|
Trying out some drum and bass, would love some feedback [DNB]
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Evolve140 |
| Pretty neat man. Sounds pretty clean too. Nice part at the ending, dope. |
|
|
| Pub Crawl |
| quote: | Originally posted by Evolve140
Pretty neat man. Sounds pretty clean too. Nice part at the ending, dope. |
Thanks Jesse |
|
|
| Storyteller |
| Instant nodding. The bass sound in the start sounds somewhat ty but works well in the full mix. Liking the chords, drums sound nice and fat. Well done, I enjoyed it :). 2nd part after the break is awesome too. I like more of this :) |
|
|
| Ficticious |
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
Instant nodding. The bass sound in the start sounds somewhat ty but works well in the full mix. Liking the chords, drums sound nice and fat. Well done, I enjoyed it :). 2nd part after the break is awesome too. I like more of this :) |
I agree with him. Maybe if you could put something in at the beginning or change it up right there with the same type of melody but a different piece it'd make it perfect. ;) |
|
|
| meriter |
| The drums sound perfect, this has real potential as a liquid DNB track but i wouldn't try to get all nasty with it. I'm not impressed with the growly stuff at the end. For me I would just never attempt to make nasty drum and bass because there are productions out there just so far beyond what I'd ever be able to do.. like the bar is set so high. What've you've got there sounds "cute" in comparison. I would just stick to the liquid dnb sound and maybe add some more variation to the main synth |
|
|
| Trancelover03591 |
| There are some really cool elements to this track. Good track. |
|
|
| Pub Crawl |
| Thanks everyone! This is my DNB/Bass alias, so i'll be posting up more tracks like this soon |
|
|
| Excess |
| gooby pls to the noise at the end and go back to the atmospheric awesomeness that was the first half of this track |
|
|
| Dj Dizzy |
nice! i went ahead and left a long-winded note no your "dnb" track on your soundcloud page. the other one, tarp, i think you did an excellement, commendable job on that as well. you captured a minimal-style vibe on that one, not an easy task with certain drum structures and i think you pulled it off so well you made it seem easy. but i know from first-hand experience, for me, when i tried to put a song together that had a very inspiration, it didn't turn out well at all. you have to either listen to minimal a lot or just be in the zone mentally with the way their genre does things. i love minimal actually, but the couple (maybe once or twice) i tried to hold back to more fundamental, minimal, back to the basics type of approach, i just ended up making a boring song because i was unable to set a mood/etc through the song. so you have my respect there, maybe for some people minimal comes naturally but it's a tough challenge to me. so i commend u on pulling it off, what sounded like effortlessly
anyway, if you hit up your soundcloud you'll see my comment(s) for the "dnb" track. i made it long-winded on purpose because i've been trying like hell to get some critiques for a song i just finished 2 weeks ago and everyone just says it's good and compliments, which i'm not complaining by any means ;) but i've been hoping to get some really nice observative critiques because posting it up on forums online is my only hope of getting someone who knows what they're talking about being able to hit me up with some critiques. so u don't have to but if you could help me out by giving my song a couple listens and letting me know what you think. every song, even the best songs could be better than how their final version came out.
========================================================
it's a dnb track too
www.soundcloud.com/djdizzy216
i had some pretty non-conventional ideas that i put into effect for the song and i'd have to say that overall i'm happy with how it turned out, it turned out the way i aimed for with one small exception. i'm not sure if i'm being overly anal (maybe so) or if there really is something midly wrong with the mixdown/mastering. if you don't mind me describing what's bothering me about it real quick, i'll make it to the point but i'm desperate to get someone else's opinion. so i'll go ahead and tell you what i'm unhappy with regarding the song. i use ableton as my DAW, dont worry i'm not an ableton dj - the ableton is there strictly as a sequencer and to take advantage of its bells n whistles. when i have the song's project open in ableton, it's in a 24-bit environment. i mastered the song myself, i've been a DJ for over 10 years and doing production technically since '99 but i never truly mastered anything outside of a couple little touch-ups so this is an area i have little confidence in, in fact a few weeks back i spent some serious time doing but read/read/read (i already knew how mastering techniques work like compression, limiting, "best practices" to use). i even did NY compression, i sent a copy of ALL my audio/midi channels to a new return channel, along with it also going to the master channel. on that new return channel i added an instance of Pro-C and compressed it heavily then slowly brought the volume of the NY Compression channel (with the heavily compressed audio) and mixed it enough to where i took advantage of considerable gain in loudness but also, doubling it up by meshing those 2 channels seems to make the resulting audio signal sound pretty beefed up. there was no delay on any of the return channels or the master so no issues with phase cancellation, etc. by doing NY compression i gained a nice boost to my RMS which was a good thing cuz my song was mad quiet. then i tossed an instance of Pro-L on the master channel and bumped it up another 3db, while setting the cutoff for -0.3db, typical practices for mp3/cd-bound tracks.
