Grandmaster producer/engineer here

can anyone here make beats over raps

Grandmaster my ass, I only fuck with 2 inch tape. Learn to do a razor blade edit and maybe I'll care what you have to say.

All questions regarding Anthony's load(s) should be directed to him.

Hard "don'ts" re. sound design are not watch too many youtube tutorials or you will never sound original, and not to bog yourself down and put sound-design ahead of the music. You might impress a few producers on soundcloud but it's doubtful that your music will have any lasting impact. If sound-design is giving you a headache and killing your motivation, that's because it's an academic process and not very musical. So you need to inject spontaneity and fun into sound design, which may involve trying hardware synths or impulse purchasing more plugins - whatever does the trick for you. But that's a different discussion. Some people have brains capable of working on a single sound for 7 hours and still feel like they are making progress, and a lot of great music has come out of that, but when it works it's because the musical foundation is solid.

Hard "do's" include reading the manuals to your synths and using audio more, i.e. granular synthesis or sampling notes from recordings and putting them into a sampler. Also "do" follow some variant of the pareto principle generally when it comes to music, but especially sound design - 80% of your sound will be complete in roughly 20% of the time you invest to get to the final sound, and after that you get greatly diminishing returns vis a vis the effect the sound will have on your audience.

I can't give you concrete directions on ghost production because, from my experience, nepotism will take you very far. I knew people who were already involved. They got to the point they did either by doing the same, or by putting out a hit track/remix under their own brands. If you manage to do that, your inbox will instantly be flooded by labels seeking ghost production services.

Thanks a lot, appreciate it

Use the Glen John's method. Only requires like 3 mics

De esser or drop the 6k range with a bell curve eq

Haha, I'll agree that there is something spiritual about cutting tape, but admittedly of the "new school" and prefer having an Undo function. A cool video of Steve Albini cutting tape if anybody is interested:

youtube.com/watch?v=VmqgUsRHjyA

Slightly pedantic point but important nevertheless, if you are digging into a vocal with a bell EQ, especially in those vital frequencies where you get the all the definition from the vocal, you will curb the sibilance but risk deadening the vocal whenever you don't have sibilance. Ideally you want to keep throse frequencies intact when there isn't sibilance and target them when it happens, hence the de-esser. Some modern EQs like Pro Q 3 have dynamic EQ which does exactly this, and using a bell shape in that region with a dynamic EQ is essentially the same as de-essing but with less control. Modern de-essers are pretty good and separating sibilance from good sound, so even if you do have a peak in that region that isn't sibilant, it will pass through a de-esser unchanged but will get caught by a dynamic EQ/MB compressor.

Great vid, sorry for being snarky, nature of Yea Forums I guess. Have you ever worked with tape? I significantly prefer the workflow and sound to any DAW/Converter set up. I actually stopped engineering because I found the new methods so uninspiring.

What DAW should I use as a beginner? I’m already a self taught pianist and play other instruments pretty well too, it’s that for one reason or another I can’t seem to get into a DAW.

>pianist
Reaper. It has a decent notation view.
>self taught
Oh, whatever you want. Ableton is what everyone will say, I imagine.

I’ve also been a singer all my life and I want to know what I should do to start arranging and recording my own songs/covers, what equipment might be best for my situation, just anything I should know I guess, I’d appreciate it. I mostly am forced to record at home btw

is it possible to record a half deceant album with a 150 dollar multitrack recorder and a 80 dollar mic?. Also gimme some tips

what is sidechaining and how do i do it? i see it a lot with hip hop production

Why is stereo a thing? Mono is infinitely better.

i work in ableton, what is a good way to edit midi

i have this korg app on the switch that im in love with because of the ui and have spent hundreds of hours in, how can i edit midi like this on my computer, right now i put everything through audacity but would like something i can use the plethora of korg synths i have on ableton on my pc

youtube.com/watch?v=_q0WJ6VeV40

Nope, I've never been in a position where I needed to. I hope I'll be able to one day, only for some personal project. I have the utmost respect for people who are able to get a record onto tape and out to the world from start to finish, and have it sound like any other digitally made song - that's the hard part. Anybody can go and smash the inputs of a tape deck and make it sound "lo-fi" or what have you. All of a sudden it becomes a lot more difficult when you have clients who pay you to make them sound good. It's like taking quaint pictures of lawn chairs with a polaroid vs. filming interstellar on 35mm. It's not something you can learn from a tutorial, takes years of practice and study to nail consistently, and I'm personally much too paranoid of a person to do it seriously. Also I'm not a fan of any more AD conversion steps than is strictly necessary, but that's a separate story.

There's an interesting documentary on youtube somewhere about how the transition away from tape "killed" music however. Personally I'm all for the democratization of music. Do we really want to return to a time where you could only make a record if you had heaps of money to pay a studio professionally record your album, mix, master, etc. all on tape? Tape, and the difficulty/cost of recording and mixing with it was what let record labels establish and maintain a monopoly over the music industry. I know that if digital wasn't around, I would be doing something totally different right now. Ironically, Albini (a legend in his own right) featured prominently in that documentary, which is strange considering he's a self-proclaimed "punk" leftie but totally wishes he could go back to the time the industry was owned by fat cats with cigars. Sorry for the rant lol

In mono there is only one source of sound and, therefore, many problems occur when one tries to put several instruments on only one speaker. It is very difficult to distinguish between them. They practically eat each other and do not come out like they're supposed to.
Stereo brought us two sound sources and it seemed that the problem would be two times easier, however this is not the case. It’s not the fact that there are two speakers, it's just that they can give us many more sources of sound.

>or you will never sound original
But isn't the goal to give what your client wants, not to "sound original"?

What are the production mistakes on this track?
soundcloud.com/zxz/let-me-break-you

>Personally I'm all for the democratization of music. Do we really want to return to a time where you could only make a record if you had heaps of money to pay a studio professionally record your album, mix, master, etc. all on tape?

We do not, because there are impoverished Mozarts which otherwise would not have the platform that they do today.

Sounds like poor mixing on your part. if you knew how to mix properly, you'd be able to balance it correctly and not rely on gimmicks ("Oh I'll just tuck this sound to the left instead of balancing it in my mix properly")

>Albini

>Nearly alone among well-known producers, Albini refuses to take ongoing royalties from album sales, feeling that a producer's job is to record the music to the band's desires, and that paying a producer as if they had contributed artistically to an album is unethical.

This guy is an idiot. This is called being a shareholder of an asset-generating vehicle and receiving dividends.

