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.

Take your dogs there.