i know there are a couple small things i need to do because i've been working on that song for 3 months and went through so many cycles of being tone deaf so u take a small break but in cycles over n over again. toss in the fact that i'm used to hearing it in 24-bit within the ableton work environment, the mp3 sounds awful in comparison. so anyway by the time i was wrapping up the song, i was pretty much useless. for exammple in my soundcloud, the song could stand to be 1-2db louder, the euphoric-sounding really trancey pad needs to be 1/2-1db louder, the female vocals could probably stand to be 0.5db louder. but that brings me onto problem #2, even after tossing a little compression directly on the instruments' tracks (was sure not to overdo it), and i used NY compression which greatly helped RMS, then i squeezed out another 3db in gain through my limiter on the master channel, Pro-L.
my lead synths, the lead plucks and the vocals all have a lot of peaks within the same mid-frequency range. the drums have a lot of ghost snares as opposed to the filler being hats or rides/etc. the damn ghost snares happen to fall not far away from the frequency range that the female vocals. so that leaves me with the 3 most important components of the song fighting over a lot of the same mid-range frequency area. so i eq'ed everything the best i could, i nothced the out of everything to try to solve the problem. b/c what was happening was muddiness for the sounds fighting over those frequencies. it didn't sound awful but it sounded lacking, it was something more akin to them doing a little phase cancellation on each other. the ghost snares sounnded real quiet, the lead plucks siybded wayyyyy quiet. i could tell they were there but the entire melody was lost. the vocals seemed to prevale the best probably because a lof of frequencies very important to those vocals were outside of that freq range everyone was fighting for.
so first thing i did was eq the living hell out of everything, not just for the sake of eq'ing cuz that's lead to weakened sounds but the most important sounds already sounded "lost/drowned out", could hardly hear them but yet the song didn't sound muddy to me. i used the eq to notch the out of the plucks, vocals, ghost hits and snares. that helped a noticeable amount but there was still too much of one sounds' freq range being shared between different sounds. then i remembered, out of habit i always put my drums n subs to mono. then i used a M/S eq to spread the lead plucks mainly to the sides and left the vocals in the center primarily. that seemed to take care of it! i still wish i could somehow crank up the lead plucks another 1db, the vocals another 0.5db but then - the mild frequency contention - starts to drown out the all-important drums.
the last i wanted was to settle for it not turning out right, these are the 3 most important sounds of the song, 1) the lead melody, 2) vocals, 3) drums. it's a drum & bass track so drums take high priority in the dnb world. especially cuz of the break i resampled, sliced up and ended up arranging and layering it to how i want it. i had to stay away frmo the amen so i used Kurtis Blows' Do The Do break. that's a song i've wanted to pick apart and put back together to use for many yearsf. but for some reason that song has driven me to the point of wanting to rip my hair out trying to get a grasp of it to slice individual instruments and rearrange it. this time i didn't have toooooo much troule making those old classic drums work. i'd wanted to make a song after having my way with the "Do The Do" drums for many years. i've always loved the drums in Adam F - Circles and LTJ Bukem - Horizons.
so there's been a couple unexpected tough situations along the way but it's much better now. the only problem i really have is that even after NY Compression and doing a +3db with Pro-L, my limiter, the song was still about 3-4db too quiet :/ so i said screw it, i opened it in cool edit (yes, from 1999) and did a quick +3db amplify and said screw it. my peaks weren't too bad after that +3db amplificiation surprisingly. i imported a few other, commercial songs, stuff from Dinka to Deadmau5 to Danny Byrd, you name it and all of those had volumetric peaks higher than mine. but going forward i'd like to squeeze those extra db outta the song during the mastering process like i should've done.