As a beginner you want something that has a minimum learning curve and that can get you to make music quickly. I usually recommend FL studio for beginners for that reason. There's a reason why FL by far and away is used by the vast majority of hip hop producers who make most of the smash hit songs you hear on the radio - it's because they all started with FL due to its ease of use and the availability of lots and lots of online resources to get you going. Drums, for example, are easiest with FL, it takes no time whatsoever to get a groove going. Finally, you get a slew of instruments and effects which are more than enough to make professional-level music. Personally I use Live 10, but to give you any more detailed advice it would be good to know what genres you are working with.

post the documents

post the documents that prove youre a grandmaster

>Personally I use Live 10

My nigga.

>art should be an asset-generating vehicle
sorry not everyone is a sellout

Everyone who has ever listened to music notices that some instruments come from far left (e.g. guitars), some from approximately center (vocals or drums) and some from the right (make up your own example). It is described by saying that the instruments are scattered across the PANORAMA FIELD.
Numerous experiments have shown that a man can tell apart seventeen points in the pan-field. To hear this many he would have to have perfect hearing and years of studio work behind him. We, the common mortals, hear only 11 or 13, if we're lucky. These points are, in fact, my precious "virtual sound sources", because the sound comes from there, and there, and there... But only with two speakers!
The purpose of this writing is to accent the importance of carefully balanced music, of a full pan-field, of a volume of every instrument in that field which we recognize as the music.

They're idiots if they aren't, or have enough money to not need any more, in which case they're navel-gazing rich kids.

Good art is easily popular, as it appeals most to the senses. But I will agree if you mean Lowest-Common Denominator art is garbage and should be avoided despite being the most profitable.

There's a balance there to be achieved.

Because humans have two ears. If humans had one ear, we would never be able to know where a sound is coming from on a panorama, we would only be able to tell if a sound is close or far away. 2 speakers let you have panoramic sound. It's like asking why shoes are sold in pairs.

If I'm remixing a song and cutting out short sections of stems to use as samples, should I be normalizing those samples or leaving them at the original volume? Let's say I won't be using any outside sound sources in this remix if that changes anything.

>They're idiots if they aren't,
Not really. Maybe they recognize it's someone else's art, and it's much like claiming ownership to something that isn't theirs
>Good art is easily popular
If money is the motivation for art, then it is not good art.

Thanks user

>it's someone else's art

The producer contributed as much as the drummer or bassist or whomever did not write the song itself.

>If money is the motivation for art, then it is not good art.

Why make art? Social acceptance on some level, which itself is a currency. The more socially accepted you are, the more you have value as a billboard, and resources are then funneled through you. That's the true dream of every artist. Anonymity can be achieved by not having done anything whatsoever, and there is always drive behind all effort.

>soundcloud.com/zxz/let-me-break-you

If it was you who made this, good work. Almost post-rocky, reminds me a big of Mono.

Some comments I would give are that the balance of the drums needs some work. The big is huge and penetrates the mix but the snare in comparison is getting choked and falls flat. That ties into the other problem which is the limiting on your master bus is causing a lot of "pumping" which is crushing too much of your dynamic range and wreaking havoc on the balance of your mix, and a lot of that is dependent on your kick dominating the mix too heavily. You can hear it especially around the 1 minute mark.

So my advice would be to bring down the kick in the mix and clean it up. It has reverb on it, maybe a part of the sample itself in added in post, that has way too much low end and that low end of the reverb chokes the limiter too much when it fights with the bass. Highpass the reverb up to about 250 hz. Don't be afraid to gently roll off a bit of low end off the kick with a low shelf EQ. What this will do is bring the kick inline with the rest of the mix, the snare will come out of the woodwork because doesn't follow a massive kick that doesn't let the limiter recover in time, the low end generally will be less muddy, and you won't have this pumping effect from the limiter affecting the entire mix. Here's an example of good tonal/level balance while still having massive drums and huge lead guitars:

youtu.be/ivL9Hd7mn_k?t=185

The kick is huge* sorry, having trouble typing lol

i come up with guitar riffs and other short stuff but cant put them together in a song , how do i make songs
i play guitars and bass and im p good at it

this is my best production job so far; what is left between that and a radio/cd tier master track?

youtube.com/watch?v=i3k-ZTWl9mg

Are you storing the samples for use later? Or are all of them going to remain in the project? "Normalizing" samples is something I do if I make a sample pack for example, where you want all the samples to be of roughly equal volume. If I'm using the samples from stems within a project, there isn't really a need to do render them out again at a different gain and then begin using them (if that's what you mean) - better to avoid (albeit infinitesimal) quality degradation and the headache. If you're putting them away in a folder for use later, then maybe it might make sense to bring up some outlier samples to a decent level (maybe -4 or -5 db) to make surfing through them a bit smoother.

Explain how compressors work, or like in terms of the DAW. I’ve never done any of that stuff, how do you compress tracks relative to one another and what does this do or actually mean?

>The producer contributed as much as the drummer or bassist or whomever did not write the song itself.
How so?
>Why make art?
t. non-artist

non sequitur

Highly recommend using a looper pedal or effect, Ableton Live has a looping pedal by default and I know there's some new DAW that just came out that is exclusively based on the concept of looping (ALK by zenaudio i think). And yes, you can arrange those loops into a full song later and add all the bells and whistles. Point is, if you're an instrument player and come up with short riffs that you want to develop, looping is the way to go. This guy uses it to great effect, might give you some inspiration:

youtube.com/watch?v=_g5NDLKy0NI

Not using guitars but same idea.

How do I properly utilize a compressor to combine sounds so they sound good together, and add punch to drums? What does ratio mean and what should I set it at?

Why are drums compressed? What should I be listening for when I compress drums?

What's the difference between distortion and saturation?

REMINDER: Take advice from larpers at your own risk.

Pitchshifting that doesn't suck?

patrish

do you have better advice?

>youtube.com/watch?v=i3k-ZTWl9mg

Good job. The energy in the mix is right. I could go at length about the details but you got the big picture right and that's all that matters. The glaring problem that I hear is the vocal. It makes me think you mixed it in last, after you've settled the instrumental track. At any rate, there's some strange phasing happening in the high end of the vocal, I think you would do well do use a de-esser to control some of the more sibilant "hissing" that happens like in the hook "when I waSSS young." It's pretty aggressive around 1:03. Are you doing something for De-essing already?

The other culprit might be the microphone itself. I've heard plenty condenser mics do this. Which mic are you using? If it's on the lower end, I can suggest some plugin solutions which might bring it back to life a little bit.

Once you've solved the sibilance, the rest is in getting the tone of the vocal right. Right now it's kind of dull in comparison to the rest of your instruments - again, might be a result of the mic you're using. I would try to brighten in a bit by lowshelving those trouble frequencies at about 400-500 hz. They give the vocal a kind of "boxy" sound which isn't always desirable. Another thing is the compression you have going on the vocal - it's way too aggressive, and I suspect you may have shoved the reverb/slapback before the compressor to cause it. It also might be overcompression on the mix-bus but I doubt it.

