About what hit productions, the ones that most of people prefer, have in common. This is about the whole production, technical aspects as mixing, mastering, but also more artistic ones as arrangement, vocals and the song itself. Maybe vocals are more important or the the song itself. Maybe the mastering is less important... What do you think?
What do hit productions have in common? (whole production elements)
- Thread starter beitenh
- Start date
Great gear for sure. It depends on who you ask, but I would definitely say that one thing they tend to have in common is that the majority of the quality is achieved prior to mixing - with hardware. Already at that point there is a lot of emotion present in the recording. So this means combos of great room acoustics, gear, monitoring that yield very high quality frequency responses, those frequency responses are then maintained well due to good monitoring, mixing and mastering further down the chain. And good song production and playing too, using high quality, highly in tune sound sources.
I also think that high quality productions tend to be well cleaned up, good compressors are used with the right attack and release settings. EQs remove noise rather than add noise, because the precision is high due to both the engineering and the monitoring quality. Effects like reverbs and delays are adding space without adding noise.
But in terms of mixing and mastering hit productions tend to not have the mixing and mastering ruining the recording, they are more adding to what is already great. That is possible when you target the material with precision and do so in an environment that makes that possible.
Overall I think a general advice towards hit productions is to try to become a bit more EQ independent. It's great to remove ugly resonances and add character and various qualities to the mix by using the EQ, but ideally you should not have to spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff, most of that stuff should not have to be done because it was spotted and avoided during the recording process. I think it is a better idea to design your room acoustics and signal chains so that you end up with good frequency responses on various sound sources already in recording and hence don't need to do so much of that during mixing and mastering. Ideally the mixing and mastering should be mostly about adjusting the volume faders in order to provide an optimal representation of the recording.
All in all, great monitoring and room acoustics. Recording, mixing and mastering is not so hard when you have a very high quality monitoring frequency response available to represent your audio. I would say that is 50% of the result. The other 50% is about understanding how to use that in order to achieve emotions in the music/audio.
If you know you have a much less than ideal monitoring environment, apply filtering on the monitoring path so that you can counter balance the points in the frequency response that weigh down your work: The edges on the frequency response tend to bring size to a mix, they can add noise too - that's part of the art to be able to have enough clean signal towards the edges of the frequency range. For this purpose it helps to shelf cut a little on the edges. It also helps to scoop out a little of the mid range so that you don't end up with too little mid range just because you are compensating at the edges. You need enough impact in the mid range. I also think that it is good to boost the 200 Hz and 2 kHz frequency ranges quite narrowly so that you can avoid some of the resonance that can build up in those frequency areas leading to quite harsh sounding mixes. Once you have compensated for some of the issues in the monitoring, then you can more effectively remove the negative resonances.
Also be aware that many times a bit more broad more mild and a bit lower Q EQing can help you avoid harsh sounding peaks that result in significant translation issues. When you apply pass filters too steeply you might get resonance build up near the cutoff. That can work if you are dealing with very high or very low frequencies, but the more audible the cutoff frequency is, the more of an issue those resonant peaks will become. So on one hand you want a particular frequency response that has an attractive sound in most playback devices but on the other hand you want to get there as smoothly and transparently as possible. Generally it can be good to for instance high pass/shelf cut some sound sources to make the mix brighter and to clean up the low mids and lows, but I think those types of filters should have a curve that is not so steep, because you might already have signal in that frequency range that is more pronounced in your setup and by adding those filters steeply you might further add to your monitoring issues, making the mix more difficult to master too. So it's not about removing tons of frequencies, it's more about softly reducing the wrong frequencies and softly increasing the right frequencies. Sound sources generally don't sound so good if they have tons of modulation in some frequency area, but totally lack modulation in a lot of other frequency areas. So don't expect great sounding mixes by doings lots of extreme high pass and low pass filtering or very specific extreme multiband compression. You constantly have to maintain modulation quality across the frequency range as a whole on the sound sources, else you will get a mix that sounds pretty good, but does not feel so good. The emotion comes mostly from the attack, the decay and the modulation across the frequency range.
So the combination is quite tricky - you want to remove tons of noise, but at the same time you want to maintain the modulation quality. So there are correct ways of removing noise and damaging ways of removing noise. Learning the difference is definitely giving you a much better sounding mix.
If you do dynamics matching with manual multiband compression, I think it is good to keep the bands quite broad, avoid matching with tons of narrow bands. So for instance rather than matching say 20 - 50, 50 - 100 and 100 to 200 Hz, it can be better to for instance have the first band at say 20 - 150 Hz and the second band maybe at 150 Hz - 500 Hz. In this way you get a much smoother overall curve and can avoid resonant peaks that will make the mix not translate as well. An even better approach might be to start broadly and then add a few layers with more narrow bands on top once the underlying bands are more where the narrow bands won't add too much negative resonance. An example of this kind of approach would be to have the first layer with only two bands, divided somewhere around 700 Hz. Once everything above and below 700 Hz is near your target, you can then add one more dynamics layer where you add a few more bands. Gradually you are then getting towards your final levels without adding too much negative resonance. Just keep in mind that if you have important crossover frequencies that describe the stereo image as part of the scope within which you apply the multiband compression, you are essentially degrading the stereo image. It is for this reason important to do dynamics matching in a way that is keeping the quality of the stereo image high. The same with frequency matching, it can be good to start with a very smooth frequency matching curve and then add a few layers with more and more specific frequency matching. Generally I think it makes sense to start with very mild dynamic multiband compression frequency matching (medium stroke), then add EQ frequency matching (narrow stroke, high smoothness), then add manual multiband frequency matching (medium stroke, high smoothness + medium smoothness) and then finally add just a little bit of all of them on the stereo scope, just a little and with low smoothness on all of them in order to bring in a little excitement as icing on the cake... You could then combine that dynamics work with gradually also lowering the compressor attack time and raising the compressor release time at each stage to make it perfect.
