thawkins
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Posts posted by thawkins
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This looks so cool.
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Minimalism is when you buy a piece of gear but you spend the minimal amount of time getting really deep with it, before you fall in love with the new shiny that you saw on YouTube presented by user RealColundiQ who is actually a deepfake of Uli Behringer.
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16 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:
sparking joy
Is this the Marie Kondo thing?
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Just came to post that I can't remember the last time I wanted new gear.
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18 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:
This is good to know. I'm not trying to stream anything quite yet, though, just farting around for my own amusement. I guess if the stream could be exported to video that might be cool? Or if you could script it to use pre-recorded video instead of streams, kind of like what Nil suggested about Hydra? How much tweaking of the video can you do with OBS? To me it seems designed to display a kind of static arrangement of video streams and maybe some images or something. Maybe it's deeper than that?
What I mean is that if you have got Hydra which can process webcam, and you have OBS where you can set up a virtual webcam that shows some other window where your pre-recorded video is playing, then if you set your OBS virtual webcam as the input in Hydra, viola you can now mess around with that video in there. Does this make sensei?
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This might be helpful for setting up an OBS steam as a virtual webcam. https://streamshark.io/blog/using-obs-as-a-virtual-webcam-on-windows-and-macos/
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3 hours ago, Nil said:
Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time trying to write the most constructive post I could, and not to eventually come across as a total asshole. I'd should have phrased it differently now that I've re-read it, mea culpa.
It can also be read as my double failure to achieve something worth sharing.
I'm by no mean criticizing the tune itself (it's pretty cool actually), but if I were asked to master that tune I'd suggest the artist to improve the drum mix so that in the end the track sounds as good as it can. It'll always sound so much better when fixed in the mix, no matter who masters it, and in my opinion here it's an easy, identifiable and quick fix.
It was easy for me to identify issues as I haven't spend the (emotional) effort, nor the time / energy / involvement writing and producing the tune. And because I know how reliable are my monitors. Not because I'm on par with Beau Thomas and Mandy Parnell (guess what, I'm definitely not :D)
The total lack of context / reference confused me too. From my experience, and from what I've witnessed / been told / read etc... it's much more effective to pick a 15/30 seconds long part of the track that sums what the tune is about (sonically and musically), and to spend most time working on that part. Here I have no clue what the entire track can be like
I'd rather be suggested modifications that could improve my track (and learn something / improve my skills in the process) rather than have my work mastered no matter what, for a sub-par result (or, if you prefer, a result that wouldn't meet my expectations). Actually it happened to one my tracks : the whole mini-LP mastering sessions went super smooth, then for the final track I honestly did a terrible, terrible, terrible job when mixing it. The mastering engineer did it best, but in the end suggested a few alterations. I came back at my place, reworked the tune, came back the next day, let the ME validate the revision (or not). He did, and he did a great job mastering it.
Whenever possible, I'll now book a listening session with my mastering engineer a week or two before the mastering session, so that I have time to fix whatever issues (s)he hears, and to do so directly in the mix. It'll always sound so much better.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely like it that you criticized the mix from your perspective. And it was definitely constructive.
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15 hours ago, Nil said:
Sorry but I struggle to hear a finished mix here, nor something reliably representative of the full tune : it's impossible to tell if the track will remain beat-driven or if melodies will be added later ? In both cases, the tune will require different treatment.
The main issue here are the drums IMO : they are quite saturated, yet too spiky / too dynamic, which prevents transparent and / or musical additional, competitive loudness. There's not much hierarchy in the drum kit, so everything stands in the foreground, upfront, and consequently EQing that mix is super challenging. I bet fixing that kick drum would already makes things a lot better though.
The raw esthetic isn't the issue here though, if the drums were more erm contained (still talking about the mix, not the drum programming) it would be a whole different story.
I gave it an honest try, twice... and trashed the 2 attempts. The masters were better than the mix, but I wasn't satisfied. I'm not sure the artist would have been either TBH.
What worked :
- low-ratio compression gave it some much needed density (but didn't address peaks fully, wasn't the point here anyway) and overall movement
- along some low-end remodeling, a relatively narrowish dB boost at ~ 160 Hz (in the mids, as in M/S) made the bassline fuller and more pleasant (it's not solid enough in the mix (to my ears), especially for such a drill n bass, post-jungle track), but also brought up some nastiness in the kick / drums.
