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Audacity has the same problem as the GIMP which has the same problem as Inkscape: they just need to completely duplicate the interface, hotkeys, functionality and interoperability of Sound Forge, Photoshop, and Illustrator and stop shouting that "this way is better". No, it's not, if you want to win several million souls, duplicate, don't innovate.
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May 4, 2008 23:20
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I think it's the fact that most developers like that are huge neckbeards and actually enjoy making things hard to use because it makes them feel superior or something. I don't use what I use because it's "more powerful" than anything else, I use it because it's a loving cinch to do whatever I want to do. It's the same reason I think doing analogue mixing is crap--I don't WANT to have to scrounge around for "engage" buttons, make sure I'm on the right path, recheck my patchbay, and wonder what the hell is going on if I'm not getting any sound. Your software wins because it's easy to use, not because it's got some advertised endless list of features that most people don't care about anyway. Especially if you're not the one with the biggest slice of the pie.
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May 4, 2008 23:43
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Yoozer posted:Audacity has the same problem as the GIMP which has the same problem as Inkscape: They are tiny things (and ones which are easily fixed) but they make such a huge difference. The decision not to allow you to zoom and make selections in Soundforge 9.0 at the same time is the type of thing that make me think: 'wow, the people who approved of these changes don't use their own programs very much huh?' I can live without the extra functionality they added in later versions (like VST plugin compatibility). I suppose its the same with GIMP but I could live with that because its free. Soundforge is pretty drat expensive. I'm all for innovation and added functionality but if you are going to gently caress with whats already there and working, I'd much rather have someone do it that actually uses the software every day. That way, stuff like this won't get approved. I don't think its a deliberate attempt to make their software different or make it stand out from the crowd since even marketting CEOs should be able to understand that standing out because it sucks is not a good way to sell a product. I do think the people that made these changes don't use Soundforge very often though.
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May 5, 2008 00:04
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Ive been djing at the hobby level (making my own mixes, playing house parties) on my lovely dell laptop running traktor for a little while, but it stutters and crashes and I want to run ableton, so this summer I'll be upgrading to a 2.1ghz macbook with 4 gigs of ram. I think this will be plenty to run ableton for DJing problems-free, but I'm also into producing. I've fiddled with Ableton for production and its ok but a bit weird, and I've heard it isnt the best for sound quality (just hearsay, I think I read JFK saying it on the MSTRKRFT message board) and I was thinking of using Logic. Can this macbook run both programs cleanly? Not at the same time mind you, just at all. I'm worried I wont have enough hard drive space for both, never mind processor power. A second computer is an option, but I'd rather just use the one macbook. Sorry if this is dumb, I've never used macs and am not sure what they are capable of, and my PC laptops have always run badly when theres too much crap on them
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May 5, 2008 04:18
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Terrible Horse posted:Ive been djing at the hobby level (making my own mixes, playing house parties) on my lovely dell laptop running traktor for a little while, but it stutters and crashes and I want to run ableton, so this summer I'll be upgrading to a 2.1ghz macbook with 4 gigs of ram. I think this will be plenty to run ableton for DJing problems-free, but I'm also into producing. I've fiddled with Ableton for production and its ok but a bit weird, and I've heard it isnt the best for sound quality (just hearsay, I think I read JFK saying it on the MSTRKRFT message board) and I was thinking of using Logic. Can this macbook run both programs cleanly? Not at the same time mind you, just at all. I'm worried I wont have enough hard drive space for both, never mind processor power. A second computer is an option, but I'd rather just use the one macbook. Sorry if this is dumb, I've never used macs and am not sure what they are capable of, and my PC laptops have always run badly when theres too much crap on them Software doesn't take up much space. It wouldn't matter though since running the program isn't some how ridiculously intensive and if you have a core duo you'll be fine. You probably won't, or at least shouldn't be using Logic and Ableton to perform your songs live without having them be mostly rendered in the first place either. I don't think there's anything you can't do with a Macbook and the right software these days.
