There's this brilliant book on producing and mixing called "Mixing with Your Mind" and it has a lot of different and interesting ideas.

There's this one chapter called "Gravity & It's Effect on Music."

In the first part of the chapter it sounds like he's just talking out of his ass, so he related the topic back to an experience he had with students he was teaching. It read like this:

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What I would do is play the students a basic rhythm track without any effects. I'd then put a digital delay on the snare drum coming back at unity gain. The delay was adjustable from one millisecond to one second and each student would take turns picking a delay that they thought suited what they were hearing. No one was adjusting the balance, the EQ, or anything else, just the timing delay of a single slap DDL on the snare. We would then record 10 seconds of each selection onto a two track tape. Ten students later, we'd have a 100-second mix with a different snare DDL every 10 seconds. I'd play the tape and have students vote on which one they liked the best. The votes would always be scattered around a handful of the delays - there might be four favorites while the others wouldn't get a look in. People generally made their choices based on maths(how well the timing seemed to fit with the rhythm) and based on some context of what texture should be like on the snare. Fine, no surprises there. After the first round of 'intellectual' voting it was time to introduce the students to the impact of gravity. I asked each person in the class to pick up something fairly heavy like a phone book or a two-inch tape etc and start moving it in the air in time with the music. Then I asked them to forget about there personal preference but, instead, to simply tell me which delay setting makes the weight in their hands feel lighter. Suddenly, the voting narrowed down to one or two delay choices. By taking the 'left brain' out of the equation, the students were able to let Gravity lead the way and listen with 'Producer's Ears', not subjective ears. The results surprised many but were without doubt conclusive. Now that's listening with Producer's Ears!

I would revisit the chapter from time to time just to see if I could get a different perspective on it. At first I thought he was talking about swing, but he was talking about a certain state of listening.

Eventually I figured out what the swinging of the phone book really was: it was dancing. Dancing is essential the same thing as swinging around a heavy phone book, except its your body.

If you sit there making a tune, sitting there relatively still, its different than trying to move a certain part of your body in time with the music.

Next time you make a track, before you say its finished try to dance through the entire thing. Things that sounded good initially, might stick out at you now and you'll want to take them out or move them around. Or you might say, "Wow, this is really shitty. I was just bullshitting myself the entire time thinking this was great."

Great dance tracks make it extremely easy to dance.

If you don't know how to dance, just step from side to side.

This vid tut is for Kysora:

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Originally posted by dj_alfi change your avatar for fucks sake.