The most useful tip you ever learned

[Tarekith]

Mine: less is more.

[pepezabala]

turn off the screen from time to time and do only listen to the music.

[perplex]

Mine: less is more.

this. i even contemplated putting up a poster that says
"keep it simple stupid"

right in front of my workshop

oh and OP, i will def do this when i get home

but biggest tip i have is similar to the poster above mines. get the room silent. close my eyes and really listen to the music from another person's point of view. no looking at the screen no looking at anything. sometimes i just turn off all the lights and have it completely pitch black.

surprisingly enough i make a lot of changes after doing this. i think i get too caught up on the on screen info for some reason.

[antarktika]

Robert Henke designed a max for live patch purely for the purpose of this called "Black" that blanks out the screen, only showing timecode in the corner.

[simonlb]

I think the most useful thing I could recommend to anyone is to really take your time to understand what everything you're using does, and back this up with experimenting and practice. This applies to sound design, mixing, your soft or hard synths and other plugins of choice, whatever. I had a revalation a year or two ago that I was using all these effects, softsynths and so on but not fully understanding what I was doing, just hoping for the best, for my first few years of being a producer. Learning your tools and techniques inside out is definitely better in the long run.

It relates to the much-repeated advice of only having a few tools that you know well as opposed to loads that you're not using to their full potential.

One other very useful bit of advice is level-matching. By this I mean if you use an effect on a track and you're comparing the sound with and without (i.e. bypassed), make sure they're at the same volume. Utility plugin and grouping are really useful for this. It seems self-evident now but so many beginners must've been misled by putting a compressor on something and thinking it sounds better when in actual fact it's simply louder and maybe (this related back to not knowing your techniques inside out, see it's all interrelated ) the compressor's not actually doing much.

And one final tip, it takes a long time to get good at this music making malarky, but if you put in the time and effort and have good resources to learn with then you'll get there...

[innerstatejt]

I really like the out of the box type of Tips here. Great stuff. I'll post a couple:

1. Remove frequencies below 120hz on all parts except kick & bass instruments

2. if a sound is muddy, lower the EQ on frequencies between 300-600hz until you find the right spot.

Removing mud from a mix drastically improves the overall mix.

[littles pliffa]

Always save. Obviously not every 5 minutes but anytime you have made real progress on a project save it. Just in case.

[perplex]

Always save. Obviously not every 5 minutes but anytime you have made real progress on a project save it. Just in case.

also not only 'Save' your projects. Save 'versions' of them, like revisions. So you can go back to a revision, if you feel like you have steered your project down the wrong road, and you want to go back to the "main street" to find a better way

[juanlittledevil]

Try to challenge yourself by learning something new or reviewing something old on a regular basis. This will keep your brain fresh with new ideas and will also promote creative thinking. You don't have to take a class for this, there are plenty of places to learn something new: Youtube, books, the manual. The best you know your tool the more likely it is to do cool stuff with it.

[regretfullySaid]

Have a glass of water at least every few hours on weekend binges.

[H20nly]

for me, when making music in the beginning i boosted everything... louder, louder, louder, more, more, more...

once i realized how much room there was to play by keeping track levels down and reasonable, then i also realized... holy shit... all i have to do is turn up this one fader on the master bus to make it all louder

seems stupid looking back...


PS cool tip in the OP funken.

[jestermgee]

Always save. Obviously not every 5 minutes but anytime you have made real progress on a project save it. Just in case.

also not only 'Save' your projects. Save 'versions' of them, like revisions. So you can go back to a revision, if you feel like you have steered your project down the wrong road, and you want to go back to the "main street" to find a better way

+1 for this!!!

I come from a background in "trackers" (cubic player, fasttracker II) which were rock solid. But I then moved to a program called Buzz Tracker. It was FREE and awesome with the ability to host VSTs and use complex routing... Anyway, it would sometimes crash in the middle of saving or corrupt a file and nothing worse than having a 2 week project corrupt and never seen again.

I "Save AS" every time I add a new instrument or extend parts. No issue if you have 50 versions... Big issue if you have 1 corrupt version. In addition to this I would have to also say, setup an automated backup system that backs everything up daily. My system backs up to the server on every startup. That way, if I really stuff something up I have a backup from the beginning of the day. This is then also backed up to external drives. Dont trust a HDD.

In musical tips, one thing I have devised for myself is when I am feeling "less creative" and not comming out with much I open a track that I haven't finished and clean out all the sequencing just leaving the instruments. I aim at creating a new track or tracks through the week ONLY using that setup and the challenge is I am only allowd to introduce effects and new sequencing. No new samples allowed except the odd drum hit. Really gets you working to make something thatas the previous track.

I also recommend the listening without watching. I read that recommendation on the Tweakheadz site years ago and it does make a difference when you aren't watching the meters and the tracks scroll by.

[teshno]

Mix with an oscilloscope. This allows you to see the nasty peaks on each track that are eating headroom. Appropriately, allowing you to kill those peaks.

[teshno]

No mate, haven't seen it. I personally use the MDA Smexoscope and any compressor, really. Usually it's going to be my UAD 1176 but any quick compressor should do the trick.

My friend told me about using the oscilloscope a while back. I now have a rack made with all my "analyzing" tools in there, including the smexoscope, and I drop it on every track.

It's also really good for seeing what your dynamics processing is doing to the envelopes. During this peak limiting stage of mixing, I am only aiming to kill peaks, not mess with the envelopes. I mess with those at a later stage of mixing.

[nemoy]

the best tip i found here was
That the footswitch 2 of an APC40 triggers the last clip, you triggered on the APC's grid.
That reeeeaaally took live looping to a whole new dimension for me!