ok, the general theme seems to be EQ manipulation, I could definately practice that some more. So most of these "production values" issues seem to center around proper usage of effects?

It is hard sometimes identifying just why things sound so ugly, that is what this thread is about, figuring out what stuff I need to work on to raise these production values, so far the answer appears to be my usage of EQ and other fx. My ears aren't trained to hear production values very well, even when I'm listening to other people's music I have trouble identifying which pieces have quality production and which ones do not(I can hear the obvious things though), so I tend to judge things more by their composition, but I would like to get better at identifying quality production and acheiving it in my own work.

Thanks for the clues, I can work on EQ and stuff

Yes, EQ and effects are definately indispensable to your overall sound. Compression is another thing, though normally this will not affect your 'sound' as much.

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quote:

Originally posted by Icone The rest I did all with fiddling and tweaking until I thought it sounded right.

I do plenty of my own tweaking but I feel as if I am not getting anywhere, what specifically should I be trying to tweak better? I know this sounds alot like I'm asking for a recipe, but I'm really not so please dont read it in this way. I just wonder, which attributes of thses sounds tend to require such tweaking, which attributes should be left alone. I try and try to get things to sound right but what almost always happens is they just sound even more wrong than before. It is really easy to say "just sit down in front of the thing and persistantly tweak stuff" but it is not helpful advice, the trial and error needs to be focused in some specific direction or I just go the wrong way!

So in general, what kind of things did you experiment with to get things to sound right, what do you mean by "fiddling and tweaking"? When I think of tweaking I think of turning knobs around on a synth and pressing keys until something sounds interesting, then I add that noise to the rest of the sequence, and at that stage it sounds like "low quality", so I try to do more of this "tweaking" by fiddling with things like reverb, EQ, chorus, delay, and whatnot, but then it gets all distorted and nasty sounding rather then getting any better, it just gets all "blurry" when I try to tweak, so I wonder what kind of tweaking I should be doing rather then the stuff I am doing now.

Dunno if this is any use, but Im finding trying to create music and produce music at the same time is a pain. So Im either creating a score or working out how to make an existing score sound richer as opposed to trying to do both at the same time as it seems to defeat itself. So Im banging out some ideas, melodies, breaks, etc as quick as possible to get an idea down before loosing focus then when I feel Im done I will keep pushing to get some other musical ideas down as quickly as possible ... then save it as new file and start tweaking that new file, point being I have a point that I can refer to do decide if my new tweaks are better or worse. I keep incrementally saving my changes too at certian points ending up with 10 versions of a song. The rest is dumping into CD or tape an listening to it in the car or mp3 player or at m8s house to get a feel for how it sounds as a listener instead of as a producer.

If im not creating or producing then the rest of my spare time is spent tinkering with instrument patches and sounds to be used for tunes

EQ wise sticking to basic rules just now of
Kicks get a high pass filter set between 20 and 80 hz
Bass is set with another highpass filter which is above the kick (30 to 100)
everything else gets slapped with a highpass filter in the range of 100 to 300hz but always above the bass

as for the rest someone mentioned using a notch filter and sweeping it over the other parts to suss out where the ugly spots are for a parts EQ.

It all depends

Last edited by /I\ on Mar-25-2006 at 18:47

So you separate your composing, producing, and sound design? I try and do the same thing, I would like to read more about your process.

So you lay out all your composition as fast as possible so as not to lose your ideas. In this phase something that helps me is messages I leave to myself on my phone. Whenever I think of something and am away from my computer I'll call myself and sing it out on my answering machine so I don't forget it. This is not really the stuff I ask questions about in this thread though, because I know what I need to do in order to improve on these aspects. I listen to other music, slow it down and disect it, practice the piano roll and train my ear to sense music and rhythm better, that is stuff that, while I am not very good, I at least know what I must work on to make it better.

So then you adjust this composition in alot of different ways. I am kinda handicapped here because I have only a tiny amount of hard drive space, around 8 gigs that I can spare for audio, and that gets used up pretty fast, perhaps an invesment in an external HD is in order, shame my laptop has no usb 2.0.