The tone and balance of the guitars, especially the solo, are great. Use of panorama is also great. The drum bus might be a bit over-compressed but to be honest, I've always liked drums to be compressed a bit too heavily so it's not the worst thing. Might make them more natural is you bring that heavily compressed sound in parallel. Great job anyway - mixing real instruments is actual mixing, so kudos for putting everything together and getting a convincing result.

Thank you. I will be using the samples in a single project and I was concerned about losing quality while normalizing. Some samples are really quiet but that's fine because I'll only be using those in quiet parts in my remix.

This is assuming you don't have anything significant on the master bus since you mentioned mastering, I assume you are going to send this to a mastering engineer. But I had another listen - what do you have on your mix/master bus? it sounds like you might have a rogue compressor/limiter on the end somewhere that's really crushing everything. Some more info there would certainly help.

Depends. Do you mean live pitch shifting? I'm afraid you're always gonna have something sucky when a plug-in pitchshifts incoming audio with low latency. I use the Soundshifter Pitch Stereo from waves, but only if I wanna hear if my song might sound better in another key, I enable it briefly. The more ideal solution would obviously be to actually transpose audio, and the best way to do that depends largely on the DAW if you are using the DAW's pitch shifting capabilities. There are other solutions which work in a gimmicky way like gross-beat (or halftime from cableguys if you're not in FL) but it has its own problems, which might actually be desirable if you're making trap/hip hop music. So it all depends on the application.

Yeah, don't worry about it then. If they are quiet just bring up the gain in the sample itself, I'm sure your DAW allows that. The quality loss going from WAV to WAV is negligible but is best avoided.

A sincere thank you very much!
I'll save these notes.

>DAW
;)

Attached: impulse.gif (560x350, 667K)

yes theres already de essing on the vocals
the phasing is because i used two mics.
i have a beta58 copy and some cheap LDC and i figured they complement eachother on the vocals when summed so i did that

i would like the plugin to fix the mics

indeed the slapback is early on the vocal chain if i recall well

i got overcompression comments on the drums during the mixing so i backed it a bit on the drum buss but you still find it overcompressed so im doing something wrong

multiband compression, some reverb under 10% wet, saturation, eq, compression and what else, do you want me to open the mastering project

Have you had any luck finding a steady amount of work as an engineer? What's the market like for that position? Is

*Is it a career that you can live off of?

Hey GMprod. I have way to nearly a thousand hours spent in reaper making prog rock and have never really looked up a guide or anything. I feel like my end results sound pretty good except for one glaring issue, my percussion!

Let's say I mix my guitars up to where I like them (usually a schoche under peaking) how loud would one consider mixing drums for a like a loud groovy part? is there a rule of thumb? as loud as the guitars/ louder/ under them. I have tried many different volume and effects and they still sound off.

Here's a reaper project I'm messing with now, in case the issue is obvious and glaring enough for you to identify immediately. and here is the link to the finished song that this timeline became.

youtube.com/watch?v=ycHu2rBg_Xc

Thanks for you time.

Attached: MISTER MASTER PLEASE.png (1910x1028, 217K)

OH also I'm using a roland SPD30 to track my drums. Sometimes they sound great sometimes they sound beyond canned. IDK. Should I just find an IRL drummer?

No difference between distortion and saturation. Distortion is just a colloquial term to describe heavy saturation.

Drum compression is a field in itself, I could explain to you at length all the nuances but they will mean nothing to you if you don't hear them in action. The way to learn what happens is take a drum bus (all the drums going through one channel), and put a compressor on it. Make the ratio high, attack lowest, release lowest, and bring down the threshold until you see the needle thrashing around. Listen to what happens to the drums when you do that. They all sound like they're the same volume, and the effect is pretty obnoxious at lower thresholds. Then start increasing the attack - put it about 50ms. Now you hear the initial impacts of the drums much harder, in fact the drums will sound like they're popping through the speakers when they are hit. Then increase the release slowly. You'll hear that the drums start to disappear more and more between those "pops". All the while watch the needle, or the gain reduction meter, doing its work. You need to understand what the release is doing to the drums by watching the gain reduction meter slowing down like molasses when you increase it. Do this with 10 different full drum sets beating away and you'll start to understand the point of compression - it's to shape the volume of the sound. It does this by reducing "dynamic range" or reducing the difference between the loud and quiet part of a sound. Again, you can read essays on compression, and I thought I knew what compressors did in great detail, until I started to mix real records with real instruments and vocals. And then it hit me how crucial compressors were. So I really recommend mixing real instruments - find some stems online from a mixing competition like Dave Pensado has once in a while.

instaud.io/3Dvd

i get attack and release, but what's the difference between low threshold and small ratio,, and higher (smaller negative number of db) threshold and higher ratio, while in both cases the average gain reduction is the same?

I have no idea how to master, how would you go about matering this step by step?

clyp.it/de2vpf2j

yo. you jumped my very serious question. what the hell dude

>youtube.com/watch?v=ycHu2rBg_Xc

Great work. The video is also awesome, really nails the vibe of the song. I always breathe a sign of relief when I hear people coming with with creative MUSICAL ideas - the mix can always be fixed if it's recorded properly, but you can't really do the same with song writing unfortunately. Anyways, onto the feedback:

I've listened to a lot of this kind of stuff in my life but not as much recently, so pardon me if my opinion might sound primitive or not really in line with what you think the song should do artistically. But when I hear the guitars and the development/arrangement of the song, I would have really wished for the drums to be more bombastic and lavish - especially in moments like 2:18, the guitars come roaring in but the drums do very little to support them. The cymbals have no problem coming through because they have nothing really in their way, so it's not like that section is dead on arrival - they translate the intensity of the moment well enough, but IMO the kick and snare need to play a much larger role in the mix and really take it home. So yes, the drums IMO are far too weak. But the good news is, you don't need to make many changes to have a really sweet track. This is where subjective understanding of the music comes into play - I personally think the melodic theme of the song, couples with the tone of the guitars you chose and the PERFORMANCE of the drums, dictates that they need to really be a lot bigger in the mix. So, select all the non-drum tracks, bring em down, push that drum bus fader up, hit it with some nasty compression to increase the sense of urgency in the drums (really helps if you have a room mic picking up the ambience of the cymbals, they respond great to heavy compression). I hear that the kick comes through great but only on certain occasions, namely those big single hits at the beginning of the bars around 0:45. That's how it should feel, but throughout the mix.