The idea behind this type of approach is to get the bulk of the frequencies in the right dynamic form first of all without getting a high negative resonant peak cost, then once you have that you can excite the mix a little by adding some resonant peaks towards the target. Some like to instead keep everything in the current balance and just add some aural exciting on top, but I think generally that fits better into more high quality monitoring situations where you need to do less to make it have the right form and excitement. Although that will give the mix excitement, it will not be able to approach a target vibe to the same degree.The nice thing about reverbs and delays is that when you feed them smooth frequencies with minimal negative resonant peaks, they start sounding beautiful. This is how you add these effects without introducing noise. Oddly enough it means that the higher quality natural ambience that has already impacted your mix, the better the performance and sound of the reverbs and delays. Add to that the fact that then you need much less artificial reverb and delay added and you have a set of qualities about your production that is hard to beat... This is the magic of big airy ambient and clean sounding mixes.
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Lyrics and/or hook, marketing and pop culture.
I invite anyone who thinks they have an informed opinion to look into actual evidence, properly designed studies, statistical regressions, principal component analysis of actual sales data, rather making wishes about how the world should be and dressing them as facts.
There have been many episodes in recent history in which entire genres of music dominated charts and yet were created in peoples bedrooms and garages. Not to mention that live music throws most production finesse right out the window in place of other, entirely different, qualities... and people often regard live music as better.
I invite anyone who thinks they have an informed opinion to look into actual evidence, properly designed studies, statistical regressions, principal component analysis of actual sales data, rather making wishes about how the world should be and dressing them as facts.
There have been many episodes in recent history in which entire genres of music dominated charts and yet were created in peoples bedrooms and garages. Not to mention that live music throws most production finesse right out the window in place of other, entirely different, qualities... and people often regard live music as better.
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waltzmastering
New member
Saw these the other day...
Music Producers Explain How They Created a Hit
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/arts/music/chainsmokers-flume-clams-casino.html?_r=0
https://thehitformula.com/
gl
nytimes.com
Music Producers Explain How They Created a Hit
Joe Coscarelli
The D.J. duo the Chainsmokers, with the singer Daya at center. Rory Kramer
“Don’t Let Me Down,” the third platinum-selling single since 2014 by the D.J. duo the Chainsmokers, has been streamed online more than half a billion times. The song’s title and singer may not be familiar — its easily hummable vocals are performed by Daya, a mostly unknown teenager from Pittsburgh. But it’s the beat, and therefore its producers, that are the stars.
No longer relegated to the liner notes, digital composers in the genres of electronic dance music and hip-hop — both now firmly ensconced at pop music’s center — often take top billing on their tracks, even if the featured guest is Justin Bieber.
So even in this moment of dominant solo idols — Beyoncé, Drake, Rihanna — there exists a less instantly recognizable realm of rising studio superstars that have leapt from the depths of SoundCloud or the E.D.M. heap into the upper echelon of influence, dominating radio play and landing high-profile festival appearances. Acts like the Chainsmokers, along with Diplo, Disclosure, Calvin Harris and even the rap figurehead DJ Khaled have proven reliable hitmakers as lead artists, frequently employing their industry friends to carry the tune while laboring in partial obscurity.
Music Producers Explain How They Created a Hit
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/arts/music/chainsmokers-flume-clams-casino.html?_r=0
https://thehitformula.com/
gl
nytimes.com
Music Producers Explain How They Created a Hit
Joe Coscarelli
The D.J. duo the Chainsmokers, with the singer Daya at center. Rory Kramer
“Don’t Let Me Down,” the third platinum-selling single since 2014 by the D.J. duo the Chainsmokers, has been streamed online more than half a billion times. The song’s title and singer may not be familiar — its easily hummable vocals are performed by Daya, a mostly unknown teenager from Pittsburgh. But it’s the beat, and therefore its producers, that are the stars.
No longer relegated to the liner notes, digital composers in the genres of electronic dance music and hip-hop — both now firmly ensconced at pop music’s center — often take top billing on their tracks, even if the featured guest is Justin Bieber.
So even in this moment of dominant solo idols — Beyoncé, Drake, Rihanna — there exists a less instantly recognizable realm of rising studio superstars that have leapt from the depths of SoundCloud or the E.D.M. heap into the upper echelon of influence, dominating radio play and landing high-profile festival appearances. Acts like the Chainsmokers, along with Diplo, Disclosure, Calvin Harris and even the rap figurehead DJ Khaled have proven reliable hitmakers as lead artists, frequently employing their industry friends to carry the tune while laboring in partial obscurity.