Outside Scoop: How to Write Promo Emails that Get Responses, 3 Tips for Choosing Studio Monitors, and More

Take advantage of Sadowick’s tips to send promo emails that get responses.

This week’s Outside Scoop touches on best practices when conducting business within the music industry, in addition to an assortment of recording tutorials, mixing tutorials, and discussions involving studio gear. The articles and videos in this roundup were published within the last week, and are from all around the web. Keep reading to get up to speed on the latest and greatest music production content.

How to Write Promo Emails that Get Responses

Sadowick covers email etiquette and how you can increase the chances that you receive a response from the producers, DJs, and labels that you reach out to. It’s astonishing how many people cannot write a coherent email with a clear purpose; I receive emails like this all the time from people sending out demo tracks or attempting to organize collaborative projects. Stop having your emails ignored by taking advantage of Sadowick’s tips.

4 Tips to Create Powerful Basslines

Creating basslines can prove to be quite challenging if you don’t tackle the issues you’re facing in the most efficient way possible. It’s common for people to apply more and more processing to try to fix bassline issues, but the best solution to a problematic bassline is usually rather simple. Black Ghost Audio explains the importance of arrangement, shaping ADSR, and taming transient recordings to achieve powerful basslines.

Experimenting With Tape Loops and Cassette Players

Every now and then a video focused on creative inspiration makes its way into the Outside Scoop, and “Tape loops are dope” by Andrew Huang is one of those videos. An artist named Amulets mailed him some cassettes and basically told him to experiment and have fun with them. Huang uses an Ableton Push controller to record drums over one of these cassettes, which results in a lo-fi beat full of character.

4 Tips for “Mixing as You Go” While Recording, Producing & More

Ian Vargo of The Pro Audio Files believes that “…recording engineers/producers should make broad-stroke sonic decisions early on, and continue to do so as elements are added.” He explains that this is called the “mix-as-you-go” approach. Vargo’s main point is that you shouldn’t be afraid to commit to sounds early on in the production process. Read the full article for a more insightful look at how he puts mixing-as-you-go into practice.

Recording Acoustic Guitar with Two SM57s

The Shure SM57 is an extremely cheap microphone that produces a quality sound and is used in many professional studios. Creative Sound Lab demonstrates a straightforward recording technique using a direct mic placement, and an over-the-shoulder mic placement in which each mic is panned hard left and right. There’s also mention of buss compressing stereo recordings to add cohesiveness, which I found to be quite interesting as well.

Ask an Audio Engineer: The April Mix Tip Mailbag

LANDR runs these segments called “Ask an Audio Engineer” every so often in which their senior audio engineer, Al Isler, responds to mail from readers. In this blog post, he covers various tips on recreating a vocal sound similar to Tame Impala, tackling mixing and mastering from an objective perspective, and the pitfalls of over processing your audio. This article touches on a broad range of topics and makes for a very informative read.

5 Essential Upgrades For Your Home Studio

Austin Hull talks about where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to studio upgrades. He makes some excellent points and argues that upgrading your computer, acoustic treatment, monitors, microphone, and studio furniture are worthwhile investments; I think that improving your studio in this order makes a lot of sense as well.

The Only 5 Plugins You Need to Do a Full Mix

Matty Harris from mixandmastermysong.com lays out the 5 plugins that he claims are all you need to do a full mix. The highlighted software includes the bx_console SSL 4000 E, FabFilter Pro-Q 3, Universal Audio 1176 Classic Limiting Amplifier, SlateDigital VerbSuite Classics, and SlateDigital Repeater Delay. Personally, I may opt to add a saturator like FabFilter’s Saturn or Klanghelm’s SDRR2 to this list, but it’s pretty comprehensive regardless.

3 Tips For Choosing Studio Monitors

Graham Cochrane of The Recording Revolution discusses choosing the right studio monitors for your set up. He makes some interesting points that include bigger is not always necessarily better, speakers are just one component of a more sophisticated monitoring system, and that you can mix on any speaker in any room if you make use of reference tracks. Watch the full video for Cochrane’s gear recommendations.

Charles Hoffman is a Mixing and Mastering Engineer at Black Ghost Audio. After graduating from the University of Manitoba with an English degree, Charles completed his education at Icon Collective in Los Angeles, CA.

Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.