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Let's face it, repetition is boring. Regardless of what genre you make, you don’t want to bore your listeners. Music is all about movement; the better you are at humanizing the elements of your song, the better chance you'll have of moving your audience. Below I'll go over some of the most effective ways to add variety to your productions, making them sound less robotic and more organic. Feel free to try different combinations of these techniques to see how they shape your sound. These methods mostly apply to working inside the box, but further options are available if sounds are reproduced in real physical spaces; using techniques like re-amping, and live mic recording.

This post is for producers who are working towards making music as a living. You've probably "released" a song on Soundcloud before only to see it get 100 plays. Clearly artists that are getting hundreds of thousands of plays on a single track are doing something different than you, but what is it? What should you be doing that they're doing?

The order of your plugins matters. Knowing how plugins affect your sound can help you to shape audio and troubleshoot problems. Below I'll explain my preferred plugin processing order, why it's in the order it is, and I’ll also provide a list of recommended plugins for each category. This list is meant as a general guideline and experimentation is always encouraged. Not all steps are needed for every sound you work on; let your ears determine when a sound requires processing.

There are a ton of music production myths floating around out there and I'm going to address some of them. Lots of these stem from great concepts that have just been misinterpreted. YouTube is a great platform for learning music production, but the issue is that a lot of information that amateur producers provide is only partially correct. You have to experiment sometimes in order to pick apart fact from fiction. Let's bust some myths!

If you've never touched Ableton before, but want to get started with it, you're in the right place. First, I'll walk you through Ableton's interface and get you familiar with where different key features are located. Second, I'll show you a great method to build your first song in minutes. I'll be giving a brief overview of Ableton, so if there's something you find interesting you at least know it exists and can further research it from there. There's no other way of saying this, but you're about to belly flop right into Ableton.

With live performances becoming more and more prominent within today's EDM scene, I thought it would be worth taking a look at how artists go about achieving this. Most EDM has incredibly complex instrumentation, so it's not always possible to play entire songs live, especially if you're a solo act. I'm going to show you how you can use a loop station, or Ableton, to create your own live loop performances.