Almost everyone gets these 10 things completely backward!
This video explores 10 counterintuitive concepts in audio production, mixing, mastering, and beyond—things that seem like you should do the opposite of what actually works best. The host explains why our initial instincts are often wrong and demonstrates the correct approach through practical examples, from lighting techniques to stereo imaging strategies.
1. More Light Creates Darker, Moodier Scenes 💡
The first example comes from the world of film and video lighting, which inspired this entire video. It seems logical that if you want a scene to look dark and moody—like a dimly lit pub with candlelight—you'd need less light, right? But that's actually backward.
In reality, you need more light to create darkness and mood. The host demonstrates this live by turning off his key light, making the room physically darker. But when he boosts the camera's brightness to compensate, the result looks washed out, weird, and not moody at all.
"If you want something to look darker and moodier, you actually need more light."
The proper technique involves using a brighter, more focused light pointed directly at the subject, which creates contrast by leaving the background darker. This contrast is what gives you that moody, dramatic look. When the host brings his key light closer and brighter, the background naturally falls into shadow, creating the desired cinematic effect.
2. Turn Drums Down to Make Them Fatter 🥁
This is a classic mixing principle that confuses many beginners. If you want your drums to sound bigger and fatter in your mix, the instinct is to turn them up. But the opposite approach often works better: turn them down selectively with a compressor.
This technique involves using compression to reduce the loudest peaks of the drum sounds, which creates more perceived body and fullness. By controlling the dynamic range—bringing down the loudest parts—you can then bring up the overall level, resulting in a fatter, more powerful drum sound.
The host mentions that many people already know this one, but for those who don't, he recommends checking out his free compression course on YouTube, which he considers one of the best resources available on the topic.
3. Record Farther Away to Sound Closer 🎤
When you want a vocal to sound intimate and close, the natural instinct is to get right up on the microphone—almost eating it—in a completely dry vocal booth. But this approach usually backfires, resulting in a muffled, weird, unnatural sound.
Paradoxically, vocals often sound more intimate when you:
- Record with the microphone a bit further away
- Use a dry room (not a bathroom or reflective space)
- Add room reverb in post-production
"Making the microphone further away and adding room reverb actually gives it a context and it might actually sound closer."
This seems completely backward since reverb typically makes things sound farther away. But the host is talking about a specific type of room-based reverb that provides psychoacoustic cues. When done correctly without overdoing it, this technique gives the listener's brain the spatial context needed to perceive the vocal as close and present, rather than just muffled.
4. Reduce Highs to Increase Brightness ✨
This is one of the most common mixing mistakes. When you want to make something brighter in the mix—especially vocals with that hyped-up radio sound—the obvious move is to boost the highs with a high-shelf EQ. But this often creates a thin, harsh, grating sound with excessive sibilance.
"You first have to reduce the dynamic range of those frequencies in the high end, selectively turning them down before you can then turn everything back up. And then you get that fat sound with loads of bass and also loads of highs without sounding thin."
The problem is that vocals have very dynamic high frequencies—the "S" sounds and other sibilants jump out much louder than the rest. When you naively boost the entire top end, you're amplifying these already-loud moments, assaulting the listener's ears.
The proper technique involves:
- Reducing the dynamic range of high frequencies first (using a dynamic EQ or multiband compressor)
- Selectively turning down the peaks
- Then boosting the overall high end
This gives you that bright, airy, radio-quality sound without the harshness. The host also notes that achieving that specific radio sound actually requires distortion on the higher frequencies, typically applied through parallel processing.
5. Turn Sub Down to Increase Sub Presence 🔊
To make something sound subbier, the instinct is to boost the sub frequencies. But this approach has a fundamental problem: many speakers simply can't reproduce sub frequencies effectively—especially smaller speakers like the ones visible on the host's desk.
If you keep cranking up the sub frequencies on systems that can't reproduce them, you're:
- Creating ineffectual changes
- Generating distortion
- Running out of headroom
The better approach is to create harmonics slightly higher up in the frequency spectrum. These harmonics provide psychoacoustic cues that allow listeners to extrapolate and perceive stronger sub frequencies, even when they're not really there or are very weak on the playback system. This technique helps your mix translate better across different listening environments.