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May 5, 2008 04:52
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Terrible Horse posted:I've fiddled with Ableton for production and its ok but a bit weird, and I've heard it isnt the best for sound quality (just hearsay, I think I read JFK saying it on the MSTRKRFT message board) and I was thinking of using Logic. Honestly, this meme is mostly people reacting to the sound of Live's warping algorithms. They're excellent, but the aren't perfect and do leave behind slight artifacts. Live's sound engine itself is excellent and it's very unlikely that anyone could tell the difference between an (unwarped) Live render and a Logic or Pro Tools render.
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May 5, 2008 05:36
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Terrible Horse posted:and I've heard it isnt the best for sound quality (just hearsay, I think I read JFK saying it on the MSTRKRFT message board) Whatever that hearsay was, it was completely made void with version 7 which got a new summing algorithm.
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May 5, 2008 05:58
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Terrible Horse posted:Ive been djing at the hobby level (making my own mixes, playing house parties) on my lovely dell laptop running traktor for a little while, but it stutters and crashes and I want to run ableton, so this summer I'll be upgrading to a 2.1ghz macbook with 4 gigs of ram. I think this will be plenty to run ableton for DJing problems-free, but I'm also into producing. I've fiddled with Ableton for production and its ok but a bit weird, and I've heard it isnt the best for sound quality (just hearsay, I think I read JFK saying it on the MSTRKRFT message board) and I was thinking of using Logic. Can this macbook run both programs cleanly? Not at the same time mind you, just at all. I'm worried I wont have enough hard drive space for both, never mind processor power. A second computer is an option, but I'd rather just use the one macbook. Sorry if this is dumb, I've never used macs and am not sure what they are capable of, and my PC laptops have always run badly when theres too much crap on them Hey I post at the MSTRKRFT message board too. Just for referance, I think JFK was referancing doing his edits with MP3s when it comes to Live. He always uses Waves only when it comes to Ableton because it sounds better, which is common sense. Plus JFK uses all hardware stuff, and of course Live isn't the prime program to use when it comes to recording. Live is all about VSTs, built in instruments, and MIDI control.
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May 5, 2008 06:07
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So basically theres no advantage to Logic over Live? Great, one less thing to get. But if youre DJing with Live, you have to warp your tracks. Are the transients just not noticable? I've heard lots of Ableton sets, both live and recorded, and I never noticed any.
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May 5, 2008 06:09
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Long story short, there isn't any difference in the inherent audio quality between different DAWs. The quality of the EQs, effects, timestretching and so on can certainly vary, but of course you don't have to use the built in stuff if you don't want to.Yoozer posted:Whatever that hearsay was, it was completely made void with version 7 which got a new summing algorithm. Come on man don't give me an aneurysm. Digital summing is literally a plus b plus c equals d. There is no algorithm involved, they search-and-replaced "float" with "double" so that, by their own admission, they could put a bigger number on the box. IanTheM posted:You probably won't, or at least shouldn't be using Logic and Ableton to perform your songs live without having them be mostly rendered in the first place either. This is mind-boggling since that is what Ableton was originally made for and Logic can be a pretty good choice too, depending on your requirements. Also, sure Logic has advantages over Live, like a much better bundle of effects and instruments (and at a lower price than the full Live bundle). Of course it has a different feature set also, which is generally more powerful than Live, but also more complex and of course Live has got some things it doesn't. It just doesn't magically make everything sound better, is all. breaks fucked around with this message at 06:54 on May 5, 2008 |
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May 5, 2008 06:41
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Terrible Horse posted:So basically theres no advantage to Logic over Live? Great, one less thing to get. Well, no. Live is much more live-oriented, and Logic is much more production-oriented. As a result Logic's MIDI editing and sequencing features are much more robust than Live's. For a real world picture of what this means, I find Live's session view to be the best way to sketch out a song but I find the sequencer really limiting for polishing it up and making a finished product. More traditional sequencers, on the other hand, are really well suited for that task.
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May 5, 2008 06:53
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breaks posted:This is mind-boggling since that is what Ableton was originally made for and Logic can be a pretty good choice too, depending on your requirements. I know, but what I'm saying is that sometimes you need to pre-render things when you're playing live so that your processor doesn't get over burdened. I was just mentioning that because he was worried about his computer crashing.
