I’ve been talking about The Tom Trick for years now. Here’s the kicker: I revised and improved it, and I found a tool that makes going about removing snare and cymbal bleed from your tom tracks a breeze.Manual is still the way to go for ultimate transparency, but hey…the 80/20 rule applies to music as well.

A song with trash drums will fail to engage your listeners. Here’s how I go about turning well-programmed drums into a living-and-breathing performance.

Vocal automation. Love it or hate it, no plugin can, as of right now, do what our ears and hearts can do: bring out the emotion of a vocal performance. Automation can do that, and much more. Watch the video to see how I approach vocal automation, and why spending an hour or more on it is definitely worth it.

Here’s part 1 of 3 of how I go about actually finishing a mix. In this video, you’ll learn 6 simple, yet effective ways to bring your mix to the finish line.

Here it is: my up-to-date approach to doing mix prep. You’ll learn what goes through my head as I hear the raw tracks I’m about to mix, how I go about doing gain staging, and much more.If you’ve watched my previous video on this topic, you’ll get to see what changed and what stayed the same.

Here’s my first look at Murda Melodies from Slate Digital. It’s a killer one-stop-shop for spatial and temporal effects.

In this video, you’ll learn why I decided to replace all my plugins with those from Slate Digital’s All-Access Pass and how this will help me mix faster, be more confident in my decisions and keep my CPU usage low 😉

In the sixth and final part in our series focusing on mixing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, we’ll take a look at the stereobuss processing, as well as track routing and signal flow.

In this video, we’re going over what drove me to creating a new mix template, the thought process behind which tracks and busses stay and which get the axe, and how to make your workflow more efficient.