Producers tips and tricks !

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Producers tips and tricks !

Postby Stazma » Sat Feb 05, 2011 9:29 am

Hail everybody.

After reading the post about the fact that this forum is slowly dying and is infected by lots of useless post I decided to try to think about some interresting topics.

So if some producer are interrested by this, feel free to share your production technics, how you are working, which kind of stuff you are using to get your sound. I think it can be realy interresting to see how different people work so we will have the oportunity to learn little tips and tricks from each other.

So ... let's go mates ! I will write my own stuff very soon ;-)

LET'S TRY TO MAKE THIS FORUM USEFULL FOR US !!!!

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Postby kosmonavt » Sat Feb 05, 2011 3:57 pm

tip: use the amen break for great breakcore!!!11

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Postby AfA62 » Sat Feb 05, 2011 4:00 pm

@ stazma > SHARE YOUR MASTERING TIPS!

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Postby Stazma » Sun Feb 06, 2011 10:58 am

Yop !

So I start the hostility hehehe.

Since a years now my way to make tracks is :

- 1 : Use some simple amen loops and load them into the ableton drum rack, slice them, and adit them as fuck with lots of pitch, stutter and time strecth effect. I record all my experiment in audio and pick all the parts I find interresting.

- 2 : I do exactly the same things for kicks. I make all my kick from scratch in Massive, mix them with other existing kicks, try different effects on, record the good stuff ect ...

- 3 : So when I start a new project I have a big existing soundbank of kicks and glitchy drums, I start to mix them for find a good rythmic starts point. I always try to use melodic materials with absynth or massive and lots of 303.

- 4 : When a track in finish about composition I make a final mixdown by using lots of equing and compression. The secrets of my mastering is that when the mixdown is finish, the master peak level is never louder than -4 dB. I export the stereo wav of the track and I put a fat limiter on it (Fabfilter Pro-L or Wave LL3 Multimaximiser).

This quickly explained so if you you have some questions don't hesitate.

It would be very nice than some other producers share their technics, it would make us a good database of creations tips. LET'S SHARE MATES !!!!!

There you can find my last track that was made exactly like explained before : http://soundcloud.com/stazma-the-junglechrist/meltface

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Postby Skornsteen » Mon Feb 07, 2011 2:06 pm

Ok, I'll share some of my techniques.
For starters, when I have no inspiration. I just find random drum loops which could potentionaly be used for chopping in to pieces. I cut every hit in different pieces and divide them under a few tracks so I can mix them.
Starting out with EQ on every independant track, send to a buss with a Multiband compressor ( I personally like Roughrider Pro very much for M.B.C.)
After doing this for a while I've build up a library of all kinds of breaks which are sorted by category, so when I need breaks in a tune, I can grab some from there easily, if I can't find a fitting break from there I usualy attempt to create a new one.

How I work with breaks in renoise:
Personally I like to have my breaks as processed as possible before they go in to renoise, so I can use tracks without any EQing etc. and use the 09XX commands to slice my loops, which also saves a lot of room in your projects making them less big on your hard disc.
Because I am limited in glitch plugins I have AD. Automaton, Replicant and Effectrix.
To use these in a controlled way, I make a different track for every glitch plugin and name these for instance; Amen effectrix, Amen Automaton.
Now when I simply want to do some chopping, I can do this in my normal amen track, and if I want to fuck them up with glitches, I can send them trough those channels.
This can be applied to any pre-processed drum loop.

