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Tips for producers

 
What is this section about?​
 
I'm often asked for advice on specific aspects of production, and I'm just going to start pasting them in here when that happens. That's why there's not much here yet. If you have a question, ask me and I might write about it here.
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Any golden tips for comping vocals?
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Make notes while you’re recording, so you can be more sure in fewer takes that you’ve got everything you need, and so you can put together your first comp really quickly after recording and not interrupt the flow of the session. I’ve developed a weird kind of shorthand to help me quickly make notes on each line of each song section. Like…
 
V1 T3 I5 II5 III9 IV2 
 
…Means verse1, take3, the first two lines were 5/10 (ok but lacking something) line 3 was 9/10 excellent and line 4 was 2/10 poor/unusable. Once I have 8+/10 at least once for every line I can pretty confidently move on.
 
And for the actual editing bit, ‘S’ sounds are really forgiving splice points, and more generally I aim for the tiny bit of quiet between a breath and a sung word.

Free resources for producers

 
What's going on here?​
 
There are incredible free resources available online to inspire and expand the possibilities available to us. I use a lot of free tools and instruments myself, and when I was teaching I thought to collate them all in one place for my students to benefit from. Eventually I will transfer all of this stuff in full to this site for *anyone* to benefit from, and you'll be able to link to all the best things I've found, right here. And please, if you know of something amazing that I haven't listed here, let me know!

For now, just a couple of things that I've discovered most recently -
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Free effects plugins​

Airwindows - A wonderful man named Chris Johnson has created dozens of amazing mixing and creative effect plugins, many of which I've not seen a direct equivalent of anywhere. You can download them individually, but because he's not added any fancy graphics to them whatsoever, he's been able to condense the entire collection into a single plugin from which you can select from the whole library - and it's really small. And amazing. If this is new to you, happy Christmas. And support Chris on Patreon if you'd like to.

Free instrument plugins​

Full Bucket Music - An incredible collection of recreations of vintage and original synths. Every time I look through them, I want to write a song.
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