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.
midtempo arrangement practice
probably at least 50-100 EQ/gain automations, automating gain and/or frequency of ableton EQ8 nodes... bout 60% of the time working on this was doing EQ automations. automations over 4/8 bars, or sometimes for fills etc it would be smaller segments of time. i dont think theres any automation happening during the drop, except the last 4 beats of the drop, just everything playing over the top of each other. but the EQ automations are everywhere else in the track. been listening on repeat so the melodies are all probably trash. i think its kind of melodically weak but i like the EQ automations
are EQ automation and volume leveling even more important than the sounds you use? probably... a track with shitty presets and decent EQ automation would probably sound better than a track with good presets and no EQ automation, at least for this type of music..? i might rely on EQ automation too much though. but i suck at arranging so if it works i can learn other parts of arrangement doing it
attempted a 2 minute arrangement following haterade (aka 'soundsgoodrecs' on youtube) arrangement advice of blocking out a track in advance and then moving patterns in roughly where you think they should go and listening to it and tweaking it. kind of like working on a 2 minute loop instead of working on a track...
i was listening to the david guetta bebe rexha song 'blue' the other day so i had blocked out that it would start immediately with a 'drop' (weak version of drop) then go straight into a buildup. this ended up not happening, but blocking everything out over 2 minutes (just putting tags where i thought intro/buildup/drops would start) really helped.
and i wanted to make something in phrygian dominant scale. phrygian dominant scale was recommended to me about a year ago by CHAT GPT. it was a scale id tried before. but after id been telling chat gpt the scales i did like, it recommended phrygian dominant. and i had tried it before, but i tried it again and ive really enjoyed it ever since. dont ever ask chat gpt for music theory things though, it is really very weak on anything to do with music theory in general... it mixes up basic musical key notation very easily, a weird blindspot it seems to have about musical theory in general(???) not that i know very much music theory myself, but it will mix up things a 5 year old wouldnt mix up, weird errors.
anyway i really enjoyed attempting to make an arrangement in phrygian dominant, last time i was arranging i had been getting bored of minor scale so maybe ill try work in it for a while. although i can never really predict what ill enjoy working on.
and this was a sort of 'drop' section. the rest of the arrangement basically fell apart at some point but it was pretty good practice
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.
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.
joined 925 days ago
Post a comment
something ive noticed about the bass presets (reeses, heavily distorted basses, etc.), a lot of the ones i like jamming in is a lot of them follow this sound design structure:
2 oscillators. both some type of saw wave. one of them might have a single voice, the other might have ~10 voices(slightly detuned). and they're an octave apart. so when you play E note on keyboard, you get two octaves of E both being played with some type of saw wave/saw-wave-detune stack, then often lowpass or distortion or both, depending on if its a more subdued reese or a more distorted bass.
the advantage of this 2 octave stack for a bass instrument is you can go very very low... and because you have 2 octaves of saws, the higher saw wave will become the strong 'bass' note while the lower octave of saws is becoming muddy. just makes the instrument really versatile for jamming on keyboard, gives you a broader range of notes you can play and itll still sound good.
e.g., when im using Guitar Rig, i have a serum preset i use which is a square wave, then an octave above it is ~10 slightly-detuned saw waves. then i run that into guitar rig presets, and jam on keyboard, guitar rig distorts the shit out of it.