The other thing is, I would really like to hear some reverb on the guitars. They need to be treated right. I'm a sucker for springs, but there are also some very nice plate convolutions/plugins out there that will work great.

wow thanks you so much. this really means a lot, you even made it through all my garbage typos. You've given me a heading and I appreciate it.

I have some big old reverb pedals and stuff. I'll consider really flaring them out. Thanks again!

Define "half decent"

ok i'm talking about an album people can listen to and enjoy and not think "wow this sounds like shit". I've lots of ideas for mixing my music but i'm not sure how important the recording equipement is for getting a good sound

Are you still here? How can i archieve this guitar sound?
youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3zaeOyL7Q

I currently don't have tube amos but i have a lot of amps sims, my idea is to get a similar sound without make too much guitar overdub, currently i've been making these demos trying to get a nice sound.
Trying with a marshall JCM800 sim
soundcloud.com/ideal-adventurer/we-green-day-now-marshall-jcm-800/s-zsXdF
and ENGL amp
soundcloud.com/ideal-adventurer/we-green-day-now-using-engl/s-gHXh7

Again, "good" is relative. There's been some great albums recorded with an SM57. But then again, most people haven't heard it.

What genre are you talking here?

You answered my questions directly and well
Thanks a lot

Okay, that's a nice, pleasant dry signal. So the worst possibility ruled out. If you can get another take, I recommend stepping a bit further away from the mic - there's some proximity effect happening ("my FFather"), and it's actually overloading the mid-range a little bit which is making the vocal sound a bit dull in the final mix. If you increase the distance from the mix, it will open the top end your voice much more and you can always bring up the gain in your DAW when you start compressing. Put a gate before the compressor to get right of some of that noise, or just delete the segments with noise in them by hand. Then I would do some compression to even out the delivery, but not much. I don't know what plugins you have, but if you compressor has an "opto" function, I suggest using that - you want a smooth, even compression to avoid pumping, so use a higher release. Then some roll-off (shelf) in the low mids and some shine in the high end after de-esser, and de-esser before compressor. This is tricky sometimes, I usually do 2 instances of de-essing before and after the compressor. The 1st de-esser does heavy lifting and the second one cleans up whatever got brought back up by the compressor. The durms are a bit heavily compressed still - go and try to smash the shit out of them in parallel and blend with the original, you won't get the pumping and still get the body from the compression. Slapback after all is said and done, the last in the vocal chain, with generous low-end roll off in the slapback if it has its own filter, if not then send to a return and filter there. The 2 mics together for the vocal, I dont know if that's being done in this demo you sent, it sounds fine here, but if it was used for the record then scrap it - it really wrecks the high end in an ugly way. Less is more, and if you really want "more is more" that badly, then put that "more" in a parallel track and bring it in to taste :)

If you're clever, anything is possible. Many artists today do the opposite - they get PAID to make music they spent $0 making. If there are some serious problems with the hardware, then maybe not. But if you're getting things like noise, that stuff can be pretty easily dealt with using plugins nowadays. Bottom line - absolutely you can make a great album with what you have.

I got this sound pretty easy through a Dean CR450 with EMGs in the neck position and the tone knob nooned, a suhr riot and a graphic EQ set like this.

The suhr is just a marshal in in a box- so I think you're on the right track.

Attached: 20190504_142356.jpg (3234x1832, 3.37M)

acoustic/indie/experimental pop n shit like that

reaper has a preset on its multiband ocmpressor called "nice opto mids" but i dont know what that means and it doesnt have an actual "opto" button

isnt a faster release more adequate for vocals so they stand upfront in the mix?

what do you call pumping -you said it on both vocals and drums-, excessive sustain?

no on that demo was each mic separately , two phrases with one, then the other.

here's another test. more distance from the mic this time. mics touching eachother and both aiming at the same angle. same take, first the dynamic, then the condenser, then both mixed.
instaud.io/3DvV
i think the dynamic has a liveliness that the condenser doesnt, and the condenser has a crispiness and openess that the dynamic lacks

i want to record mix and master my band's songs all by myself and get it good enough to play on the radio and where else

that youtube track was ezdrummer on the drums, and with my band i would record real drums. besides these two mics i have a pair of SDCs samson c02

bump

how do i go about making similar resonant wooshes?
youtube.com/watch?v=r1_XJ6g6Xdw&t=300

Good question. The primary difference is what part of the signal is actually being affected in those two cases. With a low threshold, only the top peaks cross and get compressed. If you have low threshold, a lot more of the signal is going to get treated with compression. You can reduce the ratio to get the same gain reduction, but that's misleading, because there's gain reduction being applied to a lot more sound when the threshold is low, and that will sound very different that just chopping the tallest peaks with a high ratio/high threshold - only those peals get hit but the rest is unaffected. Classic case is drums. If my snare is smashing through the loudest, I can bring down by threshold to only catch the snare, and the other drums will be unaffected. Or I can bring the threshold down below and snare, kick and hats, and reduce ratio to get the same GR, but in this case I'm getting 3db reduction on snare, 1db reduction on kick, 0.5db on hats.. etc.

what digital synth could i use so it would sound like the one in the interlude / outro of this song?
i mean, is there a certain synth or preset i could use? or how could i go about making it sound like that?

I know it's a generic ethereal stringy sounding synth, but i'd like to use something like that on my songs.
thanks.

holy fuck i forgot to link the song

youtu.be/9Ht5RZpzPqw

thanks, i'm checking and yes it gives a similar sound but i think that without guitar overdub i will never get the Ramones live sound.

Ok dude
Bumping my question
Can you please reply?

I'll upload a short audio example to illustrate something to another poster in a minute, it might answer your question

I guess, but the better you sound, the more likely you'll have a bigger audience. Maybe invest in better mics before recording and do it right the first time instead of making excuses

how do i make rubber sounds?

No if there isn't an opto button, don't worry about it.

instaud.io/3DwG

Here's an example with the mp3s you uploaded. It's going through something called a FET compressor, which is commonly used on vocals to achieve "presence" in the mix, as if it's being sung closer to you. That's not always a the goal though - sometimes you might need gentler compression that contours the sound rather than put it in your face. The FET really likes to put it in your face. For EQ, a nice reduction at the 1k area and low mids rolled off with a shelf, about 1-2db. You can hear significant background noise in the signal which obviously gets brought up by the compressor - you need to remove that from the signal manually (as I did) or using a gate, which is tricky sometimes. In this case the attack/release settings are such that there is better continuity from word to word, rather than a longer term compression that I would use on a full mix where the picture becomes more macro than micro. The distance certainly helped open everything up. This signal is the 3d version by the way. I can't comment on which signal is really better because the mp3 codec introduces some high end distortion so I can't really tell, although the first mic is a bit sizzly. Here there's about 3 db gain reduction going on. I really recommend you get melodyne, not necessarily for pitch correction but for correcting loud notes/artifacts (like the loud KUH sound in "colder then"). It's perfect for that and worth the investment. Don't get the assistant version, get the tier above it.

well that would really depend on what your trying to do

>youtu.be/9Ht5RZpzPqw
Obviously you can make a sound like this in many different ways, but if you want to get weird ethereal pad-like sounds like the last few seconds of this song, try a synth called Synplant. I recall a pad preset being in there that sounds almost exactly like that sound.

