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I'm not joking when I say that Reaper will probably be the future of DAWs. It is already insanely well featured and the developer actually listens to the people that use it and makes changes accordingly. I'd give it 1 to 2 years before it is not only competitive with Cubase/Logic but better featured than both.
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Sep 6, 2008 23:50
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:51 |
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Kai was taken posted:Terrible idea. You're suggesting that he use a fledgling software suite as his first DAW. Where did I say he should use a 'fledgling software suite as his first DAW'? So many people are putting words into my mouth on this forum today that I'm just not even going to entertain it anymore. If you want industry standard you use cubase/logic or pro tools because you can work anywhere, anytime right this minute. Good luck with the learning curve (unless its pro tools which is easy as poo poo to work with). Reaper can still be improved alot but the salient point is that it is being improved all the time so no I'm won't be surprised when I see it becoming competitive with mainstream production software because it has the potential to be. Easily.
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Sep 7, 2008 02:41
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If you are still in the 'what does this button do' phase then you should continue learning to use what you have got. Don't juggle 2x DAWs when you don't even know how to work 1 of them yet.
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Sep 9, 2008 14:09
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I'm going to complain about the way you are applying theory to your music because it is all arseways.  Theory isn't like pick & mix. You do not and should not feel like you have to throw some fizzy cola bottles in with the liquorice all sorts. You don't pick chords and throw in some minors or 7ths or inversions just for the hell of it or because you feel like you need some variety.Theory has only one useful and practical purpose for me and that is to learn how to play an instrument properly. Piano/keyboard is the easiest to apply theory to. You drill your scales to develop muscle memory. You have to do it regularly and consistantly so the fingering is broadly the same and you have to keep your palms fairly flat and keep hand movement slight. After a while and with constant practise it becomes second nature and you no longer really think about what chords/scales/whatever you are playing because you sort of do it on feel and instinct. Your fingers just automatically find the right places. The theory also helps you to sort of make a written record of what you play on feel and you will at some point want to learn how to read and write sheet music and keep some written record of the music you make. If your songs are bland it is more than likely to do with the problem I had in the beginning which was improvising with very little knowledge of what I wanted to play and how to achieve it. You get a terrible deer in the headlights moment where you freeze and don't know where to go next, so you fall back on what you know. Or you become very hesitant to try out new things because its not familiar and it doesn't work because you don't understand it and haven't developed a feel for it yet. An example: for ages the only scale I ever knew was like an e minor pentatonic and that was only because years ago I tried for ages to play Voodoo Chile. I more or less failed because even though I could eventually play all of the notes my fingering was inconsistant and the whole thing felt mechanical and stiff when it should feel natural and comfortable. Whenever I was song writing back then I would get these terrible moments where I wouldn't know where to go next so I would wank out an uninspired e minor pent and it would sound like I didn't know where I was going. Because I didn't. Listening to other people play is a good way of getting out of your own head and seeing different methods of writing and playing music which you can adapt to help your own if you so wish. I got out of this when I started to learn fingerstyle peices on guitar that required a level of technique that I didn't have so I had to learn how to play guitar properly before I could play them (Aerial Boundaries was probably the first time I realised my finger picking and rhythm were totally inadequate). I had to go back and drill scales, finger exercises, finger picking (you *have* to use your pinky) and try to keep hand movements small and very slight whereas before I would often play with my hands splayed. I had to play the song at half speed and then build up to the tempo of the actual record because I just couldn't do it. For the most part I still can't. There are alot of people over at tranceaddict that used to get into theory without ever playing an instrument and I found that astonishing because they never developed the theory into a technique that you feel when you play. It remained abstract. I cannot write/play music like that and I hope you save yourself the time and effort and not do what they are doing because it will hurt you in the end. When you can begin to hit the right notes without really thinking about it, it frees you up to think about where to go next and again its about the feel of it. Not so much about what notes you should play next. You can think about that in retrospect once you have written down a great improv. I hope this wasn't too longwinded and I hope it describes what I'm trying to get at because I'm not very good at articulating it. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Sep 15, 2008 |
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Sep 15, 2008 13:35
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It also makes your channel window cluttered as all hell. But whether you want to do that or not depends on the emphasis you put on drums and how you work. I sometimes keep all my drums in a sampler, sometimes, nearly all on a drum machine. Sometimes I do it in one shots and use a channel per sample. Sometimes a mix of some or all 3. Theres no right or wrong way to do it and I can see the downsides of all the them.