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May 5, 2008 06:55
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Well that's fair enough, though personally I find that nowadays, on one of these speedy laptops, I can run as much stuff as I can conceivably control without any prerendering. I think I am irritable today and I saw the "shouldn't" and got annoyed.
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May 5, 2008 07:02
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Terrible Horse posted:So basically theres no advantage to Logic over Live? Great, one less thing to get. Logic's built-in plugins are of very high quality. You may not hear the difference in the beginning, but once you've reached a certain level you'll start to notice. I used to work mostly with Cubase's built-in stuff, which is mostly crap imo. It's good if you're just starting out, but for proper mixdowns you'll want something with better quality and that's why Logic is so good. Mind you, I'm a Cubase user and love the program, but Logic is better for immediate clean results imho.
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May 5, 2008 08:39
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Ok here's a more theory-based question than is likely necessary for dance tracks, but I've started listening to a lot of electro [house] again and it occurred to me that introducing traditional linear song structure into dance music makes more sense to me than the standard vertical, almost african inspired tradition of minimal and detroit stuff. This strikes me as doubly true when dealing with punk/metal inspired genres like electro. So here's my theory question: I've been working on a composition (standard strings and piano stuff) for my music technology class, and when I met with the professor today he repeatedly made it a point to say that my chord progressions are just flopping around (I'm using 12 bars blues based stuff). I found this vaguely confusing, and when I asked him about it, he told me to examine pop songs and note how all of their progressions "go somewhere." Now, I've been investigating this, and I'm not seeing what he means. Half of the pop songs I've been looking into just loop the same progression (say, I-IV-V7) throughout the whole song, maybe with a slight variation (say V-IV for the chorus). I want to begin working on an electro piece that incorporates pop structure once I get done with this music final, but I'm fearful of the aforementioned flopping. So my question is, in the context of pop music, what does "going somewhere" mean? My professor doesn't seem to be giving me an answer I understand here, so I figured you guys may be able to help. Is it putting the entire song into a I-IV-V structure and modulating it based on what portion you're in (say V (Gmaj) for the intro, I (Cmaj) for the verse, IV (Fmaj) for the bridge, and V (Gmaj) for the chorus), or...? I'm not seeing a ton of modulation in pop songs, and I'm certainly not seeing it in punk, so I can't imagine that's it. Going somewhere can't just be returning to the tonic either, because that is my professor's main complaint with my piece (it returns to the I chord too much, apparently preventing melodic progression). Any help? nah thanks fucked around with this message at 05:25 on May 6, 2008 |
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May 6, 2008 05:22
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squidgee posted:Ok here's a more theory-based question than is likely necessary for dance tracks, but I've started listening to a lot of electro [house] again and it occurred to me that introducing traditional linear song structure into dance music makes more sense to me than the standard vertical, almost african inspired tradition of minimal and detroit stuff. This strikes me as doubly true when dealing with punk/metal inspired genres like electro. So here's my theory question: Modern electro going somewhere? I think a good, and extreme example of this can be Sebastian's Motor. http://youtube.com/watch?v=icQGYbbuhr4&feature=related The progression? Just a disturbing engine-like noise, but the track with the help of the drums and speed that the progression gets cut up grows in intensity. I don't think using 12 bar blues, which is more of a jam method, would work out well in pop. Pop needs to be quick and aggressive, and usually your layering needs to grow. I'm not sure I actually answered everything you mean, since I have a large deficiency in theory but, I think this might be what your professor is talking about. (As in: he meant it more as a 'feel' thing, than a theory one.)
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May 6, 2008 06:12
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IanTheM posted:Modern electro going somewhere? I think a good, and extreme example of this can be Sebastian's Motor. I'm not so much saying that modern electro goes somewhere as it makes sense to me to make it go somewhere. That having been said, I'm 90% sure he's talking from a theory standpoint, but maybe I'm wrong. Regardless, if I try to inject linear structure into electro I'm likely going to go with a simplistic punkish chord progression (a more faster take on I-IV-V, or I-bVI-IV ), not the 12 bar blues. Or I may just pump out power chords with a I-IV-V structure. I was just noting that that was what I was using in the composition my professor is talking about. Granted, I'm also now pushing away from electro house and into the realm of the now 20 some odd year old synthpunk, but you get the gist of where I'm going here. So the question remains: what in God's name does "go somewhere" mean in the context of pop structure? EDIT: Accidently wrote vertical where I meant linear. nah thanks fucked around with this message at 20:23 on May 6, 2008 |
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May 6, 2008 06:32
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squidgee posted:I'm not so much saying that modern electro goes somewhere as it makes sense to me to make it go somewhere. Well, could you post an example of your progression/song so we can get more perspective on where your professor's coming from?
