Music tips

For EDM particularly, you’ll want to balance the bass and the kick as early as possible. The lower end is SO important in dance music, and if these elements aren’t working at the very beginning, your mix will suffer as a result.

As mentioned before, bass frequencies take up a lot of headroom in the mix. If you have a particular bass line, see if you can cut out any notes not needed. This is a general rule of thumb for the whole mix. James Wiltshire from The Freemasons once told me that every single element should be fulfilling a specific role, and if it’s not it should be removed. You’ll get a louder, cleaner mix in the end.

If you have a Reverb, Delay or other effects assigned auxiliary sends, make sure there aren’t rogue frequencies on these channels by using an EQ. You can even side-chain your aux channels slightly to create space in the mix (see number 14).

There’s a really cool feature in Music settings that automatically downloads any song that you add to your library. Go to Settings -> Music and turn on Automatic Downloads.

Any song that you can stream, you can download. If you want to download a song or an album, first tap the “+” button. Then the button will change to a download button. Tap that and the download will start.

Beats 1 Shows are a great way to discover new music. But they’re live only 2-3 times in a day. If the schedule doesn’t work out for you, don’t worry. As long as you’re an Apple Music subscriber, you can go back and listen to older Beats 1 episodes on demand. Go to the Radio tab, and then tap on Shows. Explore the shows from here.

Apple Music is the only streaming service on iOS with deep integration with Siri. You should take advantage of that. This is a really useful feature especially when you’re traveling. If you’re using an iPhone 6s or higher, you can use the Hey Siri command to activate Siri without even touching your phone. So you can say things like “Hey Siri, play some Beatles” or “Hey Siri, play my work out playlist”.

By default, Apple Music doesn’t stream high quality music, in order to conserve bandwidth. If that’s not a concern for you, turn on High Quality Streaming option from Settings -> Music -> Mobile Data.

Google Maps has an in-built Music playback control which helps to control the music of your favorite music streaming service without leaving the app. Now YouTube Music users can take advantage of it. It will not be available by default, but you can set it up from the Google Maps settings. But this feature is not available for the free version of YouTube Music, you need to get a YouTube Music premium plan.

If you want to find the name of the song you are listening to, you can just ask Google Assistant ”What song is this?”. Google Assistant will start listening to the song and gives you the song name along with a bit more description. But if you are a YouTube Music user, you can directly add that song to any of your existing playlists or even create a new playlist.