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Your production order.

How do you guys go about making a track IF you are the person who is writing the music, producing the sounds, and mixing?

Do you usually start writing music first? Or do you start by using a good sound?

Most people use one platform from start to finish. This is fine if it works for you. I tend to be a bit more "ghetto" in my productions. I use multiple platforms for specific purposes.

Here's my production process:
1) Create individual loops, riffs, and samples in Reason (or Fruity Loops).
2) Convert these tracks to .wav files.
3) Use Sound Forge 8 to master each track.
3) Use Acid Pro 5 to sequence, arrange, and mixdown.
4) Save as project then convert as whole to .wav file.
5) Use Sound Forge 8 to master the complete track and convert to .mp3 (if necessary).

I do all at once... If I don't I end up getting a crappy product.

Mixing is as much part of the creative process as the arrangement and composition is. imo.

I have to start out with making sure the mix sounds decent otherwise it is very likely I won't touch the project again. Bad mixdowns really ruin my inspiration and drive to work on a track.

i either build the track around a kick sample that makes me cream my pants, or a lead, or a pad.. or a bass..

what i like to do is make my tracks with my sub off or on my creative PC speakers, and then use my monitors when i reallly want to start fine tuning levels and fine eqing.

That exactly wouldn't work for me. I feel I'm not using 100% of my capabilities if I don't mix while composing. It feels like I'm not able to pull a mix to a decent level if I created the entire track first and do the mixing afterwards . I can't be sure because I only did the mixing afterwards on 2 projects, but I always had the feeling it could be done way better if I just did it the way it works for me . It's a matter of personal preference really. You'll get to know those by learning/reading/listening and a lot of trial and error.

I always start with the kick, percs and bass.. and as i get each part about right i mix it as good as i can at that point, then i keep arranging the track as i make the parts..

I think mixing while making stuff is a must, the key to a good sounding track is in the mixing.

i do the same as subtle. kicks,perc, and then basses. then i try and make everything sound good together. then i start laying it out to the 49 or 65 measure. then i add some light texture/fx and start adding melodies, and so on.

quote:

Originally posted by Storyteller I do all at once... If I don't I end up getting a crappy product. Mixing is as much part of the creative process as the arrangement and composition is. imo. I have to start out with making sure the mix sounds decent otherwise it is very likely I won't touch the project again. Bad mixdowns really ruin my inspiration and drive to work on a track.

yes! i like the way this guy thinks!

quote:

Originally posted by Subtle I always start with the kick, percs and bass.. and as i get each part about right i mix it as good as i can at that point, then i keep arranging the track as i make the parts.. I think mixing while making stuff is a must, the key to a good sounding track is in the mixing.

That's the way I work. I'm trying hard to get past the 8 bar loop (I'm sure we all have been there )

A

I always start with making good sounds because thats the basis. The most simple melody, even a single note can sound good if the sound is awesome and it fits, synaesthetically with the notes you are trying to play.

I usually synthesize everything except snares and hihats and I don't start with consciously trying to write a song. I just focus on designing loads of really awesome, well recorded sounds, single shots and synth patches that tie in to a common theme. I have a file system on my computer to facilitate this, organised by date first, then provisional project name. In that folder I have a sub folder called 'Assets' and this is basically a dumping ground for all the stuff I record.

Sometimes it can take months for me to have enough assets to conceivably write a song out of so during that time I go back over old samples and delete the ones I think sound rubbish (I do this alot and some of them are so bad it makes me wonder to myself 'Jeez, what was I thinking?'). I keep the ones that sound good and work well with the other samples I make. So theres this selective process going on during this time where I ditch the deadweight and retain all the good stuff. Eventually I typically build a collection of assets which work together and are well recorded so I'm happy. But the downside to this is that I spend shit loads of time on preproduction and very little on mixing. So my mixing sucks donkey balls but my sound design is quite good. I need to practice my mixing alot more.

When I feel I've got enough raw materials to work with, the song just writes itself because I have quality sounds and I know what kind of theme or framework I am working towards because I designed all the sounds to be contiguous in a way.

I used to score music that I thought of in my head (and I can think of some pretty wild instruments ) but then I always used to run into that problem of how to get the sounds in your head into your DAW and I always used to fuck it up. Sometimes it would turn out ok, othertimes it just wouldn't work but the point is that it was inconsistant and I can't live with that. So I don't do it anymore.