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Sep 20, 2008 19:40
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wayfinder posted:Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the matter completely? Compression lowers your peaks, and auto make up gain does exactly what you are doing here, so it's just the thing you want to avoid doing, since it will in fact make the compressed signal sound louder than the uncompressed. To a/b your compressor without the loudness factor, you should disable auto make up. I dunno what auto makeup is (normalise?) but that method is the long way of doing it. You stick a compressor on (for example) a drum loop. Set the compressor's threshold to 0dB and its ratio to 1:1. Take note of the peak signal level. Set the threshold/ratio of the compressor to whatever you want but make sure its compressing (i.e. the ratio is higher than 1:1 and the threshold is lower than the peak level of the drum loop. Now change the output gain so that the peak level of the signal is the same as it was before. To A/B compare the two, simply mute/freeze the compressor while the drum loop is playing and switch it back on again. The channel output level will be the same and you will be able to compare the compressed and uncompressed signal fairly easily. Depending on the extent of the compression, you should be able to set the output level higher than you could do on the uncompressed drum loop before clipping occurs because the compressed drum loop has less dynamic range. Certain instruments like vocals and drums need some degree of compression because you can get quite a large disparity between loud and quiet passages and it is disconcerting to listen to (rather like a movie where some people are talking quietly and you turn up the volume so you can hear what they are saying. Then a massive explosion happens and you deafen yourself). In this case, you use a compressor to make the overall volume more consistant. Synths without velocity/pressure sentivity to volume (i.e. my Juno-6) don't really need any compression in this way because every note is equally loud all the time. The other use of a compressor is for sound shaping which is completely separate. Mostly if you are batch compressing alot of audio tracks it will nearly always sound worse than without compression unless there is a big disparity in volume between certain passages or instruments. With an amp envelope (attack/release) you can also smoothly dropout and bring in instruments without a sudden change in volume caused by the compressor stopping and starting suddenly. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Sep 24, 2008 |
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Sep 24, 2008 13:33
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wayfinder posted:Am I reading something wrong here or are you? The original issue was A/Bing the effect of the compressor without the psychological effects of louder=better. The gain in loudness comes from what you are describing (turning up the gain until the peaks are the same as before compression - making up for the compression, hence make-up gain). Some compressors do this automatically, it's called auto make-up. So what you're describing (and what I dig gardening had discovered on his own) is actually the opposite of what the guy was doing, and that's why I posted what I did. You want to A/B the effects of the compressor without the output gain changing? That is exactly what I described. It is wrong to say that compression makes the input perceivably louder - this is only a by product of what it does. A compressor reduces dynamic range so if you want to compare an uncompressed drum loop with a compressed drum loop, you keep the output peak level the same. The compressed drum loop has less dynamic range so at the same peak level, more of the signal will have more power in relation to the peak. It will sound louder but the important point to be made is that the peak level is the same and they will clip at the same point. If you just want to see what the compressor does without any make up gain or delay in the action of the compressor then you do not touch the output gain on the compressor at all. The attack and release envelope must also be 0ms or the lowest they will otherwise go. This is how it works: You take a drum loop whose peak level is 0dB. You then set the compressor's threshold to -18dB and the compressor's ratio to 6:1. I'm picking nice round numbers so the mental arithmetic is easy. This means that the compressor starts supressing gain when the peak level exceeds -18dB. For every 6dB over the threshold, it reduces the output to 1dB over the threshold. 18/6 = 3. Therefore the new peak level of the drum loop is -18 + 3 = -15dB. If you try this at home you will notice that compression actually makes the peak output quieter. The lower the threshold and higher the ratio the quieter it will get. Try -50dB threshold and 10:1 ratio. It doesn't matter how freaking loud the input it, compressing to that extent will make the output very very quiet. However, it will also have very little dynamic range, meaning that you could apply a massive amount of post gain before you clip. Without any makeup gain and -50dB theshold/10:1 ratio you won't be able to hear the effects of compression properly because you just reduced the peak signal to -45dB which is barely audible over background noise at normal listening levels. So this type of comparison isn't fair either. At some point you are going to have to come to terms with the fact that you will never be able to fairly compare a signal pre and post compression at 'the same volume' because the compressor has dynamically altered the gain of the signal and the two waves no longer even look the same above threshold. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Sep 24, 2008 |
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Sep 24, 2008 20:57
