Wrongplanet Musicians' Showcase

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An example how a nice fart song should sound (not made by me sadly enough):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftCaLm2EOJ4[/youtube]
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Judging by the score of it it's got more success on youtube than the average bieber track.

I think my biggest headache, and why I think about quitting altogether every other month, is that the ideas I have and what sounds great to me unfortunately has too much low end. I build a track to sound sublime on my monitors and I can't release because it started from an improper base. When I have a tune properly based its okay, I can release it on Soundcloud, but it feels uninspired usually and like I had to make huge concessions against the style that I'd rather be doing.

The thing that I'm dying to figure out is how someone builds a track that feels and sounds lower/mid heavy (Consequence's Live For Never is a classic example) but where for as deep as it sounds all of the percussion is incredibly soft, it sounds crisp on a car stereo or pro-grade monitors where I realize that my beats, while they're enrapturing and 'alive' on monitors, simply end up with too much mud because I tend to overdo the punch to the drums.

Seems like for most of us, while we love making music, love expressing ourselves, and love essentially painting with sound - when we're doing what we want to do, but its just technical wall after wall.

Yes, I feel that.

I do enjoy playing with the technical aspects of sound engineering and music creation, but often it feels like the challenge in creating what is desired is more of a frustrating and insurmountable mountain

Here's an idea we could try; how about we have a sort of mixdown collaboration/contest, where we all start with the same material, and attempt to create the best mix possible with the tools at our disposal. We can collaboratively discuss the process and share particular techniques used.

That would be neat, particularly if we could have a bit of something for everyone where maybe ten melodic samples and maybe a handful of drums were put together where the requirement was that you have to use at least half of each. If ZX were up for it I'd be most inclined to trust the mixing integrity of his choices in starter samples - if he were up for it at least. Getting that right though I think is the most important part because if we start with bad stems we'll all just end up making rubbish.

I thought about that, and I don't think the starting quality is so crucial, because we'll all be working with the same stuff, and it could be an instructive exercise in how to save poor material.

Saying that, good quality would definitely be preferable, and I'd go with your choice of starter, as ZX does seem to have the best quality mixes. Techno is structurally quite simple too; we only really need something that's perhaps a few bars of music; a drum part as individual pieces, bass, melodic part(s) maybe a pad and some fx bits and bobs

Something just occurred to me reading your post. You're more of an audiophile than the typical listener, so you're prone to fault-finding any time you hear your music on a non-audiophile system such as a car system of cheap stereo. Consider what kind of music you're making and where you really are most likely to hear it. The sound system in my car is horrible anyway and there's really nothing I can do about it right now. And it's not just my music...it renders pretty much everything unlistenable.

What I need to do if I want to hear my music in the car the way I want to hear it is have the whole system rebuilt.

And therein is my point. You have to make your own music according to what best suits you and your listening experience, NOT another average listener. If they want better quality, then it's up to them to adjust EQs and such to suit their own taste. What you're hearing in your monitors is probably accurate, so if you're concerned about making electronic music to get out there, then at most all you really need to do is set up a pair of powered Mackies somewhere and use those for tweaking your work.

Mmm...hate to say it but in my experience there's no saving bad sounds or samples. Now, if we start off with good stems and add our own stuff and its half-rubbish because we can't hear things right, its still better than rubbish leading to more rubbish. Having good starter samples gives us the right kind of roadmap to where we'll be slecting other drums and other sounds based on well built sounds - ie. our ears will be tuning themselves to the right kind of EQing. Without that I don't know how much of us will have anything shareworthy. I'm not saying whoever comes up with the stems should phial off all the low-end and give us kicks perfectly rounded off below 80 or 90hz and do all of that for us, they just have to be sounds that can have that done right. Bad sounds though, no matter how you EQ them, are essentially en exercise in futility and there's nothing you can do to recessitate a tune full of them aside from start over and throw the bad sounds in the waste bin.


We could mix and match as well; say if he has techno samples, someone else has ethnic percussion that they know is of good calibre, I think having the option to go either techno, organic/accoustic, or some blend of both would be optimal.

my car is done up in JL so what I get back from it is pretty reliable for nonstandard. I also have a small boombox plugged in to my soundcard to check quality against that sort of thing. There's a whole art to working with the low end, lower mids, and mids, to get something as clear as possible across any system. If everything sounds like crap on a setup it doesn't tell you anything, if just your own does its different.

That said I get what your saying, I've heard lots of pro stuff where listening to the mix I couldn't imagine doing what they did, analyzing it like its my own it just sounds too baked down; then again I think that's one of my primary mixing problems - ie. what really sounds wonderful to me doesn't work. The problem - if it doesn't work and can't be professionally rendered, its simply done wrong.



That's fine if I want to make things for my ears only, then again though that's the only option if you go that way and build things that simply won't translate off of your own monitors. I wouldn't be able to even play it in my car, I'd have to just hang out in my room and hear it.

I understand. The other option you might have that should be foolproof is just leave huge spectral gaps between tracks. I've noticed that a lot of DnB heavily filter the drums if they want to feature acid bass, for instance.

Out of curiosity, since this isn't my main area, how many layers would you say an EDM track should have at most? This is a tough one for me since what like to do tends to be pad-heavy, and I'm working at the moment to force myself to program percussive and medium-decay sounds so I can get a little further out of my usual box.

Oh frustration! The program I'm using keeps playing something I removed from a song and IDK how to make it stop. It's ruined the sound I was going for.

If it's sample based, or coming from VSTs, then the raw quality should be decent enough anyway, and then it's all about processing.

I'm not really thinking of starting off with stuff that's eq'd or compressed to death... that would be our job



I just don't want to make things too complicated too quickly. I think just having short stems of a bare bonesey track to mix and process will suffice. The idea I had was primarily about mix balancing and sound processing, rather than finished tune production, but if something good comes about, that would be good too.

Its a difficult thing to do, as in most sounds that are reasonably good seem to run from 200hz to 10khz+ and it seems like what makes the sound are the peaks, what gives personality is the nuance inbetween, seems like mixing is more like frequentially stacking lincoln logs than trying to cut a bunch of things sheer and set them up in clean-cut rows across the spectrum.


I couldn't really tell you. My sense is, if you're dealing with melodic content, you don't want much more than two or three things outside of percussion going on at once. Some producers, like John '00' in his trance masterclass tutorial or Rockwell being interviewed about Faking Jacks, will talk about 100 plus buses because they have that many sounds going on; just that clearly a lot of those are one time effects and yet another significant bulk of that are layered sounds, ie. sounds that are really 4 or 5 synth pads working together to create one and all in separate mix busses.

Come to think of it I'll post it, I think you'd get a lot out of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfTewIBCw5c

Believe it or not that's not the case. I really wish it was.


That's exactly it though - a sound that needs EQing is in that 70% range where its not perfect but its salvageable. A great sound needs no compression or EQing, a decent sound needs compression and EQing, a fair sound you'll be straining, and a crap sound, as far as I've been educated at least, can't be salvaged no matter what.


Agreed, I'm just saying that there's a distinct difference between good and bad samples and we're best off letting someone pick them out who can tell the difference.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 26 Mar 2012, 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Alright, I have a wacky loop here, I'm trying to test my EQing skills, I want you guys to tell me which of these 2 noisewrecks you prefer:
The unprocessed one:
bleepme-04-02-12-n1.wav - 2.31MB
or
The processed one:
bleepme-26-03-12-n1.wav - 2.31MB

Depends on what you're trying to do with it.

Get it heavier and phatter.