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Kai was taken posted:There's nothing wrong with it sounding bad, everyone's early songs suck pretty hard. As long as you recognize where you're falling short and can improve on it, that's what's important. Stereo separation is where you take a stereo signal (2 channels) and you add a small time delay to one of the channels. The length of the delay depends on the length of the stereo signal in question so you will often find stereo separation is not measured in milliseconds or even seconds but rather in degrees where 360 degrees represents a full cycle of the input signal. To understand what this does to a signal you need to read up on a property of sound called 'phase'. All 'stereo wideners' work by adding a phase shift between the left and right channel in a stereo pair and when the signal remains stereo it can produce an odd and exagerated sense of width. However, stereo separation also destroys mono compatibility, the extent of which depends on the extent of the phase shift and where destructive phasing occurs in the signal. When I say 'stereo signal' I mean a a 2 channel sound which is not symmetrical in terms of what is going on in the left and right channel. A 2 channel sound which is exactly the same on the left as it is on the right is called dual mono. If you were to take a dual mono sound, add a 180 degree phase shift between channels and sum to mono you will get total destructive phasing (i.e. the result will be total silence). This is not necessarily the case with stereo signals although you will almost certainly have some significant degree of destructive phasing occuring unless the left and right channels are completely uncorrolated. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Mar 12, 2008 |
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Mar 12, 2008 19:58
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Elder posted:I was reading briefly in some other forum about playing electronic music in live settings, and how with any bass-heavy stuff you should be careful that the kick is tune with the bass. I guess the idea is that when you're playing live, sub-frequencies that you didn't hear on your monitors at home will be coming through these huge, loud venue speakers. So if the kick is out of tune with the bassline, it can create some dissonance that will be really uncomfortable for the audience. Well that depends on what you mean by 'in tune'. A bass drum is a membranophone and when you strike it, it doesn't vibrate with a constant fundamental frequency and a sequence of harmonics. A bass drum is not a harmonic instrument. However, various synthetic bass drums (as derived from drum machines like the TR-808 and TR-909) do attempt to synthesize atonal instruments using harmonic oscillators and noise generators and depending on how you program them, you can get them to produce a discernible pitch reference. One that is constant enough to tune to other harmonic oscillators (even if it is only roughly). The oft used example is that of an 808 bass drum which has a very fast initial 'click' (partly the result of pitch envelope modulating a low frequency sine wave) and a long decay. The pitch dive levels out and if the decay phase is long enough and you keep the envelope modulation low, you can make out constant low frequency sine and it is that part of the drum that you can tune. Should you always tune your 808/909 bassdrums to the fundamental frequency of your monotone 303 bassline? No. You should always do what you think sounds best because frankly, nobody is interested in listening to what you think other people think is a good idea. If you want to check whether your bassline is in tune with your bassdrum (for whatever reason) you pitch up the bass note until the fundamental is audible on your monitors. You run a spectrum analyser at the output of that channel and you look for the lowest, tallest peak (aka the fundamental frequency). That is the lowest pitch reference for your bassline. An octave lower than that is the same as halving the frequency. i.e. you pitch up your bass note so you can hear it easy. You read a spectrum of it and it says that the fundamental is at 440hz (roughly, an A). The same note an octave lower is 220hz. An octave below that is 110hz. etc etc. The kick drum is harder to tell because it is not harmonic meaning that it doesn't have a fundamental and that part of the drum with the highest amplitude (the initial 'click') is not the lowest pitch reference. You can however filter out the click temporarily leaving only the constant bass hummmm, pitch it up an octave so you can hear it properly, tune it by ear to approximately the same area as the fundamental on your bassline and then just tune it down an octave again. Theres loads of ways you can DIY it if you want to but yeah. You don't always have to and you shouldn't feel like you must. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Mar 12, 2008 |
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Mar 12, 2008 21:52
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Some of you guys posted some ridiculous forum replies that were tantamount to misinformation. I thought Yoozer posted one of them (some very weird reply about what portmento was which turned out to be totally wrong). Forums are alright and you can learn alot by reading them but you need to be aware that you can also get your head filled with alot of inane and totally wrong poo poo. I appreciate the irony of stating this on an internet forum and you should be skeptical of what I say too. You want clear reasoning behind statements of methodology. Tranceaddict's production studio became like this for me - for every gem of wisdom you can get from that place, there are 10 false statements only a few clicks away. The key really is to be skeptical about everything you read on an internet forum and cross reference everything. If you are just starting out, published tutorials are generally the best way to go since they are more likely to be written by someone who can qualify their statements and they are often written with certain standards with regards to methodology and readability. I've seen many people confuse stereo separation with panning and advise other forum goers on this subject accordingly. Stereo separation is very different to panning and has its own set of problems that have to be dealt with accordingly. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Mar 13, 2008 |
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Mar 13, 2008 15:07
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There are still people around that mix in mono?! Besides, most stereo 'effects' (i.e. choruses, flangers, phasers, stereo wideners, stereo imagers, reverb etc) are phase modulators anyway. Even if you mix everything in mono it helps to know that as soon as you use you use any of the above 'effects' its going to cause some problems when you render your mix down to mono. At this point I'm used to sticking Voxengo Crunchessor on my master bus and leaving the input and output gain controls on 0dB (so that the compressor does absolutely nothing). I just use it here for the Mono output switch so I can quickly switch a stereo mix to mono and hear whats gone AWOL when I add a stereo chorus on my lead synth. Thats actually a good way of hearing for yourself the effects of phase shifts in stereo signals. Go get something like mgPhaseShifter (freeware!) and a freebie plugin that lets you input stereo and output mono. Then just drag the sliders around whilst listening to your tune looping in stereo and then mono. Check out all the freaky poo poo thats going on. Periodically, bits of your mix may even disappear. Phase