minimal dub/techno

[Guest iep]

i'm not kidding. it's a beast. do not use it for minimal, dubby techno (as i've said in one of my previous posts which you probably skipped or some shit)

 

 

well ok it depends on the sound you define by minimal dubby techno. for me dub has to be raw in the mid frqs, smooth in the low and cutting in the highs. ive used a sherman before, i know how it sounds, and i know how i used the bp filter a a send effect to eq a snare and it sounded awesome and a bit tubely distorted, exactly what i wanted. and also processing a 606's hihats and it did sharpen them up like on a king tubby track. again these are only words, not sounds, so...

 

and i dont skip posts i read everything :)

 

hehe well that sounds good but personally i'm having lots of trouble to make my sherman sound clean. ofcourse, controlled distortion (like the snare you processed with the bp-filter) can be useful.. but when i think of dubby techno, i think of smooth, deep and undistorted subbass. but on the topic of effects, a smooth filter/eq is a good idea. high quality compressors too. and maybe the most important; good reverb. but since The Moon already has an orville unit, he has most of that covered, i guess:))

[Guest Barbed Q]

yeah of course i dont distort the sub bass, thats what i meant by smooth, sorry im having trouble expressing myself sometimes and thats the reason i post so many edits and explanations :)

 

for sub bass i would use a ladder 24/db or my ms50 filter, really good when you put the res to 3 or 4 and turn the cutoff till you find that 50-60 hz zone. i actually prefer that to eqing the bass with an eq.

 

 

the sherman is hard to control sometimes yea hehe

 

what, the moon has an orville? lucky man, im using a lexicon pcm 80. id liek to have his opinion on the reverbs the orville produces.

[Guest iep]

yeah of course i dont distort the sub bass, thats what i meant by smooth, sorry im having trouble expressing myself sometimes and thats the reason i post so many edits and explanations :)

 

for sub bass i would use a ladder 24/db or my ms50 filter, really good when you put the res to 3 or 4 and turn the cutoff till you find that 50-60 hz zone. i actually prefer that to eqing the bass with an eq.

 

*salivates*

 

that ms50 sounds godlike. i hope you put it to good use:)))

 

the sherman is hard to control sometimes yea hehe

 

its really hard to make its envelopes trigger without having to overdrive the incoming signal (by cranking up the 'input' knob and introducing distortion)

 

but holy shit, the sound is so raw and organic, i love it to bits:)

 

what, the moon has an orville? lucky man, im using a lexicon pcm 80. id liek to have his opinion on the reverbs the orville produces.

 

ya i though i'd read that he owned a cs70, orville and some neve(? or other high-end) gear.. *salivates some more*

 

cheers

[Guest Barbed Q]

*salivates with iep until the saliva fills up the tread and we both drown*

[Paulie Walnuts]

yeah man i knwo what youre saying i used to have a kind of block because i pay so much importance to details and i couldnt get the flow going because in the middle of composing i would be like oh this reverb doesnt work then dial and edit for like 10 minutes on my pcm and there goes the inspiration.

 

what i trained myself to do is have a method: first ill do all the sounds (if i use my sampler), edit all the effects im going to use, get everything setup so i can just sit in front of the keyboard and play. im working strictly with analog synths and sometimes my s5000 sampler but mostly modular synths so the trick i found is to record everything midi with and then i can play back the midi and send cv to my synths and loop the midi so i can plug the modules together until im satistisfied while ilisten to the notes. yeah its still a very uneven and broken way to work and it does affect my everyday thinking.. but it works for me. if i block somewhere, doesnt matter, i just keep going, do different sections of the track, and eventually i come back and it works, i know what to do.

 

i worked my mind to forget all the little details like ``oh is the cubase summing algorithm better than logic or pro tools or analog damn im going to do a 3 hour obssesive research on the net``. i think you know what im talking about. i also used to think alot about how things have to be pure and not mix analog and digital and emulations, have 0 noise, etc etc. im a real obssesive compulsive sometimes and as soon as that appears while im music making i stop because i know im never going to finish anything. i relax and come back with a clear head and remember than i can allow a few errors/impurities here and there , whats important is the final product. i used to need weed for that, i dont anymore.

 

please dont be afraid to do your own music and dont postpone that like say yeah im going to do some dnb tracks or other peoples music and THEN do my own. because obviously youre really intelligent and understand stuff so you should make music.

