>/prod/ wiki - still looking for contributors mu-sic-production.wikia.com There's a severe lack of DAW descriptions in the wiki. If you're good with your tool of choice, consider writing a paragraph about it.
"It's obvious to say it, but you need to listen to what you're doing. I remember seeing these charts which would tell you how to EQ your kick drum. Like, "To give it more body, add a peak around 1kHz." I remember trying to follow those charts and not understanding why it wasn't working. No one teaching music technology should use those charts. " - Randomer
Oliver Miller
How do you guys make stuff? I've dicked around in ableton here and there but any time I try to start doing something serious, I feel like it's too complicated to do simple things. Like I can't really grasp handling samples. The most I ever do is manually draw in all the individual notes using the sounds in the instruments folder. Would like to be able to progress past that.
Kevin Adams
It's all practice man. Just gotta get on it everyday and try and accomplish some kind of goal, whether it be make a complete song or just a good loop. Lately I just start off by making a decent chord progression with a simple synth wave then develop it into an interesting patch and go from there.
Leo Watson
Helps to start with a progression or maybe a synth sound you like. Translate your idea into the DAW of your choice and you'll find the ideas will come naturally, the rest is experience.
Chase Cook
What sample packs do you guys recommend for hip-hop/trap, I cant seem to find one that I like anywhere, and just what sample packs do you recommend in general? thanks
Chase Bennett
Check out the lex luger pack on splice, has some good shit. I could probably upload it to filedropper or some shit later if you guys want.
Jordan Smith
that would be sweet thanks man
Jace Scott
Alright I'll compress it now and it should be up in a few hours
Xavier White
Do foam sound absorbers raise the room temperature?
Parker Hall
Not on their own, just think of them as another layer of insulation.
David Robinson
www filedropper com/lexlugerdrumkit Here you go bud, all the rap stuff I've done has used these samples for the percussion. You'll obviously still need to play with EQ and effects, but these are a good start.
William Martin
Thanks
What is the best way to attach foams to the wall without leaving chunks of glue behind if I decide to remove them
Ayden Phillips
thank you for taking the time to do that man i appreciate it
Connor Powell
All g, go make some good music with it
Kayden Perez
Couldn't tell you, I've never had to remove mine. I would suggest google.
Benjamin Long
Hey, I need some advice/help. I have had an old M-Audio Axiom25 in storage for a couple or so years now. I pulled it out and it's got green shit on all the ports and one of the pots no longer turn.
Would anyone now how I could fix this? I was thinking about calling M-Audio and asking for support but I bought it off eBay and it was a long while ago.
Hudson Lewis
Dudes i'm consideering buying kontakt ( i can't make my pirated copies work right it's so time consuming ) but does it work with pirated libraries?
Aaron Johnson
Yes it does. I've run multiple different libraries and patches from torrents and they've all been fine.
Parker Torres
I literally pirated Kontakt this morning
It took me 15 minutes to get working, downloading libraries now
Kevin Ross
How can I practice singing if I live in an apartment and don't want to disturb my neighbors? I want to practice by myself.
Is there such thing as a building with loads of small, soundproof studios in for people to use for an hour or two?
Juan Nguyen
>Is there such thing as a building with loads of small, soundproof studios in for people to use for an hour or two? You could book a studio room but I wouldn't think it would be worth it. Music schools often have rooms like that, they might let you use them. Alternatively go somewhere like a park when nobody is around.
Jayden Price
I can't load most of the libraries i've dl'ed for various reasons
Adam Ross
The rehearsal spaces I've worked at have all had vocal booths for singers, usually equipped with music playback, headphone amps and a mic with a preamp with an output that allowed a recording to be taken of your performance - don't expect recording studio mic quality (unless you bring your own if you have one) or great sound isolation (there will be several bands rehearsing nearby in only economically-insulated spaces) but it would be cheaper than a recording studio where you'd have to pay flat rate for the whole studio space even though you're not using it.
Gavin Thomas
Thanks for the responses. I think using the studio of a local music school is the best short term idea. Do you have any idea how much they cost to rent for an hour?
I'd be better off just moving into a detached house though.
Adrian Peterson
IF you are acoustically treating a small room you are wasting your time with foam absorbers. They do not absorb bass frequencies which is by far the biggest problem in smaller rooms (less then 2500 cubic ft). Untamed bass freqs can cause nulls up to 30db for some frequencies.