is not a difficult concept to understand. No more difficult than the frequency of a sound wave or the amplitude of a sound wave. Its odd that you mention wikipedia. Wikipedia of course has an article on phase but it is mostly mathematical and in practical terms has little use for people making music in their bedrooms. Taking 5 minutes out to check that stereo separation isn't the same thing as panning though. Man, thats hardly complicated stuff and its not like you have to crunch numbers or anything. I certainly dont. Yoozer posted:Just to make things clear for the rest: that reply wasn't mine Oh sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I meant that someone here (who I thought was you) posted a link to an offsite thread where some random joe explained what portmento was and turned out to be completely horribly wrong. It was used an example of the kind of weird ideas that could be put into your head if you didn't know better. ManoliIsFat posted:midiyoke helps, but it's not as nice as that mac thing Aye. MIDI yoke is a bit of a pain in the arse. I yearn for something more intuitive (preferably with a nice mac GUI). drat what is that mac program. I want to do all my MIDI msging in something like that. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Mar 13, 2008 |
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Mar 13, 2008 22:27
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Cyne posted:What else... maybe one of the older Access Viruses. The keys tend to be pricey though, so you'd probably need to go with a desktop unit, in which case you'd need to supply your own MIDI controller. If you're going for something not at all catered towards emulating acoustic instruments though this could be the one for you. The keyboard versions of all the Virus models (and I am talking about the full sized ones not the Indigo/Polar) are expensive because they are quite good. Semi weighted action with everything you want in a keyboard - pressure sensitivity (aftertouch) and velocity sensitivity. The ability to use either as a modulation source and anything can be set as a destination. Its a fine keyboard and the unit is built like a tank. Unless you are using more than 6 octaves, you could happily use this as your standard midi keyboard. I dont really recommend learning synthesis on a Virus though because it is a mindfuck to learn when you are just starting out. I mistakenly bought a Virus B after a year and before that I knew basically how to program reFX Vanguard but that was about it. I found the Virus in comparison was very arcane and I didnt understand why they buried some features in sub menus and gave others rotary and button control. I found it very confusing and didnt really use it for about 6 months. I nearly sold it. Then I stumbled across some tutorials by Howard Scarr (an sound designer for many synth developers including Access) and that got me started. I think the best launchpad for getting into the Virus would be to have a year of sound designing underneath your belt with a subtractive synth and a semi modular subtractive. Just get to know what oscillators, filters, envelopes, lfos are etc. and how they work together to making an interesting sound. Then bag a Virus if you happen to like the sound of the thing and the way it programs. First thing you should do is get Howard Scarr's tutorials. They are freely available from Access music's website. Then go through that and learn to mimic some of the sounds in the guide without needing to follow the instructions. Then after you have done that for some time - go it alone and try riding without stabilizers. After 3 years I now know why they designed it the way they did. There is a method behind the madness but prepare yourself for a helluva learning curve and alot of failed sound design before it makes sense. When it does click though you realise it is remarkably simple and ingeniously designed so you can build complicated sounds really really quickly. I love programming it. I don't particularly like the sound of it. Most of the time I use it for pads and other background stuff, never for leads or bass. Its a weird love/hate thing I have going on with it. I'd never sell though. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Mar 24, 2008 |
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Mar 24, 2008 16:44
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Yoozer posted:8-bit bible Ok this has finally inspired me to kick up some snes tunes and actually compose something with a strict track and poly limit. Thanks for outlining the boundaries I have to work within. Its strange how much effort and thought needs to be put into making your tools sound technically crapper than they currently are. Like reducing the samplerate of any modern synthesizer with a triangle wave oscillator in order to sound like a classic nes triangle. If I could get a sample of a nes triangle on its own it wouldn't be too hard to work out the bandwidth from the frequency at which it aliases at. Unless someone else has already worked it out.
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Apr 3, 2008 09:50
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Well what exactly are you trying to do? A filter will turn into an oscillator if the Q (resonance) is high enough. Do you mean the feedback trick when you wire the main outputs of the synth back into the filter input? Thats fairly simple if the synth allows it (any modular synth should be able to do this). Overloading the input of a filter (either with sheer gain or by feeding back the signal to the filter input) will cause filter saturation. For lack of a better description this is a sort of distorted effect that tracks with the filter cutoff. I need a sound sample for the other stuff.
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Apr 6, 2008 05:02
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breaks posted:As much as I agree with you about this, it's a lost cause. The description of Trance and House is a bit hosed up too. But yeah. 
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Apr 13, 2008 05:16
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h_double posted:Or if the trance description maybe had something to say about Harthouse or Sven Vath or more modern offshoots like Goa/psytrance, and how trance is usually around 130-160 bpm with a heavy 4-beat. Describing any of them is really a lesson in futility as you will never encompass everything that gets created under the name. The boundaries aren't fixed either. What is called Trance now is so different from what was called Trance in 1996 that people have begun to refer to them by different names. As this is a music making thread I assume people getting into electronic music production would be making music that they are passionate about. I don't think you need a pick and mix guide on different styles of dance music that you ideally want to make. You could simply link to Ishkur's guide if you wanted a genre breakdown and it would be alot more comprehensive than what is in the OP but just as liable to fill the reader's head full of poo poo. In the end I don't think any guide is necessary because club music really isn't explained very well in words on an internet forum. If someone wants a song ID or something then all you need to do is post a soundclip here and someone on these forums will recognise it and the style of music it belongs to. The important thing I guess is that if you want an ID of anything, you need to post a soundclip. That is all.
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Apr 13, 2008 14:38
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God I can't believe I actually suggested linking to his guide...