The way I do things now is in reverse.

The flavour of March 2007 for me is building a song based on the concept of continuouw vertical motion. I don't start with a concept. I start with building sounds and then the idea just comes of its own accord and I develop it into a concept. Its hard for me to express this in words but if you listen to the sounds I have built over the past 2 months theres a common thread running through all of them (a number of the key elements of the songs I write, the bassdrum, snare and bassline for instance all have some sort of upwards/downwards movement).

The kickdrums I built this month for instance are all straight 909 bassdrums (from the D16 Drumazon demo) and in nearly all of them theres an aggressive pitch dive. I didn'ty consciously set out to do this - I just toyed with the idea and liked it so I pushed that frontier a little further. A number of them have a pitch dive that spans an octave and I wanted to get across this sense that when a bassdrum lands it feels like a massive downward beat. I did the opposite with off hihats - mostly those are 909/808 type hats which I have pitched up or used a rising pitch bend.

I tend to find that aggressive pitch dives on 909 bassdrums tend to give them a rubbery, elastic quality, but only if the attack and tuning is low and the decay is medium/high. So I started making sounds whilst conscious of this kind of elasticity and I nearly started making psy type kicks. I had to reign it in because I didn't want to change direction so suddenly (which would probably necessitate building shit loads more assets for a completely different song).

Also, a number of the synth patches I have written for ImpOSCar recently tend to have oscillators spanning an octave and with fairly aggressive filter envelope modulation. Im not really articulating the idea very well and I guess I'd have to show you some of the sounds I built around this concept but I have to start from the sound level, then develop a concept from the vibe I get off the sounds. Then the song tends to be much easier to write.

When I start at this kind of level, I'm not thinking about getting a song or a mix and I find my workflow naturally just seems to break up into stages. All of what I have described so far would be preproduction. Then I have a production phase, a mixdown and a mastering phase although these days I rarely get to the mixdown and I pretty much never get to the mastering bit.

This idea of vertical motion really made me want to do a progressive breaks track and thats what I am working on right now. The bass drums have a really low downward motion and the snare and hats tend to have rising motion to them and I think this works really well for breaks - that is, having this disparity between up and down beats.

So the song I am writing on it is beginning to form and it too will continue this idea of vertical motion. I'm thinking of a continuous crescendo (rising volume) and in ascending intervals (rising scale).

I find it very difficult to write a song with nothing to work on. Some people can do that but I need to have good sounds and a concept to work on otherwise I just waste a load of time dossing around or sitting in front of my computer with a totally blank mind. That or I lose focus and miss the point of what I am trying to achieve so I often end up with a half hearted mix where alot of instruments are going in different directions and nothing really sits well together.

I think in that respect the thing that makes it possible for me to write music is organisation. I have to have some sort of system or everything just goes awry.

Also, it was Mysticalninja on this forum that really got me to set this idea in stone. He doesn't know it but I took those Suburban Train kicks he sampled home with me and studied them and now I can clone it almost perfectly (I was wrong - it is a single, straight 909 sound, it has no other bassdrum layers and I found that is in in fact a bassdrum which Deepsky sampled called 8089091 which you can find for free in a TR-909 pack floating around the net. Theres a octave pitch dive on that drum with a kind of reverse 'S' shape on it.

Thanks ninja man. The percs for that track have some serious pitchbending going on and there were a few things I took out of that knowledge that are now foundation elements in what I'm working on now. I have no idea if I'll finish yet (I rarely do). It depends on how focused I am on getting the job done :\

Just as a side note - because of this method of working, I rarely have anything except for effects going in realtime - in terms of mixing I do it all with the samples I've built. If I want to go and edit some of these or tweak them, I have separate projects for each instrument - i.e. I have several projects titled 07 03 07 BD00X X.X where X is a version number and BD = Bassdrum. CH = Closed Hat etc. Then I have projects for the Bass instrument and the lead and so forth. Those BD projects have Drumazon playing live with all the original processing. So I can always go back to the originals if I need ot make changes.

