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Can I just butt in here to subject something to the scrutiny of the collective? I've been in a rut for many a year until I got a new laptop last year. I finally finished something in the summer and I was pretty happy with it. Reading this thread spurred me on to revisit it with a new mix to start things up again. I'm -again- pretty happy with it as it is now, but I have absolutely no idea what genre it belongs to. I'd love to hear other people making things in approximately this genre, but I wouldn't know what or who to search for. I'm guessing, whatever it is, it's probably dated. It's certainly no dubstep. Influences are (progressive and anthemic) trance (ca. 1999) and a bit of techno (ca. 2004), but I have no clue whether I'm stepping on a lot of conventions about these or not. Another thing I'm wondering about is whether this track has an appropriate level of variation, arrangement wise. Or is it just me hearing the things that change because I put them there and is this plainly boring to a casual listener? I'm afraid I lost sight of that completely after hearing this so many times. Cantaloup - Wren (About 7min / 10MB) Any comment at all would be fantastic, learning is fun and all.
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Mar 10, 2012 19:23
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Anal Surgery posted:As far as the track itself goes, I thought it sounded decent, well-mixed to my yeoman's ear at least. Anal Surgery posted:If I had any complaints, I'd say it sounds a little "thin". The bass is up front and noticeable, the high frequencies are there if not prominent, but I kind of feel like there could be more in the middle. Anal Surgery posted:Or, if not that, maybe a little more atmosphere in the track? A little more "space"? I think the proper solution to both issues above, is in taking these things into account when picking/editing the instruments. I did that for this track on laptop speakers, that's probably not the best idea. I don't think I'll dig back into this track to that level (as said, I can't even play it properly anymore without bouncing the tracks individually); maybe some adjustments to the EQ and it will have to do. My priority now is to have something I can call finished, no matter to what standard. I'll make good use of these suggestions in new projects though and again, thanks for that. Anal Surgery posted:I think it has decent variation and works well as a more minimal track, but I might add some airy stuff to it to give it more depth. As you seem to have picked up on absolutely every suspicion I had, I'd say you have a remarkably good ear for these things. Totally fake edit: While I'm here, let me recommend some books:
If you're up to scratch with mixing, I still recommend Rob Young's book, as this may completely change your look on how the subtleties of what's exactly in the piano roll profoundly influence the sound you create and how spending time there might give you a lot of control over things you otherwise would try to fix with messing with your synthesizer or effects.
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Mar 11, 2012 16:32
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The Mystery Date posted:This might be really interesting, but I'm not sure I really understand what this is about. Is it a book on synthesis and how to play synth patches on a keyboard and program them so that it sounds natural? Could you post an example of something you learned about editing midi that you didn't realize was important before? I just can't wrap my head around what could be in here, and amazon doesn't have a "look inside" section. As a go-to example, I'll use the guitar again. The book describes how making something sound like it's played on a rhythm guitar by spacing the notes slightly, so they're strummed in the direction a guitar player's hand would move. How to adjust the velocities accordingly. How to space the chords in a natural groove. Fret noises. How to use pitch bend to create naturally occurring glides, simulate a tremolo effect using the expression controller or wah using the filter cutoff. All these things make a massive difference in convincing the listener that what's played is a guitar, even if the patch used sounds crap. The demo midi files included demonstrate this in an astonishing way. It is, as I see it, a very important, but often neglected insight. So, how does this benefit someone making electronic music? The above mentioned massive difference can be made with any instrument you're working with. Instead of clicking notes in place on a strictly quantized grid (and adding mechanized swing an randomness later) or recording things from a keyboard, you can give things a completely different feel by pretending it was played on an instrument with a totally different input paradigm. You can put (a temporary) swing on one rhytmic element and not the rest of the track. You can add delay to arpeggiated melodies, dropping individual delays in and out, so they become part of the melody. Arpeggiators are a shortcut intended for live play. Write arpeggio's out yourself! You can add interest to hihat lines, just by playing with velocities. You can simply layer different sounds from the same synthesizer, if it's multitimbral. Add midi tracks for sounds that are artifacts for other instrument tracks (in analogy with the fret noises). You can use and reuse clips of midi automation in sequencers that otherwise only offer a continuous linear automation curve (don't know if there are any of these left these days). When I used Nuendo back in the days, I abused the option to have multiple takes simultaneously on one track to layer different clips of midi data, which gives an immense flexibility in working with drum rolls, flams and flourishes from the track view. You certainly can do some of those things through other means, but why not try to get the most out of every synthesizer, plugin and stage in the process? I see production as something in layers, where quality builds upon the layer below it. Just as picking the right sounds from the start is better than trying to equalize it out in the mix, or mixing 'properly' is better than trying to fix it in the mastering stage, it's better to add interest by starting on the midi layer than to slap another effect plugin on top to try to camouflage a lackluster melody. Someone earlier in this thread suggested you couldn't write a techno track on the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synthesizer. You totally can. And I did, for a while. A lot of the musical cues for a genre aren't in the exact sounds, but in the rhythms, the tempo and the complexity of the chords and melodies. It will be a techno track, possibly even a great one. Will it sound great? Not exactly, but you can go a surprisingly long way within the limitations of any sound source by means of what you send to it as midi data (see also: 4channel chiptunes). And if it works bare naked, upgrading it