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Apr 13, 2008 23:05
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RivensBitch posted:There's a lot of discussions about tools and the correct aesthetics to ascribe to specific genres, but I'd be much more interested in a thread about electronic/club/dj music that covered the actual composition process that people use. How do you go about choosing samples or tones? Do you start with a drum beat or a synth line? How do you get from the start of your song into a full blown piece? It doesn't matter what you start with. Generally I find it easiest to start with the instruments that will have the largest presence in the mix as you want them to be the most detailed and at the forefront at all times. Depending on what instrument that happens to be, the proportion of the rest your mix will mould and recess itself around them. For instance, I tend to find that if I start with a drum track and am adamant that I want my percs and bass drum to be at the fore all the time, I necessarily have to make space for them by recessing everything else and consequently my mix takes on a tribal sort of tone (because the drums are the clearest point of interest). Because the drums take up so much space in the mix, you necessarily start to add less extras and the mix becomes more sparse. It is difficult to describe how this works. I dont always start with the same instruments and find that if I start with a lead or a pad, my bassdrums tend to be less massive because I am keen to keep the lead/pad more of a focal point. The proportion changes all the time depending on what you want to keep at the front. Alot of people do seem to start with their drum track but then it is often the case in popular Trance in the past few years that you have these freaking massive bassdrums that are ever present in the mix and eat headroom like the cookie monster. I start with whatever I have that sounds good. Sometimes this is a bassdrum and I build a groove out of it and expand it from there. Sometimes I make a really nice lead sound and I get inspired to make something out of it. That is my starting point. Sometimes I build some swirling ambient wierdness on my Virus B and I decide I want to make an ambient tune out of it that later becomes the foundations for something more clubby. The point is that everything subsequent to that has to be worked around what you already have. Composition wise, electronic dance music is typically not very complex and where I used to trip up was to make it more complex than was appropriate or even necessary. I mostly write a type of music which I guess you could call Progressive Trance or Progressive House. The fundamental point here is to create a lulling, hypnotic groove and I achieve this with a monotone bassline often consisting of just a single repeated note. As it is the driving force of the track I do invest alot of time in making it sound detailed and getting the timbre to sound interesting since it will be the backbone of the track. The tempo stays the same but you create the impression of gaining speed by double/quadruple timing - i.e. increasing divisions of notes. The aim in is very specific. You start with a simple bassline and gradually and subtlely add single layers of notes that repeat at periodic and regular intervals and simple arps that build and build into a wall of ping pong delays at the end and you won't be able to distinguish between what notes are the top end of the bass and what notes are the the bottom end of the lead. So the idea is to literally spin a weave of sound that grows in intensity to a climactic point. That is just the basic concept and by no means something that everyone should strive to achieve. I tend to find working from a concept is easier and it helps me not to lose track of what it is that I intend to do and not get sidetracked on details that do not contribute to the overall effect. How do I go about choosing samples or tones? I build a sound that I like and which sounds interesting. This is a very methodical process using a synthesizer but the remarkable thing is that you can follow a very specific set of guidelines to get to a certain point - for example a very basic way to synthesize string timbres on a virtual analogue synthesizer is to set 2 or more oscillators to a harmonically rich waveform (i.e. sawtooth), tune them slightly apart, sum them all together and rectify it. However once you have the framework you can find that you can turn a very ordinary sound into something completely alien just by doing something like changing the envelope times or switching one of the oscillators to a different waveform, or tuning one of them an octave higher or lower. Since I always start with the instrument I want at the front, I always spend alot of time just sound designing. Building interesting sounds from scratch. I save them and come back to them later to see if I still like them or to see if I can improve them. The ones I hate, I delete. The ones I like I keep. In this way I have built up several banks of usuable sounds over the years that I can use as the starting point of a song. As I said, once you have the patches it is easy to morph them into something completely different but you do need a system and you do need to understand what every knob and slider does on your synth of choice. Since the music I write is progressive, it is built on overlapping loops and sequences and once you have enough raw materials and sound assets and a clear idea of what direction you want to go in then the next big thing to overcome is the mixdown. I rarely make it to the end of this stage since I often get lost in obsessing over details and proportion and meh. The more I go through this process though the more I begin to instinctively know what will and will not work together so I'm improving all the time. But this is a process that just feels intuitive to me. It isn't necessarily intuitive to anyone else and it may not even be the direction they want to go in. The way I do things like sound design is also very synaesthetic and you know how difficult that is to explain your synaesthesia. This is all very general but then I can only offer general responses to very broad questions. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Apr 14, 2008 |
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Apr 14, 2008 21:08
