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Your production order.
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| camsr |
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? |
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| TwistedDUO |
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). |
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| 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. |
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| mysticalninja |
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. |
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| Storyteller |
| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| lowski |
| 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. |
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| ASFSE |
| 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!:) |
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| Agenz |
| 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 :whip: )
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| Derivative |
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 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 :tongue2 ) 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 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 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. |
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| david.michael |
| 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. |
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| ronk |
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 :D |
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