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May 6, 2008 07:40
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To be honest, I am perplexed at what your professor is advising you to do but if it is an academic exercise then so be it. Personally, when you start talking to me about having chord progressions and variations purely for the sake of having them in a song then I start to feel I am listening to pick and mix rather than music. There are more ways in which you can make a song have some sort of focus than what notes or chords are being played. Vibrasphere - Landmark should be testament to that. You can give a song a sense of direction by changing the way you play the same note too - by picking it/strumming it/striking it harder or softer, by transposing sections up or down the keyboard. In synthesis you can change the timbre of the instrument on the fly although if you want to do that it helps to have some idea of where you want to end up and what kind of emotion you want to evoke. Recently, I've taken some pages out of Michael Hedge's book and started to pay alot more attention to the duration of sound and silence in a song whereas before I had this overwhelming tendancy to build up to a wall of 16ths with ping pong delays on seemingly everything. Chord progression does play a big part in creating some sort of response to your music but the above are equally important really. I mention Vibrasphere's Landmark alot because it is a textbook example of how to make 'trance' inducing dance music using essentially a toy (tb-303) and some drum loops. Depite the fact it is endlessly repetitive, there are few points in the song where I feel the same bar is looping twice in a row. It is constantly, growing and evolving in some subtle way and it is sometimes discrete enough to be almost subliminal. The 303 patterns are pretty simple but the filter cutoff and resonance are being modulated throughout the track. Increasing the resonance slowly creates this sense that each 303 lead is slowly rising in pitch despite the notes remaining the same. This is a bit of a trick - they all stay in the same pitch but sweeping a resonant filter amplifies the signal around the filters cutoff so that you can make one of the harmonics temporarily louder than the fundamental and each successive harmonic becomes the loudest pitch reference. There are lots of little details like this that contribute to the overall effect which is. Well, sublimation really. This would be one of those songs where tossing in sudden chord changes and harmony would ruin the effect it is trying to create since you want to put the listener into a hypnotic groove and keep them there. Not take them out of it with some jarring change. In a roundabout way I think I can see what your professor is trying to encourage but there are many many ways to achieve it and they are not mutually exclusive. The way I sort of see verse, chorus, verse pop music is that the listener is kept attentive throughout the verse and they are waiting for the great chorus. Everything is pointing towards and building to the chorus. There may be some sort of bridge or transitional bit which is fleeting, doesnt last long and which you want to be repeated but it doesn't. Then you get to the end of the track and because its short enough you want to listen to it again. Its quite a good formular for hooking people onto some catchy groove but I frankly suck it doing it.
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May 6, 2008 13:42
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breaks posted:Come on man don't give me an aneurysm. Digital summing is literally a plus b plus c equals d. There is no algorithm involved, they search-and-replaced "float" with "double" so that, by their own admission, they could put a bigger number on the box. The summing algo folks are in my lovely opinion a few rungs below the HURRR WE NEEEEED SILVER CABLES WOVEN IN MOONLIGHT BY VIRGINS PS YOUR EARS SUCK but if it makes the complainers shut up, I'm happy. There's also a nice PDF of the Sonar folks explaining how summing is done and that one way is not like the other. It's not -that- straightforward. quote:Also, sure Logic has advantages over Live, like a much better bundle of effects and instruments (and at a lower price than the full Live bundle). The price was only lowered recently and it's offset by the fact that you need to buy a Mac  .quote:It just doesn't magically make everything sound better, is all.