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Like an Accident posted:Well then I guess my question is, do I need plugins to make decently sounding music with recent sounds Not directly no. There are many many plugins out there that can add functionality and sound design tools far beyond what your DAW can do but with that comes the learning curve. I have known many many people with hundreds of amazing plugins (and I would hazard a guess they were acquired illegally) and yet I find they cannot use even a 1/10th of them effectively. If you can make great music with the tools you have then you don't need anything else and believe me that it is entirely possible to produce professional sounding music using just Reason. There is also the idea that having a wider colour palette and a tonne of assorted brushes won't necessarily make you a better painter. Even if you knew how to use them all there are still situations where you won't and will never need to use all of them and your paintings will be all the better for working within limits. quote:and do cool things like sidechaining? Most DAWs cannot use a compressor's sidechain with only a few expections. Most people find that they have to resort to annoying and complicated tricks (like quad bussing in Cubase) to get it to work. In some DAWs you cant get it to work period (like FL Studio). Logic can do it I think. Everyone else with VST support can use db audioware's sidechain compressor. If you are smart though you will realise that can in fact simulate many of the most common uses of a sidechain (i.e. bass ducking, frequency dependant compression and de essing) with clever mixer routing and automation. quote:I feel like I can't get convincing electro noises out of Reason and I have a hunch that lacking plugins is a big reason why. You will want to get out of this type of 'grass is greener' mentality as soon as possible because far too many people seem to convince themselves that their tools are holding them back when they rarely if ever do. More likely you will have an idea of a sound that you want to create and it may likely be one that you have already heard and wish to copy. The first think you absolutely must realise is that it is always much harder to design other people's sounds and perform other people's work than it is your own. If you are expected to copy someone else's track you would need all the tools they have used and all of their knowledge on how to use them. You would come up short even if you had all of their gear but not a clue as to how to use it properly. When you do it yourself you are improvising on your own level. If you cannot achieve something you have to ask yourself firstly whether it is your own lack of knowledge and your own inability to use your tools effectively. Most people I know, including myself couldn't say with a straight face that we know everything there is to know about our tools and that they are in fact to blame for not being able to do what we want. In short our ambitions often precede our means to achieve them. And yet if you knew how a compressor and a sidechain works and you wanted to make that bass ducking effect so common in dance music these days you would know that you can simulate the effect with automation of the compressor's ratio in an envelope and simply graphing the points where you want massive, sudden gain reduction. You could modulate output gain or input gain and the threshold of the compressor to achieve much the same effect. Likewise you can improvise your way around any technical limitation in your software if you are smart enough. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 29, 2008 |
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Apr 29, 2008 19:28
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ManoliIsFat posted:You can. You use a Peak Controller and put it on the mixer channel you want your knob to be affected by. You can then set any parameter (say, the ratio on your compresser) to be linked to the value of the controller. It can take some tweaking of the mapping formula to sound smooth, but it works alright. That is not a side chain. A compressor's side chain can be used for lot of things besides automatically ducking the volume of another channel. De-essing would be one such use but as you probably well know, there is no way you can make a de-esser using peak controller, a compressor and a band pass filter. Some other DAWs like Sonar can't use the side chain directly either. Well I suppose it can but you have to quad bus which is gay. quote:Reason can produce professional sounding tracks, but plugins make life a lot easier and it's recommended that I use one? You can use VST plugins in Cubase. You can't use any plugins in Reason. Plugin compatibility is not an issue for anything that supports VST (which is like everything except Reason). And plugins don't make life easier. They just add functionality. I'll spare you the tedium and just give you the TL;DR version - Learn and master one tool at a time. Don't go and download 100 tools at the same time, make your brain explode under the vertical learning curve and rely on presets because you will suck forever if you do that. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 01:33 on May 3, 2008 |
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May 3, 2008 01:07
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I really liked Soundforge for wave editting around v7 - preferred it to Audition in fact. As of v9 they changed the workflow in some very small but hugely important ways. For instance, I can no longer drag a selection/scroll/zoom in and out at the same time using the mouse. Once I reach the edges of the screen it wont scroll for me and to continue a selection I have to zoom to the appropiate ratio, scroll along manually with the mouse and drag my selection till it reaches the edge of the screen again. Repeat however many times I need to do this to select the exact area I want. It literally quadrupled the time it took to make selections in soundforge and was so annoying to me that I have since reverted back to v7.
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May 4, 2008 18:41
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Heh, make no mistake - If I had the money I'd blow millions on a recording facility and on consultants to quickly show me how to use it all properly. But I don't so theres no point wasting time and energy thinking about it. I wouldn't spend like 10 grand on cables though. That type of thing is dumb. I'd spend most of it on a detached house with a floating room and acoustics that are so unbelievably amazing that a fart could get mistaken for the voice of a baby cherub.
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May 11, 2008 03:12
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The Fog posted:Hi there, ML! Recreating a waveform based on how it looks rather than how it sounds is more than a little bit unintuitive and I'm not sure what you expect to gain by doing this but I am still confused about what you are showing me. Both pictures you posted show the same number of cycles. However the zoom ratio/scale is different. For this to make sense you need to read off the x axis and tell me what the start time of your selection is and what the end time of your selection is (picture 1). Subtract the start time from the end time to get the length of the selection. Then tell me what the start time is and what the end time is in picture 2. They should be exactly the same length. If they are not then it means that one of them has a shorter or longer period. For instance: 3 cycles of a sawtooth wave in 1 second = 3hz. 3 cycles of a sawtooth wave in 0.5 seconds = 6hz. If the second image shows a waveform that peaks at -6dB compared to the first image then I don't see what the problem is because you can just add 6dB of gain to the second image to make it as tall as the first. Looking at the both images side by side I can see a large spike just before the middle and another large spike towards the end in both waveforms so I don't quite understand why you are trying to recreate them when they appear to be already there. Finally, for any useful side by side comparison you would need to use the same scale on both axis in both pictures and you need to show the scale. I can't make out individual harmonics in the second picture. I can't tell how long the selection is in both pictures.
