Universal Cleaner [idm weirdness/renoise beginner]

[gnarlybog]

So I started using Renoise about 2 months ago and have been feeling more inspired than I have been in years!
It's mostly abstract IDM with breaks. Would appreciate any production tips or renoise tricks.
Creatively, I'm just trying to find a nice balance between melodic songs and abstraction.

Thanks for checking it out.

brittle melancholic breaks. written at a wooden desk in a farmhouse in the polish countryside. 

sludgy psychedelic weirdness with doom 2 samples sloshing around

freejazz hip slop from the year 2099

Satisfying clap sound and bassline in here. 

 

 

[cricketbones]

It's pretty cool. Can't help with trackers, unfortunately. 

[gnarlybog]

 

New one. John Carpenter idm. 

 

[TheBro]

I like the beats but I think musically it's totally my bag if I'm honest. I'll try and give them some more time as I only gave them a quick listen.

[ArtificialDisco]

On 6/11/2022 at 9:23 AM, gnarlybog said:

 

New one. John Carpenter idm. 

 

Excellent! John Carpenter indeed, maybe a faint echo of Doctor Who, all mixed in with some great breakbeat chops. Maybe the atmospheric delay synth should take break somewhere around 2:16 and let the drums and bass just do their thing. Then it would be fresh to bring it back in later. Just a thought.

[springymajig]

These are all good. There's a sort of hazy, "drunk" kind of mood to these which is not usually my preference. But I can say objectively that these are well made. I like that you mix up the ideas quite often, it makes them fun and engaging tunes.

Sound design and mix and stuff is generally pretty good but I think maybe the bass drums and snares (or in the case of Fluxus Deluxus, the clap) could be brought up a bit more in the mix.

I am interested in Renoise for cutting up breaks. I started learning the demo of the VST "mini" version, so I can still use FL Studio as my main DAW but use Renoise for breaks... it basically works EXACTLY the way I want... and then there's all the stuff about adding effects on individual notes in a sequence... that seems really cool to me.

 

[gnarlybog]

Thanks for the thoughtful words @springymajig. Strongly recommend Renoise, it quickly starts making sense once you start getting weird results.

Here are 3 recent renoise tracks which I like, although sometimes the stuff is sounding a bit flat, mix-wise? I'm not exactly sure why. Lack of proper bass details/eq or compression?
 

 

[flacid]

Personal favourites, Puppet Regime (Aphexian melodies) and Neo--Dada (some Boardsesque pads here).

Always great to find new inspiration. Keep making tracks and developing that sound. 

[springymajig]

On 9/12/2022 at 5:48 PM, gnarlybog said:

Thanks for the thoughtful words @springymajig. Strongly recommend Renoise, it quickly starts making sense once you start getting weird results.

Here are 3 recent renoise tracks which I like, although sometimes the stuff is sounding a bit flat, mix-wise? I'm not exactly sure why. Lack of proper bass details/eq or compression?

I am FAR from an expert on mixing and mastering... in fact it's one of the things I struggle with the most... But I can comment from my experience anyway... and some of this might be SUPER obvious that you're already doing (in which case... it's probably just a matter of practice... I tell myself that anyway

• The most obvious one is putting some EQ on the whole thing, boosting the sub bass, cutting some of those muddy frequencies etc.
• Multiband compression has been a real game changer for me. In FL Studio there's a thing called Maximus, it's main function is that you can compress the Low, Mid and High frequencies separately instead of everything being compressed as one big block (but it has that built in too if you need it). I'm pretty sure all DAWs and audio software will have something like that, so try looking up multiband compression for Renoise or whatever you do your final mix/master in (I use Adobe Audition a little bit too and I know if has multiband compression but I haven't really tried it much).
• Do A-B testing! Listen to someone who you want your mix to sound like. So if you want it to sound like Aphex, blast a bit of Aphex every 5-10 minutes while you're mixing, to re-orient your ears/brain. Even just like... 30 seconds will be enough, you will IMMEDIATELY hear how different your mix is if it's not right.
• https://www.bandlab.com/ has this free mastering tool thing. You get 4 options for what "flavour" of mastering you want and they're never perfect but hey... it's free... 

I've learnt so much in the last few years from Youtubers, only one of them I watch uses FL Studio, a lot of the concepts can be transferred to different platforms... it helps to actually see and hear what others are doing rather than just reading about it.

Oh yeah and also, Overmorrow was probably my favourite so far, so pretty!