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Year in Review: Our Favourite Posts From 2023
It’s been another big year over here at LANDR!
We’re so proud to be here covering everything new and cool in music tech, theory, promotion and beyond!
This year has been a big deal for music production—with AI technology, and questions about ethics in AI music production increasingly entering the forefront, there was a lot to discuss this year.
We published over 120 articles this year, across a variety of topics.
Explore any of the categories we have, you’ll find tons of fresh ideas and articles covering everything you need to know about music making.
Like any year, there’s always a few articles that stand out to us—articles that were fun to write, covered important topics and resonated with our readers.
So, to wrap the year with a final fanfare, here are eight posts that stood out to us in 2023!
1. How to Master an Album With Mastering Plugins
If you haven’t heard, LANDR launched its biggest product in recent years—LANDR Mastering Plugin.
In tandem with this huge new plugin, we created a ton of mastering content, with a special focus on mastering in the DAW and using AI mastering in the music production workflow.
In this article, we focussed on album mastering techniques using AI mastering plugins, highlighting how effect AI mastering can be for both mastering tracks and albums.
It also showcased how mixing can work in tandem with mastering when using an AI mastering plugin.
2. The 8 Best Music Charities to Support This Giving Tuesday
Amidst the hustle and bustle of the holiday deals season, we decided to take a moment to focus on something a bit bigger than plugins, sales and deals.
On Giving Tuesday we rounded up our favorite music charities.
The spirit of Giving Tuesday—suggests we take a moment to take a step back from consumerism and instead focus the causes we care about.
That’s why it was so nice to highlight some well-deserving charities and organizations that support aspiring musicians in need.
The reality is that music-making is not accessible to everyone.
That’s why supporting these charities that encourage diversity in music, create opportunities for producers and offer resources and tools to economically disadvantaged musicians is so important.
If you feel like supporting music-related charity, check out this article!
3. Nurturing Mental Health in Your Music Journey
In October word mental health day was an important date we wanted to recognize.
In this article we discussed the reasons why musicians need to think about their mental health as they go through their music journey.
The music industry can be sometimes be a difficult place to thrive for many reasons, so it was important highlight a number of ways producers and musicians can incorporate mental health into their music production practice.
If you’re looking for some soothing ways to take the stress out of your music creation life, this a nice article to check out!
4. Double Tracking: How to Thicken Vocals and Instruments
Vocals were a big theme for the LANDR Blog in 2023, so much so that we added an entire category dedicated to the subject.
Double tracking is a particularly interesting topic when it comes to vocals, it’s a such an important way of adding depth and subtle natural sounding chorus to a vocal part.
It’s also done when tracking guitars, since many artists similarly like the warmth and subtle chorus of a double-tracked guitar part.
This article dives into a handful of tips, tricks and tools for producing well-aligned vocal and guitar doubles.
5. AI in Music: 6 Tech Tools Changing How Musicians Create
It’s no secret that AI was a huge topic in 2023. So of course, AI in music production was also at the forefront of thought in the music industry.
AI tools are already a big part of music making—especially mastering, tape emulation, vocal production and even creation tools.
Chances are strong that we’ll increasingly see AI used in more and more facets of music production—whether the AI is a co-pilot or creating the music entirely on its own.
In this article, we unpacked the best tech tools that incorporate AI into music production workflows.
If you’re curious about bringing AI into your music-making process, this is a good read.
6. How to Make House Music: House Production & Mixing Explained
We love to discuss the nitty gritty aspects of making specific genres—every genre has its nuances, so if you’re looking to make a certain style of track its good to know them.
Whether it’s trap, EDM, trance or lo-fi—looking at the finer points of different genres is always fun.
In this article, I dove into some of the basic ideas that go into house music production such as instrumentation, arrangement, chord choices, drum patterns and sound design.
If house music production is something that interests you, check this article out!
7. AI Vocals: The 6 Best Vocal AI Plugins and Tools in 2023
If there’s any topic that’s the most controversial in the music industry right now it might be AI vocals.
With deepfake AI tools getting better and better at reproducing convincing emulations of real human voices, a lot of questions and concerns about the ethics of this technology have arisen.
In music, major artists are becoming concerned about the use of their vocals in non-approved productions. Like we saw with the AI-Drake hit that briefly went viral.
Some artists, like Grimes, for example have embraced the technology, selling AI-licenses of her voice to artists and fans looking to produce tracks with her voice.
So far, streaming platforms have not been open to allowing these tunes to hit their stores—but we’re sure to see more and more tunes being made with AI vocals.
Aside from the obvious use case of using AI to produce vocals of famous artists, there are also applications as tools to help in music production, this article covers a few of these.
AI vocals will continue to be a big discussion in 2024, but for now if you’re interested in all the new AI vocal tools out there take a look through this article.
8. 12 Essential Drum Rudiments Every Drummer Needs to Know
As a drummer, I had fun writing this one. Drum rudiments are such an important part of learning and producing good drum parts.
They truly form much of the vocabulary drummers use when writing drum fills and grooves.
In this article I talk about some of the most important drum rudiments, why I think they’re so important and I discuss some creative ways to use them around the drum kit.
If you’re curious about adding drum rudiment skills to your chops in 2024, this is a great article.
See you in 2024
The LANDR Blog isn’t going anywhere in 2024, you can count on us to be here covering everything at the forefront of music production.
So keep up to date with all our great content and come back soon?
We can’t wait to see what’s next in music production and we can’t wait to see what producers are going to make this new year.
Have a great holiday and best of luck this new year!
Alex Lavoie works as a staff writer at LANDR by day and writes indie post-punk tunes in his band UTILS while moonlighting as drummer for folk-rock outfit The Painters.
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