with more sophisticated sounds becomes easy. I've seen the recommendation many times to limit yourself to one or two synthesizer plugins before buying or downloading new ones. Keeping the focus on midi first is another (artificial) limitation that works the same way. Not as a permanent limit, but as one that will teach you a lot, not in the least about how some things work behind the scenes, but also about aspects of why things sound like they sound. It's the step between learning about music theory/composition and learning about sound(design). It's rather important to know about if you intend to connect these two worlds. All this is not necessarily what the book says, but it is what I took away from reading it. I feel the tendency is too often to play some (musically correct) notes and then to start messing with whatever produces the sounds. This is easy. It's also skipping a step and it can be a bit lazy, considering how much better or more interesting some tracks can be made by spending some time in the piano roll window. This book rebalances that common extreme focus on sounds and timbres by coming from the opposite direction. Do I practise what I preach? Obviously not always, sometimes the most fun is in messing with sounds and I'm plenty as lazy as anybody else. But I've read this book at an impressionable age and it's certainly one of the reasons I religiously prefer the minimal, midi only SEQ24 as my sequencer these days. And when trying to find an interesting sound, I'll always have made a pattern before that, that outlines what rhythm and melody the sound is going to play. Because that dictates more or less which sound to pick. Many people do this the other way round. Which can work as well (hell, genres have evolved from doing it that way), but it might explain why sometimes people paint themselves into a corner sonically and end up thinking they can make interesting tracks but can't ever work out a good melody for it. Which brings me to another tip I picked up from this book: work from left to right, start to end when laying out song structure. Make a few bars, listen to what it needs, make a few more bars and so on. Sort of an additive approach, rather than subtractive (ie. make all the loops, then smear them out over a few minutes). This leaves the door open for unexpected variations. I'm not arguing everybody should be a fanatic about it as I am, but if you currently see midi as 'that note stuff thingy on a grid', there's potentially a world of possibilities and a complementary line of thinking you at least should be aware of. You could take this at face value from what I said, if you 'get' what I'm talking about and that's cool. You'll only need the book if this fascinates you and you want to delve toward the bottom of it all (there's a chapter about writing System Exclusive messages from scratch  ). And even then, you'll have to get over the fact that you'll have to translate and interpret every technique in the book for use in electronic music yourself.I'm rambling on, but I hope this helps someone, whether they were interested in the book to begin with or not. Because I'm guessing it addresses things most people hardly ever think about, as DAWs today tend to want to shield people from the technical aspects of midi. vvvvv Can't go wrong at that price. I'm sort of hyping this because of what I learnt from it, but I obviously can't promise a similar life changing experience  In the end it's, of course, just a book about midi. Still, I hope there's something in there for you too.
Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Mar 12, 2012 |
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Mar 11, 2012 22:30
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oredun posted:thirdly, its just not very interesting. It has enough of groove but then towards the middle any discernable groove disappears and then its just kicks and bass and noises, but nothing that makes you move your head. oredun posted:Something that really helps is using like 3-4 sounds for the same sound, this is an overlooked fact by many amateur producers. Like when you watch producer masterclasses on youtube youll see they have like 50 channels but it only sounds like ~8. And its because they use 5 synths for every sound. And like delays, filter sweeps, big reverbs, big breakdowns, your song has none of these things, its just really static sounding. oredun posted:Overall i wouldnt say it was bad, but i will say i think it has little to no appeal to just about everyone. I can tell you have a pretty good idea on whats going on and youre really drat close its just that last like 10% that makes a song sound like yours(or mine) and someone who sells records or has 10000 followers on soundcloud. oredun posted:hope that helps, and not trying to being negative or anything just being critical.
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Mar 12, 2012 04:36
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Weird BIAS posted:Dirty basses, half-time feels and rapid pitch drops/shifts. Then it goes four to the floor in places because why not. Also autotuned speech generators saying inside jokes. Feel free to disagree with any of this (or to find out some of it doesn'n work as intended), it's just some things I would try and I'm not a professional by any means. There's certainly nothing wrong with the mix as it is. Should you try any of it and it turns out it was totally unhelpful, let me know, so I don't go around bothering anyone else with tips like this. The vinyl slowdown/stop effect is cool, but gets a bit overused in this track to my taste (4:20-4:50), interrupting the flow. It's likely I don't get this genre, though, so another massive grain of salt to take that with. Super kick, by the way!
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Mar 12, 2012 15:23
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dk2m posted:http://soundcloud.com/stosz/you-are-not-alone Weird BIAS posted:Take 2!
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Mar 13, 2012 18:22
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oredun posted:Heres a pretty heavy electro/dubstep thing i made. I cannot for the life of me get a mix im satisfied with. I feel like the song and sounds are there but the mix isnt. xpander posted:http://soundcloud.com/glyphrojas/live-demo-2012
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Mar 17, 2012 00:06
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xpander posted:Awesome, thanks for the feedback! It's definitely a mixed bag, but that was on purpose - we wanted to try and showcase what we could do. I hope it's not too schizophrenic. We think it's mixed well and has good flow, even if each track isn't to everyone's taste. Danceable stuff seems a trump card for festivals, make sure it gets noticed. Independent of how you would start out a set in reality. I'm not sure if it still makes sense these days, but should you provide this to someone on a cd, make sure it has proper track marks for easy skimming.