Use Owens Corning 703 or Roxul Safe n Sound (sold at home depot/lowes) to build bass trap panels. Or you can use standard pink fluffy fiberglass in its uncompressed state (but you need to use it over a larger surface area, such as 24in by 24in, due to gas flow resistivity. If using fluffy, do not compress.)
Jacob Young
Will connecting my main speakers into a cheap subwoofer instead of straight into the soundcard distort/change the sound in anyway? This subwoofer in particular thomann.de/gb/swissonic_sub10.htm
Nicholas Perez
I'd like to start synthesizing my drums and I'm looking for the right VSTs. a) any general synths you can recommend for the purpose? Should be ~warm~ as all hell and still easy enough that I can run 5-10 instances. I'm looking at Charlatan, Kamiooka and Noisemaker for a start. b) alternatively, can you recommend any flexible VST drum machines? There was one on BPB recently that I'm vaguely interested in because it doesn't emulate any specific machine, but I dunno if I'm quite sold.
Jayden Carter
Here is a handy document that contains absorption coefficient data for various materials. There is a more comprehensive doc out there, but I can't find it right now.
If you are paranoid about this, see if you can find a circuit diagram, and see if it will bypass of all the active circuitry. I suspect it will be, and should be OK.
Personally, I solved this conundrum with a monitor controller. Besides being able to toggle the sub off and on, mono the signal at will, toggle between various pairs of speakers, and set the trim amounts so the alt speakers are all level-matched, all great features.
A monitor controller will also give you an extra layer of protection for avoiding potential disaster with incredibly HOT signals blasting out of your gear if something goes wrong. The volume pot won't let anything through beyond what its set at.
I use the presonus central station, and that costs a lot because it contains a lot of extra features, but there are cheaper options out there ranging from the mackie big knob, to the coleman audio stuff, to the incredibly cheap and simple TC electronic level pilot. I actually was forced into buying a monitor controller because my audio interface (motu 828 mk3) requires you to have one. The signals coming out of that thing would explode your monitors, they assume you will attenuate it with a monitor controller. All in all, super happy that I have one.
I avoided the SPL monitor controller because it doesn't give you trim adjustment for each monitor pair (wtf?).
Kayden Allen
I mix in my bedroom at medium volumes. Without carpet because it's very hot, humid and dusty here. There's a bed and wooden furniture around the room. Do you think it needs bass treatment? I only have JBL305's without a woofer. But I am thinking of getting a small one
Logan Jones
>tfw when cant compose a good melody thats completely original Fucking kill me, piano was a mistake
Christian Reed
At the very least, a thick pile rug would be a great addition. Bass traps and rug would be even better.
>tfw there's only a finite amount of listenable mellodies
Levi Nguyen
probably a stupid question but I'm building a PC at the moment and I'd like to produce on both the PC and my mac. Anyone else do this/what kind of problems do you run into?
Elijah Robinson
If money is a concern, you should seriously consider a cheap build yourself. I was able to spend 60 dollars on 6 2' foot by 3' foot owens corning 703 naked fiberglass panels (in the EU, you may have another brand that is a monopoly), and have enough leftover to purchase the cheap, shitty light weight wood to make the frame, 12 or so dollars for mounting hardware for the wall, and then the next purchase was cheap burlap-like fabric to contain the fiberglass.
This ended up being an-under 200 dollar build that got me 6 large bass traps. Buying premade panels, you would get maybe one or two for that, and sitll require mounting hardware.
Grayson Kelly
gold baby 808 and the tape 808
Cooper Allen
Experiment with non-diatonic scales and chord progressions
Christian Brown
k so last time somebody said the air horn was awkward so i had none of that shit this time and more melody, feedback would be dope as usual my dear internet friends
You dont even know half of it. Im trying to get my 5/4 9 bar g minor fugue melody on point with a switch to c minor at the counter subject and honestly only half of it is sounding good. Not melody but my counterpoint is fucked too
Luke Phillips
pretty nice and cute
Austin Ramirez
bumping for this one
Xavier Young
Pretty cool progression, like the percussion at 0:30. Drop is pretty great, goes in hard. Play with reverbs on the synths early to give it a bit more of a mellow vibe, helps to automate them to give a sense of momentum into the drop.
