This is a guest post by Splice, a ReverbNation Marketplace participant. Expand your sound with access to over 2 million samples, loops, FX, and presets. Start today with a 1-month free trial to Splice Sounds.

Back in the day, the ability to read sheet music was essential for composing, performing, and analyzing Western music.

The rise in popularity of alternative notations such as MIDI and tablature has changed this notion, expanding notation to be more idiomatic for musicians across different walks. That said, staff notation still remains as a universal standard, a common language that can be shared between any two musicians.

For this reason, even if you produce great music using solely MIDI scrolls, it never hurts to be able to read sheet music – one day you might have to transcribe a piano part to have it recorded by a pianist, and you wouldn’t want to have to learn for the first time then! This article will provide you a series of tips, tricks, and mnemonic devices to kickstart your ability to quickly identify some key aspects of a piece of music written in sheet notation. We’ll go through three cheat codes at three difficulty levels, spanning tricks helpful for absolute beginners as well as seasoned sheet music readers.

There is no single method or secret ingredient in the process for making good music. Things like years of experience and lots of familiarity with any given songwriting process can be just as beneficial—or detrimental—as sitting down with an instrument without much musical training. Because every songwriter’s process is a complex mosaic of things like natural musical intuition, experience, and musical philosophy, pinpointing and imitating what songwriting approaches prop up great music isn’t always helpful or even possible to do.

This is a guest post by Splice, a ReverbNation Marketplace participant. Expand your sound with access to over 2 million samples, loops, FX, and presets. Start today with a 1-month free trial to Splice Sounds.

There’s no right or wrong way to approach mixing, but there are some workflow basics that can help you be more productive at the process.

This guide to mixing is for the producer who struggles with what to do when tasked with a mix, or for anyone who wants to be a professional mixer one day.

In this first post of the series, we take a look at four steps you can take to prepare for a mix.