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May 6, 2008 19:04
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Yoozer posted:The summing algo folks are in my lovely opinion a few rungs below the HURRR WE NEEEEED SILVER CABLES WOVEN IN MOONLIGHT BY VIRGINS PS YOUR EARS SUCK but if it makes the complainers shut up, I'm happy. The same people that make those claims about summing algos are the same people that couldn't produce anything worth poo poo in Fruity Loops and console themselves that things will get better for them now because they switched to Cubase. Its easier than coming to the realisation that they dont know what they are doing and need to like, learn stuff. Lots of stuff. And they probably haven't heard of Deadmau5.
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May 6, 2008 19:50
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WanderingKid posted:To be honest, I am perplexed at what your professor is advising you to do but if it is an academic exercise then so be it. Personally, when you start talking to me about having chord progressions and variations purely for the sake of having them in a song then I start to feel I am listening to pick and mix rather than music. This is kind of where I'm lost too. He says I'm flopping around, but I can't for the life of me understand what this means. Maybe I'm just being too repetitious? I haven't a clue. That having been said, the rest of your post was awesomely useful. I typically don't think about altering filter/cutoff values midsong, so I'm going to have to play around with that. quote:The way I sort of see verse, chorus, verse pop music is that the listener is kept attentive throughout the verse and they are waiting for the great chorus. Everything is pointing towards and building to the chorus. There may be some sort of bridge or transitional bit which is fleeting, doesnt last long and which you want to be repeated but it doesn't. Then you get to the end of the track and because its short enough you want to listen to it again. Its quite a good formular for hooking people onto some catchy groove but I frankly suck it doing it. I think this is where I'm having a problem. I don't quite understand how the verse is built to point to the chorus. Maybe I'm looking for theory where this is none, but I can't for the life of me understand it. Pointing via the lyrics? The melody? My piece lacks lyrics right now (which he's forcing to put in, and oh my god I am not good at this), so he can't be talking lyrically. But the pop songs I've been analyzing don't seem to go anywhere musically that points to the chorus: if anything, their verses are just the same three or four chord progression on repeat, with some variation to keep the listener's attention. Maybe I ought to try asking him again and see if I get a more useful response, but through two meetings with him I haven't gotten anything that sheds light on my question.
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May 6, 2008 20:31
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Its mostly a product of synaesthesia but I have a whole bunch of very loose associations to a certain idea or a mood. For instance (and this is purely individual but you may find yourself doing a similar sort of thing): Generally: ascending whole step - climbing, striding forwards. descending whole step - stepping back, falling. ascending half step - reaching, grasping. descending half step - stumbling, tripping. major - bombast. minor - sad, welp. aug - scared, dissonant. lower octaves - weight, forboding. higher octaves - lightness, tiptoeing. silence - void, breath. very loud - somewhere in the front. very quiet - somewhere further back. high velocity - aggressiveness, violence. low velocity - tentativeness, feebleness. low freq/high Q - wetness, rubber, phwoar. low freq/low Q - underwater. (opening frequency - rising to surface) etc etc and so on and so forth. Hopefully you get the idea. Its not a rigidly analytical thing. I just play it a certain way and it evokes some sort of sensation. When I do sound design I take a leaf out of Howard Scarr's book and try to focus on one specific sensation I get from a sound in progress. Then I try find ways to accentuate it to the max. Sometimes this results in me starting with a buzzy but recognisably synthy sort of lead and ends up with me abandoning the song altogether to build a patch that sounds like a sort of killer bee from hell or a sort of...fart. Theres a rather funny preset on the Access Virus synthesizer from Ben Crosland called 'Squeaker' and for lack of a better description it sounds exactly like that sound your arse would make if you reclined back into a taut leather chair. When asked what was going through his head when he made that patch he supposedly said he was just fiddling on something completely unrelated and noticed a certain squeakiness to the sound of it. I mostly try to apply the same sort of logic to song writing even though it is more convoluted and I am more prone to lose track of what direction I want to go in. Just as a sort of exercise, take a listen to the soundtrack for the movie Kwaidan (director: Masaki Kobayashi). Be sure to check out that Vibrasphere track too but heres a more thorough bred. It is an interesting score because it is remarkably simple, consisting almost solely of percussive instruments or harmonic instruments used percussively. The movie itself is a collection of ghost stories and one of the ingenious ways in which the film manages to be so unsettling has to do with the sporadic nature of the soundtrack. It is sparse and has a fairly big disparity between loud and quiet. It frequently uses silence to create a sense of forboding or anticipation of a loud pluck or crash. Because the sound compliments the pictures so well these moments of silence often work really good for punctuating the scares or moments of dread. I guess the point of all this rambling is that you can create a very complex sensation depending on what notes you play, what timbre the note has, how hard, soft, fast slow you play them, how much silence you leave between notes etc etc.
