definite improvement
Oh man, I wish I posted a billion words about this one instead! I feel a bit silly now.
Mix is much nicer, again some parts that clip but that's down to just going through each channel and making sure there isn't any straight digital distortion happening anywhere in the signal chain ;)
hey man thanks again for everything you've helped me with. i feel like my sound has improved so much because of your recommendations; i don't think i can thank you enough! =)
wooooo :D
Okay, I loooooove the euphoric progressions and the bits and pieces of automated madness. I thought they meshed together quite nicely, myself :)
I've got a lot of feedback running through my head, let's hope that 4000 characters is enough :P
1) While I can tell this has been made using the FL engine, it doesn't really sound cheesy or "fruity", if you know what I mean. Still, the best way to get a unique sound out of fruity is to get some third-party dynamic processors, reverbs and synths. Google will help you out a lot here but if you want some good places to start for new VSTs, "xoxos", "digitalfishphones" and "smartelectronix" are all top notch developers with lots of excellent free gear, digitalfishphones in particular an excellent compressor called "endorphin" and a great analogue signal modeller called "dominion", both of which can take any fruity native sound and make it 100x warmer and fatter.
2) The kick really needs to peak out over the rest of the mix, needs to really pierce the 3Khz area and pound between 80 and 120Hz. At the moment it seems to rumble under the rest of the mix. Something I do is layer a pitched-down 808 snare with a very short decay time over the top, put it through one compressor in it's own fx bus and then send it to the kick's compressor and another compressor on a send channel. If you use a different compression plugin on the send it gives the snap of the new kick sound a nice airy character.
3) Another thing that might be dampening the impact of the kick is the number of instruments with a presence in the low area. If you want a track to sound more bassy it's always better to remove bass from instruments that don't need it than to boost, so roll off the low frequencies of all instruments at 180Hz except the kick and one sub bassline. Then roll off <50Hz on the kick. If you put a little boost on the kick at ~80-120Hz you get all the punch you need without any low frequency dissonance.
4)With low, detuned growling synths, I'll generally HP filter the growl at like 250Hz and throw a pure sine wave bass underneath it, then compress them together. Again, it's just to avoid low frequency dissonance.
5) While the master track doesn't clip, individual elements are quite clearly clipping. Unless you have a compressor plugin with some kind of waveshaping/saturation (i.e. all the digitalfishphones dynamic plugins :D) on every channel then this is something you need to avoid. There are lots of little things in the background that I thought could have been lower in volume or more seperated in the stereo field and stereo seperation goes a long way to avoiding clipping.
Okay, anything else I had to say I've forgotten. Overall it's a good song that needs a little more work on the mix I think :)
whooa, wow thanks for all the great tips!!! =) lol why can't there be more NG users like you out there? you're the EXACT kinda person i needed! thx bro =)
lovely
Very nice texture! The progression is really nice, my only complaint is the lack of some gradual changes in the timbre... the middle section also feels a little bit too inhuman. Maybe some slight timing offsets would help that, I dunno.
Overall I really liked this. Well done!
I see what you're getting at. It does sound a bit unnatural. It is a little too late to fix this one up, because my EP with this on it comes out tomorrow. Maybe I can do a human mix of this though and but it on NG.
Glad you liked it and thanks for the review :)
alrighty then.
Definitely mastered too heavily. At first anyway. The second section has much more headroom and is nicer to listen to but the vocals in the third seem to suck all the headroom right out of the mix again.
The percussion feels awfully thin, the kick and snare are especially weak and GM sounding and fall well below the volume of the string sections and vocals when the attack should be well above them. There's no stereo imaging either so they feel even more flat and inhuman.
It sounds and feels like you've taken three different audio files and crossfaded them instead of taking the three pieces and creating thoughtful transitions. Compositionally the three are good and they're thematically similar but they need something more to tie them together. In fact if you got these three audio files which were already mastered and then put them together and mastered them all over again that would make for a pretty bad lack of headroom.