6. Add Noise to Increase Dynamic Range 🎬
This technique is particularly relevant in post-production for film but applies equally to music production. When you want to make silence sound more dramatic, the counterintuitive solution is to add background noise instead of cutting to complete silence.
"Although adding subtle background noise theoretically reduces the dynamic range over just cutting to straight silence, it actually increases the perceptual dynamic range."
Here's why this works:
The problem with pure silence: The dynamic range shift is so large that your ears need to physically adjust through muscular movements, which are relatively slow. This creates an unnatural effect rather than a dramatic one.
Why adding noise helps: Room tone is generally always present in our natural environment, and we subconsciously filter it out. So adding subtle background noise:
- Doesn't perceptually reduce the dynamic range
- Prevents the muscular clamping down of our ears
- Sounds more natural
- Creates a more dramatic impact with technically less dynamic range
This is highly counterintuitive but effective when you try it in practice.
7. Remove to Add Energy 🎵
This principle applies both at the compositional stage and as a powerful mixing technique: taking something away can actually add more energy to your music.
The host's favorite example is "Royal" by Deftones from the album Diamond Eyes. He can't play it due to copyright, but describes what happens after the three-minute mark:
"After Chino's Epic Scream, there's a sustained keyboard layer, and they're just repeating the riff, and there's this keyboard layer going on, and there's a drum fill, and then they just start playing the same riff again, exactly the same as before, but it's way more intense, and it gets heavier, and it gets darker, and it gets more massive."
The only thing they did compositionally was remove the keyboard layer. This creates incredible intensity through subtraction rather than addition.
The host has used this technique extensively in his own work, including his album Vicarious Memories (a collaboration with another artist). He also points to Portishead's album Third as an excellent example, particularly the song "We Carry On."
This demonstrates how space and contrast can be more powerful than continuously layering sounds.
8. Turn Down to Make Louder 📻
This is a classic mixing pitfall. When something in your mix sounds buried and not present enough, but feels like it's technically at the right level, the instinct is to turn up the fader. But turning it up is often the wrong choice.
"The actual problem is not level. The solution therefore is not turning it up. The problem is competition."
The real issue: Other elements in the mix are competing for the same frequency range, creating masking that makes the buried element less prominent even though it's loud enough.
Solutions can be compositional or technical:
Compositional approaches:
- Rewrite the part so the element you want to hear comes through better
- Space out notes
- Remove or reduce competing elements
Mixing approaches:
- Pan sounds differently so they're not stacked on top of each other
- Thin out frequencies in competing elements
- Use side-chain compression to create space
A classic example is the kick drum and bassline relationship. By putting a compressor on the bassline and using the kick drum as a side-chain source, you can duck the bass when the kick hits. Since the kick is mainly transient and the bass is sustained, this allows both elements to be heard clearly without competing for the same sonic space.
The host again recommends his free compression course for more creative applications of side-chaining and compression techniques that aren't commonly taught elsewhere.
9. Stereo Widening Makes Your Mix Narrow 🎧
This is the longest and most controversial point in the video. It's trendy nowadays to have a really wide stereo image, but the host believes the best way to achieve a big, fat, massive, lush stereo image is to not widen the stereo image using typical widening techniques.
"Widening the stereo image often times makes it sound narrower."
The Problem with Fake Stereo Widening
As a mastering engineer, the host receives mixes that cave in when played in mono. Elements disappear or develop weird phaser-like artifacts. When he points this out, artists often dismiss it by saying people use headphones now and mono doesn't matter—but this is wrong.
"Mono is very important even nowadays, even perhaps more so than it was in the 80s... If you want your mix to sound massive in a club and translate on the widest amount of systems possible, you need a very solid mono compatibility. Mono compatibility must be king in a mix. And stereo should be the cherry on top kind of thing."
