Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

Compressors are regularly used to tame errant dynamics or to increase the perceived volume of a track. As well as squashing the audio, the compressor can be used to bring out some elements more than others.

Letting the attack through  read more »

A short series of articles on collaborating with other people to make your music better, make it heard or to help them move their music forwards.

 

1. Recording

1a Engineer  read more »

Take an old track and change the style of it.

I'm amazed how many tracks can be given more life by changing the style of music. I pick tracks that I've never fully finished to my satisfaction and apply a different musical style to them.

Identify the original style

What's wrong with the original track?  read more »

I guess most drummers will know this, but if you program your own drums or use loops, think about using a different groove for your song.  read more »

I said in the previous article that I'd provide details of my most common composing workflows.

Sync to video Soundtrack  read more »

Create a random part and modify it until it becomes musical. I'll describe a few options for taking a random parts and the processes I use for making them more musical.

1. Creating the randomness

I set Logic on a 4 bar cycle and hit keys at random on my keyboard. I chose a clean electric piano sound since they highlight any dissonance. It's not truly random because it's difficult to unlearn how to play, but after cycling through the 4 bars a few times it did become a mess of notes.  read more »

Aim
Listen critically to your compositions and spot the similarities. By identifying what you commonly do, you can start to change and improve your range.

My experience
I did this a couple of months ago and I found a lot of my compositions started with same two chord sequence but often using different keys. These were compositions that I'd approached by playing randomly on guitar, not by a more thought-out and planned approach. If I liked the sound, then I'd move to the next chord and so on.
 read more »