Casque d'Or

Distortion is the alteration of the original shape of something. In our case the waveform. By altering the original shape of a waveform you create musical effects. I personally use a lot of distortion type effects in my tracks. I place them on inserts just to make sounds come more forward in the mix. I use distortion to control my levels even more. U can kill the dynamic range for your sound which in some cases is a desirable effect. Like in a comparable way as a compressor. I use distortion to create completely different sounds. Like making a saw wave lead from a simple bass guitar sample. I use band distortion to accentuate some frequencie bands of a sound a bit more. I also use distortion as an FX send. If you like the original sound, don’t want to alter it, but you want to add some grittyness you can try it via this way. I use distortion to create filter sweeps for ...

10 Ways to widen up your sound: Some of them were already discussed but it's still a nice overview. 1: Stereo Delay: Use a stereo delay with a very short delay time. between 2-10 ms. 2. Split Equalizing: Use an equalizer in which you can equalize the left and right channel separately. This will slightly widen up your sound. 3. Stereo Enhancers: There are a lot of stereo enhancement plugins. I personally play around a lot with the ones from Waves, Brainworx and Izotope. 4. M/S Equalizing. see tip #19 for explanation. 5. Split your stereo channel into two separate channels and pan hard left & right. 6. Put two delays on your channel, pan one hard left and the other hard right. 7. Put two reverbs in two different aux busses. Pan one hard left the other hard right. Cut off all the lows from the reverb. Experiment with the reverb settings. From there on you can also put a compr...

One of the most important things I learned is that when you feel creative is to write as many melodies as you can. Not just focus on one track at that moment.  Cause then when you are a bit uninspired you can always fall back on something you made earlier.  Also when you hear back your older melody you remember what you wanted to do with that in the first place. Same goes for making drops. 

When creating an intro/ outro of a track it sometimes help to make use of ambient sounds for a couple of reasons to fill up the frequency spectrum, to give the track some character and build up excitement, or to create a minimum sound reference level.  To do this you can use anything actually. Common things like white noise, stabs with lots of reverb on it, sample pack fx's or your actual theme sound but then put in a filter with some cool effects on it etc.  Always mix in these sounds at a soft volume. You barely need to hear them in your mix but if you take them away you are missing something... 

A nice way to widen up your lead sound is to open up two synths with the same preset. Pan one hard left and the other one hard right. And then create a small difference to one (synth) side by adding some chorus or for instance an LFO. 

A great trick to give your drop some more impact is by using the Mid-Side EQ. Group your drop synths to one channel and use the mid-side eq on that channel  to cut of the low with the MID Eq. The advantage with this trick is that you create more space for the kick and bass to punch thru without making your leads sound to thin.

In the creative phase of making sounds  I usually end up boosting a lot of frequencies with equalizers, distortion etcetera.  Once I have my sounds made I usually bounce them and start the mix down process fresh or put them into a group bus.   Normally in the mix down process I use a lot of Subtractive EQ'ing.  The advantages of Subtractive EQ'ing are numerous.  - You create more headroom - Mix will sound more natural - You keep your master buss under control - And it's easier to lift out a particular synth when cutting out the others.