But weirdly enough, the more you stick to a concept and the clearer you understand it, the less often you go back and tweak sounds. Which used to be my greatest enemy. I would often keep on tweaking and tweaking until I would totally kill whatever energy my mix used to have. I used to describe it as overbaking the cake, or overworking the watercolour (I used to seriously overwork watercolour too - to the point of destroying the surface of the paper).

EDIT: just one other thing I promise. I never *always* start with a particular instrument. For instance I never start with a drum track 100% of the time. I'm beginning to work with vocals now (because of a friend at the office I work at who has an amazing voice) and I am pretty adamant about this - I have to start with her voice, and then recess every other instrument around it. Thats the one element in the track that has to be at the front and it will eat up alot of headroom.

I find if I start with a drum track, I tend to unconsciously want the bassdrum and snare to be constantly present. So I tend to recess other instruments around these two sounds. Ultimately the tracks I write from that become dominated by drums.

So it goes back to good sounds. If you are designing sounds and you come out with a freaking awesome pad, I think its better to use that as the backbone of your track, and recess other instruments around it to give it some space to breathe.

Derivative... wow, great post. I think I am going to try this method of production some time and see where it gets me. A lot of times, one might be motivated but not inspired... and this seems like a good way of working when you are in one of those moods/ruts.

first of all I do the drums + bassline...
then I program some nice sounds with my vsts
after that I write a melody that fits the mood of the track (mood = atmosphere = percussions + vsts)
and then I arrange the track, mix all channels (in FL), render to wav and master the whole thing in SF.

pretty simple, come to think of it

i work vertically...

i'll write a melody/bassline depending on my intentions and loop that bar amount
then i'll just add a midi track and write the next layer
and add a midi track
and add a midi track etc


by the time i'm down to about 15 sounds(just a number not a rule), i'll stretch it out and see what i got

I aways start with getting a good melody going first - thats the most important thing by far imo - then when ive got decent melodies,harmonies,pads,strings etc. going i concentrate on what the structure of the track will be and build it up round that with kicks,basslines,percs..

Last but not least is the spot FX i like to put in as an added touch,and they depend on what style od song it is - a 'spacey' sounding kind of song needs good FX more than others imo..

My tunes start mainly two ways:

1 Laying down beats and basses as they are a fav of mine and layering up from there, or.

2 After getting creative and twisying some noises or creating patches and come up with something that inspires me to build a song around it or start a song off.

I'm sort of there with Derivitive. I put alot of hard work in my sound design and build collections of samples to later manipulate with samplers and effects. It seems the more "molecular" you get or how well you magnify your interpretations and journey into your own sound construction you'll find very promising artifacts of knowledge that can spark several other ideas. Most of those ideas are very fickle, but you do what you can when you're busy. I spent a few months just designing sounds and now I'm in the process of chopping them up, throwing them into drum machines, messing with attacks and delays, I remember why I got into this hobby - I love figuring shit out.

Some good ideas in this thread, keep them coming.

The way I've been working recently is to define the beat and rhythm of the song. I might start with samples I've made before, and put them together to make a drum track. Then I fit a melody to the drum beat for either the bass or the lead, whichever comes to mind first. This way the sound "fits".

I think Im gonna experiment with this for my next session:

Drum track, incidentals
then pads
then bass and melody (the two are so connected it has to be one step)

Hopefully I will make my best song yet.

Varies, usually either:

Lead line if programming a synth, mucking around on keys etc

Loops if mucking around with battery or a drummachine.

Quick 4x4 and off beat bass as a bedrock and go from there.

As far as the production flow, Everything in Cubase, from start to finished wave file. Wavelab to convert it into mp3.

If your bullding atrack from beats up you need to try not to get stuck in loop mode and actually start laying out the beats from the start.

Rather than develop the full beat and then deconstruct to build from to say 0 to 64 bars.

quote:

Originally posted by flutlicht junky If your bullding atrack from beats up you need to try not to get stuck in loop mode and actually start laying out the beats from the start. Rather than develop the full beat and then deconstruct to build from to say 0 to 64 bars.

Horses for courses, no?

I'm actually pretty chaotic in my work flows... but highly organised and effective as well. What I do works for me.