What creates fake stereo: You can take a mono sound, flip the polarity of one channel, and suddenly it becomes "super stereo." But this sounds weird—like your ears have popped on an airplane or you've gone through a tunnel. It's a strange psychoacoustic effect that doesn't sound good.
When you look at a stereo image analyzer, this fake stereo shows up as energy going out to the sides rather than up and down (which represents mono content). Anything coming out to the sides will disappear or be dramatically reduced when you hit the mono button, causing your mix to crumble.
"But it doesn't even sound good in the first place. That's the thing. When people listen to this super like wide kind of fake stereo stuff, they think, 'Oh, wow. It's so wide. It sounds so good.' No, it doesn't. It sounds bad. It doesn't sound lush and nice. It sounds strange and broken in a bad way."
The Right Way to Create Impressive Stereo Width
The solution is to use contrast and understand human perception:
- Keep most elements focused down the center in mono
- Occasionally have elements pan off to the sides
- Use transient stereo movement for effect
Why this works:
- 100% mono compatible: When you combine two channels into mono, panned elements still work perfectly
- You can even pan bass frequencies slightly (the host references his track "These Moments Dismantled by These Hidden Hands" which features panned bass sine waves)
- Contrast creates perception: When you go from narrow to wide, you hear that movement and expansion
"If you default to a skinny, narrow, mono center and then transiently pan stuff off to the sides... but also if you're here and then you go there, now it's big because it's it's gone bigger, right? There's contrast there. You've heard you were here and now you're here."
Creating Dynamic Stereo Movement
The stereo image shouldn't be static. It should move and breathe:
- A verse might be narrow and focused
- The chorus opens up wide with stereo synth pads, delays, reverbs, or doubling
- This movement creates perceived width through contrast
Using stereo synths, pads, reverbs, and delays that are genuinely stereo (not just out-of-phase) and that are mono compatible will sound lusher when they come in during the chorus. This is far more effective than having a super-wide, swirly sound that plays throughout the entire song, which just sounds defocused—like your eyes are glazed over with no focus point.
"Your stereo image is technically on paper very wide throughout the duration of the track, but that means that it's psycho acoustically narrow because it's just defocused and you're not getting that effect. The effect is caused by contrast going from the the skinny to the wide."
The host acknowledges this viewpoint might trigger people who advocate for out-of-phase sounds and widening plugins to achieve the widest possible stereo image and loudest possible master. But he considers this approach nonsense—it's about being more intelligent in composition and mixing rather than just slapping plugins on everything.
10. The Cobra Effect 🐍
For the final counterintuitive and controversial concept, the host announces it's called the Cobra Effect—but to learn what it is, you'll need to visit his new channel!
This leads to the big announcement: the host has finally launched his long-awaited side channel called "Smoke and Speculation", which focuses on finance and trading. He's been threatening to start this for a while, and now it's live with the first video already uploaded about the Cobra Effect.
What to Expect on Smoke and Speculation
The new channel will cover:
- Making money and financial strategies
- Trading stocks and options
- His thoughts on real estate
- Tax strategies
- Digital nomadism
- Business topics
- Whether Andrew Tate's Hustlers University is a scam
- Whether stock trading and forex gurus on YouTube are scam artists
- The price of gold
- Best stocks to buy
- Index funds and dividends
- Options trading strategies: futures, strangles, straddles, iron condors, verticals, jade lizards (and humorously, "Batman and seagulls")
- Advanced concepts like gamma scalping, delta hedging, vega crushing
"Well then you should definitely subscribe to my new channel, Smoke and Speculation."
Final Thoughts
The host mentions he'll keep audio content on this channel and finance content on the new channel, maintaining clear separation between the two topics. He notes that he's uploaded the first video about the Cobra Effect but will wait to see if people subscribe before uploading more content. So if you want to see that "juicy content," subscribing to the new channel is essential.
Throughout this video, the common thread connecting all 10 counterintuitive concepts is the importance of contrast, perception, and technical understanding over simply applying more of what seems obvious. Whether it's lighting, compression, stereo imaging, or frequency management, the best results often come from doing the opposite of what our initial instincts suggest. 🎵✨
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