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Mar 18, 2012 01:57
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^^^^^ Ah, crap!  Vector 7 posted:I've got a question you guys might be able to help me out with. I'm looking for a plugin to automate volume changes with (fades, mixing changes, etc.) similar to Live's native Utility plugin. The problem with Utility is that when the gain knob is pulled all the way down, there's still a bit of the signal coming through. I think it's a -36dB change when it's pulled all the way down. Anyone know of anything? It doesn't have to be free, I don't mind paying for plugins.
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Mar 18, 2012 22:14
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mezzir posted:God drat I'm rusty, first time actually writing a track and not just dicking around in like a year: WAFFLEHOUND posted:I have no idea what I'm doing. FadedReality posted:http://soundcloud.com/fadedreality/virulent-wip skrath posted:Some clips of a few new techno tracks that I've finished recently: Positive Housemouse posted:http://soundcloud.com/positive-housemouse/into-a-ball-of-light a milk crime posted:You know, I think you could save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run figuring out a lot more of like how your synth vsts work. A lot of them are able to do a lot of the things by themselves, you'll find that you really just need an EQ, a compressor, and reverb at the least.
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Mar 26, 2012 15:24
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:I'm not really setting out to emulate something, more of "I grew up loving industrial, I dislike dubstep but I'd like to see if I could make a more dance-y industrial (which obviously others in the past have done, I just want to do it my own way). I do plan on vocals as well.
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Mar 26, 2012 18:12
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Sgt. Slaughter posted:I suppose the music I make falls into the genre of "electronic". I've been fiddling around with Renoise on and off for a couple of years. I've always felt there was something missing from my music, that made it just sound weird. I guess I would say it feels hyper unprofessional and I don't know how to move away from that. Most of it lacks focus. More or less random things happen at more or less random moments. I haven't been counting beats, you could possibly technically be sticking to a 4-8-16 structure, but it doesn't feel like that at all. I get the impression that you often say to yourself: Now what? Let's... errr... add another melody. Either that, or you are so full of ideas and you want to put them all in a track at once, ignoring the context of what's already there. I'm guessing here, but it seems you haven't developed an analytical ear for music yet. You need to engage your brain when listening to music. It takes effort at first, later it will become more intuitive again. There's an excercise mentioned in Rick Snoman's Dance Music Manual (that has been quoted early in this thread as well) that I think will help you along this path, that basically comes down to reverse engineering the structure of someone else's track by marking down on a grid when elements of a track start and end. And just listen to the sort of music you'd like to make a lot. That helps, even when not making a conscious effort. After listening intently for a few weeks or months, you'll find out that most music follows general guidelines for timing and structure. That instruments that manifest themselves mostly in the same frequency range don't often play together. And that almost everything, from melody to choice of timbre, to effects, to flourishes, to sound effects has a reason, a discernable motivation for being there (in the frequency spectrum and spatially) and then (in time). And a function: working towards a climax, announcing the addition of a new element, providing a break, adding or breaking tension, making it groove or mellowing it down or just being the main hook of the song, things like that. I'm not saying you'll be or must be consciously aware of all these things at the same time, but you'll develop an intuition for it once you've internalized that these are concepts, building blocks of (electronic) music. At this moment, you're aware of some of them, but you don't have all these things working together towards a common goal yet. You'll also find out these rules get broken often as well -such is the creative process-, but never al lot of them at once, in order not to alienate your audience. Familiarity, predictability and repetition to a degree can be your friends. Don't get me wrong here, I'm pretty happy to hear you making some unconventional choices and I wouldn't want you to unlearn that. There's enough blandness and mimicry out there. But you need to take a listener by the hand first to eventually lead them out of their comfort zone. And to successfully break the rules for effect, you first have to know the rules inside and out. As it is, there are too many elements going rogue at times. While listening to your music, I often got stuck with the question: "Why?". Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I suspect you don't always know yourself. For example, in Molten Salt Reactor, you have gradual mid song tempo changes. That's pretty out there. Unwritten rule number one in dance music broken. Sure you can do that, but to get away with that in front of a larger audience, you'll need to be extremely confident about the rest of the track. It doesn't really work if the track is lacking any accessible elements, because it adds up to random weirdness. Aimless Sightless and especially Lines are examples of where things do work together better and where things happen where you'd expect them. They also have a limited number of ideas going, which, I think, is not a coincidence. A great example is the fantastic break in Leep from about 3:40. It even starts to build up towards something before it sadly abruptly ends. It's simple, consists clearly of variations upon a repeating pattern. Boring, right? Not in the least. Sadly the track has fallen down long before that, because there's no bassline in the first half of the track (why?), sometimes there are three lead-type instruments playing at once, independent of each other (why?), and the drum patterns, well, they're ok, but not in the same groove as this track (why?). Breaking all these conventions at once without being able to convey in the music how that makes sense, creates a fundamental disconnect. I could comment about mixing, but I feel there's a more fundamental issue going here and I'm confident that mixing will more or less work itself out once you've got that sorted and you can start picking your track elements more consciously. I'm not sure I'm making myself clear here. You don't suck. Your music doesn't suck. It's just really weird sometimes, and I think due to a fundamental gap in your understanding somewhere that music isn't just playing and melodies, but also construction and groove. As long as you keep making music, this understanding will come. I could go on, but I'm not even sure my assumptions about you are correct. But if you're wondering what's weird about your tracks, this is what I think it is. Sgt. Slaughter posted:The sounds not fitting together is surely a result of most of the synth sounds not being made by me. Sgt. Slaughter posted:It's just a matter of practice I suppose.