 

i hope i dont sound patronising, its just i think we have some things in common from what you wrote

 

hehe, yeah i'm just getting my head round the whole, write first, fiddle later concept... for a long time it's been 99.9% fiddling, with occassional moments where i try to force musical ideas, usually after staring at a screen for a number of hours... i think i've known for a long time that this approach hasn't been working for me - so i've always been drawn to more production-heavy genres, just because i tend to get more done, and what with my studio and access to studio gear, i've always had a fairly wide foot in door when it comes to getting stuff out

 

right now i'm going back to basics - in fact, even when i started making music on an ST i was never this basic - sine wave for a bass drum, enveloped noise for a snare, a basic fm lead sound - like with the modular approach, you can write first and fiddle endlessly later because i'm using mostly s/w or midi for this stuff, where in the past i'd spend days/weeks gathering and processing sounds... and you know, for the first time in about 6 years, i feel i've got absolute musical freedom - - with dnb, you can sit there trying to find the 'right' bassline for a particular piece of drum programming, for maybe half a day, maybe half a month... every part becomes a kind of struggle, and i notice it's not a struggle in the name of creating interesting or enjoyable music, it's a struggle to find a pair of shoes which go perfectly with this pair of trousers - it's just style - and there's something definetly zen about that - like trying to find perfect form in the arranging of three rocks in a japanese garden or something

 

but it's not really music, and i think i've known that for a long time

 

i enjoy the challenge, but when i've created something i feel far too detached from it - i could come back 3 hours later and not even feel like it's my own creation

 

so now, i'm learning to embrace the stripped down approach - i start to wonder, why/how is this going to stand out from the 6 million other laptop produced demo's out there?

 

ego getting in the way again isn't it :confused:

 

i think it must be very difficult to know when you've created brilliant minimalism, or when you've just created something minimal which you can listen to endlessly...

 

i love setting up a number of different length loops - maybe 20 steps, 5 steps, 32 steps, 4 steps, 34 steps - all playing simple rhythms - and then listening to the way they all phase in and out with each other, and create a unique 6 hour long performance... then you can always throw unusual delays in the mix, or modulate filter settings with completely out of time LFO's - that kind of stuff can be insanely absorbing to me... but then i find that's like dripping paint onto a spinning wheel or something - it's just a concept plus trial and error... maybe that's all music needs to be, but i don't see many outside avant garde even trying to delineate music in this way - and i'm not sure there'd be an audience out there for it unless it came with a fairly glowing stamp of approval from someone in the know

[Guest taxman]

agh reading this thread makes me feel like some kind of gorilla or caveman or something.

 

i know my way around all of my synths and everything, and i can make everything sound just exactly the way i want (and i'd have to say i like a lot of my music just as much if not more than most other music out there)... but i always wonder what it would be like if i actually put a lot of thought process into my music like you guys seem to... or if i actually knew the rules in the first place.

 

i tend to just turn off my brain and play and see what happens. haha am i a lot different than most people in that respect or do i just not know how to talk about it after the fact? :ermm:

[Paulie Walnuts]

oh when i'm making music i find it very hard to think like this

 

usually, later at night i'm in the pragmatic zone, where i'm just focusing on the tools, the sounds, the melodies, etc. then in the day i'm always more analytical about what i've done and where i'm going with it

 

when i make generic music, i like the fact i don't have to think about it so much - it's like a puzzle to me - finding the bits that fit together

 

but at the same time, it's really production, not so much music/art to me - and it's always a struggle to do anything really original because you're only thinking as far ahead as your next synth line

 

when it comes to conceptualizing music, you can form the concept first, then structure your whole writing process around that - then you're never forcing anything - you're just trying to find the sounds which help you achieve what you've already achieved in your head

 

it's like with art, there's always the danger that you end up focusing more on the thing you're drawing, the colours you're using or the actual process of painting, than the concept you're trying to get across... and that's really being a painter - art's everything other than the actual process

[Guest Barbed Q]

lol @ cavemen feelings

 

i think the whole point of technology is to become so used to it that it becomes second nature. i mean if you program in a tracker you know what im saying, its just an interface between your ideas and the outside. the more you work with it the more transparent it becomes.

[robotrobot]

I don't know too much about producing the other minimalist styles...but I do know that you can make kickass digital representations of Detroit techno in no time at all via FL. Once you figure out how to assign synth and bass volumes, cuts and rezes to the X/Y controller, all you need to have is good handful of kick and click patterns with subtle volume and rhythm changes.