Music Production #FastTracks - Alexonweed | LevelsFM

Music Production #FastTracks - Alexonweed | LevelsFM - YouTube

if you're creating a melody uh just make it as unique as possible and stay away from it sounding like it's car commercial music and just make it like i always try and just make it as unique as possible using new sounds new instruments and then add drums over top and then often just make the beat in a few minutes and then you should in the same session i'll have like my vocal chain and everything all my sends already set up and then you just start recording and then with that you can kind of like change the beat around to their vocals because it's all in the same session you know what i'm saying so like they'll just record some i already have all my like my sick chains set up and everything so it already sounds amazing you know right then base and then basically from there you just do a little bit of editing

this and that and then um yeah before you know it you have like an already nice sounding almost complete song after like maybe an hour or two you know that's great so i think that's kind of just having it all prepared already in the session i have like numerous different templates depending on like what kind of vibe i'm going for some will have like different reverb effects or different delay effects and then others will have like i'll open the session already have like the vsts and stuff that i like ready to go already have the drum sound set up that i like so it just like speeds the process up and you're always catering to the artist right so if the artist is ready to record you just you have to be ready because they might have a great idea that you just have to be ready to record like from the jump you know you don't want to miss that magical moment

when they're first getting excited about it and so you just have to be really just prepared i guess is the what's the biggest thing what's your daw of choice oh man uh for making beats fl studio and then i i do up my recording in ableton lately so do you bring do you sort of uh bring the stems in from fl or do you bounce it all down to a stereo and bring it into bounce just bounce an mp3 throw it in sometimes but often that's only been my process recently usually i'm making the beat in ableton and recording the vocals in ableton right but uh lately i've been getting into fl i really like the way it sounds so interesting doing that i might start recording in fl studio so we'll see what do you mean you like the way it sounds how does it sound uh it's loud it's super loud

it's just like you don't i don't know it's i find there's just something magical about fl studio like you don't have to mix as much like you just can kind of like throw on a soft clipper or limiter and just kind of mix into it right and your beat will sound like just smackingly loud and like cool that's usually what artists want nowadays is just like super loud and just slaps so they're kind of getting more into that you know that's great um oh i one thing i want to before i uh continue on with my line of questioning i want to i want to go back to something you were talking about can you tell us a little bit about the content of your vocal chain are you able to reveal some of the components of that for us general yeah okay cool um it's a lot of it's it's a lot of eq it's about three pro cues

um wow i don't i don't use any hardware actually i learned that from you anything you can do outside the box you can do inside the box switch map um fletch man um it's a lot of eqs i'll cut i'll do uh a um i'll do a low cut at about minus eight decibels from about five to seven k down so i'm basically cutting out everything low and then i kind of add the lows back in just so they're more controlled um i've been using um what's that thing called there's this new there's this multiband that's that's it's my new sauce it's um it's called like the mc2000 or something it's hold on let me pull this up really quick it's so good um

yeah that i really love the eosis de-esser um and uh hold on one second here what do you love about that de-esser in particular uh it adds a nice high end i find it like it pulls out all the frequencies you don't want and it adds like a really cool like kind of high end that i like um yeah the uh mcdsp the yeah this is what it is the mce i think 404 okay yeah the mc404 from mcdsp that's that's my secret sauce right now shout out to mcdsp and then i'll have um uh three c6s usually three to five c6s all cutting like very small frequency bands so like

i'll usually have a cut around like 12 to 13k usually have a cut around in the in the harsh five to seven that everyone hates and then i'll usually have a cut around one to two one to four k anywhere around there and you just obviously use your ears but um yeah i'm all about using very narrow because a lot of the time with multi-band compression you you lose the power in the vocal but if you do it with very narrow um q width then it it you can still get lose the harsh frequencies without losing the power in the vocals so just kind of been focusing on that that's a heavy chain and i assume you just record raw and then all of this processing is done later right no it's all on there you track through it i'll track through all of it i love it that's great god has to sound like a finished record

while they're recording you know that's amazing that's that's genius um so any latency problems not real if if if you usually you get like maybe a couple milliseconds but if an artist is super picky about that then i'll just go to uh the universal audio stuff because it's has basically no latency at all so right right okay so for for the listeners that don't really understand this process and just to just to be clear you're bringing your signals in through like an input channel doing all this processing on it and then taking the output of that channel and and bringing it into a new track on which you record this processed audio is that correct basically i'll have like in ableton you can create groups and so i'll have my entire vocal chain at the on the group and then you just have your tracks underneath that and you record it and

anything being recorded is going through that vocal chain so um and then from there you can have all your sends you add your reverb delays or whatever and then it's just super odd easy to like automate those you can do like reverb throws or whatever you know what i mean right but i keep i'll just like by the time i'm mixing just making very minor adjustments to the chain because it already sounds so good it's already very dialed in you know right do you sort of like do minor adjustments like per vocalist and but it but your sort of de facto settings sort of work for everybody exactly and the reason i and that's the reason i i switched over to using multiband like i stopped doing eq cuts and stuff because nowadays like a vocalist might change their cadence every bar so it's like are you really gonna go in and eq each bar separately like no so with like multi-band you can it just kind of rides the vocal for you and you don't really have to do too much

or worry too much about that so that's why i started doing it that way rather than my old way which was like making a million different little cuts and finding all the bad frequencies is like you don't have to do all that you know right have you ever tried any of those smarty cues like gulf foss or soothe i used to i'll use soothing mixing just because soothe is a lot of latency you can't really record with it right sometimes if i find there's like harsh mids and stuff that i can't control so easily i'll go to soothe but again soothe you have to use very carefully um because of the bandwidth yeah it just again it can take like a lot of the sauce out of the vocal too so you gotta use it you know sparingly but um golfos is sick i love golf loss it's my favorite plugin of all time that goes on the master me too yeah it's amazing 27 up 27 down there
you go it's it's an incredible plugin for sure it really is i love it yeah absolutely yeah uh shout out sound theory [Music]