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Mar 28, 2012 17:29
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:Some progress! I would like to make it less bro-y and more industrial still. Friction posted:Tried out this electro house thingy. Few bars here, am I doing this right?  Looking forward to hearing more from you.
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Mar 31, 2012 17:53
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:Here it is, but personally I find the lead kind of flat without it. I guess what bothered me a little, is that its long notes somewhat undermined the abruptness of the gaps in the stuttering effect. They fill the holes, legato undoing the staccato. Maybe it should stutter along? Or should it only be muted during the longer gaps in the bass sound? I don't know, I have trouble explaining it properly. I only half know what I'm talking about myself. Thanks for indulging me, anyway.
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Mar 31, 2012 19:02
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:gently caress though, there aren't too many VSTs that don't cost a lot capable of making the kind of plucks I'm looking for. It seems like Sylenth1 and the Minimoog VST are the only ones that do it well, and I'm just using Massive and FM8. Based on your post in the VST thread and some Sylenth1 youtube progressive pluck tutorials, I tried with TAL Noisemaker and Superwave P8, but those were more miss than hit. It was an interesting excercise to see what a difference roughly the same settings on a different synth makes, though. I should do more hands on tests, theory isn't everything. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Mar 31, 2012 |
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Mar 31, 2012 20:05
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:This is the closest I've been able to get. Very short attack, exponential if available (don't have Massive), then medium length decay towards a very low sustain. And open up the resonance more. If you can choose between different filter algorithms, there are massive differences possible there as well. Filter shouldn't be too steep. Moog type filter is a plus. Maybe there will turn out to be more to it than what I'm suggesting here, but filter envelope is where it's at, in any case.
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Apr 1, 2012 00:28
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:Flipperwaldt, do you have AIM? I'd rather avoid making GBS threads up the thread with pluckchat. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Apr 1, 2012 |
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Apr 1, 2012 01:43
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:I've got stuff that sounds close to that before (yeah, I got that it wasn't just a single note In the spirit of dead-horse-flogging, here's my extra plucky take on it, all in one instance of Oatmeal (just threw a GComp compressor over the output), which I think sounds... fair enough. I was bumping into the plugin's limits at the end, trying to get closer, but the basics are there. For more "tock" and less "pluck", I'd need a whole lot more waveshaping distortion and hard limiting than Oatmeal offers. I could have filtered deeper too, but then the filter wouldn't have opened up completely when the automation kicks in. There's no offset parameter for making the modulation asymmetric.. Here's the Oatmeal preset, should anyone be interested. I know, I know, Oatmeal has no OSX version  . Massive should definitely be able to do this right though, which seems the key point.
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Apr 1, 2012 16:20
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Beef Log Boy posted:On the model contract they gave me, one article says I need to guarantee it was never made public. Does this mean public as in distributed through another label? Or public as in someone's heard it before? I feel like I may have screwed myself on this one. Pure conjecture from my part, but I suppose it's to prevent the situation that some other label or entity has claims on your music, resulting in annoying legal action. Also the amount you will be paid is set from the assumption you made new material for them and they will have first opportunity exclusivity on the sales for that material. Which is the case. They just don't want nasty surprises, like discovering nobody buys it from them because an earlier release of it is still available on the market. Or because it's already a massive hit on P2P networks. They also don't want to find out that they, without knowing it, violated an earlier contract you made with someone else. Sharing, intended for feedback or troubleshooting purposes, in a limited, relatively private circle may violate the letter, but certainly not the spirit of the stipulation. You could somewhat argue that the readers of this thread constitute a limited, private circle. Your intent certainly wasn't to distribute. It's like giving your friends a copy for their opinion while you're working on it. Or giving it a test play for an audience when DJing. That's not what this is about at all. I recommend going through the Soundcloud license agreement though, to see if it contains unexpected gotchas, just to be sure. You can disable downloading and allow playing from the site only on Soundcloud. I'd recommend that for more or less finished tracks you plan on releasing anyway. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Yeah, the few downloads are out of your hands, but the odds are astronomically small it'll suddenly get distributed widely on such a scale that your label would notice or care about. I wouldn't even have told them, to be honest. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
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Apr 3, 2012 03:24
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WAMPA_STOMPA posted:Where's the line that marks the difference between "you should have gear at least this good or everything will sound terrible" and "above this level of expenditure you won't get anything out of it until you have more experience than beginner level"? You upgrade gear when you bump into the real limits of what you have currently, not when you bump into the limits of your knowledge. At that point you'll know why to upgrade and have clues as to what you will be looking for. Be very aware that the entire idea that you can substitute knowledge and experience with spending money, is fundamentally flawed. People don't make great and great sounding music because they spent a minimum of $$$, but because they put in the time and the effort to learn. Days, months and years. You can make decent sounding things with what you've got already, you just need to know how. They did that in the 50's and 60's with lower quality gear that was a thousand times less sophisticated. At this point it's not the quality or the possibilities of the gear holding you back. I'm not saying you should forego modern conveniences indefinitely, but until you get a basic grip on the software you're using, any money spent is wasted. Now, you say you want to learn, that's fantastic. I've been looking at basic Reaper tutorials on Youtube and indeed, they aren't great. Most use outdated versions of Reaper, that look a bit different. It's hard to help, however, because it's difficult to assess what you're trying to do and where exactly you get stuck. So I want you to look at this video, try what is presented yourself and report back where things go wrong. As specific as possible; with a screenshot if needed.