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May 23, 2008 13:46
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Use whatever you have to get the job done. The problem with presets isn't that it constitutes cheating because it doesn't. If you are looking for a very specific sound and there happens to be a preset that fits exactly what you want then use it. This rarely happens to me because I find that I want to make a very specific sound and there isn't always a preset that fits exactly what I want. I find this is the case most of the time actually. If you are used to always using presets you never learn to program a synth. This is a problem for example on synths which don't have presets or have really lovely ones that do not reflect what the synth is capable of. It can lead people to simply not use them or not make the most out of what they have because they don't know how they work. Nearly all of the Access Virus presets for example are interesting sound design tests that show you what you can use the synth for but most of them are unusable. They are in fact designed to show you how to achieve certain sounds and the idea then is to apply that knowledge to create sounds that you want. For examples theres a patch called Peanuts which sounds like a human voice making nonsensical vocalisations. If you break it down and study it you find that it uses specific wavetables and both resonant filters to simulate vocal formants and the vowel sounds are made by modulating the filter and amplifier envelope. However, if you never learn any of this you will never be able to simulate human voice sounds because you won't know what you have to do to create them. This creates alot of problems in the long run because you do get people that have alot of synths and do not have the knowledge to use them to achieve what they want. In the end, the only way they can expand the palette of sounds they can create is to buy more synths and get more preset libraries. That or actually learn how to use their synths. In some cases, certain presets are so recognisable and used so often that if you use them, it can be difficult to shake the idea that you are remaking a song you have heard before (with the same presets). For example, I can't use any of the stock pluck presets on Virus B because they were all used wholesale on VNV Nation records and when I use them for arps it sounds like I am just remaking a VNV Nation song except its not as good. I consider presets on signal processors like compressors to be universally bad because when you want to compress something, how much compression you use is entirely dependant on the sound you stick in the input and its peak amplitude. i.e. The settings you will want use will change every time you change anything on the channel before the compressor and it will change for every sound you want to compress. I've seen people with compressors on their multitracks and they are actually redundant because I look at the settings and see a threshold of -3dB and output gain of +5dB but the peak channel level is -6dB or something. Basically, the compressor is never triggering and may as well not be there because no part of the signal is sounding over threshold. The reason why they think it sounds better is because theres +5dB of gain and its louder but no compression is actually going on. The simpler solution is to take off the compressor and just bump up the channel gain by 5dB. Stuff like this is bad because when you see it happen you realise that the person making this project doesn't know what hes doing. It doesn't matter if it sounds great because all that matters is the end result but if you truly don't know what you are doing then you won't be able to recreate or better your successes. You are taking shots in the dark and whether you make a tune that sounds good or not is all fluke. I can't work like that and I don't want to work with others that work like that. I found that in the long run I only need presets to show me what a synth can do. Whether it can realistically simulate acoustic instruments, human vocalisations etc and other complex but specific sounds that are traditionally difficult to synthesize. I rarely use them in practice. I also found that I don't need alot of synths to create 90% of the sounds I want. I only ever really use 2 or 3 for a single song, mostly impOSCar, minimonsta and a Virus B. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 14:27 on May 23, 2008 |
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May 23, 2008 14:17
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If I found that in my basement the first thing I would do is get a quote on getting it restored from places like http://www.synthrepairservices.com/ if you live in the UK. I would take it there in person rather than post it since analogues don't really like getting jostled in the mail. Dust shouldn't really be a problem and in most circumstances it is better that you don't persistantly clean your synth as you can sweep dust and dirt underneath rotary pots and clog them. I had a few scratchy pots that needed to be removed and cleaned because I kept clogging them with dirt which got there from overzealous cleaning. The important thing is you can get sound out of the thing. I would personally get it serviced and keep it but those things are quite rare so you could probably sell it for a pretty buck. If you choose to keep it you will probably have to take it in for servicing once every 1 or 2 years and you really shouldn't move the thing around alot because it will probably will go out of tune and develop all sorts of problems if it takes a knocking. I wouldn't ever gig with it because you will destroy it doing that. Also dirty sounding is good. I mean just take a listen to a Juno 60. Its filthy and I love it. Really want to buy one.
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May 25, 2008 13:05
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Mr. Pharmacist posted:In Fruity Loops, how do I get it to let me make really precise changes in Fruity Slicer (like the bar starts right on the pixel you click on) rather than just going from the start of each box? I know it used to do this but I opened it up again today and I can't make those precise placements anymore. Well this might not be all that helpful if you are dead set on using Slicer but if you have FL Studio 8 you should use Slice-X which lets you move the start and end points of each slice to wherever you want. Plus its just generally 10 times better than Slicer in every way imaginable.
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Jun 20, 2008 12:22
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Mr. Pharmacist posted:EDIT: Sorry, I was talking about the Piano Roll. The sounds on each slice automatically go to each 16th note and won't allow me to place any faster beats. Piano roll is easy. Theres a tab near the top of the screen with 'Line' written in it. Click that and set it to 'none' and you can freely move around note triggers in the piano roll and make them any length you want. If you just want a finer degree of quantisation set it to '1/4 step' - this will let you stick 32 and 64th notes in the piano roll using the default timebase (96 PPQ). If you find the resolution is too low (even when zoomed in fully) you can also double (or quadruple) the timebase in the options menu to make the time interval in the piano roll finer so that all the note triggers get longer and easier to work with when you are having to click around tiny triggers with the default timebase.
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Jun 21, 2008 13:43
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If you really want to sound like an 808/909 go hunting for a Jomox XBase09. It has been discontinued but you can find ones in reasonably good condition for about £350.00 sterling on eBay. I'm not sure how high it goes in US dollars but it can sound very 909ish. You can't afford an XBase999 so forget about that. Brand new it will cost you about the same as a used TR-909. You could get a Vermona DRM-1 mk II for about 500 bucks but you have to really like primitive electro because all the drums sounds are kind of small and...electro-ish. If you like that sound but can't afford a mk II you could probably pick up a DRM second hand for about 300 bucks but they aren't exactly common. TR-707 is still inexpensive and so is the TR-606 but give them a listen first. The 707 has some sounds which are really close to the 909 but the bassdrum and snare are completely different. I know it is not uncommon for people to go all out for a 909 purely for its bass and snare drums. The only analogue drum machines I want right now are either a Jomox XBase999 or a Machinedrum SPS-1. That includes all the really old stuff (I would say categorically that I would rather have an XBase999 than a TR-909. Expensive bugger though.) WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jun 28, 2008 |
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Jun 28, 2008 20:30
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Yoozer posted:For the 808 or 909 there's a reason to get the originals, but you can do a LOT with good samples. I thought so originally but I changed my mind some time ago. Samples are fine if you can find one that sounds exactly like what you want. But I rarely see that happening so I prefer to program it and sequence it myself. If you wanted 808 and 909 drum sounds and you don't have enough money to buy a real 808 or 909 or a Jomox XBase then I would completely skip the samples and the Electribe stuff and go straight for the VST plugins. In particular, D-16 Group Drumazon (a rather good 909 clone) and Nepheton (a very convincing 808 clone). Both are cheap as chips compared to the alternatives and they program just like the real things.
