German producer Deniz Koyu is known for his unique and masterful production style. Seeing that he is one of the most respected producers in the game we thought we’d try to get him to spill his secrets. Here we bring you Deniz Koyu’s top five production tips!
My first production tip is about mixing. What I do when I start a new track is I put my master limiter on from the beginning. Then I mix accordingly so I have the master limiter enabled from the start. I recommend that because you can push the levels higher during the production process. If you do it like that you can always see what your gain reduction is on the limiter. Then you can push all the levels in your mix as high as possible and you can always check your master limiter and see what’s happening. If you do it the other way around and don’t put a master limiter on from the start then you are gonna end up having two separate process first during the mixing then the mastering. I recommend to do it in one piece.
Number two, I just switched to some analog gear in my studio actually and I have a tip from my experiences with it. Compared to a digital mix the analog mix sounds more open, more transparent, and more wide. When you have a mix with a lot of different layers in the analog mix you have better transparency in these layers. For example you can hear every sound so clearly and every sound is positioned a lot better compared to the digital mix. In the digital mix sometimes what happens is that one layer clouds the other layer like for instance when you have some strings and a vocal then maybe the vocal gets clouded a bit. It’s easier to handle with analog summing so if you get a chance you should try analog gear out.
The third tip from me is something for drum processing. If you have the UAD there’s a plug-in the called The Fatso that makes stuff really, really phat. It’s a compressor but it’s a bit different than usual compressors. You have to read the manual maybe and really understand the machine but once you get it you can do a lot with it. What I do is parallel compression on my drum bus. I create a bus channel and all my drums are going into that bus then I put The Fatso on it but I do it with parallel compression. What that means is I have my original drums and then my compressed drums. I mix-in those compressed drums on top so you have the clean drums and the compressed drums. You make sure you have the punch of the original drums but also the compressed sound which is like a dense sound from The Fatso. You have to try it out and experiment and see what it sounds like. You definitely should get that plug-in if you have the UAD.
Photo cred: Facebook
Number four for kick drums try out the Nicky Romero kick drum plug-in. The great thing about this one is that you can tune your kick drums in a really cool way. Like you can create a pitch envelope and can set exactly what nodes your kick drums should end. You can really tune it to your tracks. It’s a really great tool and it’s very easy to handle so you should definitely check it out.
My fifth and last tip is about reverbs. When you set up the rooms for your project try not to create too many different reverbs. It’s better if you create certain rooms maybe one big hall room, maybe one small room, and then one delay. Try to only use those ones on all of your tracks, don’t use too many different reverbs. Try to think of it in a natural way. Actually think of it like when people record a band they don’t have like ten different reverbs. You have the microphone which is almost an instrument and then you have the microphone that captures the room you are recording in. That’s how you make an actual acoustic track so you should try to think about that and keep it in mind when you create your own reverbs. For electronic music it should be the same way so only create like two different rooms that should be it. One small room and one big hall and use that on all of your tracks. Mix only the levels of the reverb according to how big you want the reverb to sound. It’s just important that you don’t have different sounding reverbs so you can make it sound really natural.
Photo cred (top): Facebook
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