Then you do your sound design at a different time, interesting stuff. If you were starting a piece completely from nothing, which would you do first?

If you do nondesetructive edits with your samples then you could have sample repository for your song and share those samples between each song. That would save a lot of space as the actual project file would be less than 1mb.

Writing wise starts with what part comes up as good first and the rest follows. Could be a section looped and being edited in step time like an arp or a base line, then make a copy of it and make more edits for variation or could be playing out chords and melodies with a 4/4 kick acting as metronome in realtime. Also a fan of serendipity and always listening out for good accidents to happen like making a mess of an edit but it sounds pretty cool

singing into a tape sounds interesting, like that idea m8

The answering machine thing is actually alot of fun. I got a little drunk at the bar last night and then inspiration struck me, so I called myself and left a message on my phone. Some other kids caught me singing into my phone and thought it was funny, so they grabbed my phone and did some singing of their own. It actually wasn't that bad, I'm considering using it . I have several messages full of drunken bar singing from last night, both from myself and other kids, yay. I do alot of other silly things to try and remember stuff, like writing down phonetic spelling that attempts to describe the sound I'm imagining, or drawing little pictures that I try to use to remind me of the thing that I thought of(I have all these pictures that no longer make any sense to me, sketched on napkins and on the backs of old homeworks, all scattered around the desk where my computer sits), but that kinda thing doesn't seem to work as well as singing into my voice mail, even though I am a really crappy singer and my phone captures my noises very poorly.

I could save on HD space doing samples and project files, that's a good idea, much better than giant exported audio files, which is sometimes necessary with all these incompatible freeware programs that I'm stuck with. I do my sample editing in audacity, which is nondestructive, but my sample repository is embarasingly small. Maybe I should take some time to build up a bigger set of source sounds and patches.

It seems that we have a similar work flow, that makes me feel a bit better about what I'm doing, sometimes I just get this idea in my head that I am going about things all wrong and that is why it sounds bad. I guess I just need to keep trying and work on my FX some more, thanks for the encouragement everyone.

psyklolink's EQ tip is probbably the single most important thing to learn about EQ. Everything else stems from that. As for sound & Production values some of the best and mostoriginal tracks I've heard are some of the rawest.

Learning to produce ASOT style is very worthwhile, but it's certainly not the only way to make records..

It depends on what you are afer..

If you are on the zero budget vibe with older hardware you could always take a peek at some of the linux distributions & tools out there.. Things like Ardour ( http://ardour.org/ ) and Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ ) are actually pretty useful right now, and will get you playing for free, and return you good karma for not warezing.

You can even get CD distributions that you pop in and boot from, with no need to wipe down your HD..

two words:

STEAL SOFTWARE

I'm sorry. But I don't care who, WHO tells you on this board not to do it; that it "loses it's meaning when you steal software."



YOU CAN'T AFFORD 100$ vsts and 1000$ sequencers and neither can I.

I have mounting college debt and I'm only 20 I do not have a good income source yet.

I openly admit I produce on a pirated version of Nuendo 3.0, with a pirated copy of Waves 5.0 diamond bundle. And an upgraded version of ProTools (the original version 6.1 came with the Mbox, but the 7 upgrade was "illegal"). As well as a bank of other stolen VSTs. Does that make ANYTHING I produce less artistic or worthy? No.

Until you get a really really nice job, and can afford to indulge yourself in the pro-audio world, don't bother paying for a thing. If you're not making a dime of your productions (I sure as shit ain't). Then there is no harm.

I'm pretty passionate about paying for good things. And I gladly pay for music I love. But if some decently sized companies like Waves, Digidesign, or Stienberg are going to want me to fork up thousands of dollars of dough to LEARN... LEARNNN how to produce and mix music, they can go strait to hell.

I'll gladly pay for all my software when I get the money. Gladly. I swear to God I will someday.