- a super gentle / broad, stereo, 1dB cut ~ 900 Hz pocketed the snares and opened up the mix nicely
- it was relatively easy to make the tune wider without losing its focus / center solidity (and without compromising mono-compatibility either).What didn't work :
- various degrees / sorts of saturations to tame peaks. It raised the RMS, but wasn't convincing enough.
- I gave both clipping and limiting a try, and nothing sounded good enough either. I prefer to limit/clip last, once I've got nice balance / density with EQ/comp, it's always worked better for me that.Maybe I should have tried to raise the level first, and then to EQ etc... into the limiter / clipper.
I hope that post comes out in a positive, constructive way.
PS : the main loop was roughly at -18 LU (peaks at -1,8 dB FS), raised it to a bit more than -10 (peaks at -.5dB FS, true peak), tops. I suppose I could get much cleaner results if ignoring loudness imperatives.
On one hand, I would pay premium if someone destroyed my mix quality like that instead of just accepting the money and just putting my turd through their bespoke analog chain.
On the other hand, if I listen to those clips I don't find anything really bad with the mix at all, in fact it was pleasant to listen to (esp. the first clip), which is really uncommon for me in IDM type of music.
So it shows I have a lot of work to do.
By the way, is it not common to provide some reference tracks to the mastering person so that they have an idea what the artist wants, or is that more of a mixing thing?
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1 hour ago, Berk said:
^Not shown are my 70s mixer with lush spring reverb, my new Korg sq1 and the neutron I'm receiving today.
Now I gotta stop being a gear slut for a while. My excuse was that I'm not or hardly spending any money on going on vacation etc, but yeah..
That looks good, but you should probably get some speakers or at least headphones too. Otherwise it all sounds kind of quiet.
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16 hours ago, willochill said:
Beautiful, again I really love the organ tone in the beginning and throughout. Love the pattern theme. Not much that I can say other than it ends too soon!
Also your mixes are really nice, what sort of setup do you use?
Glad you like the mixes. My setup is:
- Neumann KH120A monitors with IK ARC2 correction
- MOTU Track16 paired with a M-Audio Profire 2626 over optical link
- Roland XV5080 (also Korg MS2000R, Korg MicroX, Volca Sample, Yamaha DTX12M which are not used in the track we are talking about)
- Ableton Live 10 Suite
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10 hours ago, user said:
Found a free Yamaha dd11 today. It seems to be working as it should, has midi in and out and seems quite modable.
Between this, the d-110 and korg i5m I’m set for shitty 90s pcm drums.
On first listen this seems to have the samples I like the most, even on the built in speakers they seem quite punchy and crunchy.
Make sure it does not have an ant/cockroach/wasp/colundi/microtonal/chiptunes infestation, those things suck to get rid of once they spread to the rest of your studio.
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On 6/20/2020 at 5:41 AM, willochill said:
I actually really really dig this, from the outset, such a lush sound, and it builds up so well throughout the track. No recommendations or anything, everything needed is there and nothing more.
What is that high pitched synth from the beginning and throughout? I love that organ-like sound.
Thanks, glad you like it.
The high pitched sound is exactly what you hear, an organ preset off the Roland XV5080 (probably Surf's Up!) with some processing added on top.
Here's this week's track, which was made in a hurry because I spent half the day trial and erroring some weird clicks and pops that keep bugging me.
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All the weekly stuff I put on Soundcloud is mastered by myself, the chain is basically sum everything below 120 (or 250, can't remember) Hz to mono, then AirWindows ButterComp at 40, full wet. Then render from Live with normalization. I usually try to listen to the render after that to see if it is too loud or something like that, but for quick and dirty seems to work.
Occasionally I get the dumb idea that something is really good and worth a proper release, and then I want to have it mastered properly by someone who has more fancier gear and knows some stuff. The first albums I did I went to a real mastering guy, but my experience was that the processing ended up amplifying some mix mistakes. I decided after that point that I need to find a way to have a more productive/constructive back-and-forth with the mastering person so I could stop making mixes with dumb problems.
So far that seems to have worked well.
I am not under any illusion that my stuff will have a "real" physical release any time soon (tapes don't count) so I am not chasing any platinum producer touch, but just nice to have the aspiration of doing better every next release.
Anyway once I spend the effort to "properly" mix and finish a record I am sick of it and don't want to listen to it much anymore. It's more important to have a kind of milestone out there that "hey this was what I felt was good enough to put out back then". Who knows maybe I still hate it 5 years later, but maybe I got lucky and some tracks are actually good.
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Some years back I went to a day long noise festival in Tokyo that also had teenage idol bands and a couple of really nice experimental art/installation kind of things. Probably one of the best concerts I have been to.
