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

Why Your Ears Are Lying To You

You know that frequency response chart that came with your nice set of speakers?

Mixing Levels

A really common misconception about mixing is that your job is to make everything even.

Video thumbnail: For those of you who are just starting out and a few of you who probably ought to know better, stop...

Not The Biggest

For those of you who are just starting out and a few of you who probably ought to know better, stop doing that thing where you try and make yourself look like you’re bigger than you are.

Songwriting: top down bottom up

It’s only fair that I tell you what I mean when I say bottom up or top down songwriting.

Selective Leveling

Level isn’t the most important element in your mix.

Video thumbnail: The mighty mighty tritone Let’s get this out of the way in the middle ages It was called the...

the miighty tritone

The mighty mighty tritone Let’s get this out of the way in the middle ages It was called the devil’s interval which is kind of fun because it sounded dissonant to them So they discouraged it along with a lot of other stuff that turned out to be really awesome It’s called a tritone because it’s made of one two three whole steps put another way That’s six half steps out of a total of twelve.

Video thumbnail: If you find yourself turning up your levels when you record and then turning them back down when...

try this setting logic pro x

If you find yourself turning up your levels when you record and then turning them back down when you’re done, consider changing this setting in Logic Pro.

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.

Video thumbnail: It’s a radical idea. But I teach mastering before I teach mixing, and I don’t spend a lot of time...

Who Needs Mastering

It’s a radical idea. But I teach mastering before I teach mixing, and I don’t spend a lot of time on it. Two reasons. Mastering is pretty straightforward. The objective…

Video thumbnail: If you’ve ever tried to explain a compressor to someone who’s new to music production, there comes...

Which Kind of Compression

If you’ve ever tried to explain a compressor to someone who’s new to music production, there comes a moment where they look at you with a really puzzled expression, and it’s probably because they’ve heard the word used in two ways.

Hello: nice to meet you

Welcome to a ton of new followers and I figured I’d introduce myself.

Video thumbnail: Tuesday’s Music Theory Gym and its Stevie Wonder adds where we find a convergence of ascending and...

As: Stevie Wonder

Tuesday’s Music Theory Gym and its Stevie Wonder adds where we find a convergence of ascending and descending movement.

polarity and phase

One thing that tends to confuse new engineers is the difference between phase and polarity.

Video thumbnail: There are vocalists out there that will never ever give you a good performance in headphones, but...

Just Get The Take

There are vocalists out there that will never ever give you a good performance in headphones, but even seasoned vocalists sometimes have a hard time matching the vibe and the performance of a relaxed studio environment with the monitors on.