Anthony Cooper
Experiment with timbre, dynamics, transients. You don't need to come up with a totally authentic melody. There's nothing really new under the sun. As long as it sounds good and it doesn't remind you of anything else it passes the quality control imo
Brandon Perez
This sounds like it was in a high humidity environment and corroded. That would be really bad news, and could be a total replacement.
Thomas Taylor
Yeah, my problem is im overly experimental because i dont want that studious sound if you know what i mean.
Adrian Richardson
I know what you mean but the best way to avoid that studious sound is to learn how it works, decipher it through theory, so you can recognize it more easily and move out of its way. But you probably already did that
Nicholas Fisher
Yeah, my problem is really "writers block" in a sense as well as learning music as a subject being one of the worst ideas ever
Zachary Robinson
Why?
Aaron Williams
Poorly paced and something i feel can be learned with ease oitside of a class. I feel music theory can be condensed with ease, however thats just me and others probs enjoyed it.
Hunter Richardson
how the FUCK do i into drums. are there like drum machine vsts or something?
Connor Butler
>are there like drum machine vsts or something? yes, but what part of drums are you struggling with?
Jacob Rodriguez
Drums beyond rock kits, like timpani etc
Chase Smith
literally everything. i dont even know where to start.
Joshua Stewart
Yeah there are heaps put there. If you run FL, there is a VST called FPC, that started out my learning on synthetic drums. Check out this indie-rock song I made, all the percussion is programmed using Addictive Drums 2. soundcloud.com/christopherterrence-audio/actually-good
Cooper Martinez
I want to make drums like this the ones in this song.
You don't but it's incredibly flexible. It has hundreds of drum styles and sounds and you can route it with great manipulation.
Liam Russell
how long have you bean making electronic music?
Wyatt Diaz
about 4 years
Luke Rivera
I should elaborate
I spent two years before that making pretty shitty music that's lost to time with lmms and various shit on an ipad
then I got into fl studio 4 years ago, made shitty music on that.
the next year I took a class on music production, which was fairly basic, we used mixcraft
took 4 years of music theory in high school, graduated last week
started lurking /prod/ and making decent shit last year
Eli Edwards
structure and sound design are decent. i just feel like the samples don't harmonize in any way. it feels extremely out of key. it also doesn't help that you have banjo kazooie brass.
but i actually think that after putting some more work in it, you could do something great with this
There are several problems with this. The clap is hollow and phasey sounding. The song obviously is bass dominant but it doesn't really make much use of my subwoofer other than the kick, giving the impression that it lacks power. The synth sounds are simple saw/square stuff and come off rather generic (though I don't mind the parts they play). And it sounds small in the sense that it could use more stereo widening/space/air.
Though it gets more interesting as it goes along, so your songwriting isn't bad.
clyp.it/catgnxpx thoughts on this? it has been sitting in my projects folder for a long time. just wanna finish it. i'll probably tweak the mix a bit so any feedback on that would be great.
>boring been done 10000 times before so has ur mum but that doesnt stop me or any of the other local vagrants
Austin Carter
thanks for all that feedback, I get what you're saying time to get some /real/ brass
thanks
Jackson Hernandez
clyp.it/xud1upv5 aka 'Uh' and Soulstice are great, fantastic even, but honestly user, the rest is near crap. Did these two start from sampling or something? Just the various level of quality you go to and from really interests me so I'm wondering what your approach is, or if you have changed anything over time.
Charles Howard
sloppy drums is real nice too actually.
Ayden Miller
what's been done before 10000 times before exactly? i know im not inventing a new genre here but is there something specific you're thinking about?
Charles Sanchez
thanks :)
Lincoln Wilson
>www filedropper com/lexlugerdrumkit I love it when people post sample packs I don't have! You're the real MVP.
In return, here's a pretty cool set of vinyl drums. www filedropper com/vinyldrums
Jason Young
not him but I agree
same shit all these trill beats chill beats artist do.
Compressed punchy drums that sidechain everything else and some guitar sample.
Do something interesting
Owen Rogers
>I spent two years before that making pretty shitty music that's lost to time with lmms and various shit on an ipad lmms is a fucking joke, why can't linux get its shit together with music production? I can't believe you still can't COPY AND PASTE FUCKING LOOPS in lmms.
