Hey guys

So Ott and Tipper was fucking phenomenal. Like, on another level. I'd had 2x 100mic tabs, my buddy had the same, and the girl I was with took 1. I can't even begin to describe how amazing that show was. I have a trip report saved somewhere in my comp if anyone's interested in it, I'll PM it to you, don't really feel like posting it in here.

Hey Dylan, have you been messing with Reaktor 5 at all? I remember you saying you'd gotten komplete 8 or something like that from NI. I got a nice version of Reaktor 5 and have been having a blast. Can sound a bit sterile at times, in a way too clean sort of way, but I've been really digging it. I haven't really got into making my own ensembles yet, the process is admittedly kind of daunting but I'll make an attempt someday soon. I've heard that there's thousands of free ensembles on the NI user library, but I don't have access to any of those, sadly.

Sounds like an awesome show! Send me your trip report if you want man, sounds like a good time.

I learned a bit of Reaktor in my Sound Design class and yeah I have Reaktor 5. I like it for some quirky stuff but I honestly don't use it as much. It's cool for some sweet effects and stuff though, there's a cool ensemble called S-Layer by Twisted Tools that I'd love to pick up sometime soon. I learned some "programming" also. I have a synth I made with a step sequencer and some filters and LFO or two and some other shit on it, it sounds pretty good for what it is but I don't use it much. I just have much better experience with other synths with more advanced capabilities anyway so I tend to use them. I only have the stock Reaktor stuff, maybe I need to expand a bit more and spend some money. It'd be cool to make my own effects one day but honestly it's not on my to-do list anytime soon. I know the basics but delving into that world is a whole other hobby unto itself. Maybe one day I'll get there but first I want to master my mixing and mastering techniques... not to mention just overall musicality haha. Reaktor is definitely cool if you take the time to use it though, endless possibilities basically.

Reaktor 5 is tons of fun for making really abstract and crazy noises, a la Tipper or Derango, that sort of thing. But for your bread and butter stuff it just isn't that great. I've just recently switched a bunch of shit around and kinda started from scratch in some areas of my music production. Been trying different DAWs and lots of different plugins. I'm thinking when I have the money I'm gonna buy a hardware effect unit. I've noticed many of the artists I like use outboard effects almost exclusively, with the exception of reverb to some degree. Hardware effects just sound so much warmer and thicker. Have you learned music theory at all? I took a class at my college last semester and got a lot of the basics, but man that shit is complex.

Yeah I imagine if I had some more interesting patches I might use Reaktor for more of the "twisted" kind of weird sounds. The stock patches are alright, there's a few really nice ones but I just don't find myself reaching for them often, maybe that will change eventually. I have really embraced software lately for a number of reasons but the first is definitely convenience.

There was a blind test on isratrance by a guy with a few of his own analog synths and some digital synths. He created a kick and then wrote a simple bassline across 8 synths. Some of the hardware was nice, but my favorite one ended up being a Sylenth1 patch. Sylenth sounds great for what it is, but it's not right for every occasion. It has a very distinct sound to it, as most synths tend to. Sylenth's characteristic is plasticy or rubbery which is fantastic for particular sounds. I also think with some newer plugs, the boundaries are dissolving between analog and software. Especially I am thinking of u-he's Diva in particular, but also D16's LuSH-101 is a beautiful replica of the Roland 101 with added parameters.

If I could get my hands on Eventide H3000 or 8000 I would probably use the thing to death. Well, I'd like to imagine I would, but I do find my outboard gear gets used way less just because of the hassle of using it and my tendency to prefer MIDI clips over audio clips almost always. In terms of outboard synths, all my synths have MIDI so that's not an issue but if I used an Eventide I would have to either run from an outboard synth into the computer, or probably more commonly, route the signal out of the DAW, through the Eventide and back in which will invariably give me raw audio to work with which is just less malleable than having a chain of effects there. I found some H3000 impulse responses online which I haven't tried out yet but in theory they should be nearly identical, if not completely identical to the actual unit and I think a lot of stuff is moving this direction. In 5 years I'm curious to see where software stands, but we do need to make a few jumps that haven't fully taken place yet. Especially I would like to see 64bit become the standard and DSP usage would need to be addressed on some plugs but computers are becoming so powerful it may not be an issue. By far my main attraction to hardware is the hands on aspect, I think that is invaluable towards getting a dynamic characteristic to your music that is not impossible on software, but much tougher.