Ah well if you want to make music for clients, where they literally ask you to "make a beat that sounds like x" or "make a x type beat," that's much simpler to do. You are literally copying sounds you hear in famous songs. For that you need to know a few commonly used sound design gimmicks that are prevalent in certain genres to achieve certain sounds (hip hop for example.) I laugh when I listen to interviews with the top hip hop producers who refuse to divulge their sound design "secrets," when in reality it's just some not-so-secret youtube tutorial video that uses some tremolo/tape effect or whatever. The result is that 90% of modern trap and hip hop beats sound identical. If you want to go that route, tell me the genre and I will tell you the gimmicks you need to be aware of

please suggest good reading material for designing a synth
I know how to play an instrument at a fairly advanced level and can compose, but creating a sound from scratch is beyond me

Hi there, GMprod! How do you do?

Here's a "track" I made about 2 years ago:
soundcloud.com/bobby-philler/vignetting-shades-of-emerald

Would appreciate your feedback.

If you are making EDM, I'm just gonna flat out say that you don't need to bother compressing anything at all. Compressors act on dynamic range in a signal. That means a signal changes in volume over time. That doesn't happen very much with synthesizers, and if it does, you can just change the settings in the synthesizer itself to achieve your desired dynamic range (ADSR envelope.)

If you want to know what I compressor fundamentally does, it generally reduces, or compresses, dynamic range of a sound. Dynamic range is the difference between the loudest and quietest part of a sound. A piano note is loud in the beginning and quiet at the end. A compressor will make the beginning of the piano note quieter so that the end of the piano note will appear louder (pic related). Another example is a human singing; not every note will have the same volume, and some notes will get lost in the mix and some will jut out too much. A compressor evens out those notes so that the vocal sounds even across the whole performance. The effect this generally has is that is brings the track out into the "front" of the mix, it becomes more "present" in the mix, but only if the signal had any dynamic range to begin with (changes in volume). And compressing typical EDM drum samples is silly because they are all hilariously over-compressed to begin with.

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What genre?

>youtube.com/watch?v=r1_XJ6g6Xdw&t=300

Well the answer is in your question, What you want is a bandpass filter with adjustable low frequency and high frequency cutoffs, and maybe even a bell in between. You increase their resonance and automate their movement back and forth in different ways to get those vowelly sounds. You can also automate the resonances for more variation.

GMprod help me I'm so easily distracted making music on computers but buying a multitrack recorder seems stupid in 2019. How does one stay focused on a computer and keep a musical mindframe? I almost never get shit done because you know you can check your mail, then facebook then 4 hours later you're watching some weird video from Korea and nothing got done.

>soundcloud.com/ideal-adventurer/we-green-day-now-using-engl/s-gHXh7

Well you're very close. The midrange is bang on, better in the second version than the first. What you're lacking there is high-end distortion. Lots of amp sims have a "tone" value which is essentially just a pre-distortion lowpass filter. You wanna turn that up to allow more of those high frequencies in. I'm not sure what plugs you're running but if you had something like decapitator by soundtoys or saturn by fabfilter, that will give you the high end bite you're looking for, and in the case of saturn you can apply it selectively to only hit the high end and not the mid range. Put that right on top of whatever signal chain you have right now. Likewise you can create a parallel track with another amp sim setting that's really trashing the high end and blend it in parallel. Hope that helps

What daw? I agree with you that sitting at a computer is not musical, I don't think that's an abnormal feeling. Do you play instruments? What genre do you make?

I use Live 10 as well. I play jazz piano, guitar, bass and sing. I try to make new music. A mix of Bill Evans, Frank Zappa, Ariel Pink and Theo Parrish. The distraction is two fold: One is simply not spending time with music. The other one is the mindframe: Genuine creative time and musical composing.

Okay, well then I would suggest developing your musical ideas as much as possible at the piano, before ever opening live. You will know if a musical idea is worth pursuing if it excites you while you're at the piano. Once you have a melodic motif or chord structure you're happy with, open Live and record it without thinking into a clip in session view and let it loop. Then pick up your bass and write a bassline while your loop is playing and record into session view. Neither sound might make it into a song, but what you're doing is sketching musical ideas that you might transform into something else later (which is especially easy in midi.) Once you have a coherent idea coming together, stop yourself and have a break, do something else. I usually work at night so I just fall asleep and wake up to the idea I wrote having no recollection of what is even sounded like. Then the first few seconds of playing back are the most valuable because your instincts tells you what's missing or what to add, as if you're hearing it for the first time. It's absolutely essential to trust those instincts 110% and record anything that comes to you on the spot and with an instrument. The good news is that session view in live makes this especially easy, and if you aren't using session view extensively (especially as a live musician) you're just using glorified Audacity. Sketch, sketch, sketch, keep it as rudimentary as possible, store everything, try to make a sketch a day, one of those days you won't know what happened and you'll have made a song. Music for is about throwing shit at the wall until it sticks.

What would be the equivalent workflow of creating and saving sketches in something like Reaper? Is there anything?
I'm not him, but I also play piano and this seems like a great idea.

Ideally you create a basic template for drums, bass, chords and lead of some kind. Use something inoffensive for the chords, like a rhodes or basic piano, something that isn't too suggestive of any musical direction. For bass just a triangle wave or lowpassed square. Lead would be a saw wave in a higher register or a string or something. The point is that you want to boot up your software and have everything ready to go ASAP. The advantage of live is that you're able to store a bunch of recorded ideas in one track, and when you trigger them, they will automatically play in time, so you can have a bunch of them for a piano and trigger them in sequence and play them "Live." I imagine Reaper is a horizontal timeline DAW. The only way I know of replicating something similar is by mutilating your timeline and storing a bunch of clips in a horizontal track and navigate through them later to decide what to use, and have a section of the timeline devoted to just storing all your junk ideas that you might bring back later. But the underlying premise is the same, which is not to use your mouse to do everything and to understand the fact that all the sounds, notes, etc can be changed later, so you don't need to worry about writing a full song from the beginning. You need to worry about creating the fundamental musical components which you will then be able to use in a song. Force yourself not to tweak a single knob until you've arranged a basic song with the most basic instruments, then the hard part is over and you can fiddle away to your heart's content.

is there a free plugin with a reverse reverb function somewhere out there or do i just have to keep doing by hand

Answer definitively:
WHICH DAW BEST DAW? (Also, why?)

how do I make errie hollow sounding synths. Also, how do I make ultra clear crystal or bell like synths? What free softsynths do you recomend?