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Jun 28, 2008 20:39
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Anal Surgery posted:Hey all... Hardstyle type drums are really easy. Go get: D-16 Drumazon demo D-16 Devastor demo or Tri Dirt (freeware) TLS Saturated Driver (freeware tube distortion plug) Load up a standard 909 kit in Drumazon, turn on pattern write mode and plop a kick drum down (double click it in the sequencer so it is accented). Mute all the other instruments. Adjust the drum to taste (you perhaps want a bit more decay than stock and maybe a little bit of negative pitch modulation so it sounds like its 'going down'). Export the wave and chop the drum so you have a nice one shot sample and run it through Devastor. It takes a while to learn how to use this distortion plugin but flip through some of the presets to get an idea of the range of sound shaping you can get. I stuck the drum through TLS Saturated Driver to give it a bit of wub and this is the result: http://media.putfile.com/Gabber-Kick Its 32/44.1 so I'm not sure if you can play it your media player. I can play it in mine using a Realtek AC97 so it seems ok. Turn down the volume before pressing play because it might be a bit loud. If you can hear it then just save it and use it in your tunes if you want. You can use Drumazon for the 909 snare too. You don't need to distort it as massively as the kick but you should recognise it instantly (gabber snare rolls). That and the offhat and you have a 200bpm kit that you can readily identify from any really extreme hardcore track. For a more modern style hardcore kick drum you need to go the Alphazone route which involves splicing various drum machine sounds, gated reverb kicks, snares, closed and open hats (pretty much anything thats loud and transient) into 1 sample and deliberating creating a massive clip so that it literally 'bangs'. Alternatively you can just buy VEC-1 which is all over hardstyle and hardcore and has been for a few years now and the guy behind Alphazone just gives you a tonne of samples he made himself. I prefer my drums to be a little more subtle but hey. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jun 29, 2008 |
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Jun 29, 2008 00:18
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Should have made it clearer. The XBase has certain things that are fully analogue and the rest are samples. The SPS-1 has certain things that are virtual analogue and the rest are samples or physically modelled. Either way I kind of want both but if I get an XBase999 I want the beige one not the charcoal one thats being sold on the site.
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Jun 29, 2008 18:29
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Yoozer posted:Start with a 2 oscillator polysynth and a 3 oscillator monosynth. Yeah definitely start with a subtractive synth - the simpler the better and if it has its signal chain marked on the UI or a schematic or something then even better since you can follow what its doing and how the sound is changing. However I wouldn't go into FM without knowing the following: 1) how to program a simple subtractive synthesizer, what oscillators, filters and envelopes are, what all these modules do and how they interact. 2) how to read a spectrum. 3) how to interpret an oscilloscope trace and how it is different to a spectrum. 4) simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of frequencies, exponents, reciprocals and basic trigonometry and how to interpret 'unit circles' to understand why sine waves are the building blocks of FM and additive synthesis, why we have to deal with the concepts of phase and periodicity and why we measure differences in phase and periodicity in terms of degrees. 5) what a partial is and how harmonically complex sounds can be seen as being derived from them. 6) how to additively synthesize basic non linear waveforms (i.e. ramp, square and triangle) by summing sine waves. For instance, you need to know that a square wave (a common oscillator waveform in subtractive synthesis) consists of a fundamental sine wave and all of its odd harmonic sine waves at fixed multiple frequencies of the fundamental. You need to know what these terms mean. For example: If I told you that the first 5 harmonics of a 262hz (middle C) tone were 784hz, 1310hz, 1834hz, 2358hz and 2882hz you should be able to tell without seeing or hearing it that it is a square wave or tending towards one. You should be able to see this on a spectrum of a square wave and read off each harmonic on the graph. You will be able to hear its distinctive sound as long as no other signal interferes with it. You should be able to tell that each harmonic of a square wave are related by being odd integer multiples of its fundamental frequency and that the amplitudes of all those those harmonics are related by the reciprocal of those integer multiples. This all seems a bit unnecessary and abstract at first but if you know all of this then you can look at a 6op FM synth and you can synthesize a square wave instantly because you know what the harmonic intervals are and you know how much energy each harmonic has to have. You can do this with a ramp wave and a triangle wave and any other periodic signal that can come out of a subtractive analogue synthesizer. In short, you are half way to the point of programming an FM synth with a mind to making it sound like a subtractive analogue synth. Once you have got the hang of that then you can move one step further and start modelling up to the first 6 partials of an acoustic instrument or any instrument you can find a sound clip of. You almost certainly want to look at a spectrum of the instrument and make a note of the first 6 partials and their amplitudes (they won't necessarily be harmonic nor will their amplitudes be mathematically related). Once you can build basic approximations of simple real world sounds then you can add noise generators, filters and waveshapers to the signal chain for extra sound shaping and morph those sounds into something completely different but with the same harmonic complexity. Or you can use them to model instruments that are atonal and derive their sound in fairly complicated ways. A noise generator + high and low pass filter array for instance can be controlled by the velocity of a share hit so that it increases the amount of broadband noise in the signal when you smash the key harder (which approximates the noisy and harsher sound you get by twatting a snare drum really hard with a stick). What you absolutely must not do is wing it and just twiddle knobs and sliders because this won't work with FM or additive synthesis and everything you make will turn to complete poo poo. You will never be able to create anything good sounding with any sort of consistancy and you will become one of those people that just cheeses DX style presets and never be able to create your own sounds or do anything without your DX presets. Take it