
don't show up in beginner music productions,
even though they are generally important
to songs of almost any genre.
So let's hop right in.
I'm going to demonstrate everything with my song, "Julian."
♪ (playing "Julian" by Andrew Huang feat. Tom McGovern, Gabi Rose) ♪
I dropped this a few months ago
featuring Tom McGovern and Gabi Rose.
♪ (playing "Julian" by Andrew Huang feat. Tom McGovern, Gabi Rose) ♪
Item number one is groove percussion.
♪ (percussion sounds) ♪
A lot of beginners will get the basics of beats down.
They'll be able to make their patterns the way they want.
They'll even do some drum fills.
But I find this element of groove
and kind of background percussion is often missing.
And that might be as simple as a tambourine or a shaker.
It could be something like a clave
that happens more sparsely over a beat.
So you hear all of this stuff.
♪ (percussion sounds) ♪
It's a bunch of nice, light percussion.
In this case, I'm using Klevgrand's Ting plugin.
I play the beat without this.
♪ (percussion sounds) ♪
It's just a lot more empty, a lot less groovy.
♪ (percussion sounds) ♪
So yeah, I see a lot of projects
where it's kick, snare, hi-hat, crash cymbal.
Add more percussion.
♪♪
Number two is ear candy.
Ear candy is something that I've done a video on before.
So I won't go into as much detail,
but I will say that video was focused on ear candy
where it's meant to fill space
in an attention grabbing way.
However, I wanna talk about softer, subtler ear candy.
This is sort of the next level of it
where the ear candy is there in a supporting role.
It's not meant to be the focus.
It's registered a little more subconsciously.
I think my favorite example of this from this song
is this little thing that I did
after the first line of lyrics.
♪ (playing "Julian" by Andrew Huang feat. Tom McGovern, Gabi Rose) ♪
This little sound,
♪♪
it's a basic chord.
♪♪
I'm using Massive, it's being arpeggiated.
With everything off, it sounded like this.
♪♪
And then I've never done this before.
I just kind of figured it out
while I was trying to figure out
this super subtle ear candy.
I put it through two pretty wet reverbs.
Their settings are ever so slightly different.
And then I'm also extremely filtering
and RC-20 for a little bit of vintage vibe.
♪♪
All of this in my project is all ear candy.
Some of it sounds that I made,
some of it samples off of Splice.
Let's play just the effects bus.
♪♪
So it's stuff like that, swells, sparkles.
But in this song,
you're really not paying attention to that stuff.
It adds to the momentum.
But at the time that these are playing,
I'll play the track in a second,
you're paying attention to the
vocal, the guitar, the drums.
♪♪
But if I take those ear candy elements out:
♪♪
It's just a lot more basic and a little flatter.
And this portion of the song segues perfectly
into my third item, which is transitions.
♪♪
As you can see and hear,
a lot of this ear candy stuff
happens around transitional points in the song.
When you're moving from one section to another,
you often want to overemphasize,
or it feels like you're overemphasizing that change.
Because music is dramatic,
and you really have to like
hammer it home to your listeners.
So in beginner productions,
I'll see like maybe someone will do a drum fill,
or one new instrument will come in at the chorus.
But it's really good to think about how much contrast
you can create in those moments
where sections are changing.
Almost every instrument can be doing something different.
They can be building up, they can be cutting out.
More layers can be added on
like I showed with this ear candy.
And then of course, it's also
fun to do things with effects.
So like on this lead vocal.
♪♪
I've got the last line echoing out
and getting filtered and compressed.
I'm using Transit, which is my own plugin,
and makes it really easy and fast to do this kind of stuff.
But of course, you can use any filter, any delay,
any compressor or OTT,
and automate their parameters to get this kind of a result.
♪♪
And as you can hear, all that building up
completely cuts off the moment we hit the next section.
And that's something that's
worth being very deliberate about,
about whether your transitional elements
hang over to the next section or stop completely.
They might stop right on the downbeat.
They might stop a little bit before.
They might stop on the first snare after.
Play with that though,
because all of it really makes a difference.
