Tanger Answers Music Production Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

What's up guys! I'm Tanger. I'm a  music producer, and today I'm going to be answering your questions from  Twitter. This is Production Support TornadoEF6 asks: "What is your general basis on  mixing and mastering?" so what I do most of the time is I use Maximus for multiband compression,  I put that in front of an OTT on like 20%. After that, I just have an EQ that's cutting out  under 40 HZ and above 20K HZ, because we can't really hear those frequencies. Run it into a  limiter at the end. Cul

t from YouTube says: "What obscure plugins do you recommend?" I don't  know if these plugins are actually considered obscure or not but dblue glitch and dblue tape  stop are like super clutch plugins and they're super fun basically what dblue glitch does is you  can make it have a different effect on every beat you can do a ton of stuff in glitch if you're  making like dub step and stuff it's really fun tape stop is very useful it's it's when you hear  those songs go bar it's like the record sto

pping dblue tape stop is usually how people get that  effect Ashley asks how do you go about making a good sounding chord progression when I was a  beginner what I did most of the time is just study other chord progressions from other songs  that I liked and learning to transcribe chord progressions is a skill in and of itself it also  helps you recognize the patterns and chords and what sounds good and what you like you know what  you can do you can download MIDI files of songs you like and the

n just study the chords and how  they're made in MIDI so you can see what you can do disco says how the does one make a speed core  kick speed core kicks are typically just really short kicks with lots of distortion on them have  a distortion on a kick put a EQ next and then put like a peak up put another Distortion after that  you want to move that EQ Peak up and down to see sweet spots and how the Distortion affects the  Peaks differently it's a really cool thing you can do with Distortion Z a

sks how do you make those  groovy chords on some of your songs personally I really like the harmonic minor five chord and  that's basically just taking a normal minor five chord and making it major instead raising the  third let's say we start an A and then we go down to an F which is the sixth chord and then  we go to E which is the five chord that sounds normal on its own what I do to make it more  fancy is start at the A and then you can go instead of making this five a normal five chord  you

can raise it a third and it adds a lot more tension also what you can do is just add like add  more notes whether that be in the chord or between chords just little just more is usually better  buddy 2707 asks what inspired enuton honestly it was a pck I just went on one of those websites  where you like create a custom anime girl and I just made one and then just it just stuck Dan flop  asks what inspired you to create bike and how do you feel about all the recognition that it got so  I origin

ally made bike for an audio combat which is a music contest for eliminate which is a music  producer I did sample that bike video that was part of the contest everyone else had to sample  a bike video I didn't actually win someone else won and then eventually voxy Cat made the GD level  and S present it to me and it was small at first and I thought it was really cool and then about a  month later I've been seeing it everywhere and it blows up I'm really happy it blew up I got a lot  of new fans

from that I'm glad I got to introduce a bunch of people to my community carai asks how  do you usually do your fast dubstep wub sounds for 200 step in jcore and whatnot to get the Wow Wow  sound you just have to have a frequency going up and down so you can use a notch filter you can use  a high pass with a notch you can use a low pass so something like this would work that's like the  very Baseline but you can go beyond that and add like Distortion multiband compression and if you  want a reall

y groovy based line you're going to want a lot of like short notes so it's like very  choppy cuz more choppy is usually more groovy Remy CA says how would a total beginner start to get  into music production I would recommend the FL Studio trial because it's really good you'll  have pretty much every tool you ever need at your disposal the only downside is that you can't  save project files but as long as you leave the file open it shouldn't be that much of an issue  because you don't need to re

open it if you never close it right but more importantly than anything  you just want to mess around go into your software and just click buttons make random sounds and have  fun because that's the most important thing Jago I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly says how  the hell do you extend a song I run into creative blocks after making the first 20 seconds of a song  I used to have this isue a lot and you might hear it in a lot of my older music it's really boring  and repetitive cuz I just

copied and pasted my friend day1 125 once told me just add a second  theme and it changed my life if you have one theme one idea in a song and you're trying to  extend a song that might be hard when you have one idea and then you add it to another idea you  can experiment with how these ideas mingle with each other throughout the song whether that be  just changing the chord progression up adding a new instrument and then usually at the end of  the song you have them both combined it's like a ni

ce resolution I guess to have them both there I  remember scrx said this one time automate automate automate three very important things things if  you automate stuff and just make them change over time very slowly is a very good way to make  a boring track more interesting exision says tips on how to have clean loud bright and sometimes  distorted SLC crunchy mixes you need to really take care of your high-end it's tempting to just  boost the highs in every single element in your track because

