Original subtitles

So what is a reference song? What is a reference track?

Just in case you're not quite sure on this, a reference song, make a reference

track or a ref is a completed song by another artist that you use to guide your

decision making as you produce, mix, master, or otherwise finish.

Your particular song, a great reference track, ideally covers 4 main criteria,

which I'll cover in more depth in an upcoming video, but here's a little

preview. First of all, it's going to be high

quality, meaning it was professionally made.

And you might have it as a high quality lossless file format like WAVE AIF, or if

you're using a lossy compressed format, at least a and twenty kilobits per second

mp three or a two hundred and fifty six kilobits per second AAC encoded file.

Also, you want your ref to be in the same genre as your track and also the same

era, the same time period.

It definitely helps if your ref is

popular. And that way, the proof is in the

pudding. You know it's a decent target to aim for.

And finally, aim to use reference songs that you personally like a lot.

Songs that you love.

If you nail all four of these criteria,

you're going to have a perfect reference song.

In Lesson 4, How to Choose Reference Tracks.

I go into much more depth on these topics, but that should get you started.

Now why should you use reference songs? Well, Simply put, reference songs.

Which again, should sound awesome to begin with.

They serve as goal posts for your music.

You probably know by now that song

creation is a difficult process.

It's a subjective art form with limitless

possibilities, right? If you don't have a benchmark, everything

can take a lot longer and you'll have a harder time determining when you're done.

Also, using rough songs is going to help your song sound good next to other songs

that people are listening to.

Nowadays, with streaming being so common,

it's more important than ever to make sure your song doesn't jump out in a bad

way. When added to a playlist, for example,

you ideally want your track to sound good or better than the last song that was

played. Now, mixing mixing is probably the most

common time and place to use reference songs here.

Using a reference song will help you engineer your music much faster and with

more confidence, which is great.

When you're mixing music in isolation,

meaning you're not comparing your song with a reference, it's common to lose the

plot of what's happening and get stuck and just fuss with things without knowing

if you're actually making improvements.

What do I mean by this?

Well, for example, it's common to be thinking to yourself while you're mixing.

How much high end is too much or too little?

How much sub should there be? How wide should I be making this?

Is the snare loud enough? Too loud?

I don't know.

So these are all questions that can be

really confusing to answer, especially as your ears get tired and you lose

perspective on what's good.

So a reference mix will help keep your

ears as objective and as fresh as possible and hopefully help settle some

of these tricky areas.

So in other words, what I'm getting at is

that ref songs give you a new perspective on your music, which is totally

invaluable. Especially if your room isn't perfectly

acoustically treated, which, let's be honest, that's super common.

That's most of us.

So ref songs help mitigate that issue as

well. Again, because ref songs give you a goal,

you're going to mix actively and more accurately and not just guess or settle

for something that sounds okay on its own, but actually sounds terrible or not

so great out in the real world.

Now production is another area where ref

songs come in handy.

Refs can also aid in the production

realm, especially for beginners.

I always recommend using reference songs

because they can help you identify what your song is lacking in terms of

instrumentation especially, but also affects song structure and other things

too. So for example, if you think your song is

done but then you start mixing and you get the feeling that something is off,

using a reference song can help you focus on what's missing.

Or it can kind of highlight the fact that you've added too many things, because a

really common beginner mistake is to add too many sounds, clutter up the

arrangement, and make it very challenging to mix.

Reference songs can often help you kind of pare things down just to the

essentials and make mixing and mastering a whole lot easier.

Also, there's a ton that you can learn from analyzing a song you love and want

to mimic. For example, you can start with a

reference song. And use its sound, design, arrangement,

etcetera as inspiration for your own song.

Then at the mixing stage, you can compare elements like mix width, compression,

loudness, saturation, and it's all going to be very applicable because you've been

mimicking that original reference song.

In general, this is more of an exercise

and not exactly what this course is about, and it's definitely not what you

should always be doing as an artist.

You don't want to get locked into just

copying other people.

But looking at another song for roduction

ideas can be a really effective way to improve your song quickly and

effectively. O that's the essence of using reference

songs. Next, let's hone in on common problems

that can arise when you're using reference songs.