We’ve recently done a tutorial explaining our new „Major Lazer - Cold Water“ project file. Here, we’ve extracted some essential tips from it which can help you improve your mixdowns. 1. Sound widening Here are two possible techniques you can use to make a track sound wider: - using Simple Delay / Filter Delay  To widen your track with a Delay, set both Left and Right channels to Time. Next, bring both of the Time settings to 1.00ms. That way the whole track will be delayed by 1 millisecond. Next, increase the time difference between L/R channels. You’ll notice...

  Matching EQ allows you to sort of "clone" the frequency spectrum of another track. EQs like the Fab Filter Pro-Q2 offer such a function. You basically create two audio tracks and let the EQ calculate the differences between the frequency spectrum of your work and the one of the other (eg. commercial) track. Then, these differences get sort of "added in" or "taken out" of your track, resulting in an overall appearence closer to the reference track, depending on your instrumentation.    Learn more about EQing and how to deal with it when mixing: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch...

We had a lot of questions on how the compressor actually works, so we decided to make a small series of videos covering the functionalities from the perspective of the Ableton Live built-in compressor.     Learn more about compression in the mixing stage: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing, compressor, how to use a compressor, how does a compressor work

A lot of the subtractive vs additive EQ debate stems from the analogue times when recordings still contained a lot of noise. Boosting through additive EQ increased the loudness of such noise and was - simply put - therefore to be avoided.  Another argument against additive EQ that still holds nowadays is the "louder sounds better" trap. If you have two instruments occupying the same frequency band, boosting one to make it "cut through" will easily trick your ears into believing the overall mix sounds better - when it actually results in setting off the balance of your mix. Reading...

Lets quickly address a psychological phenomenon called "frequency masking". It occurs when we are listening to a mix of instruments playing together at the same time and affects our perception.  Lets say our frequency spectrum above 5kHz gets filled up with a loud playing cymbal sound. If we have a vocal part playing along, we will perceive it a lot less well around that frequency range since above 5kHz, the cymbal is "masking" other elements. That happens even if the vocals themselves sound nicely bright in solo mode.  So in order to deal with this effect, we now have to boost the...

Definition of Dithering Dithering or to dither means adding noise to the audio signal. Noise is being added on purpose to trade a little bit of low-level hiss for a great deal of distortion. The distortion is first caused by using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 16 bits) to represent our sample points as accurate as possible (in the analogue world, there are infinite or continuous sample points available, whereas they are finite (discrete) in the digital world).  So, in our DAW for example, "dithering is done by adding noise of a level less than the least-significant bit before...

Buy Toraverb from D16 Toraverb is one of our favorite VST plugins when it comes to creating long tail reverbs for rather epic sounding tracks. Its heavily used in this video tutorial, check it out around minute 13:30:   Buy Toraverb from D16

If you're new to music production / Ableton Live 9, we've put together a little course that might help you starting out - watch this youtube playlist:         Additionally, if you're looking for a profound in-depth course on how to produce a track in Ableton from "Start to Finish" - we've put together an extended 21-studio session paid class with Francois. You can enroll right here:     

Exclusive beatport charts track tutorial: Walking through Francois Rengere's Remix of Mahfoud - The Giant.     You can grab our drum sample pack here:  "Deep Premium Vol. 1" Pack: http://bit.ly/pml_s_deeppremium   Keywords: how to produce a track for the beatport charts,  how doz I chart on beatport, how to chart on beatport, producing a beatport top 10 track, how to produce a beatport chart track, producing a beatport charts track tutorial, How to make a track for the beatport charts make it to the beatport charts produce for beatport charts in ableton producing for the beatport charts

  We find this image to be really useful. It's an infographic showing you what is where in the audio spectrum and providing a lot of useful hints on how to eq the different elements in your mix. Advice: print it out and put it up on your wall! Large version here   NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Watch our free tutorial series on EQing on youtube:       keywords: how to eq, parallel eq, sidechain eq, eq basics ableton, free eq tutorial, dynamic eq ableton, mixing a track from start to...