And the type of transition you want,
is gonna be different depending on the needs of your song.
So yeah, just one example, but really get in there,
play around, you can add new sounds to your project,
or you can mess with the material that you already have,
and just make your transition special.
♪♪
Tip number four is to have multiple approaches
when you're doing vocal harmonies.
It's pretty common to add just a third or a fifth
on top or below, and then sing the exact same thing
as the lead vocal.
But play around with having some layers
that only come in on certain lines or certain words,
some parts that maybe hang on a single note,
while others could move around with a lot more range.
And then it can also be really effective
to get a little fancy and kind of come up
with an additional part that doesn't quite lock in
to the same rhythm as the leads.
So I love this moment in "Julian"
where Tom came up with this thing that we sang together.
♪♪
Tom's idea was to have these harmonies,
not sing all the words of the line,
and also some of them came in earlier
in a completely different rhythm,
and then the last note gets held out longer
over the rest of the line.
♪♪
You can hear there as well
while some of the notes are holding,
others are still moving.
It's very dynamic.
There are so many vocals in the project.
From here to the bottom is all vocals.
And you can see we're trying lots of different stuff here.
There are things that only come in one time
for the whole song.
There are things that are different
from section to section, even when it's the same section,
like each of our choruses are different.
This is a really key way to keep things interesting
for your listener.
And it segues perfectly into my final tip of the day:
♪♪
Every section should be different.
Now that computers are such a part of music production,
it's so easy to just copy and paste.
And I see that happen in a lot of beginner productions.
You know, you've got your verse and your chorus.
Well, that means you also have your second verse
and second chorus, right?
To some extent, yes, but it's really important
to keep things varying,
even if it's stuff that the listener
is not necessarily paying attention to,
it will translate to the track
just having more life to it and more replay value.
As one example, this harmony.
♪ When we talk again ♪
♪ It's like we never stopped and I know already ♪
That's only there once in the song.
It accents just one line of the second chorus.
In the first chorus, that line is not harmonized.
And in the third chorus, what do we do?
(electronic beeping) ♪ When we talk again ♪
♪ It's like we never stopped and I know already ♪
Right, on the third chorus,
we did a dropout on the first half.
So it's actually completely different.
There's no drums there.
Other instrumentation has changed.
Let me play you all three instances
of this part of the chorus as an example
of what I'm talking about,
about switching up your sections.
♪ When we talk again ♪
♪ It's like we never stopped and I know already ♪
♪ That I'll never let you go ♪
♪ Whoa ♪
♪ You go ♪
♪ When we talk again ♪
♪ It's like we never stopped and I know already ♪
♪ That I'll never let you go ♪
♪ Whoa ♪
♪ When we talk again ♪
♪ It's like we never stopped and I know already ♪
♪ That I'll never let you go ♪
♪ Whoa ♪
So yeah, there's lots of ways to vary your sections.
You know, obviously changing up the instrumentation,
whether it's a little or a lot,
you can do little variations
on what instruments are playing.
You know, like the drums should do different fills.
Maybe the guitar plays with
more energy, more notes, louder.
Different vocal ad libs help.
We talked about having
different kinds of harmonies in there.
Oh, bass fills.
The bass line can be doing different stuff
to keep the attention up.
♪ (bass guitar music) ♪
So each of these fills coming out of the chorus
is a little bit different.
Though I guess at this point, it's also worth mentioning,
you should be deliberate about which things are varied
and which things are repeated.
Cause there are those little hook things
that maybe the audience would expect
to be the exact same every time.
It's just like, they really want to hear it again.
They want to be able to sing along with it.
It's not bad to repeat things either,
but music and music production is all about
finding that balance of like,
what is predictable and unpredictable?
What is expected and anticipated?
And what is surprising?
If you have any other tips to add to this,
I'd love to hear, leave a comment.
And of course, please stream "Julian"
if you enjoyed this song, it's out everywhere.
Link is in the description.
See you next time, bye!
♪ (playing "Julian" by Andrew Huang feat. Tom McGovern, Gabi Rose) ♪
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