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Rivensbitch posted:I hate to step into the middle of this debate, but I use faders to control loudness and leave the "peaks" and "dynamics" to the players, the instrument, and the dynamics of the room. Oh please. Unless you can lookahead and ride a channel fader as fast and accurately as a machine can you are never going to do anything with a channel fader that is comparible to what a compressor can do so don't even go there. I can't believe I'm even telling you this since you know it already so why say something as dumb as you just did? You of all people know how useful compressors are on tracks that have alot transients in a short space of time (most electronic dance music to be honest). You don't have the time, the reflexes or the computer like mental arithmetic to do what a compressor does with your bare hands. And then there are performances that simply benefit from a little compression because the style is fast and very dynamic (which is not always a good thing contrary to popular belief). You can't realistically have some guy sitting on a mixer and twatting a channel fader up and down a couple of times per second. Lets be real about this. The Fog posted:you seem to have confused the real-world application and the intention of it. I agree with Wayfinder on the point that the intended purpose of a compressor is meaningless. All you need to know are the mechanics of how it works. I don't really care what it was originally intended to do since that does not mean that it cannot be used for other creative purposes if you saw fit. If we all thought like that then you wouldn't have people using turntables to make original music. I mean their intended purpose was just to play records right? I use compressors alot in sound design where you can shape simple sounds like short low frequency sine waves into thumping bass drums. You can set up a compressor to work like a threshold sensitive amp envelope (and I personally find it much more controllable and faster than drawing a volume envelope in Soundforge but hey). Hell, half the effects you probably use are the creative, unintended results of exploiting a compressor's sidechain for things other than peak level detection (like de-essing, frequency dependent compression, knee etc. etc.) WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Sep 25, 2008 |
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Sep 25, 2008 11:14
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toadee posted:You may have noticed the innovation of the automated fader driven by DAW's? You could listen to a track, make note of the level changes you'd like to make, draw them in, and still be controlling the volume "by the fader" and not by hand.... Are you seriously suggesting that you hand draw a volume envelope and create an automation track to do the exact same thing a compressor does, only slower and less acurately? Be my guest but you are wasting your time. Edit: If you want to ride channel gain fast without having to do it with your hands or hand draw annoying envelopes and click in a bunch of automation tracks and do all the mental arithmetic yourself then just use a compressor. Its dead easy. Come on, ML is above this sort of crap. Both of you are above this sort of crap. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Sep 25, 2008 |
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Sep 25, 2008 12:04
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A MIRACLE posted:I have a kick-related question. Is it supposed to clip? Ummm it can if you want it to. It depends on the sound you want. For instance, I often make composite bass drums from D16 Drumazon and Nepheton demos (to get straight 909 and 808 drum sounds respectively). I tend to like them massively overdriven and the first transient very often gets flattened off. I'll post an example when I get home to show you what I mean. I noticed from some reference tracks that the bass drum can sometimes be clipped in the sound design stage deliberately. A good example of this is the bass drum in Tiesto's Urban Train which is a composite of an 808 and 909 BD and a 909 OH and the first transient squares off pretty dramatically. Theres quite an aggressive clicking sound to it if you give it a listen. You might also want to listen to some Alphazone kicks or pick up a few free samples of Alphazone style kicks. These are usually composites of several different sounds (snares, claps, hihats, drum machine kicks etc) and in some of them you can see a massive and deliberate clip. Alphazone style kicks are usually very hard, very aggressive and the clip is key to that sort of sound. I tend not to like them because they go off like gunshots and I prefer my drums to not be so banging. I don't want my meters redlining in the mix though. If I introduce some sort of clipping distortion it is because it is necessary to have it there. I don't want it occuring because of poor mixing or anything like that. If it does happen it could mean the bass drum is disproportionately loud compared to other instruments and/or there is some clashing with the low frequency component of another instrument that happens to sound at high amplitude in the same phase. If its clipping in the mix then you really want to identify why and how it is clipping and whether you want that effect or not. There isn't a straight answer that always applies because its a creative decision. As a general rule, most people try to avoid clipping in the mixdown because they already distorted their bass drum and their guitars and what not exactly as desired and they don't want any ugly digital distortion on top of that when its getting mixed. Do you get where I'm coming from? WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Sep 25, 2008 |
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Sep 25, 2008 15:47