But for now sir, you like me, are better off learning from whatever you can get your poor little paws on.

Trust release groups like H20 and steal, steal, steal!

Sorry that I went on a rant on this. I don't mean to change the subject really. Just passionate I guess.

As for your question "Is my gear too shitty?"


A simple way to go is this:

Get a solid sound-card. M-Audio 2496 (pci-based), or an Audiophile USB (both relatively inexpensive) or any other similar product that can process good clean 16bit 44.1khz sound.

Get solid head-phones. Don't recommend DJ Phones at all. Stay away from cheap-o 50 dollar headphones. If you want some solid headphones that will give you some very true and balanced sound I recommend the the AKG K240M . I am going to grab a pair after I heard how a friends sounded. Unlike like the Sony 7506s (which seem to be everywhere) which are notorious for accentuated highs, and dimminshed low end. The AKGs are pretty much spot on. Bass will be back in your mix. And your high end will be a lot more true. They have a semi-open air set up which gives you a great sense of depth and space in your mix as well.

Good luck.

---Adam

EDIT:
As to free-ware solutions. They aren't industry standard... yet. And most people do NOT want to bother with a linux box. It's no stretch for me. I'm going to be building a linux box very soon JUST for ardour which concievably could/will be a VERY usefull solution. But it does NOT HAVE MIDI YET. So for most electronic music producers, it won't be very usefull.

Free-ware is always a good way to go. Try using the Kahurues (spell?) Classic Suite of VSTs. Can't go wrong there.

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^ You're a god damn idiot.

Besides H20 doesn't say "steal, steal, steal". Their policy is "Try before buy". Cubase SX3 for example, doesn't even have a demo version.

I am actually running linux on my laptop right now, I use Ardour, seq24, zynaddsubfx, om synth, and alot of that kind of stuff, so I have free software pretty much covered. I also play with dyne:bolic livecds on occasion. I have been messing around with linux audio since summer last year, its been a real learning experience. I actually talked about the linux audio stuff with a requiter who works for redhat and he acted pretty impressed by it, wouldnt that kick ass to get hired by redhat just for playing with some noise software? Graduation is still a couple years away though, but I thought it was an interesting possibility.

Hardware wise I could do much better though, my sound card and speakers are very poor. Maybe I can get an echo indigo io pcmcia card for my laptop and those headphones you mentioned, I could probably find around 200 dollars somewhere.

I'm not trying to sound like ASOT, I hate ASOT, twinkly proggy trance sucks balls. I am just sick of sounding "low quality", I want to have higher production values. I know certain rawness can sound good, I have plenty of raw music in my collection that I enjoy. But Production values are very important it seems, nobody enjoys a tune when it sounds like it was recording by a fifteen year old in his mother's basement.

I have a bad ear for production values, I will pick tracks I enjoy and share them with people, and they will tell me that they are low quality sound, pointing out issues with mixdowns and mastering and things that I don't know how to improve upon. I just listen for composition so I don't even hear this "production values" very well, but they remain important regardless. Im just a bit tired of it is all, I want high quality productions for as little money as possible.

Heyas,

So, basically what I think you are getting at is you need to spend a lot of time LISTENING to many many tracks, and try and pick them apart in your head. To understand how somthing is done is a very big step in the direction of being able to do it yourself.

I used to st in the back of clubs just listening and watching the crowd react to music. It was very very enlightening..

If I was you, I'd start by working on remixing a bunch of tracks that you (and by the sounds of things your firends) like. By copying is a very good way to start learning actual technique.

There is stuff in the linux world that is of a quality of the level you are at (And stuff I actually still use in a pretty significant studio). There are many out there who resort to downloading large collections of Warez and really it's just like trading cards. They lack the understanding that makes those tools truely powerful.

If you know your tools you can get very very far without spending much.

Time, Money, Quality. Pick 2. You have little money and want lots of quality so it's going to take time.

It's a long journey and there are shortcuts. the thing is it's the hourney that matters, not the destination. Hence shortcuts are a waste of time.