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Apr 3, 2012 17:05
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^^^^^ I like the very end as a build up towards something danceable. The rest has a lot clashing in the midrange, to the degree you should consider just not having some of these lines playing together. There's some (near) sub bass, but not much in terms of actual bass. I suspect this is rooted in a far from ideal monitoring situation. It's a bit weird and random as a track on itself, but this may well be something I just don't get, so take that with a grain of salt. Rivfader posted:Techno work in progress, any feedback more than appreciated at this point! Is that FL's 3xOSC, by the way? If so, it's worth looking beyond what comes bundled with FL Studio. TAL Noisemaker is a fun, not too difficult, well laid out, rewarding, free synth to get a grip on the basics of synthesis. As for the genre, I wouldn't call this techno. It has a very distinct slowed down hardcore/gabber flavor, what with the drum patterns with the incessant clap on the kick and all. It's very different musically from the actual techno dj sets with Avex Lemarto on SoundCloud where your stage name is credited. If you want your track to fit in with what's labeled Techno in a record store, study those differences. All this not to quench your spirit; it's definitely not bad. Is there room for improvement, as you asked? Yes. vvvvv Lovely, as always. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Apr 6, 2012 |
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Apr 6, 2012 13:40
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Rivfader posted:Genre-wise, I get you'd call it that haha. But it's actually a pretty common form of rawer, darker German techno. Which does indeed sound somewhat like pitched down hardcore stuff. (See for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKVBhb3dhOQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEuYX4ERdvg) I somewhat maintain my point that, while both of these are half techno, half hardcore, you picking the hardcore element from each leaves you with a non-techno track  Anyway, with those examples, I now see you're probably getting pretty close to what you strive for. At that point, discussion about genres is moot. Keep tweaking that lead, though. Rawer and darker is a good thing to aim for
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Apr 7, 2012 20:02
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oredun posted:So whatever marketing you are talking about, i really dont think its that big of a deal for most people on this thread and i dont think most people even know what synths their favorite producers use. The idea that you can buy your way out of years of work and study, is a tempting one, especially if you're just starting out and everything you make turns out like poo poo, partly because you don't really know what you're doing. If only I had those monitors! If I could just get that latency down! I need a new synth, with those new, currently popular sounds, because this isn't doing it for me! Another guitar, antoher amp! The music I'm making isn't great because of [technical excuse]! To a lot of people that's a lot easier to digest than accepting it's got nothing to do with the gear and that there are no shortcuts; they still have years of loving around before them. In some cases it's easier to accept than the idea they might never make something they or other people like as much as some of their idols seem to do so easily. You might think you're immune to it and I'm not even going to argue with that. I know I'm not and I know I'm not alone. I'm just "lucky" I don't have the budget to indulge that laziness and fear with regular boatloads of shiny new stuff. By the way, I also think "a synth is a synth" was never intended to mean that all synths are the same and are all capable of producing every sound. Just that every synth is a synth in its own right and every synth has the capabilities of producing interesting and usable sounds, provided you put some work in it. I thought that to be a fair point. If something doesn't suit you, your workflow or your goals, fair enough, but it doesn't necessarily mean the synth "sucks". Some of my favorite synths are severely limited, crappy and/or inccessible. Subjective assessments can be useful, indeed, but blanket statements are useless. I agree with some of the points you make, but you mainly seem to be raging against something that was never actually said.
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Apr 12, 2012 00:04
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ALEX TRILLTON posted:I'm thinking of getting Ableton since I have a PC and have heard good things about it, but my friend uses Reaper and that has the distinct benefit of being free. Besides that, I'm hearing mixed things about them and I honestly don't really know what I need to look for in a DAW, so I'd like some help here. All that I really know is that Reaper doesn't come with instruments, but there are a bunch of free synthesiser VSTs and I could probably save some money to buy Massive if I got reaper. Besides that I really don't know what I'm doing. I also don't think you should decide on a DAW solely based on what instruments are included. You'll want to include third party stuff anyway, free or otherwise. The main difference between both, as far as I'm concerned (haven't used Live since version 4), is that Live has a convenient repository for licks and loops, that allows you to get everything in place before you actually start building your track. Whereas Reaper is more like working on the timeline directly. That's a matter of preference. Reaper does have endless right click menus and some interface quirks I don't like or even find downright confusing sometimes and the midi part still feels as a bit of an afterthought (even though everything is there). That doesn't mean it's unusable. That said, the biggest benefit will be having a friend that uses Reaper. That's invaluable in learning the basics. So, if I were you, I'd abuse the poo poo out of Reaper's trial and your friend's knowledge to get somewhere first. Should you start to feel confident with what you're doing, the switch to Ableton Live shouldn't be that hard. Alternatively, Reaper could have grown on you by then. The great thing is you don't have to commit right now, at a point you don't know what you're committing to. Same goes for Massive or Razor; it's a great synthesizer, but it isn't like you won't get by without specifically those. If money's an issue, use the time to learn and save. It'll get clearer automatically what your priorities for the money are. There are some great recommendations for free synthesizers in the VST thread.
