Submissions from 2019-06-03 to 2019-06-10 (10 total)

Take your dogs there.

Fancied doing something errie with just the Neutron. (And external effects)

Oops late submit.

This month (and the next) I'll be focusing on chiptunes and lsdj.

Here is a simple chiptune track I made based on a song name recommendation. I didn't get to do any arrangement glueing so if it's choppy I understand!

Pop song new wave

this week i made a silly quick vaguely house-ish experimental electronic track early in the week, in case i didn't have time to do anything later. as it turned out, that was smart. here it is

Another quick hip hop loop that I bashed out in the only spare hour I had this weekend. I quite like the Blofeld pluck sound. Needs some drum variations, but that will have to wait.

I think I'm done with this track for now - I started it a few weeks ago and even though "Weekly Music" is about creating a new piece of music each week, I thought that my weakness was not in actually creating music but in actually sitting on a piece of music long enough to make it significantly better over time, so I've spent the past month or so with an emphasis on improving a track each week rather than making a brand new one.

For this track I focused a lot on mixing and a little on mastering, but mostly in mixing and especially in getting things both balanced, and loud.

Here are some lessons learned so far:

  • Use reference tracks. Use more than normal. I started dragging in reference tracks into my song and I realized tons and tons of problems with my mix as a result, like:
  • I always always always made my melodies too quiet. Like way way way too quiet.
  • My mixes were quiet overall, and often I wasn't compressing things enough. While I'm still trying to figure out how to compress elegantly and gracefully still, overall it seemed that I needed to apply really extreme compression to each track with much higher gains than I was used to. I also needed to apply limiters to get the loudness I wanted.
  • What seem to be ridiculous numbers maybe actually aren't. Limiters in every track. 30:1 ratios on my compressors. Gains of +10dB. These feel like ridiculous numbers to me but in reality they didn't actually affect the mix that much and they made everything much more even. Maybe as I learn more I won't need to paint with such a heavy brush but so far, it seems to be doing more good than harm.
  • More automation, side chain/ducking, and auto filtering to balance other tracks. As I layered and layered, I needed to do all of the above, especially to compensate for really layered choruses vs. subdued verses and intros.

I could still probably compress my kicks more (they are peaky) and I can probably continue to improve overall sound design but I'll do that for another project.

Very busy week with travel, but here's a rhythm-driven track that I managed to put together. Three drum racks, an Impulse device (hand claps), two Electric instruments for keys, bass (direct), and Res-o-Glas guitar (direct). Standard signal chains; more notes soon.

Title from a use of this week's element, rhenium.

Chopped something up from today's jam.