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.
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.
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ive added something important to the midi-keyboard-jamming-over-drumbeat script. i kind of think the script would suck without it now. its a way to get new scales from natural minor scale by just cutting notes out of the scale (except the rootnote).
main reason for including this is because jamming on keyboard i end up playing things the same way, no matter how much i try not to. resolve tensions the same way etc, whether its monophonic or polyphonic presets.
so if you cut one note out of natural minor scale, and make physically pressing that note do nothing in ableton's software (ableton midi-device rack setup ill talk about in a second). then you cant resolve tensions by playing that note the ways you were doing. and as long as you dont cut out the rootnote of the minor scale, you have 6 "scales" that sound pretty good, pretty similar to playing in natural minor anyway. and you're going to be playing similar note transitions as youd be playing in natural minor.
so for A minor scale: A B C D E F G. you get 6 new 6note scales:
they all sound pretty good to me. just to jam over for 30 seconds anyway. to learn new muscle memory or new ways to evolve the melody/chords you play without using the same sort of notes all the time.
next ill probably add all the 5note scales that include the rootnote of minor scale. if youve ever done permutations and combinations in maths, its 6 possible options (because root has to be in all scales) and 4 being chosen, order doesnt matter (combination). which is another 15 scales total.
i think it is important to always include the rootnote in the scale. but this might just be preference. it seems kind of weird to have a scale without a rootnote. but you could even try omitting rootnote and play it as if it has the root that you cant play?? i dunno, im not doing it this way, im always including rootnote.
anyway the way to set this up with the autohotkey randomizer ive talked about for ableton: you get an ableton 'Scale' midi device on the track you want to jam on with an instrument. you group it into a midi-device-rack (once the Scale device is on the track you want, just rightclick the title of the Scale device and and click 'group'. and for the Scale device, you want it to only allow the root of the scale through. so it only has one little square lit-up in its graphic thingo. then you want to duplicate the Scale device so you have a total of 7 Scale device all in the midi-group on top of each other. and each one will do one of the 7 notes in the scale. then you want to map 7 different macro knobs to MUTE/UNMUTE each scale device (mute/unmute is a little yellow box next to each of the 7 Scale devices in the RACK list of all 7 rack chains). then you spam "0" or "127" into each of the macro knobs with autohotkey to turn that note on or off across the whole keyboard. and you can have autohotkey generate random scales (that always include the root note, and e.g. always have exactly 6 notes. or 5 notes, if you like.). and then have autohotkey rapidly clicking and typing 0 or 127 into each of the 7 macro knobs to make it so your midi keyboard will only play in the scale you wanna practice on.
the reasoning for having ableton block the physical notepresses: i think you pretty much need to have software physically making it impossible to play e.g. the 'B' note if you want to play A C D E F G scale. because unless you press the note and it makes no noise at all, its gonna be impossible for you to want to learn the scale, you'll always be saying "fuck it the B note sounds good, im not playing some shit scale without it". so its pretty much necessary to kill it in the software in my opinion. and Ableton 'Scale' midi devices make it very easy to kill one note across all octaves. and if you know how to use Scale devices in a rack with macro knobs then its all pretty easy to set up.
setting up the rest of the "jamming midikeyboard over drumbeat using autohotkey to spam into Ableton" takes some time too, though. its part of a bigger script. i cant be fucked cleaning up the messy script and sharing it. but i thought the general ideas are easy enough to convey in text box. learn basic scripting, its helpful. autohotkey is nice a fun for getting your computer to interact with different program interfaces such as Ableton, make your own randomizers for jamming midi keyboard over drumbeats with random presets or whatever.
i usually like to keep it simple, i press spacebar and autohotkey randomizes a bunch of shit in the Ableton jamming template i have, then i keep jamming on midi keyboard. and then i often tweak parameters in the autohotkey script to change how randomizers behave (e.g., having it only choose 6-note scales, or only choose 5-note scales). or i use serum2 tags to only be playing e.g. 'keyboard' presets for a little while, or only playing e.g. 'lead' presets for a little while.