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Apr 13, 2012 00:29
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keyframe posted:If you absolutely need the clip launching functionality of live wait for Bitwig:  It's so pretty! If this does about half of what it promises to do, I'm sold. I hope it'll be cheap.I'll add, for completeness' sake, that SEQ24 also has the clip thingy, but it's midi only and if you want to use it with vsts, you'll have to use a midi loopback driver. It's messy and sometimes wonky and certaily not the ideal starter's setup.
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Apr 13, 2012 03:42
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EDIT Essentially beaten, so tl;dr above ^^^^^WickedIcon posted:So basically, keep the mind sharp and keep throwing poo poo at the wall until something sticks. That's pretty nonspecific advice, I was hoping for stuff more pertinent to the tracks I posted, but I'll keep it in mind. Now, it's frustrating, because, unlike with language, barely any of these rules are written down somewhere. They vary largely by genre, which is one of the main problems with that. On the creation side of things you'll be mostly stuck with throwing poo poo at a wall and seeing if it sticks. Creation just is like that in a broad sense. But you can work on the analyzing side of things to develop targets, targets lead to targetted practice, wich leads to an increase in aim, all the while developing a feel for which poo poo flings best and which poo poo sticks best. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: listen to music in the genre you're trying to make. And I don't mean going to a club or having it on your ipod while you work out. Listen with intent. Use your brain, not just your ears (and heart). Analyse the poo poo out of it. To the point of reverse engineering. Literally. Notice things, make notes. Pick a thing and find out how it's done. It won't always be as tiresome as that; after a while you'll develop the instincts to do this automatically. Like when learning to drive stick. But first you need to kickstart that habit. This might seem like overly broad advice, but it's the best I can give you. I'm sorry I can't quantify or qualify what makes it "a bit poo poo". Maybe that's a good thing, since I don't really believe in shortcuts in this learning process. It reminds me a lot of the sort of thing I used to make when I started out. Everything I've learned since is very hard to put in words. What I know is that things started to change once I stopped trying to create as if I was in a void and started setting myself some concrete goals based on music I liked. I'm still no real musician by a long shot, but what I make is a shitload closer to what I intend to make than when I started. I suppose the less you know what you're doing, the more you'll benefit from formalized exercises. If you want something more tangible: club music doesn't use rock type drum sounds, nor rock type drum patterns. It's one of those unwritten rules. You can't break it without weirding out people who expect club music. So start there, I guess. What does a snare drum sound like? How are the ones I'm using different from those on a club track I like? Learning to pick another, more genre appropriate sample is a start. vvvvv I'll stick my neck out and say I don't get the mocking in this specific case. All he asked for is some tips that are more specific to making music than "live healthily". That doesn't seem overly unreasonable to me. Appropriate considering the thread title, even. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 17, 2012 |
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Apr 16, 2012 23:59
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Cobweb Heart posted:Alright, here goes. Almost every element in the track (apart from the kick) seems to be spread wide stereo-wise, often without significantly adding anything. A mix will muddy up pretty fast that way. Reducing stereo width for nearly all of the elements will definitely help. Do this as early in the process as possible, ie. in the synthesizers themselves if the different oscillators have a panning knob as opposed to putting a mono effect on the end of the channel. The latter one may cause unwanted phase cancellation when combined with earlier stereo effects, removing every bit of punch from a timbre. Doing this from where the track is now, may still occasionally feel like losing out on essential characteristics of the timbre, but remember it will never work together like this. The point is mostly that you shouldn't listen to/tweak the instruments in isolation too much. They may have to sacrifice individual greatness to work together. Using (lightly tweaked) synthesizer presets may be part of the problem, as they're mostly created to sound awesome in isolation. Homebrew sounds don't have all that baggage, unless you added it yourself. This is another great argument for making your own sounds, if you're not doing that already. Work on this before you start carving poo poo out through equalizing (which will be necessary as well), as there's room in a mix for surprisingly many mostly mono instruments with the use of some subtle panning. With all the instruments at maximum width, panning means nothing. To this end, panning with the master track set to mono is the best trick to detect where things clash and where they gel together. Treat wideness like an effect such as reverb. Adding some selectively can have an amazing effect on a bone dry track, drowning everything in it is setting yourself up for trouble. To avoid a muddy mix, there's roughly five stages (not strictly in a chronological sense):
EDIT: Sidenote: In general, stage 3 and 4 should be balanced out against each other, based on their subjective priorities. In some cases, equalizing a minor track element is the more logical solution over panning it out of the way (which might make it stand out more than it deserves). I recommend starting at stage 3 for this track, as that seems the most noticable problem. You might need to revisit stages 1 and 2 later; at this point it's hard to tell if that's really necessary. Once the muddiness has cleared up, giving the drums their proper place should become a whole lot easier as well. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Apr 17, 2012 |
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Apr 17, 2012 11:31
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WickedIcon posted:This and the music theory/production guy are more the kind of advice I was looking for. I'm using Reason 5 and mostly Subtractor/Malstom synths on those with a couple of Thor ones dropped in here and there. Rick Snoman's Dance Music Manual is a great book that covers all the basics.