If I can start to make money off my music I have intentions of buying some hardware and really putting it to the test but I've spent a lot of time weighing the decisions and I've almost completely lost my lust for hardware anymore. In fact I almost bought a x0xb0x over Christmas and the guy who was selling them basically talked me out of it. He told me there were other options with less hassle to do what I specifically wanted to do with it and after a lot of debating I decided to stick it out with ABL. I bought some Vibrasphere remix packs to deconstruct a few of their tracks. They were the guys who really got me into 303's in the first place, before that I wasn't too interested in them. Anyway, I know Vibrasphere owned a real 303 and I always thought that's what they used. Well I have 6 remix tracks and on all 6 tracks ABL is what they used, not a real 303 so I have a feeling they sold it eventually. ABL sounds amazing to be honest, it's different side by side with a real 303, but in a mix it's VERY hard to tell the difference.

Anyway, having said all that, I still may pick up a QuadraVerb sometime in the nearish future since they're so cheap. They are supposed to be nice multieffects processors which have been used on countless records. Ott recommended it as a nice starting unit and I want to give it a shot because I do find in the software world what is particularly lacking is more the effects than the synths themselves. SoundToys makes some amazing effects but they need to make more stuff! And I am VERY picky about reverbs and Lexicon PCMs are alright, I use them often but I would love a lush Eventide verb for sure.

Yes, I know music theory basics but I am by no means an expert. I took a basic class at my school, but one of my other teachers really helped it click. He said "all notes are colors" and I guess that was enough for me to go "a ha!" I know enough to compose and dissect music pretty well. I find the main things that have been useful to me as someone with an interest in creating electronic music are things like intervals, modulating keys and in general just the relationship between intervals and keys. I think the rest sort of falls into place. I now find myself able to identify more and more intervals as time goes on when I'm listening to music and that's a satisfying feeling and does wonders towards understanding how music you love is constructed and executed. I'd like to audit a class at the local college or something sometime and really become more an expert on it one day but there's so much to learn about music it can be overwhelming sometimes. I guess I am just taking it a step at a time.

What DAW are you using now out of curiosity?

This post was edited by HERETICtheory on Jan 11 2013 11:16am

I too almost got a xoxbox at one point. One of the modded ones, a xoxio or something like that. At this point though, I'm not gonna buy any more hardware synths. I've realized my workflow is actually much better with software. The problem for me with hardware is that I get distracted making noises that are just completely loony and will never fit into anything I make, ya know? Whereas with software I tend to make more useful and musical patches. My Akai Miniak has some crazy FM and Osc Hardsync modulation options, and I play with that for hours sometimes running it through a shit ton of effects. Hardware effects like I said I'm still interested in. I feel like if I don't use any out of the box stuff my music will sound too 2-dimensional, ya know? If you're an expert producer and know all about fine EQ and compression and side-chaining and that stuff then you can make software sound pretty damn good, but personally I'm just getting into a lot of that stuff. I have very basic knowledge of compression and EQ, and still have no idea where to have certain frequencies "sit" in the mix.

I'll definitely have to check out ABL. I've heard of it, but never really bothered to give it a chance, I guess. But hey, if Vibrasphere made it work, you know it's good. I was wondering what they did to make their more acidic leads, since they didn't quite sound dirty enough to be a 303 to me. I know they have a moog voyager, but it didn't sound like that to me either.

I actually had Sylenth1 for a brief moment I think, not sure if it was the full or demo. I think it was the demo actually. It sounds incredibly smooth and glossy from what I recall. Kinda reminded me of Waldorf's Largo a bit.

Currently I'm in FL Studio 10 Producer Edition. I was using Reaper, but got tired of the workflow and general basic feel of it. I went back to Cubase, which was my original DAW, but again got tired of the workflow, its complicated as fuck in Cubase. I played around with Ableton a good bit on a friends laptop, and although it seemed very straight forward if I'd made the effort to get to know it, it was just alien to me. So I went and grabbed FL Studio 10 and have been loving it. I had only used FL studio once or twice before a long time ago, and wasn't impressed with it then. I like it much more now. Particularly for sequencing drums. There are MUCH better sequencers for composing melodic things, and I might pick up something else for that, but for the time being it's doing just fine. I can make a solid beat in FL Studio within a half hour and actually get to working on making something. It's just sped my process up so much. I would spend HOURS in Reaper or Cubase messing around with drum machine vsts just trying to figure out how to route the bastards, let alone the programming which was a nightmare. I don't want to have to go into submenus to decide which channel I want my snare coming out of, I wanna be able to click on one panel and move a number over that aligns with the mixer, which is how FL studio works.