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May 6, 2008 22:13
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Been plugging away silently ever since my last post in Reason and Ableton (havent touched Cubase yet). Just coming back to say that I respect everyone in this thread for their immense amount of patience in scrolling through 2000 soundfiles, repetitive and tedious mouse movements, and general immunity to frustration. I'm still having a great time but it becomes so frustrating and tedious very quickly. I'm hoping that will fade once I learn what the hell is going on. to the guy above me: I've always thought of verses and chori (lol whats the plural of chorus) linking together with a cadence as a chain. End you verse in V and you can start on I smoothly for your chorus, same for every other cadence and variation thereof.
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May 6, 2008 22:14
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Like an Accident posted:Been plugging away silently ever since my last post in Reason and Ableton (havent touched Cubase yet). It's Choruses I think. I know what you mean though, it takes quite a bit of work before you can create the types of things brewing in your head. On another note: Audacity has some lovely lovely interface implementations, I love how when exporting and naming a samples, while you type it uses those hotkeys instead of just allowing you to type.
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May 7, 2008 05:51
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Like an Accident posted:to the guy above me: This is a decent point, and something I often fail to do (I have a tendency to drift back towards that I chord). I'll try to incorporate this from now on, and I think I'm going to have a go at structured modulation as well. WanderingKid posted:Its mostly a product of synaesthesia but I have a whole bunch of very loose associations to a certain idea or a mood. For instance (and this is purely individual but you may find yourself doing a similar sort of thing): I definitely do that sort of thing, though I have to disagree with your low cut/opening the freq analysis. That's obviously opening the door to a club and anyone who says otherwise is wrong I say, wrong! quote:I guess the point of all this rambling is that you can create a very complex sensation depending on what notes you play, what timbre the note has, how hard, soft, fast slow you play them, how much silence you leave between notes etc etc. I listened to the Vibrasphere track earlier today, and for the record, it's fantastic. That was a really good choice of a repetitious song that manages to avoid sounding repetitious. I had no problem just focusing on listening to the entire thing. Thanks for the tips on sound design, by the way. I typically flail about in the hopes of getting something good when I try my hand at patch design, so it's nice to have a framework to work within. I'll have to post my final piece once I get a chance to bounce it down -- it uses a K2000 from our lab, so I can't bounce it right now. It's a real gas though, let me tell you, since 1) It's the first thing I've ever done with lyrics, meaning they are hilariously bad, 2) My acapellist (is that a word?) housemate who was supposed to track the vocals for me flaked out (completely forgivably) because his finals were taking more time than anticipated, forcing me to sing the parts, and 3) I decided to make the song about Where the Wild Things Are, and reshaped my vocals into monster voices and a little boy lead singer. I've never created such a ridiculous track in my life. My professor is either going to love my creativity or hate how insane it is. I'm inclined to believe it'll be the latter, but what are you going to do. Repitching my voice made me wonder how some recording artists manage to repitch vocals so cleanly. I'm thinking of The Knife and Danger here specifically -- the pitched vocals on Silent Shout seem largely devoid of artifacts, while my repitched vocals gained that nasally quality the pitch shifts so often create. Danger pitches his voice way up there and I perceive little in the way of artifacts, though he may very well be doing a straight tempo change. I'm using Digital Performer's spectral effects to do the pitching so it's not as though I'm failing to alter the formants with the pitch. Are those clean shifts just a function of the hardware they use (I seem to recall that The Knife use a hardware pitcher, I want to say it's a Roland something something)? Or is something else going on? I would have guessed that it's that Andersson's vocals are usually pitched down, but that isn't really what I'm hearing on Silent Shout. Danger certainly flies in the face of this assumption. EDIT: Strike that, The Knife doesn't use a Roland. They use a Boss Voice Transformer. nah thanks fucked around with this message at 10:29 on May 7, 2008 |
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May 7, 2008 08:24
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WanderingKid posted:Its easier than coming to the realisation that they dont know what they are doing and need to like, learn stuff. Lots of stuff. It's also easier to spend another $500 on new DAW software than to spend $15000 on room treatment. (pictures start at page 11)
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May 7, 2008 12:04
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Yoozer posted:It's also easier to spend another $500 on new DAW software than to spend $15000 on room treatment. (pictures start at page 11) Its easier to use headphones and pretend like the room doesn't matter. :X
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May 7, 2008 12:58
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WanderingKid posted:Its easier to use headphones and pretend like the room doesn't matter. :X That's sort of my situation  I do have monitors, but no treatment. I have a lot of comb-filtering, which makes it impossible for me to judge the bass. I rely on my earplugs for that. Also noticed that when I was done mixing, I would get better results when I adjusted the faders with earplugs than when I used the monitors. I assume this is because of the acoustics in my room.
