PHOTO CREDIT: reportingtexas.com Low Down on 5 Music Mixing Mistakes Exposed: What You Need To Do I've helped hundreds of musicians improve their musical style. Sometimes it's as simply as fixing a few instruments, sometimes it's a total overhaul. Avoid these on your next mix.  Affordable Music Coaching at MusicXray 1. Lack of music variety One of the composition projects I am working on right now deals with creating a few dozen short musical snippets. Nice little music ditties that fit snugly behind dialogue. As I am composing, I listen to the tracks for any sound that seems to stand out inordinately from the mix. I am not talking about solos, drum fills, or riffs. I am talking about a walking bass line that seems to plod, the string patch that sounds okay for two seconds, then gets blase', the drum beat that is nauseatingly redundant, or the synth pad that seems to swallow up the bottom end of the track. Solution? After recording or MIDI inputting...

Logic Studio (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Below are three electronic music exercises that will help musicians, music students, and music educators work on their mixing and studio skills. As a music professor teaching sound synthesis I developed these exercises for my beginning Sound Synthesis students who were just beginning to use audio programs like Logic Studio and Garageband to create new music. Any musician can adapt and use these music exercises to work on basic audio skills, including use of audio effects, sound, noise, and music composition. I encourage musicians and music educators to adapt these projects to their own studios and classrooms as useful tools to expand their skills.  Project 1: Effects and Appropriation DESCRIPTION: Students use effects and editing techniques used in class to create a new piece using appropriated material. Students will learn to recognize different types of copyright licenses. Appropriated materials includes use of prerecorded ...

English: wavelength in sine wave (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) English: Simple Sine Graph with description (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) English: This shows several waveforms: sine wave, square wave, triangle wave, and rising sawtooth wave. Français : Cette image montre plusieurs formes d'onde: sinus, carrées, triangle, et dents de scie. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Ever wonder what sounds are made of? These are the building blocks of sound. Check out these informational YouTube videos on sound synthesis, sound waves , and music technology. Online Noise Generator http://simplynoise.com/ Basic Sound Waves Sine wave to Square Wave Additive Synthesis Visual only LOGIC STUDIO NOTES Logic Studio's ES2 synthesizer has a Tutorial Library which has several basic settings that can be used for amazing original synth beats. The EX24 has basic sound waves under: Synthesizers/Synth waveforms . There you will find both Analog and Digital waveforms that you...

Percussion 101: Percussion Families When most people ask what I play, I say "Percussion". They usually look at me with a questioning look, and a "Oh, that's nice". Then I say, "I play the drums." The lightbulb hits. "Oh, you are a DRUMMER!" Percussion is more than Animal banging on a set of toms. It is more than "More COWBELL!" and it is definitely more than that little monkey that plays the cymbals. There are several different groups of percussion instruments. Since percussion instruments essentially include anything you hit or shake to make noise (including noisemakers like bird whistles, car brake drums, radios, and the kitchen sink), being able to include every instrument seems like a daunting task.  Generally musicians group percussion into pitched and non-pitched percussion. Here are some basic pitched Percussion Instruments:  Pitched Metals : Bells, Crotales, Vibraphone, Chimes Pitched Wood : Marimba, Xylophone Pitched Drum...