as a given that you need to know some very simple math and you need to be organised and methodical in your approach to FM sound design and you will coast it. But I wouldn't even go near it unless you are really intimately familiar with how a subtractive analogue synth works and how to program it to get sounds that you want. Subtractive synthesis has long been known for being the simplest, easiest and most intuitive way of creating a broad variety of sounds and if you are interested in dance music then 90% of the stock 'electronicy' sounds you have been hearing for the past 20 years have either come from subtractive analogue synths anyway. So a number of folks never find themselves wanting or needing to move onto a different method of creating sounds. Certain things FM and Additive synths can do that Subtractive synths cannot. Theoretically you should be able to do anything a subtractive synth does additively but the process would more often than not take forever, would be more analytical than spontaneous and it would be boring as gently caress to program. Besides you will never be able to model the subtle imperfect behaviour of inherantly unstable velocity control oscillators and filters so some would say the task is futile and I more or less agree up to a point. The bottom line is that it isn't worth thinking about what you can and cannot do with these two types of synths. If your learning takes you that way then fine - just go with the tide. It will work out better for you to focus on getting good simple sounds first before getting good complex sounds. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jul 1, 2008 |
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Jun 30, 2008 20:45
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Yoozer posted:
Nearly every sound in that youtube vid (sans drums) is from an Alpha Juno or Alpha Juno 2 using the 'What the?' preset as a base. Certain passes during the song have the VCF envelope polarity inverted (so it sort of sounds like its reversed. Its hard to explain.) You can try building those sounds on a 3 oscillator analogue or analogue modelling synth but you will probably fail because: 1) Roland's chorus on the Juno series is unique sounding and is unbelievably noisy (you will seriously not believe how bad it is until you switch it on and off with all the oscillators disabled and observe the swirling hiss). 2) Alpha Juno's LFO modulates pulse width and chorus of all pulse oscillators independantly (which you won't do properly because you don't have the chorus) and: 3) All of Alpha Juno's DCO pulsewidths can be modulated independently which you might be able to do with a synth that has really flexible routing (though its easy enough with the Juno which isn't a complicated synth anyway). Fortunately for the guy who wants to know how these sounds are made, Alpha Junos are dirt cheap on the second hand market so just buy one. Get whatever obsession with it you have out of your system so you can move past that and get on to making something unique and interesting. If that still involves the Alpha Juno then fair play since it is capable of more than hoovers. If not then you can sell for close to what you paid for it to another guy that needs to get the fetish out of his system. Like most things, it is easy to build once you know how it is done. Alpha Juno is a real easy synth to program and its not difficult to make monster evil hoovers from hell in minutes. They sound great too. In fact, buying an Alpha Juno is probably going to lower your opinion of hard house and early hardcore because it is like the great arcana and elixer of hard house has been exposed and you realise how effortless it is. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jul 14, 2008 |
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Jul 14, 2008 14:31
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Man, I don't use any layers for kick drums. :\ Just the one sound straight from the drum machine or the mic and then a tonne of wave editing and post processing if necessary. I tried layering drums for ages and I never found it to be a reliable way to make drum sounds that I liked. Mostly I couldn't tell how they would turn out until they...turned out and half the time the result was unusable or horrendous sounding.
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Aug 13, 2008 13:54
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wayfinder posted:You should really give it another try, it helped my kicks tremendously. Maybe try and slice the punch from one kickdrum together with the tail from another in a wave editor. Or i dunno. What I did was set up a dedicated project file for layering kicks and just pull every stop I could. Non-realtime compression, checking against signal analysis, waveform surgery like filtering single peaks, etc. Spending an hour or two on a single kick sounds like a really stupid idea but once you do it and it works, it's gonna pay off. Thats only good for making kicks like alphazones where you want massive clips or sudden changes in the period of the wave. The trouble is I really don't like those types of kick drums and trying to get a smooth transition from attack to decay phase of the drum boils down to trial and error and just getting lucky with sample selection in my humble experience. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I hate it when I have to resort to trial and error. I think I just find designing drums with a synthesizer more intuitive. Then I reshape it as necessary with distortion/amplitude modulation/compression or whatever. I find micing a kick drum intuitive too since you move the mic around to get different sounds tape objects to the where the beater makes contact with the drum to get a different sort of tone or more or less click. Afterwards you can still distort/compress it or run it through an amp modulator and you aren't making any drastic and sudden changes to the period of the waveform. I find very subtle layering can work great. But designing composite single shots out of different readymade kickdrums is really hit and miss - even if you know roughly what you are doing and what you want to achieve.
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Aug 14, 2008 13:50
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Cubase can do all of that stuff. Most signal processing effects can be done the old fashioned way in pretty much any DAW. For example: 1) A gate/compressor can be made with an amplifier and an envelope follower. 2) A chorus can be made by cloning any channel and adding a time delay (in milliseconds) to one of the channels. Then you can route the output of one of both channels to an independent LFO (which can modulate pitch for example). 3) A de-esser can be made with a compressor and a band pass or high pass filter connected to the compressor's sidechain. etc. etc. It actually helps to get used to making effects this way just using routing tricks if only to get a decent understanding of how they all work.
