The French-Canadian electronic musician and DJ Fred Everything, shares his secrets on production, collaboration, promotion and keeping your mixes interesting. Follow along as he shows original tracks, remixes, re-edits, mashups, analog synths and Maschine.

Part One, Two & Three:

• Part One: Introduction, inspirations, musical beginnings, breaking into the industry.
• Part Two: More background, Fred’s Lazy Days label, self promotion, how to start a song.
• Part Three: Percussion, arrangement, elements of a good mix, FX, vocals.

Part Four, Five & Six:

• Part Four: Delay FX, original loops, collaborating, cutting and arranging vocals.
• Part Five: EQ and compression techniques.
• Part Six: Low frequency considerations, sidechain compression, match EQ, remixing.

Part Seven, Eight & Nine:

• Part Seven: Analog synths, tape delay, drum programming, percussion.
• Part Eight: Fred’s studio, analog gear, room acoustics, reference monitors.
• Part Nine: External MIDI, the SH101 played live, ES1, CV.

Part Ten & Eleven:

• Part Ten: Swing/shuffle, remixes vs re-edits, automation, creating a breakdown.
• Part Eleven: NI Maschine, remix/mashup, remix techniques.

Part Twelve & Thirteen:

• Part Twelve: Comparing EQ’s, mixing bass, atmospherics, which remix jobs to choose.
• Part Thirteen: Q & A, workflow, staying motivated, automation, summing, originality.

How to Produce Deep House with Fred Everything
Parallel Compression

Parallel compression is what they call the, they used to call the New York Compression Trick. It’s basically instead of putting here for example, I do that on drums. Let’s just do a little trick with the drums. But you can do that with everything. Okay. Let’s put that to a bus. There’s no bus. Let’s do one. Fact. Let’s do two. Okay. We’ve got bus, back here assign those to bus one.

Now we have our drums coming in. Coming out of bus one right? Normal compression would be this. I put a compressor here. Whatever I’ll choose a setting like for example. Okay. Can you tell me what’s the problem with doing this? Does anyone know what the problem is? Listen. If you listen to that now. Then we take it out. Yeah.

You killed all the punch because the attack is too quick.

Yeah. Well, no matter what like the settings are, the thing is you’re killing your transient right now. It’s nice. You get something kind of cool like something a bit more aggressive. Something with a little bit of glue. You’re killing . . .the kick is . . .you’re kind of losing it.

You’re parallel compression is you use your basically use your compressor as a send like you would use a reverb. Instead we have ascend here and on the second bus you put your compressor. So now you . . .I have my single which is going to stay the same. I’ve got that. What I’m going to do here, I’m going to turn this up. Okay now it’s exaggerated a little bit. Basically here is my return. You got to check your levels. You got to do some unity gain and everything. Basically you want to add the aggressive part of the compressor.

The second compressor, again don’t look at the settings, the settings are something you can work at home. It’s always different. What you want is the aggressiveness of the compressor. Basically add a layer of drums almost. This is without it. Okay now we’re cheating a little bit because we got a little bit more volume. Basically this is . . . some people also what they’ll do . . .well the real trick is supposed to be this supposedly. You’re supposed to EQ like a smiley EQ after the compressor. Again, you can do whatever you want. You could put a distortion if you want. This is without the parallel compression. Usually I use universal audio plug-ins. I use a lot. I have been a long time user of the uad plug-ins. I couldn’t bring them here because they’re all on my tower. I’ll use a fatso or something like that. You could use something more . . .you could do anything.

Again, if you want to put a distortion, if your drums are too . . .if they need some little . . .hold on what is this? Of course I don’t have all my plug-ins here. It doesn’t really work. Okay let’s see this thing here. They need to get if they are too sleepy and you need to make them a bit more alive. That’s your regular and then you go like.