Small Bites | Beat Kitchen

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Small Bites

Content from our social media — music theory, songwriting, engineering, mixing, synthesis, and more — collected in one place. If you saw something on our page and want to find it again, it's here. Read it, search it, share it.

Featured Bite

Chord Thinking over Key Thinking

I favor chord thinking over key thinking, and here’s what I mean.

Weather Sonification

What if you could hear everything? Sound waves are spheres with pressure in one dimension and time in the other.

Hearing Vibrations

We say that when you hear a sound you’re hearing vibrations, but what does that mean?

Anatomy of a Reverb

After the onset of the original sound, the anatomy of a reverb occurs in three distinct stages.

Video thumbnail: A compressor reduces the level of a track, but one of the places people get confused is in...

Compression: input output

A compressor reduces the level of a track, but one of the places people get confused is in understanding where it reduces that level.

Video thumbnail: Tetrachord Tool — interactive scale and harmony builder on the Beat Kitchen ear candy page

Tetrachord Tool — Build Scales, Modes & Harmony from Two Groups of Four Notes

An interactive tetrachord explorer that lets you pick lower and upper tetrachords, hear the resulting scale, rotate through modes, and stack diatonic harmony. 65 scales from pentatonic to bebop.

Having a Key Center

Having a key center means holding a note in your mind even once you stop playing it.

Perfect Plagal

This Bb has an F in it.

Chord Clash Logic Edit

Like most things, fixing a subtle clash in logic is pretty much the same as it was in Ableton.

Video thumbnail: Stereosaurus, monoreverb.

Stereo Source: Mono Reverb

Why sending a stereo source to a mono reverb return often sounds better than stereo reverb on everything — and how it keeps your mix focused.

Borrowed Chord

What is a borrowed chord?

Sus

A suspended chord is a bit of a chameleon.

Altered Sharp Nine: The Hendrix Chord

Here are some thoughts on the thing you might know of as the Hendrix chord.

Sound Waves Spheres

Music exists for the sole purpose of bringing joy into the world.

Video thumbnail: Whether you call it a bus or whether you call it a send and a return, the utility of running...

A dedicated space

Whether you call it a bus or whether you call it a send and a return, the utility of running effects like reverbs and delays in parallel rather than in series is more than just a matter of resource management.