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May 7, 2008 18:58
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It does have an effect sure. But its not something you can't overcome with sheer force of will. I've been renting for 3 years now and I keep moving around every year so I have had some monitoring time in 3 different rooms, all different sizes and shapes. In that time I have come to realise that Rip Rowan was pretty much spot on when he says the Dynaudio BM series are like 'the anti NS10'. Theres no drat mid range. During the time I had the extreme misfortune to have 1x BM5a with a blown tweeter and 1x BM5a with a woofer that wouldn't fire I got the chance to hear what the drivers sound like on their own and I still can't figure out where the midrange is supposed to come from. Certain things are to do with the room but they can be controlled. One such example is listening distance. If I sit like 2 feet away from the Dyns with the tweeters at ear level spamming a kick drum sound in Floops sounds like 'dumm, dumm, dumm.' Sit back another 3 feet, pull the keyboard over and spam the same kick drum and it sounds like 'DOOOOMM, DOOOOMM, DOOOOMM'. Its actually disconcerting but it doesn't matter to me as long as I stay in the same place when I'm referencing my tracks. Otherwise things go to poo poo and I mix completely off. They are also sensitive to direction. Again, not a problem if you have a reference track, keep A/Bing and sit very still. If you move around alot its just annoying. I used to have one of my Dyns adjacent to a hollow wall and that was really terrible. Horrid flutter echoes. Very annoying. Solved more or less by moving house (I simply didn't use them for 6 months). Could also have been solved by moving everything into the spare room and rearranging the furniture but it was such an undertaking that I never made time to do it. I think the important thing I realised is that room acoustics are important sure - but my monitors sound kind of lovely regardless and in ways which have nothing to do with the room really. The strange thing is, in the time it has taken for me to come to the conclusion that Dynaudio BM5as sound like rear end at low volume, I have simply gotten used to the way they sound and what I can and can't get away with. I don't ever use my monitors to mix. I only use them as secondary references. I use a pair of Sennheiser CX300 headphones as my primary reference - a pair of earbuds that cost me about 30 bucks. I am so used to these peices of crap that I have extreme difficulty mixing on anything else (including the Dyns).
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May 7, 2008 19:26
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When you're using monitors you should have the two monitors and your head forming the 3 points of an equalaterial triangle, as perfect as you can possibly get it, and then just dont move from that spot for mixing.
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May 8, 2008 11:30
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Oh the back ache though. :\ Sometimes I yearn to move and when I do everything sounds different. I love those lovely CX300s because I can play whilst practically lying down. Then I can sit up and mix. I can loaf at the same time that I am producing. How great is that?
