Today is my birthday! Whoo!

I was originally going to schedule this to go out at 5:20 am because that's the time I was born.

But then I realized, that's GMT time and I'm in Arizona on MST which is 7-8 hours behind.

So that would've meant it would've gone out on Sunday night.

And that wouldn't even have been my birthday here!

So instead, I just sent it at 9 am :(

Friggin' timezones....ugh. Way to ruin the party.

Anyways, I wanted to give you some quick hard-hitting tips to get you started for the week.

If you want to change it up the next time you're producing a new song, here's some advice:

• If you only record in mono, try out some new stereo techniques.
• If you have two singers that harmonize well together, try to record them together to get their phrasings perfect.
• Spend time making sure all your recordings are in phase. Record a snippet, play it back. Check out the waveform. Rinse. Repeat until great.
• If you always mix all faders up, try the top-down approach.
• If you only use condensers on vocals, try out a dynamic and see how it sounds.
• If you’ve never tried recording drums with one mic, next session is your chance.
• If you always use compression a certain way, throw that mental block away and approach it from a different perspective.
• Try different plug-ins.
• Try limiting yourself to only four plug-ins.
• Play around with all those scary modulation plug-ins you never touch.
• Try to use only one reverb on a mix.
• Close your eyes when you're moving the mic around and concentrate on how it sounds, not how it looks.
• If you're both the musician and the engineer, get a buddy to hit record so you can focus on playing the instrument.
• Get real feedback from real musicians and engineers on your mixes and recordings. Your friends will love whatever you do, don't trust them.
• Don't think that using two mics means it has to be stereo. Combining two mic characters can give you a sound with more depth. It doesn't have to be panned and in stereo.
• Reference your mixes on multiple monitors.
• Start your mix with the vocal before you add anything else into the mix.
• Simplify, simplify, simplify. Both in your recordings AND your mixes.

If that last one struck a chord it's because I yammer on about it all the time.

It's also a big part of my video "Visualizing and Simplifying Your Mix" that teaches you how to know where your mix is going to end before you even start playing around with it.

It struck a chord with Ernie Smith, a Mixing Strategies customer:

“I usually used to just start a mix and ‘see where it’s going’. Now I spend some time deciding on what is best for the song…it has really caused me to ask the right questions before and while mixing.” -Ernie Smith

If you want to join Ernie, and over 2,000 other engineers that I've helped get better recordings and mixes now is your chance.

My 30% birthday discount ends TONIGHT so make sure you grab the Strategies Bundle before then:

www.audio-issues.com/strategies