it sounds good and it sounds clear  if you just low pass certain elements that don't really need that high Sparkle it'll really make  the other elements shine through as for the loud and distorted part what I do is this is probably  not good but I just clip it into a limiter on the master until it sounds distorted enough sosis  says are you an automation side chainer or a plug-in side chainer for me it depends I use both  sometimes I use the fruity limiter side chain when I have a track that's n

ot four on the floor four  in the floor for clarification just means there's a kick on every quarter note and usually a high  hat on the offbeat this is found a lot in house music and hardcore stuff with tracks that aren't  for on the floor it's just automated for you and you don't really need that consistency that you  need in four in the floor genres on the other hand when I'm making four in the floor music  with whether that be hardcore or house I almost always use an LFO tool that ducks it a

nd I can  adjust the shape accordingly I would recommend trying out both see what you like better uvall  asks what's one element of your music that you would say makes it your style this is a bad habit  of mine but it really defines my style I use this plugin called span it's just a visual plugin it  shows you the average frequency volume over time I have a bad habit of just trying to make it very  flat something about me just wants everything to be nice and even typically EDM has a lot of base 

and a lot of high-end my EDM I try to just make it flat I hate Dynamics Thresh from Twitter asks my  tracks often sound empty or like there's a piece missing what is the best way to find that missing  piece the golden rule that I use is that if your track's empty add more stuff and that sounds  really obvious just you got to do it just try it cuz it really works just layer things if you have  a bass add another Basse that's playing the same note if you have a Melody add another instrument  that

's playing that same Melody if you don't have high hats add some high hats in my song bamboo  Berry I remember my lead having like 10 different instruments playing the one Melody and that's how  I made the lead so prominent in the track garia STD it's a good name and they ask um how do cords  work and why are they difficult to understand I'm not the greatest person to ask this question in my  opinion chords are just a way to convey emotion a way of building and releasing tension they really  hel

p the track feel like it's going somewhere music theory helps a lot and you should study it  cuz it's fun but also you don't need it you can just reference other tracks chord progression and  see what you make this person asks do you have any tips on making catchy Melodies yes I do put your  track on Loop and hum if I have a certain hum that goes a certain way I'll just like oh I got to put  that down on an instrument and that usually is how I make my Melodies Viv asks as a fellow FL user  do yo

u have any shortcuts or anything that might make certain processes easier definitely make a  template 100% make an F Studio template cuz as you can see mine well mine first of all it looks  really cool it's like all rainbow and gay and shit shit but also it's like so useful cuz I can just  put a kick on channel 25 and it's automatically rooted to the side chain Channel and everything  on the other channels is automatically on the side chain I don't even waste any time making a  template that fit

s your workflow is almost always going to benefit you time wise it also looks  really cool Ronin 67 says why did you choose a tangerine as a mascot so there's this Flash game  made by Gaz Thomas called Tangerine Tycoon and I played it in fourth grade I was really good at  that game and it was really fun eventually my username ended up being Tangerine I would go into  certain streamers chats and they would just call me Tanger for short and it just kind of stuck  I've never even eaten a tangerine

in my entire life I've eaten oranges but not tangerines glitch  cat says how do I vary my sound design more I want to be more diverse with it this is kind of  obvious but you just have to try new things do things that you wouldn't normally do turn knobs  that you wouldn't normally turn and eventually you'll get something silly so for example I can  go into the miscellaneous filters and and look at band reject I've never even used this filter  in my life I'm going to turn a knob all the way up se

e that's like that's already pretty cool  I don't know what you could use that for maybe like an acid base kind of thing if you want  to change the result you're going to have to change the process no matter how uncomfortable  that is for you ammer asks is your music will be in the GD music library hey robtop I'm down  if you're down so Kad asks favorite chord and favorite key to make music in so my favorite  chord is the minor four chord and the major key you can start in C and then go up to th

e  four which is F major and then F minor just sounds so good it's very like nostalgic sounding  I don't have a specific favorite chord because chords aren't really anything on their own it  just depends on the context which they're used as for my favorite key B flat minor I just think  it sounds really bright and pretty Cynthia asks how do you layer interments so I don't know if  you guys know this but an interment is when you place someone in their grave so I guess if you  wanted to layer inte

rments you need to place multiple people in the same grave and I don't  know how legal that is so you probably need to do it at night I think they meant to say  how do you layer instruments so if you think you want to layer one of your instruments you  have to ask yourself what it needs a very low mellow piano and you want to layer it to make  it a little brighter you could make rain an instrument like put it on a sampler and have the  different pitches be the different keys and then it just bec

omes a texture that's part of the  piano and I think that effect is really cool that's all the questions we've got for today  but hope you learned something new um join the Discord stream my latest album that's not out  yet it's called prefer not to say and it's out not very soon it's going to be a while  but stream it when it does come out bye