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Aug 29, 2008 13:24
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The Fog posted:So, in essence he's saying: Prophet-5 unison stacks all 5 voices onto 1 note so playback is effectively monophonic. Access Virus C is 32 voice polyphonic so you have a range of unison modes. For instance x2 unison stacks 2 voices onto 1 key which means you can only play 16 notes before hitting the polyphony limit. x4 unison stacks 4 voices onto 1 key which reduces the total polyphony to 8 and so on and so forth. There isn't an option for it but if you could make it 32x unison then playback would be effectively monophonic since all 32 voices are stacked on 1 key. It does this because its DSP is only capable of sounding 32 voices at any 1 time. Some software synthesizers don't really have an effective polyphony limit or it doesn't reduce the voice count to any meaningful degree (like reFX Vanguard). Pressing more notes simultaneously or using high unison count just uses more CPU cycles which is good and bad. Its good because you don't really ever hear dropped notes. Its bad because playing with high unison RAPES your computer. Analogue polyphonic synths always have low polyphony compared to digital polyphonic synths. Take a Juno-60 for example. It is 6 voice polyphonic and has 1 oscillator per voice. There it a total of 6 oscillators and when you play 6 notes simulataneously all those oscillators sound at the same time. Each oscillator is its own discrete circuit so you can see how making a 64 voice polyphonic analogue synth with 2 oscillators per voice could be a problem. You would need 128 discrete oscillator circuits and then there are the independant LFOs and filter/amp envelopes per voice. This would make the synth freaking gigantic, really heavy, really really expensive and complicated to assemble. For most people in the business of making and selling synths they are increasingly impracticle and not at all economical. Sure the guy who made the Sunsyn (probably the most well specified non modular analogue polysynth ever made) stopped making them after 200 units or so, citing near bankruptcy, the unavailability of VCA parts and a desire not to waste his life building the fecking things. 16 voice, 2 oscillator polyphonic analogues are already big, heavy and expensive so yeah. Modern analogue modelled synths save money, manpower, size and weight by simulating everything in software that is crunched by a tiny microchip processer (a DSP). They can have loads of oscillators and loads of voices and amazing routability and the capability to stack one or more voices onto a single key and its all programmed and you don't need a person to handwire it or anything. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 2, 2008 |
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Sep 2, 2008 13:54
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I just bought an Oberheim Xpander so I'm now in the market for a semi weighted velocity sensitive midi controller keyboard with aftertouch (preferably something between 49 and 76 keys and as small as possible). My local stocks alot of the keyboards you can find on Thomann and I did try the more compact m-audios, novations and CME keys but I didn't really like any of them. The novation 4 octave keyboard was alright but it was outrageously expensive for what it was. For not much more money I could just buy another Access Virus only this time with a keyboard attached. I've played a kB and I thought the keyboard was better anyway. So I'm sort of looking for options outside of what you can find here: http://www.thomann.de/ie/midi_master_keyboards.html You know, things I can try out on home trials to see if they suck or not. I am not averse to buying synth keyboards if they are really good keyboards but obviously if the price of the synth makes the keyboard like more than 500 euros then I'm going to have problems since I dropped 1.5 grand on the Oberheim and am alot poorer now than I was yesterday. I briefly considered an Alesis QS 6 or something and I remember tinkling one ages ago but I can't remember if I liked it or not. Really interested in user reviews and opinions from owners if any folks have the time to say just why their keyboard is so good, it does their washing up for them. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Sep 2, 2008 |
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Sep 2, 2008 23:29
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Yoozer posted:Holy poo poo, congratulations. Believe it or not, this was my comfort buy after I lost an ebay auction for a Jomox Sunsyn. The auction price started high and jumped £1,500 STG in the last minute. I got to the point where I was typing £3,000 STG in the box before I realised this was madness and just retreated. For that sort of money I could buy an Xpander for 1,250 an XBase 999 for 1,000 and still have cash left over to buy a small used car. I bought the Xpander anyway and the rest is going into savings account for the time being. quote:Sadly, the kB's keyboard can nowhere be found - I don't think Fatar puts it in a separate keyboard. On the other hand, the Fatar controllers may be what you're looking for - it's just that they're knobless so you want to have an extra box w/ sliders and knobs. I was afraid you would say that. And it is equally disturbing to find the Virus kB nowhere to be found because they keyboard on that thing is really quite decent and I regret buying the rack module. On the subject of good keyboards I remember Novation Supernova having a pretty decent keyboard but I'm loathe to buy too many new toys at the same time. Really 1 toy a year is enough for me otherwise I get all confused. Have you tried any of the Fatars? I don't mind knobless/sliderless keyboards since I intend to control my Xpander and Virus using their control surfaces anyway. I guess I will miss softsynth hands on control but I never had any so I don't know what I'm missing. :O quote:No such thing. Pretty much reiterating that the Machinedrum has absolutely nothing that compares to it. Its a pretty unique drum machine. I am constantly lusting after a Machinedrum or an XBase 999. I find that the only real solution to this sort of thing is to get it out of your system. Work and put away some money every month until you can afford it and just buy a machinedrum and scratch that perpetual itch you have. If you still like it and use it a year from then then it paid for itself. If not you can always sell it for close to what you bought it for. Same goes for the 999.
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Sep 3, 2008 13:50
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MX200 is pretty decent if you want Lexicon-ish sounding plates. Same applies with TC plates which are quite different. If CPU load is a problem for you then I would probably consider one of these machines, otherwise you can make better verbs with software like Voxengo Pristine Space and a bunch of Lexi PCM91 or TC system 6000a impulses from noisevault. If money was no object, I'd still buy an Eventide over anything else (DSP3000 or Orville if I had a big wad in the bank).
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Sep 4, 2008 06:15
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