The only time I've been able to make electronic music with linux is by programming the drums with hydrogen and then playing that and the synths live into ardour. No midi for synths I've ever tried works, all has to be live. Rosegarden crashes more often than drunk drivers.
Jason Torres
After seeing the other comments posted here I was expecting to hate this but it's alright man. Reminds of some early nineties triphop.
Jackson Barnes
or yknow, tycho ripoff number 5000000000000000 (not that tycho wasnt already a ripoff)
Oliver Torres
>tycho Never heard of him. Is he only famous in America (I'm not from there)? Mind you I don't listen to the radio anyway.
Jackson Wright
>tycho >radio >tycho >famous >tycho >america
lol, watch adult swim
Luis Johnson
but that's how you spell rc
Landon Thomas
>lol, watch adult swim Why would I do that. I'm a grown man in my thirties.
I like tycho (sorry if it's not Sup Forums-cool). i really wasnt trying to sound like him tho :S
Carter Long
Yeah, but adult swim isn't really the culture of the Sup Forums board.
DESU it was lazy bait, I watch shit like Rick And Morty.
Juan Cooper
there is no sounnd
adult swim plays all the Sup Forumscore
Noah Long
>there is no sounnd really? works for me
Julian Torres
Works here too. I like it. Relaxing.
Josiah Foster
wow you must be so grown up and matyoore
Alexander Edwards
nvm my bad
you have nice ideas but they quite honestly get ruined by reservation. Like I have heard this beat ten thousand times before, all the trill beat producers do this stuff, they have good ideas but then reduce them to maintain catchiness for whatever reason. Do some half time, go hard on modulation. I don't wanna hear the same shit for the 45005435983405th time.
Like yea it's not technically BAD, it has a strong melodic line and could be making you money, It's just personally boring to me.
Brandon Lewis
And an example of someone making catchy music that still is very fun and interesting is Perfume or Nakata more specifically. Level 3 and Triangle are both really fun records that plays with synthesis everywhere
Dominic Sanders
i like your honesty desu. i listen to a lot of stuff that you probably would find boring (teebs, mndsgn, samiyam, shigeto, that kinda shit). i know im often bad att developing my ideas to real "songs" so they end up just being "beats" (if you know what i mean). i'll work on it and check those artists out.
thanks senpai, i thought you were a dick at first but your feedback is actually pretty helpful
Brody Baker
I like Shigeto, MNDSGN was meh, idk the other two.
Your music isn't bad, again, if you wanna make those dope beetz go for it, you'll prob get fans and money.
I just like seeing artist do interesting things. One time this guy in here made a song like yours but he had this weird sitar break down in the song, see that interest me.
Ryan Gray
>near crap there's a reason why they aren't on soundcloud
well usually, I think of a musical idea, and try to transfer the idea to fl studio as best I can, sometimes it's good, usually it's bad, i end up never actually finishing them. I usually don't waste my time posting stuff like this. mannequins (clyp.it/g20fudnw) was that kinda deal. I came up with the little 2 bar loop in the kitchen, when I decided I was going to emulate the 90s as best as possible. it came out eh/10. It has a place in my heart though.
sometimes, I mess around with a certain sound and happen to gather the will to make something out of it. Good shit usually comes from in the moment stuff like that. like this (clyp.it/mb2eg2pd): I started with the sound that comes in about 40 seconds, the little vibrato synth thing, and just ran with it. at the time (1 year ago) it was the best shit I ever made. in retrospect, the bass sounds pretty trashy, but I'm not sure I have the project file nor the will to fix it.
or this: clyp.it/wks30lqh the little pad thing was a drum sample I had fucked with. I probably should have posted this with the ones before but I never actually fixed the somewhat bad sidechain compression
for the one I posted today it was a combination. I had an idea: the motive played by a mallet percussion sounding sample that came with fl and I said "ya know what'd be cool, if I made a tnght style trap song with this" while I was listening to the loop
what I usually do on good songs is start with sound design and work vertically, and then I try to go horizontal with it, and add other stuff as it comes to me. then at the end I try to glue it all together with various non-melodic sounds, theatrical stuff. usually just white noise sweeps.
on things I recognize as bad I don't finish, and they stay loops forever. sometimes things go past my better judgement though, because I have fun making them at least.