Yeah I hear you. That's the biggest reasons my synths don't get so much use, because workflow-wise it's just a fucking pain in the ass. Especially when the synths I have are just VA's anyway, might as well just pull out a nice plug. I really wanted the x0x but in the end it just didn't make sense and once I tried ABL the difference was so small that $500 wasn't going to justify the incremental change for me. Maybe one day... And yes, I definitely know what you mean about sounding 2 dimensional. I think contrast is a major aspect that is often overlooked by producers and having a contrast between software and hardware seems to help things become a little more dimensional. Regardless of the convenience of cost of software, hardware does have a certain allure that software will probably always dream of having.

Software definitely can emulate hardware to a large degree but like you said, it takes a good bit of know how and even on top of that, experimentation and finding the "right" plugs for "that sound." I find EQ to be invaluable for cleaning up a sound, particularly at the low end where it is absolutely essential to have a clean "runway" for your bass to roll through, however I do tend to feel over-EQing a sound happens a lot because people feel a need to EQ something so that they feel like they have actually done something to shape the sound more. I am thinking of a lot of cases of "surgical EQing" when in reality it's often a bit of overkill. I mean back before these digital parametric EQs people were using the EQs on their mixing consoles, which it seems Posford still does, at least in his live sets. Definitely a lot less options in those older EQs and yet the music still is beautiful and compelling. In many cases I think rolling off the low end can be enough, though there are also plenty of cases where carving out space with EQ is a powerful option to revealing some clarity in the mix and to a degree it has become expected in modern production that sounds will be cleaner. Sometimes all it takes to clean up a sound is a HP set at the right cutoff point to keep the low end out of the way. And I am ALWAYS cutting my kick/bass somewhere between 30-50Hz to get rid of mud.

Personally, I understand compression has become an increasingly used tool to the point where many producers will compress pretty much every track in a song but I tend to be light with compression. Some people avoid it altogether, like Infected Mushroom uses no compression whatsoever during mastering, which is remarkable really, but they also pay out the ass to afford the DA converters to pull off "magic" like that. I find compression to be useful in certain circumstances but since I am not trying to be the loudest track ever, pushing my gain staging to the max and sacrificing dynamic range is sometimes very undesirable. I tend to use compression as a tightening/stabilizing tool or to glue pieces together. On occasion I will use it to boost loudness of a track but with the advent of digital limiting it's usually a more convenient option for me to use a limiter.

I am by no means an expert and I am still learning so much but in the last few months in particular a lot has clicked in terms of finding my own workflow and finding what effects work for me instead of just blanketing on effects because I feel I'm "supposed to." Specifically I am talking about EQ and compression because a lot of people will say those need to be on every track and while I may agree in certain circumstances, it's not ALWAYS the case and sometimes over processing a sound can lead to worse results so A/B testing is essential. You have an Isratrance account if I recall correctly? That place is a fantastic resource, as well as psymusic.co.uk There is a particular thread on psymusic called something like "Why compress the bass?" where Ott weighs in on how and why he uses compression on his bass, which he mentions is often gently compressed up to 6 or 7 times.

Anyway, take what I say with a grain of salt. It is what I have found works for me and I think what works for each person is their own individual journey to figure out but jumping in head first into the world of EQ and compression can really bring some revelations even if you fuck a bunch of stuff up for a bit. I have a few tracks I was loving until I tried to take them to next level where I made some mistakes and they never quite got there but it's OK because now I have some newer tracks where I have found more of a handle on these techniques. Lately I have realized the real power in just diving in and fucking things up until you get it right, it's probably been the most powerful learning experience for me so far as every track I take risks on tends to be leaps and bounds better than the last as long as I take time to make it sound right. Refining workflow has also been a major revelation, it is so essential to my own process.

ABL is great because once you distort a 303, it's pretty hard to tell whether it's a real one or not and usually in most cases I will use at least a tad of distortion. The distortion modes on ABL2 are pretty solid but it might be nice to have a few plugs you like too to get certain types of distortion for different styles of sounds. I'm really addicted to the 303 acid lines as I've been thoroughly obsessed with Vibrasphere again as of late. I love ABL to bits and just playing around programming acid lines is so fucking fun and so much easier than using a real 303. MIDI notes beats the shitty 303 programming method any day in my opinion. I didn't know Vibrasphere was using a Moog too, that's interesting, I'll have to look out for that one.

And yeah Sylenth is definitely a smooth, glossy sound, very software sounding though but it IS a good sound in my opinion. Sounds high quality at any rate and is very good for certain new school style patches. You can find cracks for it for sure if that's your thing, they are abundant on the net. It's at least a good way to try it and really find if it's worth adding to your workflow. I really love it, it's become a staple of my own process alongside Massive and Zebra 2. Then again, right now I am not trying to emulate the hardware sound so much. I've been very interested in new school progressive and definitely certain synths are better for certain vibes so it becomes an artistic choice really.