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Apr 17, 2012 13:44
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These are not as polished. Reminds me of when I suffered from eternal "everything must be louder at once" syndrome and started putting limiters on every individual track. A bit harsh. Not bad tracks, though. Love these, my sort of thing and very well executed. Would honestly not know what to complain about.
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Apr 18, 2012 07:22
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killhamster posted:Awesome, thanks for giving it all a look. I don't have proper monitors so I'm constantly worried about levels and trying to get into the habit of EQing better to keep stuff from getting muddy. I've done a little recording for traditional guitar/bass/drums bands but I get carried away when I write my own stuff and end up having to carve lots of little niches out for various synths and stuff. As far as real mastering is concerned, you can't do it, don't even try. I personally have given up on limiters specifically almost completely. The key is to make a great mix without needing to pump it up in the end. If your kick or sub bass needs to be the loudest thing in the mix, that means the rest of the mix will need to be quieter. If you need to hear all of it louder, turning up your monitoring is a better reflex. If you get lost, you shouldn't be afraid to backtrack a bit either, instead of piling on another compressor. Save the current state, pull all faders down and start over. If you get it right at this stage, all you may need to prepare it for SoundCloud, is a subtle tiny bit of quality character compression on the master track to glue things together and a limiter to catch the very occasional stray peak (both as opposed to using them to boost the volume). I'm going to admit this didn't work for me until I learned to use a compressor properly, using all available parameters (I overlooked timing settings for a long while). I also admit that for Drum & Bass, some limiting on the snares may be a prerequisite, I don't really know. If your monitoring situation is really crap and the budget tight, decent quality studio headphones are a good investment to hear details you're otherwise missing. With reasonable speakers you can get by by listening to a lot of reference material, doing a/b comparisons, testing mixes on different speaker systems and using visual aids (all varieties of metering). From experience, this works reasonably well once you more or less know what you're doing. It's a lot more work though and there'll always be the occasional nasty surprise. Anyway, this is mostly going from the first two tracks. If 3/4/5 are more representative of what you're doing now (didn't go back to check the dates, sorry), disregard all I'm saying, because you're doing absolutely fine Popcorn posted:Can anyone recommend 2. This thread had some great tutorials for Synth1, sadly all the pictures are gone Recreating things that were requested in the thread based on the responses, might still prove informative, though. Youtube has some good and lots of terrible synthesizer tutorials. It's worth just trying some, even if they use another synthesizer in the video.I've only really read one book that tackled synthesizing, but it's a good one: Rik Snoman's Dance Music Manual. There's a link higher up on this page.
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Apr 18, 2012 22:50
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Vector 7 posted:What's the most powerful bit reduction type distortion plugin out there? Anyway, E-Phonic LOFI does the trick in loving things up for me, if you're on Windows.
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Apr 20, 2012 02:49
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Vector 7 posted:No, gently caress, god drat it. Googling around, best free alternative with similar features I've found so far is TB TimeMachine. Can't compare the sound, because I've never owned any NI Produkt. For lack of a better word, it's quite a bit gentler and more musical than the E-Phonics LoFi I recommended earlier.
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Apr 20, 2012 13:34
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TheWevel posted:Can somebody do me a favor and listen to this track with a sub? The sampled bits are somewhat in your face in the ~1kHz-5kHz range. If you're compressing the master bus, maybe make another bus and compress everything apart from the sampled bits there and lose the compression on the master. That's just an idea, not sure if that would work to satisfaction.
