Producing Beats

These days it is pretty cheap and simple to quickly get your independently produced CD published to look just like a professionally made shop bought one. There are a whole bunch of companies that will cheaply print up CDs, T-shirts, mugs, keyrings and posters amongst other items with your logo or photo on. So cheap in fact that it is possible to look upon these items as promotional items by giving them away in giveaways and gaining new listeners for the small upfront cost of the product. Let me explain this concept that some promotion companies have used for a long time now and how you can use it to get effective blog posts (adverts) about your music and ultimately new listeners and fans...

In Britain over the last few days I have seen some different articles on our newspaper websites about "a new instrument". From my first impressions of what I have seen in the links below I am pretty impressed with the controls it gives you and it certainly sounds more expressive than many other electronic instruments around at the present time. It can be played in numerous ways as the video below shows, but with a price tag of £3,950 it doesn't look like I will be getting hold of one anytime soon.


New York Parallel Compression
The compressor can be one of the more difficult effects to get your head round using effectively, today I am going to show how to use it to make your beats sound noticeably louder using parallel compression, which is great for harder sounding genres of music. Firstly it is probably best to show you what the original beat sounded like before any compression is applied.

Our second sample pack is also free for you to use within your tracks. This time we have 20 free Arcade style samples, we haven't gone out our way to remake classic old samples from classic arcade games, but we can just imagine these being heard in an late 80s - Early 90s arcade and we had to call the sample pack something cool. I suppose you could even imagine these being heard on a slot machine or something too, so if your after something sounding a bit like a computer game music or in a casino maybe one of our 20 arcade sounds might just do the trick.

DJ Arrangement
Many tracks, especially within the genres of house and trance, have a habit of arranging a track for a DJ. The producer purposely places a section at the start, beginning with a simple kick drum and building up adding a new sound at the end of every 4, 8 or 16 bars finally adding the bass at some point. Then whilst getting towards the end of the track, the parts are faded out, most of the time as a mirrored version of the intro. This was started as a way to make life easier for the DJ by allowing long and smooth transitions between tracks when the are mixed together. I have some thoughts about this that I want to share.