i wanted to record some of the new process ive been using to practice electronic music.
mainly focused on mono sounds being played on keyboard over a drumbeat.
i love brass stabs. i have about 40 good serum1 presets i use (echo sound works: coda, grey, roses, sphere). every time the brass stab sample changes, its me hitting spacebar on QWERTY keyboard to generate a new sound for me to play on the midi keyboard.
in my opinion, this 10 minutes of audio sounds nothing like how i would usually play. i found, today, trying to play for the audio recording was a bit too distracting. i usually play more exploratively. i think i changed instrument about 2 or 3 times faster than i usually would have.
i like mono brass stab jamming because you can really hammer repeated notes, for an entire 4 bars even lol. not many sounds you can do that with. but i do this with a lot of different sounds. mallet-like sounds its nice to play 2 notes at once. reeses are boring to jam with. guitars are great for mono-jamming. keyboard sounds you could do mono-jamming or polyphonic jamming. i mainly come from jamming on piano (polyphonic) so monophonic jamming is something new enough to me. my opinion is monophonic jamming is really something especially worthwhile if youre into making electronic music.
monophonic flute jam
keyboard is called Korg micro key, 3 octaves of notes
feel like a lot of these flute presets could use some additional work to make them my own. dunno. flute is a pretty weird instrument. sort of like a vocal instrument and a sine wave. talking about music is so fucking boring
i think a lot of these are Echo Sound Works. lets see. yeah, esw coda, esw sphere. also kshmr symphony 2. serum 1 presets
recorded a 10 minute monophonic jam of keyboard presets over a drumbeat.
is it weird to play keyboard monophonically? i think it can be good exercise. i mainly do it to try and sort of just be able to tell the difference between the 200 keyboard presets i have in "keys 1" serum2 tag.
i think about "stacking ammo" like eminem was always writing lines and hed never use them. i like always playing monophonic lines and then maybe i learn how all the presets sound. stacking ammo. eh i dunno. i will probably get sick of it eventually. im still pretty new to playing monophonic keyboard.
the secret to making music is clicking the little bubbles into ableton
nah i like this one. pretty shit but itss always nice to get something made, this streak club website helps me to do it
i think reese bass is probably my new favorite instrument of all time
david guetta says music is a lot about tension and release. im pretty sure i agree with him. id like to work more on the tension part and how to make it longer and longer
im putting a list of my 80 favorite basslines in the comments. i like to have them in a randomizer, then when im starting writing ill often start with bassline. i dont really start with basslines anymore but its still a good randomizer to have when youre bored or need a seed for an idea. i more just start with rootnote of the minorkey at the moment. todays upload the bassline is just the rootnote the whole time
anyway the upload today was alright. i wanna get back to making buildup-drops. caus theres so many layers and theyre fun to make, feel like i could learn a lot. i used to like making short loops more, but now i find making loops fairly dull. i like 1 minute arrangements at the moment. specifically buildup to drop segments are always full of different layers and patterns switching, and you can use different presets for different things.
one thing ive enjoyed lately is taking my favorite pad presets and turning them into 8bar or 16bar pitch risers in serum, then resaving them as a preset tagged with riser in serum 2's new tagging system. eventually ill have some good riser options.
just a lil loop, i wanted to make some brass trap. i listen to an amount of brass trap but every time i go to make it i have no idea what im doing. much more comfortable with these 3 instruments: piano, reese, hardwave lead. so i went to make brass trap and got this loop instead. nothing like brass trap but ok. serum 2 has a few reallllllly nice piano sample-based banks i like. serum 2 is fucking awesome. free download if you bought serum 1
listened to this too many times, added more details than usual. found it challenging making an intro and buildup for the drop, since the drop was just kind of piano and glockenspiel type instruments.
Drop Layers:
bass layers: reese, reverbed brass stab, slaphouse pluckbass (same midi for all 3)
melody layers: piano reverbed a bit, glockenspiel-type preset that already had reverb, some other reverby sustained lead preset (same midi for all 3 layers)
other: cymbal crash at start of each 8 bar section, some other reverbed+phased crash that does a repetitive 1/4note pattern at -32db (can barely hear it but it sort of maybe adds something), kick, no snare for some reason, string melody in second half of drop (returns from the intro), piano chords playing bassnote+octave above+fifth above
i like this one. i never have really tried to make short things in arrangement. it was a lot of fun though. a lot of eq automation, presets that already had a lot of distortion, volume automation and leveling.
Back making electronic music. Haven't made any arrangements in a while. I thought the first thing back might be cool, sometimes happens but nah this is just okay.
I like the presets and the combination of presets - I didn't make the presets though, so idk if its weird to be happy about. Another thing I liked was not all the melody notes are on gridlines, possibly caus ive been noodling on midi keyboard with a lot of mono presets lately.
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things id like to expand upon in this randomizer system for midi-keyboard jamming in future:
i like to stick to relatively simple kick-snare patterns. its easy to add too many kicks. i like to stick to more basic kick patterns. and each kick-snare pattern only works well in a range of 20-100bpm variance, ive found, depending on the pattern. might be nice to have the randomizer choose a new kick-snare pattern every 5 or 10 presses of spacebar, with it then being locked to the appropriate bpm where the kicksnare pattern sounds good.
could also have a randomizer for hihat patterns that sound good with it, instead of the hihat pattern i use at the moment (just repeated 1/16th or 1/8th notes).
should be fairly easy to implement this with autohotkey macros and ableton, maybe slightly more complex than the macros i already have at the moment, maybe would want to use ableton's "session view" mode instead of the "arrangement view" mode i use at the moment.
i like Echo Sound Works caus they have done such great work on sound design with sounds that sound awesome out the box in a great format - serum 1 presets. which you can easily convert to serum 2 presets (with a script), and then if u ever want to do your own sound design, you have the best LFO in the game with Serum 2, and pretty decent FX, really great filters, etc. to edit new presets
but i do this for lots of different instrument tags i have in serum2. brass stabs, flutes, keyboards, piano-like, guitar-pluckish, bass, distorted lead. whatever. i probably have about 50 main categories i like in total and just tier them so have brass stabs 1, brass stabs 2, brass stabs 3. mostly just put all the good shit in the tier 1 and mostly play that, for each instrument class.
also sometimes u have to sort of create names for sound categories. i have a category called bass(wave)1. what does it mean? i dunno, but all the sounds in it sound pretty similar, so it works for me. as in its a bass sound but it sounds a bit like a wave of noise. similar to a bass stab but different. and then i have a different category called basspluck1, thats basically all slaphouse/brazilianbass presets.
one category ive just realised i have is "pad stab 1". what the fuck does that mean. that category is gonna get merged with something else or renamed lol
i have a category called "poly softer attack 1". it used to be polyphonic only, now it has both mono and polyphonic instruments. and its for things that sound synthetic like a synth sound, but arent quite delicate enough to be a pad. i dunno, it means something to me. thats the beauty of tagging systems like in Serum 2, can group things with some name and it just has to mean something to you
i think its important to group sounds together that sound similar to you, and give them some name. if you use a lot of presets, such as using a lot of Echo Sound Works Presets. or a lot of omnisphere presets, etc.
the way i have it set up. i press spacebar on QWERTY keyboard. and it chooses a new serum preset from the 40 brass stabs i like. and then every ~5 times i press spacebar, it also changes the key of what im playing, and also changes the bpm to another bpm that works for the same drumbeat. this is all AutoHotKey macros spamming shit into the ableton window rapidly. ableton and serum can keep up with macros being spammed into it. occasionally you need to do a "sleep, 50" (50ms sleep) into your autohotkey script. pretty standard for scripting macros