To quantize or not to quantize?

This video, by Boonie Mayfield, about the pros and cons of quantizing your beats is aimed at people making hip hop, but you might find it informative whatever type of music you're making. He compares a beat before and after quantizing, and stresses the importance of moving with the beat as you program it. Boonie's an entertaining guy, which always helps!

Structure: Bounce by Calvin Harris featuring Kelis

Spectogram of Bounce (produced using Sonic Visualiser)*

Related articles

• Bounce: Mix review by Mike Senior Mike Senior has a regular feature in Sound on Sound magazine, where he analyses the mixes of current pop tunes. Here he sings the praises of Bounce. It's worth taking the time to listen to the songs he reviews with the articles in hand - very informative. More mix reviews here.
• Here a fascinating article about applying the rule of three to music composition. You might like to try applying it to your own compositions, especially when you're feeling a bit stuck. While you're there, you might like to check out some of the other free tutorials (not all are free) on the site: synthesis  Reason  mixing
• Here's a demonstration of how an electro-house track is structured, from the excellent book Secrets of House Music Production. Click on the link to download some free pdf excerpts.
• Stepping away from dance music, this songwriting teacher has a lot of great articles on his site, including analyses of pop songs, for example, here's his take on why the Adele's Rollin' in the Deep works for example.

Tutorial Videos

• Tutorial on making the Calvin Harris sounds using Logic synths - pretty involved, so not for the faint of heart!
• Dance music producer D Ramirez builds up an arrangement with his assistant, filmed by Future Music.  This is the third and final part - they're all worth watching, but be warned, they're long and at times rambling.
• Producers Dodge and Fuski on typical dubstep structure are rather more succinct! Check out their other tutorials if you're interested in dubstep, or dance music in general. They use Cubase and the plugin synth NI Massive.
• Trifonic - who made the Malstrom tutorial linked previously has also done an interesting video about harmony without chords, or counterpoint, in a remix he did of a Hecq tune. Nothing that amazing, but relevant to Calvin Harris's approach in Bounce I think.

Tools

• It's worth downloading Sonic Visualiser - a free, er, sonic visualiser. You can open an mp3 or wav file of a song and view a detailed spectogram and waveform.
• Although Izotope RX is primarily designed as an audio restoration tool, the demo version makes a great free visualiser - the spectogram is great.

Simon & Garfunkel & Halee

Roy Halee at the mixer with Paul and Art

Try to watch this great BBC documentary about Simon & Garfunkel's classic 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water.

There's lots of discussion with the engineer Roy Halee about the unusual recording techniques they employed to get novel sounds, including recording backing vocals in a church, drums by an elevator shaft and even having the duo sing inside an echo chamber.

If you'd like to find out more about his career and approach to recording, there's an interview with Roy Halee from EQ Magazine and a feature on the making of Paul Simon's "You can call me Al" from the album Graceland from Sound on Sound magazine.

Brian Eno on bizarre musical instruments

Here's an interesting talk on the history of music technology given by Brian Eno at the opening of the Science Museum exhibition on electronic music. The exhibition is called From Oramics to Electronica and is on until December. Here's a film on the making of the exhibition.

Printz Board from Black Eyed Peas on Reason

Printz Board, musical director of the Black Eyed Peas, makes it look very easy to create a hit. Note he is using Reason rewired to Pro Tools, so the vocals are recorded in Pro Tools. All the rest is Reason.



You'll notice he has a reflection filter behind his microphone - this cuts down on room reflections, giving the recordings a drier, less "roomy" sound. These are becoming increaslingly popular with people recording in an ordinary room, rather than an acoustically prepared studio.

Cubase tutorial: using Beat Designer with Groove Agent One

Here's a very useful tutorial on making beats with Beat Designer and Groove Agent One:




And another one, this time from Steinberg themselves...

Stromae making a hit with Reason

Here's a nice video (from the Propellerhead site) of Belgian artist Stromae, explaining how he made his dance hit "Alors on Danse" using Reason and a very small keyboard.

A few Apparat links

A few tips from Apparat, whose track Hailin' from the Edge, we recently analysed.


Here's a nice pic of his studio (complete with real bass guitar)

Tips from EQ magazine

Here's an article from EQ magazine outlining a rather methodical approach to creating a dance-type track. It's aimed at more experienced  users (it refers to a couple of concepts we didn't cover, for example the oh-so fashionable sidechain compression), but it might still be useful.

Here's a very practical article on tidying up your sloppy playing using Key Edit or similar. Some good tips, expecially for those of us with less than outstanding keyboard skills.

Reason Tutorials

These video tutorials on the Propellerhead site (makers of Reason) are worth watching. Checkout the RPG8 Arpeggiator and Vocoder ones in particular. We didn't have time to cover these features in the course.

There are also some really useful non-video tutorials. Some of these are get a bit technical, so be warned!

Here's one more - a really good explanation of filters, with audio examples from Reason's Thor synth.