Music Production
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A piano-roll performance can have the right notes, the right rhythm, and the right sound while still feeling strangely flat. Look underneath the notes and one reason often becomes visible: every velocity bar is sitting in roughly the same neighborhood. Velocity is easy to treat as a miniature volume control.…
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A producer can spend an hour searching for the next sound when the arrangement may need the opposite. Muting a kick for two beats, shortening a sustained chord, leaving the vocal alone after a phrase, or pulling a layer before a transition can change the shape of a track without…
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A finished song is remarkably good at hiding its own history. By the time the master plays, the chorus sounds inevitable. The vocal seems attached to the track rather than recorded on top of it. The drums push exactly where they should. A harmony that appears for four seconds can…
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A final chorus can use the same chords, melody, lyrics, and tempo as the first chorus and somehow feel twice as large. That difference rarely comes from one spectacular production trick. More often, the producer has spent the entire song controlling what the listener hears, and just as importantly, what…
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A modern pop song can sound remarkably simple from the outside. There is a lead vocal, a beat, some chords, a bass line, and perhaps a few sounds that seem to appear around the edges. Open the production session behind that same song, however, and the apparent simplicity may be…