Can you give me some feedback on this?:
instaud.io/3Dyy

they're all literally the same if ur semi skilled

anything with good audio quality that can read dlls is basically perfect

What a cop-out answer.

Live 10 is objectively the best for making music hands down and I've tried them all. The metric I go by is efficiency in workflow, which is all that really separates DAWs from one another. Also Push 2.

If you mean reversing long reverb tails then no, not that I know of. There are some quirky plugins that use reverse-reverb on the fly though, one that comes to mind is Crystallizer by soundtoys (although it's more of a delay than a reverb.)

Whats the best way to make your own drum sounds? Any VSTs that you recommend?

For both bells and hollow synths you'll be looking at FM synthesis primarily, and FM8 is the go-to tool for that. Many synths have FM functionality build it though, and most DAWs have FM synths built in.

The demo you linked is interesting, if a little repetitive at times. Two things I would advise you to get a handle on are scales and developing tension/release in a song. Some notes in your melody are dissonant/illogical. Correcting some of those notes up or down a semitone will make the melody make sense again. The sound that way because they fall outside of the scale your song is based on. Obviously I'm generalizing, but for staring out, you should familiarize yourself with some scales and try to write melodies within them. Building tension and release is the basis of any song, so for your next try, try creating tension with a crescendo and releasing it with a decrescendo. As you go along you'll learn more and more interesting ways of creating tension and release, but it's literally the bread and butter of writing interesting music, so keep that in mind.

I'm new to production and this is best mix i think i've made yet. been pedantically eq'ing for weeks but cant make it sound pro.

soundcloud.com/robert-dunn-22/the-early-hours

What else can i do to make it sound more professional?

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Yes, I've been using Punchbox by D16 exclusively to make kicks. Rent it on splice, I just straight up bought it and it's in my default template. Find me an equivalent clap engine and I'm never using samples again.

808s I make in Serum. I know you can make huge dubstep snares in Serum but the styles of music I usually work with don't really need snares like that. If you're interested in how to do that, you can look up a video Virtual Riot did explaining it.

Hi hats, shakers, shit like that I use from packs because they aren't as functionally important as the kicks, snares, claps etc. I hate using samples for kicks especially because you're completely locked into its tone and you're in a stalemate if you want to take the low end of your mix in a new direction.

>soundcloud.com/robert-dunn-22/the-early-hour
If it's private you need to send the secret link, it's not opening.

Please post your music here so we can be the judge, senpai.

It's a minor melodic scale. I changed the root of the scale with the changing of the chord progression. Should I instead keep the root of the scale the same throughout the song?

Have you ever tried this?
sonicacademy.com/products/kick-2
The degree of control you get is unparalleled, and it's extremely easy to use.

What "scene" or environment do you work in?
How do you make money exactly? (like do you sell your own orignal music on a label, do you dj? do you make custom beats in the studio with rappers? etc.)
I think this information is vital in a thread like this because it tells us where you're coming from when you make an argument and provides context for us to understand you better.

Punchbox is this but with with many more features, go check it out.

thanks, you are very kind.

Not really.
All it has is more effects that you can replace with third party plugins.
It doesn't have what makes Kick 2 great, which is the envelope shaper that you can use to customize the precise pitch and amplitude envelopes, with multiple individually-tunable breakpoints like you can with Serum's LFOs.
It even shows you the phase of the various layers so you can align them perfectly in a second.
What can Punchbox do what you can't with Kick 2 and some effects added after it?

I do sell original music on labels and plan on developing a brand once I graduate uni. I'm paying for that by farming out production/mixing/mastering services to stock music and sample companies, as well as "ghost production" for several well-known EDM acts. There are very few genres of computer-made music I haven't produced in the decade or so that I've been doing this.

>"ghost production" for several well-known EDM acts
I hate that big names get to take credit for other people's work.

Attached: Goldie-GQ-Style-hp-GQ-19Sep17_b.jpg (1620x1080, 112K)

Do you ever meet or collaborate with other producers?
Any one that we would know of? (not necessary to giveus the name)

how do i tell my parents im gay

Suck your daddies dick in front of your mom

Yikes, I did not know they updated Kick to version 2. Looks like it has virtually the same functionality eh? I got punchbox for the fact that it had real-sounding 909 and 808 generators, on top of all the top/mid/sub sample capabilities. Before I was going through 909/808 folders of 100 kicks at different lengths/pitches and it was a nightmare. If Kick2 has 808/909 generators that sound like the real thing then the bezier curves put it over the top for sure.

Favorite music documentaries?

Have you seen this one?

vimeo.com/70724357

It makes me interested in being a DJ

Ah so it's not the features but the sound?
Yeah, I don't care for that so Kick 2 is perfect for me.

>Looks like it has virtually the same functionality eh?
They actually added quite a bit of stuff from the first Nicky Romero edition.

How I make shoegaze with only a DAW?
Also, how do I create crazy drum patterns like Aphex.

Basically, how to be Sweet Trip?

>How I make shoegaze with only a DAW?
use enough reverb where people cant tell its not a guitar
>Also, how do I create crazy drum patterns like Aphex
write a nice melody in the piano roll
then copy paste the piano midi into the thing for drums

How do you get good sounding, non harsh distortion on an instrument?

use fuzz

Yes I've collaborated with several producers, mostly overseas. That's how I got my "start" so to speak. Nowadays if I collaborate I work in the room with people, and not in a production capacity - nowadays I have a lot more fun making pop beats and I work with vocalists. I've had several experiences where I've collaborated on records with producers who were nobody before and I watched their careers take off on those records, when the distribution of labour was always heavily skewed in my favour. I'm not salty about it, I was just hyped about making music with people I respected and worked my heart out. This is in the EDM scene by the way, several years ago when it was still popular. I've realized I enjoy making pop music way more so that's what I'm trying to do nowadays.

Every time I produce a song it sounds good and clean up to the mastering stage, after which it starts to sound like shit at the slightest attempt at limiting or maximizing.
I've tried a ton of different limiters (inclusing the Ozone maximizer) and none worked cleanly.
How do I make my tracks louder without them sounding overcompressed and full of limiting artifacts?