Not sure about the overlap between idol group fans and noise fans though.
I too listened to a lot of Frank Zappa in high school. Back then I thought it would be funny to play Bobby Brown as graduation ceremony soundtrack.
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4 hours ago, kakapo said:
It's good for simple pleasures. Sometimes it's just one oscillator beating against another, sometimes it's just a filter sweep. I'm the least spiritual person I know, but I dont know how else to describe my relationship with my euro serge. Sometimes I just let the simplest patches drone away, while the rest of my modular looks on in disgust.
You know I wonder if there are any euro serge compatible teledildonics modules yet.
8 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:Hope your 2626 isn't a problem after recommending it. I've been using one as an expander for over a year with good results.
I hope that's not the issue either. I think something else is causing the problems.
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2 minutes ago, chim said:
Behringer Profit Won
Autocorrect of the year.
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I have a MOTU Track16 paired up with a M-Audio Profire 2626 over optical ADAT. I think this set me back around 700EUR total. This gives me something like 16 inputs, which for me translate into 8 stereo pairs. I like it because it is physically quite compact (if you ignore the cable nest), but recently I have been having some weird clicks and pops from the Profire so don't rush into this purchase. The MOTU is quite solid though.
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Messing around with an old project, this is probably 2-3 songs that should be finished properly. I have my excuses.
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That looks really good.
I did not do any soldering, but I did set up a NoteModulator M4L device so I can feed any arpeggiator MIDI into it and fade individual notes in/out using velocities (works well if the synth responds to velocities dynamically).
It supports 16 steps and a lot of other insanely configurable parameters, but since Live racks only have 8 parameters easily mappable (and therefore easily visible on Push UI), I just restricted myself to 8 steps. Fortunately the sequence length is easy to change in the modulator plugin so changing it to 5-7 or other odd number AND feeding in a arpeggio that repeats in a different number of notes, you can basically have a rhythmic (arpeggiator is constant tempo, and the note modulations set up a kind of rhythm) stream of random-but-not-too-random notes.
Next level is to map a M4L LFO to all of the different steps, set to a low speed and lot of randomness should ensure completely generative sequences based on notes that you can just play on the keyboard. (Random arpeggiator + hold).
I also cleaned and tidied up my desk.
Here's the link for the M4L note modulator I was talking about by the way https://roberthenke.com/technology/m4l.html
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Experiment N in trying to emulate fade in-s and fade outs by velocity modulation.
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Damn I just saw that you definitely wanted a digital version. Sorry. I guess it's understandable that the authors don't just want to send a non DRM PDF and risk that someone just puts that on torrents or something.
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Hey @xox your original link has also availability on Amazon, did you check that too? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8899212104/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=electronic+music+and+sound+design&qid=1559729551&s=gateway&sr=8-3
It's not an e-book there, but definitely no DRM on a paperback.
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1 hour ago, Nil said:
Picking a guitar and being intuitively expressive with it requires at least equally as much learning, practice and understanding of both music and the instrument itself as using a synth in a satisfying way, don't you think ?
I for one am incapable of playing a guitar (or most "traditional" instruments) while I can dabble with a synth
I think a guitar (especially with effects pedals) is much much more "playable" than most synths in terms of your ability to do subtle tactile expressions and have the sound react in weird but predictable ways to that.
One of the most blatant reasons is that you can affect the guitar more closely in many more ways than you can a synth - most MIDI keyboards and controllers are still plastic and at 127 levels of velocity. MPE, aftertouch and all those newfangled things are changing this but the modern guitar has some 40-50 years of head start just in terms of how many players have evolved and progressed the art of playing it, and also incorporating all the physical imperfections like feedback, muting, pick noise, into the sound.
How do I do something like palm muting or bottle slides on a Moog? I can figure something out with filters and triggers, but the guitar player can just pick some construction junk and stick it between the strings and viola.
This is changing nowadays bit by bit thanks to - yeah - eurorack and other initiatives that expand the horizons and bring more ability to have ad hoc out of the box thinking going on.
Coming back to the tactile expression point though - I am definitely one of those who wants to control the sound with their fingers and directly play things instead of using the keyboard to simply select the good notes and let the programmed audio engines do the rest. I suck at guitar too, but if there was a way to hook up the expressiveness of that instrument to the synth sounds I find on my hardware, then that would rock.
I am not saying synths are basic and boring, you just inspired me to write this stuff.
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the watmm GAS thread
in EKT General Discussion
Posted
Both of these things can be true.