but aside from it being a little on the quiet side still, i'm not 100% on how it came out, the sound quality seems lacking. i realize i've spent countless hours hearing it time n time again in ableton's 24-bit environment but i can't help to think something's up with my mixdown or mastering. if you listen to the mp3 on my soundcloud at www.soundcloud.com/djdizzy216 the song is "DJ Dizzy - Feel So Free), when that was rendered i ended up using Ozone 5's Maximizer on the master channel instead of Pro-L. i did a lot of comparison and even though all-in-all i like Pro-L better, sometimes u have to take it on a song-by-song basis cuz Ozone seemed to sound better with this song than Pro-L did, the differences in aliasing and whatnot. then i export as a 16-bit wav with POW-r2 dithering enabled. i'm going to re-render the song but try Pro-L for that extra 3db instead of Ozone 5 Maximizer and i'm going to use Pro-L's built-in dithering and disable Ableton's dithering. i don't know, maybe it's all in my head but the mp3 and wav version just soumd "off" to me.
this loooooong-ass block of text will prob prevent anyone from in with this post or helping me with a real good well-thought out critique but i wanted everyone to explain the full situation so maybe someone would see i've been at this for a hot minute, wasted ungodly number of hours reading (trying to troubleshoot the mixdown/mastering). so i'm hoping someone will take sympathy on me n take time out from their day to give this song a couple listens and report back what they think, straight up, no need to tip toe around. i prefer when people are just blatant and straight up to me.
, sorry to hijack here Pub Crawl. , i must be getting desperate. all of my friends are just like "it's beautiful, uplifting, s dope, OMG i love it, etc" and i really do appreciate that but i'm stilll left with this loss of quality issue i'm trying to resolve, if at all possible then resolve it to the best of my ability. it's just that i hear my song in the car next to other, regular songs, and i'm unhappy with it. needs to be a little louder unfortunately and the voice/lead plucks don't really individually pop out on their own like they might do if they had a sufficient designated freq range. |
|
|
| EddieZilker |
| I like the little growlies, at the end, but I also think you should absolutely not finish with that. Stuff like that is cool, when used sparingly, but don't feel compelled by tradition to resort to cliche', throughout the rest of it until the end. I absolutely love what you've got down, so far, and want the final version in my collection. Really nice stuff. |
|
|
| Pub Crawl |
| quote: | Originally posted by Dj Dizzy
nice! i went ahead and left a long-winded note no your "dnb" track on your soundcloud page. the other one, tarp, i think you did an excellement, commendable job on that as well. you captured a minimal-style vibe on that one, not an easy task with certain drum structures and i think you pulled it off so well you made it seem easy. but i know from first-hand experience, for me, when i tried to put a song together that had a very inspiration, it didn't turn out well at all. you have to either listen to minimal a lot or just be in the zone mentally with the way their genre does things. i love minimal actually, but the couple (maybe once or twice) i tried to hold back to more fundamental, minimal, back to the basics type of approach, i just ended up making a boring song because i was unable to set a mood/etc through the song. so you have my respect there, maybe for some people minimal comes naturally but it's a tough challenge to me. so i commend u on pulling it off, what sounded like effortlessly
anyway, if you hit up your soundcloud you'll see my comment(s) for the "dnb" track. i made it long-winded on purpose because i've been trying like hell to get some critiques for a song i just finished 2 weeks ago and everyone just says it's good and compliments, which i'm not complaining by any means ;) but i've been hoping to get some really nice observative critiques because posting it up on forums online is my only hope of getting someone who knows what they're talking about being able to hit me up with some critiques. so u don't have to but if you could help me out by giving my song a couple listens and letting me know what you think. every song, even the best songs could be better than how their final version came out.