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May 8, 2008 13:16
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I'm of the opinion that people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on all sorts of extra bullshit for their studios are idiots. GUYS WE NEED DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED CABLES THROUGHOUT THE BUILDING OR ELSE..... OUR SIGNAL The way I look at it is this: If your track or album is mixed reasonably well, nobody is going to give a poo poo if your kick sits a decibel above whatever, or if you should pan your snare 7 ticks or 8. Especially considering the market that we're all in (I presume nobody is mixing for Madonna), people are going to be more concerned with what you're producing, and less concerned with how you're producing. Nobody is going to go "Yeah that's a pretty sweet track there brosef except for the fact that you put your HP filter at 500hz instead of 460. Sorry, you would have had some Grammy material but now it's the worst motherfucking song I've ever heard." Take your track, listen to it at home. Sound good? Put it on your iPod, listen to it in your car, and have some cheap desktop computer speakers. Still sound good? You're clear for 99.99% of listening conditions people have. I'm not saying that you shouldn't at least reasonably try to get accurate sound reproduction with your gear, and maybe throwing some foam around where you can, but there's really no need to spend thousands of dollars trying to pad up your basement. Decent monitors? Decent headphones? You don't live in a concrete refrigerator box? You're set. Maybe not the "audiophile" who spent $30,000 rewiring his house for DC, but who gives a poo poo, someone will always bitch about something. "Audiophiles" can be some of the biggest morons on the planet, even worse in the studios. Nobody cares if you're recording at 192 or 96. Seriously. It doesn't matter. Nobody can tell. Nobody cares if your bass is up a decibel. If your mix has no glaring problems that prevents you from enjoying it, it's fine. I think one of the bigger issues for people is trying to make everything sound perfect. Mute the third hat in the 12th measure? Does it matter? How much basil do you add to the pasta sauce? Just add it, if the entire thing tastes good nobody is going to be like gently caress MAN you should have put an extra quarter of a teaspoon in there. If they do, tell them to shut the gently caress up and they don't have to consume it. PRADA SLUT fucked around with this message at 22:07 on May 8, 2008 |
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May 8, 2008 22:01
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Kai was taken posted:I'm of the opinion that people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on all sorts of extra bullshit for their studios are idiots. GUYS WE NEED DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED CABLES THROUGHOUT THE BUILDING OR ELSE..... OUR SIGNAL Wait, what exactly do you mean by the spending tens of thousands of dollars thing? Like, sound proofing and treatment or what?
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May 8, 2008 22:15
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Stux posted:Wait, what exactly do you mean by the spending tens of thousands of dollars thing? Like, sound proofing and treatment or what? Yeah, its almost excess because most people won't notice those tiny details and you should focus on the song writing.
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May 9, 2008 00:31
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IanTheM posted:Yeah, its almost excess because most people won't notice those tiny details and you should focus on the song writing. Well sound proofing stops or reduces sound coming in and going out of your mixing/recording area which is an obvious plus, and treatment lets you get rid of standing waves, weird reflections etc. Obviously overboard for most amateur stuff, but its not really fair to say that anyone doing it is an idiot adding extra bullshit to their studio.
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May 9, 2008 00:43
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Stux posted:Well sound proofing stops or reduces sound coming in and going out of your mixing/recording area which is an obvious plus, and treatment lets you get rid of standing waves, weird reflections etc. Well, it makes sense for a studio. But I think he was writing from an amateur perspective. Obviously what separates a studio from your apartment is the specialization and money going into it.
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May 9, 2008 01:17
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I really want to start making electronic music but I have no budget. I'm looking to get a sound like NIN, Gravity Kills, KMFDM, ect. I'm guessing I should get a midi controller and some software like Fruity Loops but my budget is around $150 at the max. I have all these ideas for music I want to make but I have no idea where to get started.
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May 10, 2008 03:05
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Overbite posted:I really want to start making electronic music but I have no budget. I'm looking to get a sound like NIN, Gravity Kills, KMFDM, ect. I'm guessing I should get a midi controller and some software like Fruity Loops but my budget is around $150 at the max. I have all these ideas for music I want to make but I have no idea where to get started.
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May 10, 2008 15:02
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ManoliIsFat posted:If you're looking to save money, wait on the midi controller. And the best way to get started is just dive right in. I'd suggest Fruity Loops, as I think it's the most intuitive. Get a demo, and just start clicking around. Once you get the demo setup, we can help you in here. I'm not going to be able to help you get the industrial sound you want, but I can help you with the ins and outs of FL. I was messing around with it and figured out how to make a drum beat, and somehow managed to get a weird synth noise. It ended up sounding like a generic techno song but at least it's something. How hard is it to change the sounds of the drums? They were too clean for my tastes.
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May 10, 2008 19:35
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