Sorry I don't have an example at the moment but you know what I mean.

how do i go from being able to make loops and short melodies, synths and drums i like to actually having a full song?

i can make parts of songs, but have problems making entire songs

Get some overboard distortion plug-in like ohmicide or izotope trash, and a reverb plug in / your native reverb in your DAW. Increase the reverb decay all the way and distort the guitar beyond recognition.

Aphex drums is like said, just set your project tempo to something high and pencil in notes virtually at random. You can try the same distortion/reverb combo on that too for maximum shoe-gaze effect.

Daily reminder hardware studio tools including a decent multitrack 1/2 tape machine or mastering deck are widely available and great for your mixes if you do a little research on how they work and aren't dirt poor and anyone disparaging these methods are A. Inexperienced and just taking out their ass or B. Poor and coping and get bent out of shape over a few grand and shouldn't be trusted. I run a hybrid studio but mostly track on 8 track tape with real instruments and use my DAW for mixdown and further EQ, Compression and it's absolutely awesome and not so expensive considering the amount of money most waste on things like VSTs and plug ins

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Can we hear a sample of your work?

Fuzz is nice but is very committal. If you want to "saturate" rather than outright distort, you want a high quality saturation plug in. Softube, a company I swear by, makes a free saturator called "saturation knob" that is phenomenal for the low price of giving them your email address. Apart from that I always recommend decapitator, and more recently the Black Box HG-2 from plugin alliance. Also Saturn from fabfilter, it gives you much more control than the above but isn't strictly an emulation of analog saturation (you get multiband, envelope followers, lots of awesome algorithms etc)

Thanks, guess I often can't get the right amount, true detective soundtrack has some nice distortion swells on drones and mine sounds too brittle

Good question, one that's close to my heart. Assuming your mix is solid, then the newest ozone 8 maximizer on one of its IRC algorithms should lets you push it pretty hard. Personally I swear by Fabfilter's Pro L2, I think it's the best true-peak limiter there is, aside from Limitless which I'm currently testing. It will let you get pretty stupid loudness levels, it WILL get angry with you, but it's distortion is almost always pleasant and fits the program material. Try a demo of it out and see if it helps. If you're still having trouble, what you should do (if you aren't already) is drop a compressor on the master before the limiter to offload some of the gain reduction work on the peaks. You'll get much less distortion from the limiter that way.

If you find that distortion is causing your sounds to be brittle, don't be afraid of turning down the dry/wet knob so you don't sacrifice the "fullness" of the source material, assuming it had any fullness to begin with. Also, if you read the manuals of your distortion/saturation units, look for algorithms which bring out even harmonics rather than odd harmonics. Even harmonics tend to thicken out the sound or make it "fatter," "warmer" etc.

Could be a gain staging issue just thinking now, because I use to turn everything down quiet, I heard some distortions account for that, as in the signal louder = better tone possibly

How can I tell if a track or channel (often with long reverb) is giving me ear fatigue and whether it's actually objectively bad or its just my ears because I've been listening to the same thing a lot?

I doubt that. Louder signal = better tone when the limiter isn't overworked and the program material (your song) is mixed properly. Think about limiting this way - if your mix is suffering from frequency masking in the low end, that might not be a problem when you have 6 db of headroom. It becomes more and more of a problem when you start taking away headroom, and eventually either your drums or bass will lose the fight and give up. You should try to balance your mix in such a way that when you take the oxygen away, the most important elements in the mix survive. So if you're limiting and your drums are dying and your bass is dominating, you need to go back to the mix and give your drums more breathing room in the low end and take some away from the bass. Even a 1db reduction in the subs can tip the balance under the limiter. Very small changes cause massive difference when you have no headroom and are going straight into a brickwall. This comes with practice and mixing with a bit of foresight will help your results. Halfway through your mix, try running everything through a limiter at very high input gain and see what is dominating and what isn't. You will have much less of a headache when you begin mastering.

I only used up to Ozone 6 and Pro-L (the first). I'll definitely try the newer versions and Limitless as well, thank you very much.
And yes, I do use a compressor before it.

I should say that I don't have proper listening equipment and I only use some cheap earbuds (that I know extremely well and try to compensate for by using reference tracks). Is it possible that by not hearing correctly I'm uknowingly mixing things in a way that may sound fine to me but is causing problems down the line?

Could very well be (see above paragraph), but aren't the purely amplitude problems of gain staging eliminated by the "infinite" headroom and absence of any significant noise floor of modern digital environments?

If you're having this thought, it's because you've been working far too long in solo. Nobody is going to hear your solo'd tracks, all that matters is how a track sounds in the mix. Make a habit of making changes in your mix while everything is playing. It will suck at first but that's how you become a good mixing engineer. If your track is actually just one track with a lot of reverb, well then I guess you should compare it to a similar track from an artist you like to determine if it's shit or not.

That depends on what you call a "gain-staging" problem. What I'm describing can happen even if you have perfect, orthodox gain-staging everywhere in your mix. Imagine stepping on a can of coke with perfectly perpendicular force, downwards. If one side of the can is weaker, it will give out and the can will fold under your foot. If all sides are equally solid, the can will retain it's overall shape but get shorter and shorter until it's a puck. That's what you want in your mix. And that doesn't just require a good amplitude balance across all the tracks in your mix - ir requires the correct tonal (EQ) balance, as well as dynamic range (compression) balance (like the vocal is always present and not disappearing/reappearing too loud under limiting). So if something in the mix is failing as you start applying gain reduction from a limiter or compressor, go back and check if all those "balances" are satisfied. Gain staging isn't relevant in this case.

By the way, what you say about infinite headroom only applies to the track outputs of your DAW. Gain staging is absolutely critical in between plug-ins that are situated in a chain. Certain plugins are designed to distort at certain input/output levels, and if you screw those up, well you either get too much distortion or not enough, and you might not even know what's causing it. So always watch out for input/output gains between plugins to be within tolerated limits.

Absolutely, mixing on earbuds may cause problems. So what I recommend is have a compressor with heavy settings on your master bus that you leave off and once in while engage to see how your balance is doing. Or, if you have the balls, just mix into an active compressor. Your mastering engineer will not be happy with you, but it's doable. Nobody @ me, Andrew Schepps mixes into a pair of 2264s doing 3-4 db of gain reduction, and if he does it, you're allowed too.

I respect where you are coming from. A lot of people use tape as an 'effect' just like you say, slamming it hot and distorting everything. The studio I worked with recorded very clean, doing 15ips IEC (European EQ curve, kept the heavy low end of 15 but with extra sparkle at the top)

I personally recorded my own music at 30ips for max possible clarity. But the sound of either coming through the monitors is like hearing thunder. I worked at a very nice digital studio (analog console, outboard, etc) before quitting, and it just didn't have the same feeling, even though my boss was more talented, and I had gotten more talented as well.

