My Music Production Manifesto

This is how I make music, and advice I find myself telling people when I master their music. This is strictly meant to be personal, and only applies to myself in the first place (and using Ableton Live). Pick and choose things to your liking, this is not meant to tell you what to do. If you disagree with something, write your own manifesto and share it with me ❤️

Making

• Get a laptop with decent enough built-in speakers and don't use higher-fi monitoring till you're actually at the mixing stage. (I love my MacBook Pro ones, here's my affiliate link)
• Work from a couch till you're at the mixing stage.
• Don't use Ableton's Session View for too long, it'll get you stuck in loops. Work directly in the arranger instead.
• Resample and chop things up and re-use everything at least twice.
• Two effects per channel is too little, 15 too many.
• Once you're done arranging/resampling, duplicate the file and clean up, organize channels for the next steps.
• Don't start automating/detailing till you have a rough outline of the arrangement.
• Or don't make an outline, and automate your pick-and-choose adventure step by step.

Detailing

• Listen, write down todos, implement todos, bounce, listen, write down todos, implement todos, bounce, repeat.
• From this stage on, avoid demo-itis. Don't listen to your music casually to avoid getting used to it. When you listen, always have a notebook and pen.
• Detailing is not actually about details—slap aggressive filters on things and make them move in grotesque movements.
• Hierarchy: Use sidechaining/trackspacer to build a hierarchy order in your track. Which voice is most important? Change in hierarchy probably means a change in sidechaining.
• Put an autofilter, utility, transient shaper and saturation on every channel, automate everything to contour the arrangement.
• Remember you're working in the theater and your job is to put the spotlight on the character who's most important at that moment. Accentuate different actors in different parts. If your faders remain the same throughout your play, you probably have a boring mix.
• Add subtle noise floors to make parts more dense. Pull down sustain on your transient designer on the drum bus to make parts more thin.
• Detailing: if you're automating volume of a single sound/gesture, use Utility+automation. Automate the channel faders for complete sections.

Mixing

• Saturate your bass and kick, then roll off the low end, make it audible on small speakers. (If you've been working on your laptop speakers, this shouldn't be a problem in the first place)
• Grain Delay can be better for creative 'saturation' during mixing than your expensive warming plugin.
• Use a phaser with feedback, not an EQ, to make a thin sound thick.
• Freeze channels, encapsulate in a 'group' with mixing tweaks.
• Use saturation like textural varnish—multiple thin layers make the best finish. On all tracks, on the drum bus, on the mix bus, before glue and after glue. Use different types of saturation, bring out different harmonics.
• There is no such thing as over-doing distortion, there's only a lack of courage.
• Try a reverb-less year. 2025 without reverb?
• Lower monitoring volume when dialing in compression, that way you can hear transients so much easier. Use the attack and release knobs to push and pull the feeling of the groove.
• Put a subtle wow on everything with different speeds excluding kick and bass. Voila, everything moves.
• If everything is super wide, nothing is wide—mono things!
• Mix for impact, not for clarity. If everything is clear, nothing is clear. Again, you're in the theater, you point the brightest light at the protagonist, different lights at the antagonist and supporting actors.
• Multiple reverbs panned in different directions make a more natural reverb.
• Faders are EQs too. Level before EQ.
• Mono everything below 200Hz, the more aggressive the bass, the higher you probably want to go.
• Forget what everyone is saying about not using a limiter whilst mixing. Safety of your ears is more important than advice from internet forums. Just turn off clipping and limiting when sending to master and render at 32-bit without dithering.

Published at Wed, 21 May 2025 15:24:39 GMT