Wrongplanet Musicians' Showcase

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Thank you, it should go nicely with such a combo.

At least for the dnb they highpass as much as they can at 600hz or higher.

It did

Try Transient shaping.

That a newer tech? I hadn't really heard anything on it before but it looks promising for taking the hardness out of bass drums and snares.

On Petal Jumpers I might have halfway lucked in having the right sounds but I was able to sort of ridge a couple regions in each sound, lower an area between them, and get a sound that was still balanced but also had significant weight cut out of it. That translucent feel has a lot to do with that aspect, I remember a couple years ago I was experimenting with masking a sound with an inverted copy of itself and peeling certain frequencies and edges of the mask back to see what kinds of results I could get - clean results but I realized that's also a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut (that and if you're working below 1 db of variance it can get dangerous - especially if you end up increasing the volume of one of the two channels by accident which I thankfully never did). I had another track in 2010 where I'd devised something in Reason's Combintor for two BPF's via the Thors and then a post for highpass that did a real good job of cleanup; downside is I never found a convenient way to make a parallel of that in Ableton and didn't feel like bumping all my tracks back and forth to Reason.

I bought myself a new plug this past Thursday as well, looks quite promising and I can't wait to see what I can pull from it on my next go-around:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbMa8g_jV2I[/youtube]

That looks nice

I like that, like the offbeat synth bass.

You're melodic ideas are sounding pretty good as well. I don't think you're having too much of a problem with mix balance either, the practice you had back in the day definitely shows.

Thank you Though I'm really stabbing in the dark with my mixes, I can't actually hear what's going on at all.

More by luck than judgement.

Are you using regular/commercial speakers to monitor your mixes? I remember that carried me for a long time, I couldn't get a great deal of clarity but my mixes seemed to translate across systems without much trouble. Once I got flat-response monitors though, different story.

SPL Transient Designer's one of the best plug-ins I've ever bought.
It does an excellent job of cleaning loops.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNf12nUPia8[/youtube]

Link

I used to use some 2nd hand hi-fi speakers. I had to get rid of those for space though. Now I've got an old pair of cheap Sony MDR CD280s that I inherited.

Not exactly Sarm studios here

How long have you had the flat monitors, and do you mean to say that you find it hard to mix for 'translatability' now?

When I used to be utterly obsessed with music production, I was really hung up on mix and tone qualities, and I gave up because I couldn't achieve the results I wanted on my gear. I prefer just making music for the pleasure of it now, and if I get half decent mix results, that's okay.

I watched a tutorial on that earlier today when I commented and yeah, it looks like it essentially does most of what I'd want to do with a compressor but a heck of a lot better and easier. To tell the truth I've rarely ever had much luck with actual compression making a difference to sounds so this could definitely yield better results - both on adding initial punch to synth, bass, or soft drum sounds or perhaps softening drums that come across as too hard (albeit that would be the bigger challenge as I keep hearing that in general a shite sample is a shite sample).

Dialing down the sustain gets rid of any background clutter on loops. I can guarantee you that any current loop based music is created with help from this tool. Combine transient shaping with an exciter bus, and I think you'll get that clean sound you're looking for.

Well, I got them in two rounds. I first got a pair of the Yamaha HS80M's back in 2009 without the subwoofer but found out they can't deliver bass at all, so for that amount of time my low end was mostly invisible to me, ultimately I still used Logitech Z4's and volleyed between Reason 4 and ProTools to see if I could work out the difference. Then I bought the HS10W to go with them and still, the lower mids and bass were still overdone - which is a combination of flat response speakers not having the normal commercial curvature that most speakers have (which enhances lows and lower-mids), so I was still trying to make music to sound great to me on those speakers but at the same time I was still ending up with way too much low end because of that. I had to do everything - whether listen to music, play computer games, etc., through them for a good long while to get a knack for what music is supposed to sound like through them. To this day though, I notice that my mixes have a tendency to be most present below 1kHz and above 4kHz, that 1kHz - 4kHz has a bit of a dip and I don't know if its just the way I've tended to like my mixes but I get the impression that not having a nice neat line sloping down from 50/70Hz to 10kHz is also a bit of a mixing issue. I even realize that listening to stuff on my car stereo by the pros that if it were my mix some of that stuff sounds wrong to me (especially certain sounds turned up to jump out of the mix), it seems like there's so much with mixing that you can get away with but at the same time there are a few iron-clad rules where if you're missing them even your best efforts can fall apart.

Mixing is one of those head-achy things for me where its often been my least favorite part of the creative process but at the same time its where so much of the song is essentially made that I can't not push to get better. Its always seemed to me like a good analogy would be having a house where if you turn on the sink the sliding door to the patio opens, you close the sliding door and the basement lights turn on. You turn the basement lights off and the water to the tub turns on, you go to turn the tub off and both the kitchen sink and the patio door open again . I *like* to think I'm figuring it out better as I go along and how to keep myself from banging my head into the wall, at least at this point I think I'm done reinventing a lot of past mistakes, and I've picked up a good habit of making at least four or five save versions of a tune; ie. you always want to see how far you can tweak and clean-up your sound but fixing it till' its broke is also an incredibly easy thing to do.


I think that's why I left hardware - there was no way I'd ever have enough money to buy four or five synths, a nice big mixing board, a rackmount filled with hardware effects, monitors, etc. etc.. I remember my cousin had all of that, a $30,000 room down his parents basement but - his parents financed all of it. Software makes it all a lot less expensive, a good DAW worth its salt comes with at least so-so versions of everything you'd need DSP-wise for starters, and a quality plugin seems to be 5x - 10x cheaper than its hardware equivalent.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 12 Mar 2012, 9:44 am, edited 1 time in total.