You only have to do one AD conversion if you record, mix and master off the tape. The master 16/44.1 or whatever the new standard is made off the tape deck, plenty people still do this. Last songs I recorded were digital and the mastering engineer laid them back to tape and mastered from the deck to give it a little more warmth. It was a subtle difference, but my point is more it's out there if you know how to use it and have the money.

I'm torn on the democracy of music. More shit then diamonds in the rough comes across my ears these days. However digital did not kill the recording industry. Napster diner did. You could make an audiophile recording on PT, I just haven't heard it yet. You also have to resist the urge to tune and use beat detective.

The thing I miss about the 'fat cat' days is that you had a real budget. Big boys got six figures, usually around a 250,000~ budget.

I personally don't think you can do it right for less, regardless of capture media.

I miss that Steely Dan took a month just to get hte snare drum sound. I miss the limitations and having to find work arounds instead of instant fixes. A lot of human element required for polished and 'near perfect' sound in the analog era.

Also using a tape machine's remote transport is just as easy as using a DAW, maybe more so.

Yeah that happens, but listenign to everything also I get a weird pressure in my ears using long reverb and can never find what frequency that's causing it, Somewhere either sub lows or mid lows 200-350hz, no idea. On a particular track using Valhalla shimmer, I highpassed within the plug in to a point it sounded still ok, but the ear fatigue was wretched though subtle so changed to stock reverb in ableton. I ended up curtailing the reverb tail with automation on each burst as other instruments fade in.

:0/

Thank you very much.

this ones not much of a direct question
ive been playing guitar and bass for about 2 years now but focused only on technique, theory, and scales.
only recently did i start looking into pedals, effects, and everything that comes with recording and tone.

My main question is where can i found out what the paramaters of an effect actually do to the waveform, and how different orders in a signal chain will change that effect.
What im getting at here is for example, what does a compressor really *do* to the signal (this one i already know the answer to ;)). This question is even more broad when working with synths in DAW's and seeing the millions of digital knobs with abstract names and not knowing what they do!

So the long and short of it, Is there an online source where i can learn about these various knobs and how they work rather than playing around in a DAW for hours on end?

I hear you. Neve, even with his ears at 92 years of age, maintains that 192 khz is not enough to declare the end of analog recording/processing. Maybe he really is a god and can still hear distortion from sample rates that high. But when it comes to how the majority of consumers listen to music today - which is the paradigm I operate within primarily - needless to say it's more than enough. I romantically like the idea of transferring a record onto tape and back into digital, I just don't know if it's really worth pushing it through anything but the very best AD converters, rather than just use some of the great tape emulation software out there? :P In fact it's one of the reason Andrew Schepps has transitioned to working almost entirely in the box, and he claims his mixes have only gotten better for it.

I see your point and can only say: thank god it's not worth 250,000 to make a record nowadays. I have no idea what I would be doing with my life otherwise, lol.

Interesting, I'm not sure I've heard about anything like what you're describing. Are you using speakers or headhpones? There are many kinds of reverbs (plate, spring, convolution, etc) that you can try. I personally can't stand ableton's horseshit reverb. I don't get any sort of pressure on my ears, but I certainly want to kill myself whenever I'm forced to use it. Get Max4Live and download the free convolution reverb unit from Live's website, that will give you a whole new perspective on reverb.

Yeah I'm on bose qc25 headphones, I like the noise reduction, they aren't flat though. Do you have any recs for headphones? Thinking of getting seinhessier 660 a while ago, not sure if they're still made.

Yeah I could get max for live. I stayed away because it looked like another time black hole

I like the stock reverb now hah. Playing round with the settings its good enough though I just got altiverb which I haven't done much with yet. Yeah I get a strange ear pressure, it could be hearing damage don't know.

I just got limitless and going through presets.

If you're interested in what happens to your waveform when you use an effect, download a free oscilloscope plug in. That will help you visualize changes in real time which can certainly help conceptualize things, especially when it comes to things like FM synthesis or compression.

Regarding knob names, it may seem that there are millions of names but I can assure you, if you look closer, the same parameters reappear over and over again. In fact I can list the ones you need to learn that appear everywhere:

Attack
Release
Sustain
Decay
Dry/Wet
Cutoff
Volume/Amplitude/Gain
Pan
Threshold

These parameters appear everywhere and knowing what they do off the top of your head will help you massively in navigating any DAW. There are glossary terms you will learn over time through simply using the software and trying them out (do you know what an oscillator is? basic waveforms? what a bandpass is? etc.) All synths have oscillators, filters, ADSR envelopes, and LFOs. Knowing what those 4 are and what they do has you covered for synthesis in terms of knowing the fundamentals. The rest is gonna be in the manuals, which I highly highly recommend you read, even if you are an advanced user :)

My personal feeling is that if you are going to record digital, own it, don't emulate or push through tape. The songs I had mastered off tape were the mastering engineer's idea (Greg Calbi) he provided straight digi and the tape master. They sound basically the same. I also had my analog stuff mastered straight from 1/4 inch tape at Bernie Grundman's studio. That was a fucking cool experience, but his ears must be going because it was almost all midrange.

We'll have to disagree about the budget thing. I think the art of recoding has suffered from it, even though a lot more can do it now.

I have QC35s and, funny enough, even though I own expensive monitoring equipment, I swear by them and reference all my mixes through them when I go out for a walk. I know a few top level guys that straight up mix albums on those (not recommended). I would not be at all surprised that you experience some sensation of "ear pressure" when you use them though. In fact it's a common effect of active noise-cancelling headphones, believe it or not. So that might be the culprit.

Well, I'll be, thanks for your responses, you could start youtubing if you don't already heh

This is a weird question, OP and I don’t know if you’ll be able to answer it. I’m at about 10k-15k listeners on Spotify and I have 6 good tracks ready to go for a summer project. Am I better off releasing them all individually as singles to play the algorithm?

10-15k listeners monthly? Are you coming off a release or is that where you stabilized? I would come up with a marketing plan, film some videos and release them as singles. Although it really does depend on the genre and the strength of the tracks on their own. If they are strong as singles then absolutely. IIRC spotify does give you some kind of an edge in terms of recommendation algorithms if you have a full length LP extending past a certain amount of time? Or was it Drake's double LP that exploited that? At any rate, focus on growing your buzz with strong singles and don't forget to film videos, even if they are just lyric videos with some palm trees in the background or something. Good luck

Good thread

mix in samples, use drum recording to trigger the samples.
thats the way its been done for almost 30 years now.
you really think these metal/rock drummers can play a kick that consistantly.
please

How do i get my music to a "normal" audio level without getting audio clipping?