Processing breaks:
I personally do not like my sounds very clean, I like them more lofi but still punchy.
I have a tapedeck, casette deck and Akai s950 and a Casio RZ-1
When I want them dirty I choose one of these devices and post process them as much as possible before loading them in there.
EQing, compression, limiting maybe.
I record them, when I record them in the tapedeck, or cassette deck, I'm limited to a stereo out, so I simply run the outputs trough a Analog mixing desk that I have, I personally like the EQ inside it and use that to add some punch and low end to my sounds before they go in to my Soundcard.
Usually I set up my tapedecks on the highest speed available with the DBX button on.
And when I record them back, the DBX function goes off.
With the akai you have 8 indipendant outputs, if you record the entire break, you can simply copy it and cut it so you have 8 single hits, and via the midi sequencer in Renoise, I can make these samples back in the original composition of the break.
Now I can assign all these samples to my independant outputs and mix them all on a separate channel.
The casio RZ-1 is very cool for the really lofi sounds having no decay whatsoever. I most of the time use 2 sampler blocks at the time for 1 sample. It can wield 4 samples, or 2 at the double time. Which also grants you 2 outputs for your samples.
Most of the time when I get my breaks back in my computer I cut them up again and mix all sounds indipendantly, trying to preserve the crunch of the sounds I have recorded.

For my synths (surprise surprise) I also use a lot of hardware, but it all works very similar, just in a different interface.
When I create a synth I have a set method to start off.
I first start by opening an empty preset, or just turn all the knobs to a neutral state.
When this is done, I start with the oscilators, selecting the ones I like, or want. When this is done, I move on to the enveloppe. When the enveloppe is like I want it to be, I move on to the filters. If the sound at this moment doesn't sound pleasing, I simply return to the point of which I am not satisfied and redo everything from there.
After I created the entire sound I start programming a melody, and record it, or if I use software, simply sequence it.
When this is done, I try adding some drums and mix them apropriatly with eachother.

Synth recording, (also applicable to software synths)
I have a big bass amp, sometimes I lead the signal trough this amp and record it with a mic, to mix this signal with the original one.
Sometimes the sole sound of the AMP is brutal enough to not use the original recording.

Filling gaps in your mix: Look at your spectrum analyzer when you feel like nothing more compositionally needs to be added to your song.
You might notice some small gaps on the screen, it's better to simply hear these gaps, but the spectrum analyzer helps you to see at what exact frequency they reside.
Now add some white noise, and EQ it in such a way that it is present in every missing frequency. For the rest its not present in other frequency's.
Add a slight reverb to it and mix it in such a volume that you don't notice the noise being there, but you do hear, or see the gaps being filled.
When your mix is good this technique is not required.
What also makes a difference for this specific technique is the source of your noise, I personally prefer a noise generator from one of my synths although it practically sounds the same, you can barely hear the differences. This last thing is just an opinion ofcourse.

Some interesting 'master techniques' I use:
When I want to have a bit more warmth in my song, I record the entire song to my tapedeck, and re-record it, I mix this with the original mix about 20% of the volume used in the original mix.
When you want a more room like stereo sound, use a stereo microphone record the output of your speakers at a loud volume trough these microphones, mix this with the original mixdown.
The room recording is placed in a slight delay from the original track (milliseconds) to make it extra stereo without ruining your original signal with stereo widening plugins.
You can get some phasing issues, I usually solve this by some slight panning and EQ'ing.

Terror kicks etc.: I have some drumboxes, IMO the electribe ER-1 I believe it's called, creates the most massive kicks. I lead these trough my Mam MB33 filter input and with a resonance mod I can distort the hell out of them and they remain very fat sounding, very massive.
This signal goes trough my analog mixing desk and gets a nice low boost.
You can use this technique for practically every kick source, and there are probably a lot of filters out there who can do this, but I picked up my mam MB 33 for about 40 bucks, and the mod didn't even require extra materials, and BAM I had a nice filter !

Good luck.

This is about what I have to share.
-Skorn

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Postby Mathlovsky » Mon Feb 07, 2011 3:09 pm

When your subbass doesnt really match with the frequencies of your main kick just eq and tune the kick untill it's fits nicely with your bassline.
Best is also not to have your kick much louder then the bass but let it fit in evenly so it becomes one giant sound.