The one thing I am doing now that I never used to do is cutting drums and arranging them so that they are sample accurate. Especially when layering sounds as any sort of phase offset can produce really weird results when certain parts of the mix are summed to mono.

I noticed this really badly when trying to clone that Suburban Train bassdrum. I was wrong the second time too - its an 808 kick layered with a shallow high passed 909 kick run through an envelope follower. Then theres an octave pitch bend on the 808.

Both kicks probably came from a real 909/808 by virtue of the fact that you can find two almost identical kickdrums in Deepsky's free 909 pack off the internet. At least these were the ones I used.

Anyway to cut a long story short to get the tight clicking sound of the drum you have to layer both drums so that the tallest peak of the attack phase of both drums strike at exactly the same point - to the same sample. If you don't do this when you sum to mono it completely changes the tone of the drum because destructive phasing occurs periodically throughout the entire sound when you sum it to mono and it changes the waveshape really dramatically when you look at it in a wave editor.

In programs like Fruity this is impossible because Fruity's wave editor cannot edit wavs to sample accuracy. So you would need an external wave editor like Sony Soundforge or Adobe Audition or something.

Now that I think about it, creating tight, phase accurate mixes in Fruity is impossible without a sample accurate wave editor.

Anyway that degree of accuracy made me rethink the kind of effort you need to put into a sound straight from a synth or drum machine in order to make it sound good and contiguous with other sounds in the mix. Which is another reason why I can never just have VSTs and such running live in a project - its never phase accurate if you are layering several instruments together.

I also noticed with the SubTrain Kick that theres a cropped 909 open hat striking on the bassdrum for most of the tune. That open hat is layered with the BD in such a way that its peak strikes on the same sample as the first peak of the BD. And because the peak on the open hat is about a 1/3rd of the way through the sound it means theres theres this excess (a sort of phwoomping, fade in at the start of the drum. Thats actually the open hat rising to peak level). When I put this together I noticed that the time difference from the start of the wav to the peak of the BD + open hat was exactly 531 samples. So if I were to just throw this into Fruity's step sequencer, everything else that starts sample accurate or with an offset that isn't 531 samples will just be out of time to varying degrees. So I had to put a channel delay on every mixer channel other than the BD + hat and I had to keep runing tabs on this and the phase offset of every instrument in the mix.

I used to just wing it and this is one of the big reasons why my mixes and drum tracks sounded so 'loose' before. I think they are much tighter now.

Again though it comes back to the sounds. If you get the sounds perfect and have a concept that ties it all together, you could make a track consisting of 1 note and it would sound decent because everything its so tight.

I keep coming back to Suburban Train because that track is a real interesting study but melodically and harmonically its simple as fuck. The bassline is just one repeated note but it has this amazing, undulating rhythym and the 8th notes use a different instrument to the off beat bass. It has the same kind of rhythm that you would get if you sat on a train and listened to the clicking sound that occurs on the gaps in the tracks.

All the sounds in that track seem to just fit in with the concept of riding a train out to the end of the line at the end of a long day.

I'm not really a big fan of trance music from this era but that song is a conceptual masterpeice and every sound in it is perfect for expressing that concept.

I find I build tracks the way they would be played, build up the synths find a melody that goes with the bassline "go supernova" (i.e. bring the track to a climax) then watever.

Sometiems I do come up with a single melody and then just build a song around that.

I don't really have any kind of formula, every track is born a different way.

quote:

Originally posted by Mr.Mystery I don't really have any kind of formula, every track is born a different way.

I'm the exact same way. Sometimes its a melody, sometimes a percussion rhythm, sometimes its a cool sound I come up with or even a preset. Often times, its just hitting those black and white keys until something comes out good . I don't have a method. I just find inspiration in so many different things.

I do, however, work on my songs from beginning to end. I have a hard time moving on to the first chorus without first having an intro that meets my standards. It takes me forever to finish a composition.

With regards to mixing/mastering, well....lets just say I have a ways to go I am actively learning though...

quote:

Originally posted by David Adams I do, however, work on my songs from beginning to end. I have a hard time moving on to the first chorus without first having an intro that meets my standards. It takes me forever to finish a composition.

Actually, I'm the same in that sense - I work in a linear fashion from start to finish. I might have the main hook/whatever finished before that but I always put that aside while I work the intro out.

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