for jamming on keyboard, it just works. if you dont use keyboard and only use computer, i guess you're used to stacking octaves like this. if you work only on computer with no keyboard, you probably like to have each layer separate so you can effect them differently. but purely for jamming its nice to have these presets that are really 2 octaves playing at once. for monophonic bassline instruments
i think you want at least one of the two saw wave oscillators to have ~10 slightly-detuned voices. either the high or the low one, either sounds good. but maybe not both or the distortion will become too noisy. if i ever get into sound design im definitely gonna be looking into this. but i havent done much sound design yet.... so its kind of just an idea at the moment
for these type of bass instruments i typically like having a reverb with a really long decay, but at very low dry/wet. 15% dry/wet Valhalla Shimmer. just sounds boring if its completely dry... want to give it a tiny bit of an atmosphere so when you release a note it has that bit of sparkle... BUT NEVER PUT REVERB ON BASS or something....... i dunno
i gotta say this is mostly for super distorted BASS music, mostly. but also just for everyday Reese Bass sound too
a type of bass preset i DONT like... i think its like the Original reese bass sound or something, where you play a low note and you can hear the oscillator beating against itself at a certain speed, and then when you play a higher note it beats faster, and then you play even higher notes and it beats faster again. i just find this sound a nightmare for jamming, i dunno how anyone uses it. so when i say 'reese' bass i just mean lowpassed detuned stack of saw waves
really sound design is probably a waste of time because the sound of a stack of 10 slightly detuned saw waves always sounds better than everything. maybe with distortion, maybe lowpass, probably some amount of reverb
nah i cant jam with those sounds that have a fast lfo at high pitch and slow lfo at low pitch. maybe i can deal with it in a lead, if its subtle. but for a bass instrument nah. doesnt sound very musical to me to have that random lfo in the sound all the time. i guess its in a few tracks i like. and theres no way to control the LFO either, its baked into the sound isnt it... eh ill stick to the detuned saw wave type presets
another idea ive had is to take all the reese bass presets i like (mostly Echo Sound Works...) and try and convert them into 808s. just putting a decay on the volume, basically. since i always get frustrated trying to use wavfile 808s that abruptly end. can a reese become an 808 with a bit of tweaking? maybe.... im pretty noob at sound design so maybe not. but its an idea
808s might be more like a single voice being pitched down (and a lot less harmonics than a saw)... whereas Reeses are more like... 10 saw waves stacked on top of each other... not being pitched down. eh i dunno... my main goal with 'learning sound design' is just gonna be tweaking the presets i already like. then after that i could maybe make strange versions of the presets that combine one preset with another, then id have learnt sound design and could do my own thing.... im not in a rush to learn sound design, fairly happy with the sounds at the moment
one thing worth mentioning if you wanna make music where u hammer the rootnote for the bassline... which is most of the music ive been making lately. i only want rootnote to be one of these: D, D#, E, F, F#. so for natural minor i only work in 5 out of the 12 possible keys. D minor, D# minor, E minor, F minor, F# minor.
anything lower than D and the rootnote reese bass starts to break apart and sound too muddy and inconsistent as a note, and anything higher than F# and the root bassnote sounds too high-pitched.
i was working in C# minor and G minor but i got a bit sick of these as C# was often too low and G often too high.
i dont feel super limited only working in 5 keys. it feels like strange advice to give, to ignore 7 out of 12 keys. like ignoring half of all possible music. but eh, i want the rootnote to hit hard
does this mean i never play a bassline note lower than D? not at all, can go as low as you want for the bassline in parts of it, but i want the rootnote to hit hard, the other notes in the bassline can sound muddier in places though, or high pitched, whatever. its just an easy way to always have a hard hitting root
i dunno, get your advice from multiple sources. it feels very strange to say "dont make music in half the keys". feels sacrilegious
i used to play piano only in F# minor... for ages... i just found it the most comfortable key to play in... and i never felt that limited by it. and whatever i learned in F# minor would carry over into other keys. at least i thought so
probably dont ALWAYS never make music in 7 out of 12 keys... try them out occasionally at least...
ill get back to arranging and just use the same 3 presets i always use lol
need to get back to ARRANGING and CLICKING things into ableton
but i definitely spend too much time on midi patterns. is what i enjoy
and i feel like a lot of what people call "sound design" is them reinventing the wheel... eh idk... i focus on midi patterns mostly. i can figure out automation when i need to
electronic music is a broad field and everyone is a jack of all trades and a master of none. id like to get further out of the jack of all trades part at some point
other people can get the same thing using "inspiration" or actually making tracks but i dont really like making tracks and im not very inspired. doomed to fail
like having: certain instruments for intro (pads), certain instruments for buildup (more intense), then certain instruments for drop (more intense again). but im probably wasting a lot of time playing instruments ill never use
the way i think about the music i make is that caus im not gonna be using a vocal. and in most electronic tracks the vocal can be the main thing that carries the track between sections. since im not using that i need to be a lot better at choosing instruments for the different sections. as well as all the boring technical things like automation and FX. so im focusing on instruments at the moment
id find music pretty boring if i knew how it was made
i dont really know much about the genre or how to make it. i just listen to it. i dont pay attention to how its made really
its all about kick patterns as well. the snare is pretty consistent. and then can have weird hihat patterns or weird 2ndSnare patterns
would wave hardwave work without vocals. ive never thought about it
all my tracks are about a minute long. not enough time to ride the vibe like hardwave does anyway
i dont think im a good enough producer to achieve that type of subtlety. and i dont think its what im interested in either
hardwave is very atmospheric. maybe kind of like ambient music in some way
which i think is more like edm. whatever edm is
i dont really think about what i make in a genre sense. i just do the same things i always do
maybe hardwave needs vocals. ive never thought about it
but it feels separate to what ive tried to make. my stuff is more generic edm type shit stylistically
i like the sounds and rhythms and atmospheres they create though. really nice
but im barely a producer atm
i like sort of intensity whereas the hardwave often rides a vibe in a more subtle way which i dont really do
i feel like whatever garbage i make is more like edm/trap/dubstep in most ways