Also compressors; use them alot on your basses. That way you can create huge sounding basses without everything going into the reds. Just fuck with the settings of your compressor until you get the sound you want. Distortion is also real handy to use on your basslines to create more harmonies in it so you can still hear the bassline even on weaker soundsystems.

not really tricks but but useful tips, the end of the day it's up to you to use your own method but try out alot of techniques. You can always learn alot :)

grtz,
Mathlovsky
soundcloud.com/mathlovsky

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Postby Stazma » Mon Feb 07, 2011 3:53 pm

Thanks a lot Skornsteen for sharing ;-)

It's good to have some hardware user there, for my part I havn't get any money to get into real synth but I hope I will can buy some this years (like a SH-101 or a Virus hehehe).

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Postby Draegg » Tue Feb 08, 2011 1:41 am

Great initiative Stazma, kudos!


Here´s some of my tips & techniques:


I resample all of my basslines and almost all of my drums! Resampling means that you can add more distortion/dblue glitch :P and you save a shitload of cpu!


I make all my breaks from scratch using weird drum samples/other breaks( circles break is awesome for some high end madness)/Glitch sounds and so on. Be sure to use lots of quantization like swing and stuff, makes stuff more interesting!


I always spend like 4 hours for sample collecting, either from torrentz or just browsing google or youtube and just record it with audacity when you find something funny/stupid/sexy


Hey stazma share some of your massive patches :P

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Postby HORSE FORCE » Tue Feb 08, 2011 5:32 am

oh shit! there are some good tips in this thread :D

i have promised people a video tutorial for a while, and im still working on it, but here is the gist of what i do when i make my noisecore shit:

i do every song in two days.

first day is spent (soberly) painstakingly sorting through drum sounds. i use reason 3.0.5 with a combinator and a bunch of NNXTs so they can all be programmed with the same midi data. i go through a bunch of samples (all kinds, not just drums) very quickly and throw them all into a sampler. i arrange them by pitch and frequency content, then i go on my keyboard and play around, slowly eliminating sounds that suck, combining sounds, and making sure they are all the same audible level. the key is to work quickly and let your ears do the work. if you dont like something, then you delete it and move on

the second day, i spend just sequencing. i grab a 6 pack of beer, and do every bar sequentially from start to finish. i always sequence in 1/4 so im free to change time signatures whenever i want.

this is a very short explanation, but it'll have to do til i can show you what i do. the mastering process is fairly simple and mostly just adding small amounts of reverb, subtle compression, then limiting.

video coming soon :D

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Postby divtech » Tue Feb 08, 2011 6:13 am

Draegg wrote:Great initiative Stazma, kudos!


Here´s some of my tips & techniques:


I resample all of my basslines and almost all of my drums! Resampling means that you can add more distortion/dblue glitch :P and you save a shitload of cpu!


I make all my breaks from scratch using weird drum samples/other breaks( circles break is awesome for some high end madness)/Glitch sounds and so on. Be sure to use lots of quantization like swing and stuff, makes stuff more interesting!


I always spend like 4 hours for sample collecting, either from torrentz or just browsing google or youtube and just record it with audacity when you find something funny/stupid/sexy


Hey stazma share some of your massive patches :P


i have a lot in common with this, i can keep myself busy resampling and re-distorting all day, i don't really use breaks as much anymore, mainly just sampled drums which have been heavily edited. this +much time+patience gets me about 6-7 seconds of good sounding intensity which is usually enough to inspire me or get me fired up; get the creative juices flowing

something else i think iv learned over time is that your music doesn't have to be compressed mp3 listen-to-this-shit-in-your-car produced, sometimes it takes a large amount of time/equip/work to get something that really has soul to it over to a format that can sound loud or mastered well enough to mix with professional work. its not always worth changing your work over to that format because adherence to that formula impedes of the artistic integrity of your work. breakcore doesn't have to be something that has to be playable on vinyl/ipod/over the internet, eg. realicide, captain ahab, baseck etc. in fact many of the artists i find appealing usually work more with presentation than mastering. i guess my real point is artistic integrity>recognition (this may be an arguable point for another thread however, hehe)

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Postby Stazma » Tue Feb 08, 2011 8:51 am

I'm glad to see than people there are happy to contribute hehehe.

