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..

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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.

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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.

Last edited by Derivative on Mar-12-2007 at 13:37

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.

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

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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...

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