========================================================
it's a dnb track too
www.soundcloud.com/djdizzy216
i had some pretty non-conventional ideas that i put into effect for the song and i'd have to say that overall i'm happy with how it turned out, it turned out the way i aimed for with one small exception. i'm not sure if i'm being overly anal (maybe so) or if there really is something midly wrong with the mixdown/mastering. if you don't mind me describing what's bothering me about it real quick, i'll make it to the point but i'm desperate to get someone else's opinion. so i'll go ahead and tell you what i'm unhappy with regarding the song. i use ableton as my DAW, dont worry i'm not an ableton dj - the ableton is there strictly as a sequencer and to take advantage of its bells n whistles. when i have the song's project open in ableton, it's in a 24-bit environment. i mastered the song myself, i've been a DJ for over 10 years and doing production technically since '99 but i never truly mastered anything outside of a couple little touch-ups so this is an area i have little confidence in, in fact a few weeks back i spent some serious time doing but read/read/read (i already knew how mastering techniques work like compression, limiting, "best practices" to use). i even did NY compression, i sent a copy of ALL my audio/midi channels to a new return channel, along with it also going to the master channel. on that new return channel i added an instance of Pro-C and compressed it heavily then slowly brought the volume of the NY Compression channel (with the heavily compressed audio) and mixed it enough to where i took advantage of considerable gain in loudness but also, doubling it up by meshing those 2 channels seems to make the resulting audio signal sound pretty beefed up. there was no delay on any of the return channels or the master so no issues with phase cancellation, etc. by doing NY compression i gained a nice boost to my RMS which was a good thing cuz my song was mad quiet. then i tossed an instance of Pro-L on the master channel and bumped it up another 3db, while setting the cutoff for -0.3db, typical practices for mp3/cd-bound tracks.
i know there are a couple small things i need to do because i've been working on that song for 3 months and went through so many cycles of being tone deaf so u take a small break but in cycles over n over again. toss in the fact that i'm used to hearing it in 24-bit within the ableton work environment, the mp3 sounds awful in comparison. so anyway by the time i was wrapping up the song, i was pretty much useless. for exammple in my soundcloud, the song could stand to be 1-2db louder, the euphoric-sounding really trancey pad needs to be 1/2-1db louder, the female vocals could probably stand to be 0.5db louder. but that brings me onto problem #2, even after tossing a little compression directly on the instruments' tracks (was sure not to overdo it), and i used NY compression which greatly helped RMS, then i squeezed out another 3db in gain through my limiter on the master channel, Pro-L.
my lead synths, the lead plucks and the vocals all have a lot of peaks within the same mid-frequency range. the drums have a lot of ghost snares as opposed to the filler being hats or rides/etc. the damn ghost snares happen to fall not far away from the frequency range that the female vocals. so that leaves me with the 3 most important components of the song fighting over a lot of the same mid-range frequency area. so i eq'ed everything the best i could, i nothced the out of everything to try to solve the problem. b/c what was happening was muddiness for the sounds fighting over those frequencies. it didn't sound awful but it sounded lacking, it was something more akin to them doing a little phase cancellation on each other. the ghost snares sounnded real quiet, the lead plucks siybded wayyyyy quiet. i could tell they were there but the entire melody was lost. the vocals seemed to prevale the best probably because a lof of frequencies very important to those vocals were outside of that freq range everyone was fighting for.
so first thing i did was eq the living hell out of everything, not just for the sake of eq'ing cuz that's lead to weakened sounds but the most important sounds already sounded "lost/drowned out", could hardly hear them but yet the song didn't sound muddy to me. i used the eq to notch the out of the plucks, vocals, ghost hits and snares. that helped a noticeable amount but there was still too much of one sounds' freq range being shared between different sounds. then i remembered, out of habit i always put my drums n subs to mono. then i used a M/S eq to spread the lead plucks mainly to the sides and left the vocals in the center primarily. that seemed to take care of it! i still wish i could somehow crank up the lead plucks another 1db, the vocals another 0.5db but then - the mild frequency contention - starts to drown out the all-important drums.