As three seperate tracks the composition and arrangement in each is fairly good. The way you've attempted to turn them into one track isn't working for me and there's a lot of things I don't like about the mix in general, some of which might just come down to a difference in how we work.
Isn't it great what an old-fashioned tape-recorder and aux cord direct to the computer audio import can achieve.
*bops head*
I like this overall. It has a very stiff 1-2 feel of mid 90s dance music along some trippy atonal synth you'd expect from new school electro house.
Really needs a stronger backbeat, that tiny little clap doesn't cut it past the 8th bar so I guess you should throw down a crunchy, filtered noise or something on the 2 and 4 once that choked synth comes in at 0m14s
I think the sidechained whitenoise sweep is a bit loud. maybe a bit of lowpass sweep on it would smooth it out a little and give it a bit more depth.
I'm thinking at 1m37s you could drop the beat and everything else completely and suddenly introduce a 2 bar shrill lead with a good portion of reverb and delay, with the 2nd bar silent for now (to give the effects room to ring out). Build the track back up, then when the beat comes back in you can throw both bars of lead down with much less reverb and delay (still a little bit though). Maybe layer a lower octave with less harsh tones as well.
haha thanks for the advice, ill look into some of this, but for now i gotta go so peace, and if ya got anything you want reviewed leave me a msg.
number two
second but on a more gritty sounding synth. maybe double it up with a clone of the same synth and automate some squelchy high pass filtering.
actually it really depends on what sort of track you want to build from this. you could create entirely different songs from either so i guess it's up to you depending on the direction you want to take.
yeah
the snare is a bit ugly sounding. maybe use a sample of a shallower snare with less gated reverb?
otherwise it's pretty bitchin'
woulda liked to hear more squeals and wailing solo action. ohhhhh well.
awwwww isn't that nice
needs a lot more of those dynamic and timing offsets i keep telling people to put in...
but then the pads come in and it doesn't seem as inhuman for some reason. the chord progression is just darling.
still... the intro seems really stiff. even the sustain pedal keeps releasing at the exact same time each bar, haha.
really nice composition and arrangement. simplicity is the bomb.
I really need to get back into tweaking each individual note...
hot
The sort of breakbeat based industrial I try to make, except this is a lot less orchestral and more atonal broodey stuff...
The excessive bitcrushing gives this a bit of generic "hey guys i'm using a bitcrusher" feel. Okay, that doesn't really make a lot of sense but if you're using ephonic lo-fi you could try pitchshifting and dirty-ing the signal after the crushing to make it sound a bit more unique in the tonality. Or just keep it straight crushed at the start and then do stuff to it when it gets used afterwards...
A little hypocritical of me seeing as I love me some generic daft punk style bitcrushed synth basses.
I love the power in the beat. The deep kicks are great, sounds like you have some peak based synth layered under them making them nice and gritty too. I dig this.
P.S. The people being all "oh my god it's industrial not hip hop" probably haven't heard Saul Williams, awesome rapper with dirty industrial beats produced by flippin' Trent Reznor of all people. Reznor's collaborated with flippin' Dr Dre too guys, it's not a sin to make "industrial hip hop". Open your ears a bit.
Finally someone who understands me :333 I heart you, thanks for the bitcrushing advice, I'll give it a try next time I am doing this sort of HipHop / Industrial Sound. I know what you mean with its getting generic... I have to get some new Ideas for using bitcrushing and EQing it. And thank you for telling me about Reznor, I got to check that out asap :O
lovely :)
Not much to add. My thoughts have already been expressed :)
I think if you were to add vocals it'd be difficult to do since all you have is the wav file (hopefully unmastered) to track on top of. It might be easier to not bother.
In any case, thanks for sharing this with us! :D
used to put a lot of music on here and then i stopped but maybe i will start doing that again one day hehe
Age 34, Male
australia
Joined on 1/7/08
Peril: Distant Star 