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The reason why you set the attack time to 0ms to demonstrate automatic gain reduction on a compressor or limiter is because it takes the delay out of the equation. Which is particularly useful to know when you stick a compressor on a drum track and all the transients over the threshold are less than 10ms long. If your compressor reachs peak gain reduction at 50ms after detecting signal over threshold then it may appear not to do anything. This is because the compressor detects the peak over the threshold. 10 ms later the transient has passed and the peak signal goes under the threshold again. 40 ms later, the compressor reaches maximum gain reduction but it has already missed the transient so no gain reduction occurs (and that confuses people). There is no misunderstanding. A limiter and a compressor work in fundamentally the same way even if they are often used for vastly different purposes. They automatically suppress the amplitude of a signal if it goes above a certain threshold. It is easy to see and hear that gain reduction if it is instantaneous and the threshold is low and ratio is high. Will you set up a compressor to hard limit like this very often? Probably not. Its very extreme and it sounds it. But its a useful starting point to take it as far as it will go so you can see what is possible with these tools. In truth, hard limiting is mostly the preserve of large soundsystems where the aim is to completely supress transient clips that will destroy speakers. Its why the attack time has to be so short so it can catch even the shortest transients. Depending on the music you make and the sounds you are working with, you may even find yourself using very short attack times on a compressor. I know I do. If I seemed exasperated or offensive that was not my intention. It was merely to make an example that is easy to understand, easy to demonstrate and which produces a very prominent effect that you cannot fail to notice no matter what type of sound you are running into a compressor. At the end of the day, compression is really simple and really easy to understand if it is explained properly. Therefore, if there is any misunderstanding it is because you or I have failed to explain it properly. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Sep 26, 2008 |
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Sep 26, 2008 00:07
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cubicle gangster posted:Why dont you both just fiddle with knobs till it sounds good instead of talking about it so much. There isn't a right or wrong way to use it but this is the first time I've ever seen anyone actually encourage people to use a tool without knowing how it works or what is achievable with it. Its not like it takes a great deal of effort or knowledge to figure out how a compressor works. Knowing your stuff helps you to better achieve what you want to do and helps you to get there faster with less trial and error all round (which in my humble experience is a really lovely way to do things). Fiddling is good and you should play around with settings and put the ideas into practise rather than leave it abstract and theoretical. But encouraging people to just fluke it is bad form. quote:You're kinda both right, you know. This debate cant go anywhere, nor is it very productive. We may disagree on alot of things but the above is pretty much true. You can use the terms interchangeably and insisting on rigid definitions when the function of many compressors overlaps with those of a limiter is really pointless. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Sep 26, 2008 |
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Sep 26, 2008 22:56
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RivensBitch posted:So I have a question for WanderingKid and Stux. When setting up delay on a vocal send, what's the best value to start with for the pre-delay setting? Do you prefer a hall, or a vocal plate? Or maybe a spring delay? I want a lot of echo, so should I set the diffusion value high or low? That would really depend on what kind of sound you want. Pre delay is used to simulate the delayed reflection of projecting a sound in a really large enclosed space. If you stand in a really big hall and clap your hands loudly, you will hear the first reflection later than if you did the same thing in a small room. I sort of think about it in this order: 1) Pre delay (the time it takes between you clapping your hands, the sound wave, hitting a surface and rebounding). Dont set this too high unless you want a deliberately unnatural sounding effect. Even in massive concert halls the delay is in milliseconds. 2) Difussion (the frequency of early reflections). Occurs immediately after the pre delay phase. High diffusion is meant to simulate very small enclosed spaces which cause sound to bounce around alot. Low diffusion is meant to simulate large enclosed spaces where the frequency of rebounds is much lower so that each one is perceived as an individual echo (i.e. HELLO-hello-ello-lo-lo) Unless you want your vocals and drums to sound like they were recorded in a massive cave then you probably want to experiment with lower diffusion values. High diffusion will make short sharp sounds very blurry and indistinct and it can slur speech if its high enough. Conversely, if you want individual echoes on background vocals (to give the illusion that there are people chanting in the background at the entrance to Lechuguilla) then you want to experiment with higher diffusion values. High amplitude sounds really 'excite' a reverb. 3) Decay (the time it takes for the early reflection to lose energy). Should be roughly proportional to the amplitude of the input. For example, if you clap really loud, the soundwave produced has alot of energy and it takes longer to decay. If you clap softly, the soundwave produced doesn't have alot of energy and decays quickly. Try using higher decays on high velocity, transient sounds like claps or snares to get a lush sounding wash effect. It can sound great in sparse mixes or on solo performances but high decays rarely sound good when theres alot going on in the mix because it bleeds into everything else. When theres alot of dry sounds going on then having one instrument with a huge decay makes it sound unnatural because it is obvious that the sound is not only coming from a different room but a completely different part of the planet. 