the last i wanted was to settle for it not turning out right, these are the 3 most important sounds of the song, 1) the lead melody, 2) vocals, 3) drums. it's a drum & bass track so drums take high priority in the dnb world. especially cuz of the break i resampled, sliced up and ended up arranging and layering it to how i want it. i had to stay away frmo the amen so i used Kurtis Blows' Do The Do break. that's a song i've wanted to pick apart and put back together to use for many yearsf. but for some reason that song has driven me to the point of wanting to rip my hair out trying to get a grasp of it to slice individual instruments and rearrange it. this time i didn't have toooooo much troule making those old classic drums work. i'd wanted to make a song after having my way with the "Do The Do" drums for many years. i've always loved the drums in Adam F - Circles and LTJ Bukem - Horizons.
so there's been a couple unexpected tough situations along the way but it's much better now. the only problem i really have is that even after NY Compression and doing a +3db with Pro-L, my limiter, the song was still about 3-4db too quiet :/ so i said screw it, i opened it in cool edit (yes, from 1999) and did a quick +3db amplify and said screw it. my peaks weren't too bad after that +3db amplificiation surprisingly. i imported a few other, commercial songs, stuff from Dinka to Deadmau5 to Danny Byrd, you name it and all of those had volumetric peaks higher than mine. but going forward i'd like to squeeze those extra db outta the song during the mastering process like i should've done.
but aside from it being a little on the quiet side still, i'm not 100% on how it came out, the sound quality seems lacking. i realize i've spent countless hours hearing it time n time again in ableton's 24-bit environment but i can't help to think something's up with my mixdown or mastering. if you listen to the mp3 on my soundcloud at www.soundcloud.com/djdizzy216 the song is "DJ Dizzy - Feel So Free), when that was rendered i ended up using Ozone 5's Maximizer on the master channel instead of Pro-L. i did a lot of comparison and even though all-in-all i like Pro-L better, sometimes u have to take it on a song-by-song basis cuz Ozone seemed to sound better with this song than Pro-L did, the differences in aliasing and whatnot. then i export as a 16-bit wav with POW-r2 dithering enabled. i'm going to re-render the song but try Pro-L for that extra 3db instead of Ozone 5 Maximizer and i'm going to use Pro-L's built-in dithering and disable Ableton's dithering. i don't know, maybe it's all in my head but the mp3 and wav version just soumd "off" to me.
this loooooong-ass block of text will prob prevent anyone from in with this post or helping me with a real good well-thought out critique but i wanted everyone to explain the full situation so maybe someone would see i've been at this for a hot minute, wasted ungodly number of hours reading (trying to troubleshoot the mixdown/mastering). so i'm hoping someone will take sympathy on me n take time out from their day to give this song a couple listens and report back what they think, straight up, no need to tip toe around. i prefer when people are just blatant and straight up to me.
, sorry to hijack here Pub Crawl. , i must be getting desperate. all of my friends are just like "it's beautiful, uplifting, s dope, OMG i love it, etc" and i really do appreciate that but i'm stilll left with this loss of quality issue i'm trying to resolve, if at all possible then resolve it to the best of my ability. it's just that i hear my song in the car next to other, regular songs, and i'm unhappy with it. needs to be a little louder unfortunately and the voice/lead plucks don't really individually pop out on their own like they might do if they had a sufficient designated freq range. |
Seems like your drowning your elements with too many effects. For instance, you use NY compression, but why? I've never had a situation where I said, "Damn, this HAS to have parallel compression on it!" One thing I've learned over time, is that knowing when to compress comes with repeated trial and error. You know when compression helps and when it does not. Also it seems like you put too much emphasis on mastering. I rarely master my tracks for the sake having a modern polished clean sound(Hope you know what I mean), rather I master just to make it louder and compare it with other mastered tracks.
I can understand why you obsess over this track. Your not too happy with how the percussion sits with the rest of the elements, etc... but let me tell you this. Do you think all of my projects, are as well mixed as you say? Nope. About 90% are failures, either on the mixdown or musically. But with each failure try and understand why it failed, and avoid it in the future. Here's my advice, start pumping out tracks one after another, understand the shortcomings of the last one, and avoid it in the future, and DON'T OBSESS SO MUCH ABOUT ONE TRACK.
Kinda like women, there's plenty of women out there, there's no need to obsess over one girl. |
|
|
|
|
