How To

TL;DR A split sheet is a one-page agreement that records who wrote what percentage of a song. Sign it the day the song is finished. It applies only to the composition (publishing), not the master recording. Typical producer split ranges from 20 to 50% depending on whether they wrote the melody and lyrics or just the beat. Every producer eventually makes a song with a writer, a vocalist, or another producer. The day that song blows up on Spotify, the question "who owns what percentage of the songwriting" becomes a legal problem, a friendship problem, and a money problem all...

TL;DR AI vocals have three tells: digital wobble on sustained notes, stiff breath-free phrasing, and metallic sibilance. Fix them with Melodyne pitch drift cleanup, a layered real breath track, and aggressive de-essing. Then stack one real vocal layer underneath if you can. That single real layer changes everything. Suno v5 and Udio sound better than ever. They still have tells. If you listen to 50 AI-generated songs in a row, you start hearing the same artifacts: an odd plastic-y quality on long notes, phrases that land a hair too perfectly, sibilance that sounds slightly metallic. This guide walks through exactly...

TL;DR Target -14 LUFS integrated for Spotify, -16 for Apple Music, -14 for YouTube, -14 for TikTok. Don't over-master: Spotify turns you down anyway. Keep vocals at -6 to -4 LUFS momentary above the instrumental. True peak below -1 dBTP. Mix at 85dB SPL if you can. Mixing a vocal in 2026 isn't the same job it was even five years ago. The streaming platforms normalize loudness, so cranking the master limiter doesn't make your song louder than anyone else's. What it does is crush your dynamics and kill your vocal presence. This guide walks through the loudness targets for...

TL;DR Delay is the most underrated vocal effect. Slapback (80 to 120ms) for intimacy. Dotted eighth for pop and EDM energy. Ping pong for space. Tempo-sync everything. High-pass at 300Hz, low-pass at 8kHz on the return. Use it on a send, not an insert. Reverb gets all the attention, but delay is what makes a vocal sound wide, rhythmic, and alive. U2's entire sound is delay. Billie Eilish's intimate ASMR vocals: slapback delay. Every modern pop chorus that feels big without feeling washed out: delay. This guide covers the five delay types you actually use on vocals, the settings that...

TL;DR De-essing is compression on a narrow frequency band. Target 5 to 9kHz for most vocals. Threshold should only catch the harshest S sounds, not every sibilant. Use 3 to 6dB of reduction. Split-band mode beats broadband every time. And fix the mic/performance first if you can. A great vocal with harsh sibilance sounds painful on headphones, amateur on earbuds, and unusable on small speakers. De-essing is the fix. Done right, the listener never notices it happened. Done wrong, the vocal loses life and every "s" sounds like a whispered "th." This guide walks through what de-essing actually is, the...

TL;DR Anything composed before 1930 is generally public domain in the US (as of 2026, works from 1930 just entered the public domain). This includes most traditional folk, blues, classical, and gospel standards. You can cover, remix, and release these without a mechanical license. Heads up: public domain covers record arrangements of existing commercial recordings, not the composition itself. Most cover songs require a mechanical license (around $15 + per-stream royalties). Public domain songs don't. That means zero licensing paperwork, zero ongoing royalty splits to the original writer, and full ownership of your arrangement. For DJs, producers, and remix artists,...