5) Damping (how much high frequency energy is lost when reflecting off surfaces). High damping is used to roughly simulate some of the absorption of various materials that the room is made of. For example, a room made entirely out of wood can be simulated with higher damping values. A room made entirely out of sheet metal is easier to simulate with zero damping. 6) Room size. You need to adjust this with Decay and Pre Delay. It will be a sort of balancing act but just think it through logically and try to imagine the sort of room you want your singer to sing in or whatever. Long pre delays + high decays + very small room size can sound weird and unnatural but you may want that effect. Theres a reason why cluttered mixes are often alot more dry sounding than sparse mixes. It is harder to control reflections and decays when theres alot going on and it might work on some instruments and gently caress up others. Really large room reverbs with huge decays sound really lush on solo instruments and audio demos for synths but when you put it in the mix you start to feel like everything else has to have more reverb so its more homogenous. More like all the instruments are coming from roughly the same place. But if you do that then the mix will sound like its playing in a cave so use restraint. Sparse mixes can get away with this more. The first thing I try to do is visual a sort of place that I want to be playing my guitar or playing my synth. Use your imagination. Then I roughly think about the dimensions of that space - how big it is, whether there are lots of flat surfaces or whether its got alot of irregular surfaces. I think about what sort of material it might be made of and imagine how that might sound. Then I set up my reverb accordingly. If you use convolution reverbs you can even layer impulses to create really unique effects or better yet, use short impulses to simulate micing a amp and then route the output of that convolution channel into another one with a large concert hall reverb to simulate than amp being in a concert hall. Reverb is really cool because its not that abstract and you can visualise what you want to achieve quite easily. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Sep 27, 2008 |
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Sep 27, 2008 13:10
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The Fog posted:I definitely agree with you that there are rules. I also think people should experiment without thinking about the rules, but at the end of the day, you need to know what the rules are and WHY they are used, to get the big picture to gel. Yes. I broadly agree that we are building structures and they are subject to certain laws of physics with regards to how sound is produced and how it interacts with other sounds and the environment it is sounding in. At the same time, there is no reason why you cannot break those rules but the important thing is that you need to know what those rules are before you are in a good position to go about systematically breaking them to create interesting effects. I personally do not like to think about music in terms of laws and rules and I don't like listening to music which sounds to me like it is a textbook of rote learned production tricks and math. I like hearing different takes on a familiar concept and people bending established concepts to create something I haven't really experienced before. But there is a logic underlying it and a method to doing this. It isn't fluke. I only ever used music theory to train my hands to hit the 'right' notes. After a while, it becomes reflexive and you don't think about the theory anymore or even what notes you are playing because you just do it on feel instead. Your hands get comfortable hitting the 'right' notes. So when you want to play something deliberately wrong or deliberately hit the wrong note it feels awkward (as it should do). And if you feel it enough it comes through in the peformance. I'm not there yet with my guitar but its a great place to be because then you can really start conveying sensation through your instrument. You can concentrate on the feeling or sensation and you don't have to reason or rationalise how to achieve it using your instrument anymore - your hands just do it and you feel it. I am interested in hearing music from people that feel everything they are doing but I have no doubt that they know what they are doing. So well they don't even have to think about it anymore. WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Sep 27, 2008 |
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Sep 27, 2008 13:29
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Seriously, what is the point of you even being in this thread?
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Sep 27, 2008 15:50
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Well uhhh what are you trying to do specifically? I mean theres a tonne of ways to make a kickdrum alone - from drum machines, from a synth with a sine wave oscillator -> pitch LFO -> amp envelope, from an an acoustic bass drum recorded via a mic, out of existing samples/recordings/synths and superimposing them etc. I mean what do you want? What instruments do you want to create? No matter how prolific you are its going to take time to get a feel for what works in a particular context and it takes ages to get to the level where you can think of a sound and recreate it using a synth. You really need to be adept at synthesis to even begin to do something like that.
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Oct 7, 2008 21:14
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Elder posted:Oh yeah, Surge is great. Insanely tweakable - everything can be tied to an LFO, and then you start modulating the LFOs with other LFOs...it's neat. What about mod matrix? I like synths where everything can be a modulator too. :iamafag:
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Jul 5, 2010 11:26
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