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Apr 21, 2012 20:42
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qraham posted:As I've become more and more interested in electronic music over the last few months, I've begun to notice that there seem to be specific standards that certain composers stick to; things like every song by so-and-so is 155 bpm, and they always use literally the same beat. Another thing I've noticed is that these songs always include a "mixable" intro without drums at all. Second of all, if someone makes all his tracks at the same tempo, with the same drumbeats, that's partly sticking with a formula that seems to work for them. I won't call it laziness or being scared of experimenting per se. Idea's, hooks, licks, beats and grooves have been reused all over modern music. You can make different cakes from the same base ingredients, there's not always a need to reinvent the wheel. It can be workflow related; if you've got an idea for a melody, you don't necessarily want to slave hours over a fresh new beat first. Or it can be intentionally striving for a signature sound. It's a pleasant experience for composer and loyal fans alike to be able to say: "Oh, this is a Tiësto track. I love Tiësto!" All music is a delicate balance between familiarity and experimentation. Some people 'play' this balance more and/or better than others. Drumless intros (if you exclude the kick as being a drum) are indeed mostly catering to the convenience of DJs, if not directly, then because it has become part of what's expected in a genre. From what little experience I have with DJs and DJing, I gather that it's indeed difficult to properly integrate a track that strays from that convention into a set. If you have a melody from the start, it might clash tonally with the previous track. Please note that not all genres adhere to the same standards and that some genres simply are harder to mix. Tonality isn't as big a part in Techno as it is in, say, Latin House. Latin House may have the simpler, more consistent rhythm and clearer separation of sections, but it generally also has melodies and chords from the beginning, thus making finding a track that works with the previous one a lot more difficult. So, if there seems to be a sort of consensus on how to make specific genres of music, it's because musicians themselves volutarily subscribe to a vague outline of what their music is supposed to be or belong to, based on what their predecessors did, and because audiences too are conservative and easily alienated by the breaking of too many rules for a genre at one time. There's nothing stopping anyone from doing things completely differently. Especially in EDM, where you aren't limited to how fast a drummer can physically move or what sounds you can get from a guitar and things like that. But your product will be niche and probably won't 'sell', and that doesn't align with the ambitions of most musicians, who, like most humans, thrive on public approval at least a little bit. EDIT: Just want to add that it's a lot like biological evolution. A proven formula might work for a given set of circumstances and might be worth sticking to for that reason. Random, small mutations occur and if they strike a chord with an audience, the genre evolves. Random, large mutations occur as well, but they only stick when the circumstances define it as viable. That's when a new genre is born. The Rick Snoman book describes some of the unwritten rules of different genres, but it's a description of how the situation is, not so much about how it came into existance, if that is what you're looking for. It's not like everyone bought the book and is making music the way it's described in there and that's how different genres came to be either. Obviously vvvv Haha, reminds me of eighties synthesizer music so often used on space documentaries of that time. I don't mean that in a bad way. Also, sometimes it's not hard at all to pick out those who spent a lot of time with trackers. Makes me nostalgic. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Apr 30, 2012 |
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Apr 30, 2012 11:02
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boxorocks posted:So I've been trying to mod this E-MU sampler and chuck a removable 2.5" SATA drive in by using an IDE/SATA bridge (I've tried a couple different ones, they're only like 5 bucks each). The poor little guy doesn't like it and the disk always looks asleep (bear in mind I'm trying to put an SSD in it, I might try just a regular SATA drive I've put in floppy drives with the connector upside down plenty of times when building computers and it shouldn't do any damage a factory reset wouldn't fix, as far as I'm aware. Good luck. vvvvv You're in a much better shape than I thought you would be, the limits I mentioned shouldn't apply, although I vaguely remember somthing about a similar problem around the time disks grew larger than 128GB. Not sure what that was, might have been something Windows specific. I guess that type of lcd screen just does make everything look ancient. Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Apr 30, 2012 |
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Apr 30, 2012 15:11
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Anal Surgery posted:Hah wow, that simple huh? I thought there'd be more to it. I wonder why it sounds so different from having like 3 or 4 oscillators going on Operator or Massive. Here's the Massive Manual in pdf form, you can search it for the word unison. It's what I did, because I don't have Massive.
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May 15, 2012 12:23
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h_double posted:Could I get some mixing advice? 1. there's an enormous amount of energy in that kick that won't come through in an average system. Highpassing it at something like 35Hz will allow you to turn the kick up a bit more. You'll have to find a compromise there, even if it's just removing the subs even you can't hear on your speakers either. This is good practice and will help with the blubber on the car stereo system. 2. Subtlely layer another strongly higpass filtered kicksample on top that provides a clearer transient. On the laptop speakers, the brain will sort of fill in the missing bass frequencies when it is made aware that there is supposed to be a kick there. But it needs an anchor that can be reproduced by such speakers. Again, perhaps, a slight compromise is in order to accommodate those. Don't set your hopes too high, though. Laptop speakers are crap and will only ever give you the gist of what you were supposed to hear. You can't but accept that. I sort of like this (even though the bass sound is a bit basic), but I wouldn't call it downtempo. The kick may go at half speed, but the percussion and hats are pretty fast paced. It's not relaxing or anything. Not that is has to be. h_double posted:How would you suggest going about the mid/side EQ? By shelving the low end on the side channel of the kick and cutting a bit of the bass on the mid channel of other stuff? Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 12:45 on May 23, 2012 |
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May 23, 2012 12:25
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Gonna echo that this is an excellent book. From what I remember from way back when, Cubase should have a comprehensive pdf manual as well. I don't know if that's still the case, but it's worth considering leafing through that. Don't expect to be clear on everything before you start, a lot is messing around, making lovely test projects to get familiar with some features. This can be fun, though. Vidmaster posted:Also I was working on this today - it's still super rough but I'd love to get some feedback! http://soundcloud.com/vidmaster/system-lights-vidmaster-remix Or it might be that the vocals are in a subtlely different tempo than your track, in which case localized stretching is something to consider. Don't be afraid to chop things up and make the vocals fit the groove of your track, is what I'm saying, I guess.
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Jun 7, 2012 15:58
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Love it.
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Jun 17, 2012 00:09
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Rivfader posted:So, I'd appreciate some input, positive or negative. I don't really object to the sounds, but I'm not wowed by them either. Maybe it's because you aren't really showcasing them. From all of it, I think the drums are the least in need of work. Keep at it, tough.
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Jun 21, 2012 18:54
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