So new stuff of the day. I found a realy funny way to make some sick kick drum yesterday with resampling. I just mixed one old kick I made with my dead Metal Muff with two other kick from a Richard Devine sample pack.
I added lots of distorsion and waveshaping.
So I had a realy strange but efficient distorded techno kick but too static for my taste. So I have simply map all the control of the distortion on my UC-17 and play arround with them and record it at the same time, so at the end I had more than 20 realy different sounding kicks but all very heavy !

The more I had experiences in making music the more I use randomisation and live play recording for extract the most interresting sounds. More fun, more sounds and more ideas hehehe.

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Postby Stazma » Tue Feb 08, 2011 2:58 pm

Yop !

There is a very interresting like for all curious people : http://www.noisyneighboursounddesign.blogspot.com/

This is a sound design blog run by Techdiff where he is posting new sounds everyday with lots of explanation about how he does it.

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Postby Cra_Core » Tue Feb 08, 2011 10:05 pm

This is all so sick!! Thank you all so much!! The whole tread is now printed out and stuck on my wall above my monitor, im sorry that i can't contribute as there is nothing about sound that i cud teach u guys^^ Hopefully i'll have a track or two by the end of the month, i'll post em up for analysis on weather or not ive understood these tutorials :D

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Postby Draegg » Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:53 am

Some more tips: If your into dubstep and all that jazz here comes a little tut to make that skrillex/borgore kind of "transformer vomiting" sound:



Open up your cracked version of massive and turn on all oscillators.
Make the first osc a modern talking and bring down the pitch to a negative 12. The second you make a digigrain 1 and bring down the pitch to negative 12. And make the third a flenders 1 with the same pitch as osc 2. Sounds pretty crappy right? Now drag the wt pos of osc 1 to 12 o clock. and osc 2 to 9 o clock and finally osc 3 to 3 o clock. Still sounds pretty crappy but heres where the fun part begins.


Go to the voicing tab and bring down the max and unisono to 4. make it monophon. It sounds grittier now right? You could fuck around with the wavetable position here, i usually dont though.

Time to choose a filter. Just take the daft filter and set the cutoff to 11 o clock and drag the resonance to 8 o clock.


Now go to the lfo section and choose 5 lfo. Drag the xfade curve all the way up and choose the triangle waveform. Drag it just a teeeeeeny bit to the left, just so you see the beginning of the next triangle. Everyboy with me? Now drag the 5 lfo to filter 1 and set it athe first little box under the cutoff. Now drag the yellow stuff that´s on the lfo and drag it so it´s almost covering the whole cutoff. Now if you didnt fuck up, you should hear a pretty gnarly wobble.You could play around with the rate now, i like it at 2 o clock.



Choose the lfo 6 and let all the stuff be except the xfade curve and the rate. Drag the xfade curve all the way up and make the rate very slow like at 10 o clock. Now drag this lfo to the first box under wt-position under the modern talking osc (osc 1). Now do the same thing you did on the cutoff except now on the wt-position of the osc!. Now were getting somewhere ey!? Now go the fx 1 and choose a classic tube and drag down the dry/wet to 9 0 clock and then go to fx 2 and choose a dimension expander and do the same thing with the dry/wet.


Now go down to the insert 1 and choose the sample and hold. Drag the dry/wet to 5 o clock and the pitch to about 4 o clock. There we go! Gritty and filthy! Now experiment more, for example, play with the cutoff and resonance, or just resample the fuck out of the sound! Hope anyone learned something!. Peace// Draegg

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Postby Monoreaction » Wed Feb 09, 2011 4:27 pm

Hey! Very nice tips here. I've been a musician for a while now (started playing bass on a rock band at 15 and have been producing industrial/rhythmic noise for about 3 years) but I'm kinda new to breakcore, and since I wanted to incorporate that genre into my music, I ended up here.
Currently my setup is pretty basci:
Ableton Live 8 + tons of VSTs
a MicroKORG
a crappy Behringher Mixer.

I now enough about synthesis to make cool sounds from scratch on so this is what I can share and when I think of something useful I'll post it here.

@Stazma: So, do you load entire breaks on each pad of the drum rack? Or do you slice to new Midi track and rearrange the single hits?

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