I used FL since version 6 or so, it was my first DAW and I learned for years on it. I do miss it sometimes but I prefer Ableton for a lot of stuff. However, like you said, FL is pretty much king of drum sequencing in my opinion. The drum grid thing they have is really unparalleled in any other DAW I have seen and it's very handy for experimenting quickly and finding a nice groove. I've never used Cubase but I have a vague understanding that it is much more complicated. I've also heard it sounds amazing though. My mixing/mastering teacher uses Cubase professionally and he argued that it had the best summing algorithm, which is a HUGE debate but I trust him to a good extent. Anyway, I'd probably be using Logic or FL if I didn't use Ableton. I never tried FL10, I left off at 9 and I know they introduced some fairly major changes into 10 so I'm sure it's for the better.

Anyway, that's all for my music rant right now haha. Thanks for joining me in discussing, I love talking about this stuff, I find it so fascinating but in the end it's one of those things you have to just decide what sounds best to you because in the end art is a series of choices based on personal taste.

Speaking of Tipper and production... His production is certainly top notch. Apparently somebody said he is known to spend up to 300 hours on a track. Incredibly really, especially when you consider how long a track of his is.

Oh yeah... also this...

I recall reading in I think a Filteria interview where he was talking about the obsession with clean production in today's music. There definitely is a lot of that going on. Whenever I go to a local electronic show, one thing I always do is try to listen for how the bass sits, how the kicks, snares, hi hats, etc etc everything sits with the synths. What I've found is that the lead synths are usually crapped on to make the drums ultra punchy and the bass super pronounced. Which is all good and fine, but then you're just listening to clean percussive music with no details in the synth noises at all. Which I guess isn't a problem for a lot of the popular genres today, a lot of this brostep stuff is so incredibly over compressed and distorted and makes use of the exact same noises I doubt anybody cares, least of all the guys making such trash. The more I think about it I feel like the less EQ and compression the better. If you program your stuff well enough, it seems to fit in nicely on it's own. Like you said, Posford isn't using some ridiculous surgical EQ, just his mixing desk and it sounds great. However I think his stuff has a definite bit of "Lo-fi" charm to it that may not work unless you're Simon fucking Posford, lol. Like, I don't think unless you had some of his psychedelic mojo going on, it'd be kind of hard to pull off his style of production. In fact, just with the way that music is moving these days, I feel Shpongle is definitely on a tiny little island of what's accepted in those terms, and I think nobody cares that he doesn't have very clean percussion or incredibly pronounced bass because it's god damn Shpongle and everything they produce is sonic gold regardless. But in all actuality, production isn't that big of a deal, really. Honestly the only people who are going to notice are other producers, the average listener isn't going to freak out because your snare isn't ultra punchy. And who are you really trying to give a hard on to anyways, other producers or the listeners? And on top of all that, when music is played live, you're really at the mercy of the venue's acoustics and speaker quality. Your production might be godly, but if your playing in some dinky venue with fucked up acoustics and piece of shit speakers, none of that production magic matters hardly at all. I think production is definitely an art that's as important as being able to make music itself, but there is definitely a point where it's too much and begins to sound far too processed, not like any of the listeners will notice, again. Like you said though, everything is personal taste. What sounds over processed and stale to me may sound like ultra clean polished awesomeness to someone else's ear.

Yeah, clean production is definitely the "in" thing right now. I would attribute it probably to the advances in technology and specifically to software in particular. Over compression is a constant issue these days that is largely ignored by mainstream music. The loudness wars ensue.

I really do think programming your synths will get you a large part of the way there. Using the effects to really finish off the polish and take it to the next level. In the same sense that a mix should be fairly complete before mastering, a sound should fairly defined before mixing.

I hear what you're saying about the lo-fi nature of some of Simon's work. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that he is really using a good amount of analog gear and on top of that, a lot of his famous releases are pretty old now. Stuff from '98 definitely has a more lo-fi charm. But I will say that the newer Shpongle albums have some incredible production in terms of cleanliness and clarity while still retaining the extreme amount of layers. He really is a genius at production in my opinion. And on top of that Ott is always credited on Shpongle albums and I think Ott is one of the best producers from a technical standpoint I have ever heard.

Anyway yeah, production is important, it helps separate quality for listeners who don't fully "hear" the differences. But it also can become something that you can get too hung up on. Like you said, who are you producing for? And is production getting in the way of making real art? All good and fair points.