id recommend a 3 or 4 octave keyboard for 'jamming'. 2 octaves is too small, 3 is good, 4 is great. 5 is too large but i guess would be fine. im pretty used to a 3octave keyboard with smaller non-weighted keys "korg microkey 37". i really like it, cant complain. id just say anything less than 3 octaves is too small i reckon. if you have smaller hands, smaller keys can be good. if you have average-sized hands, any sized key probably works, if you have large hands, smaller keys wont work. i dont personally care about velocity so i dont care about weighted/non-weighted. non-weighted might be more ideal if you want to avoid fatigue? dunno really.
its probably learning a trillion data points about me but its got some funny jokes sometimes
i like chat gpt its kind of funny
but i havent used the LLMs for programming for about a year so i dont know if anythings changed. i just used chat gpt anyway. there might be ones better for programming, no idea
just dont ask it anything too complicated or u get increasingly lower chances of getting useful info. sometimes though i think it has no chance of solving some weird problem i want it to solve and it can do it. other times im asking it questions for 2 hours and its been making shit up a bit much
chat gpt occasionally forgets the syntax of autohotkey. and uses some other programming language syntax. its just something infuriating u get used to. caus it always sounds so confident. i dunno if they can ever design it out of the system but maybe they can make it happen less, especially for more basic questions. i dont keep up with the LLM tech and what its getting better/worse at
but that was a year or two ago, idk if theyre substantially better at programming. or if theres certain models for certain programming languages, etc.
i used chat gpt to get my drum-sample-memorizing script up and running. i dunno how long it would have taken me otherwise. i might have given up on certain elements. well i dunno i just probably wouldnt have done the TTS, i dunno bruh
if i didnt find the sound designers i have found i guess id be using a lot more omnisphere, caus i quite like omnisphere presets. but i prefer working in serum2 format now if i can
im not sure id recommend looking for sound designers. hard to find good ones
it also recommended me shinju and i really like quite a few of his sounds. a lot of them might need tweaking, or only work in a couple octave range, but some nice sounds ive heard so far
i found the 3 serum preset packs: plugmon Analog Anthem, vintage soundset Analog Titans, drey andersson Mellotape by continually probing chatgpt for recommending sound designers. it insists on recommending whatever common recommendations are online but if you keep saying nah i want a certain type of sound i found those 3. liking those 3 packs at the moment
i mainly like making intro-buildup-drop and then starting a new idea. just feels like a natural way to make more music. but most tracks i listen to dont follow this structure. most tracks i listen to have at least 2 drops, or 3. i just find it boring to make those type of tracks
i dont really care about production techniques. i more just care about leveling and EQing. knowing how to tweak the parameters of a reverb plugin. i dont really care about fancy shit at the moment
have i watched any other production tutorials. david guetta had some thing on how you can sidechain the reverb of a lead to the dry sound of the lead. i guess i tried it and it works. i dunno if i need to do it though. just ducks the reverb when the lead hits... useful i guess??? i dunno im not a mix engineer
i spose with juelz the fact that he doesnt use synthesizers probably works in his favor for getting him into arrangement earlier. and not wasting time in synthland
i dont really watch production tutorials though. do i really need to sidechain
the main thing i noticed about the juelz track breakdown i saw him do... hes mastered ableton at least these 5 ableton stock plugins: reverb, eq8, overdrive, saturator, delay, multiband compressor. and in what order to combine them.
ive also loved using extremely high drive values on the stock ableton saturator (20db). but he does that, and then he'll have 2 eq8 after it to meticulously shape the sound even more. caus apparently distorting that much fucks up the eq distribution of the sound. and he'll do a reverb, then an overdrive... i also like doing that. but hes just dialed it in as a skill. i was surprised he doesnt even use synths. its all sample-based for him and then shapes it with the stock ableton plugins. i reckon it works well
i do a lot of playing serum presets on midi keyboard, i also try and sort serum presets into serum2 tags based on vibes... some sounds might sound good in only an octave or two.... i dunno
trying to think of any other production or music advice i have.
with the drum-sample-memorizing, i really am trying to base it off 'vibes' at the moment, and am sorting a lot of probably-good samples into folders i wont memorise, just caus i gotta follow the vibes
i do like a couple of the little tracks ive uploaded to this site, shout out streak club website
one day i will learn what a compressor does
i like automating volume of individual elements, i like to eq individual elements, i like to automate eq parameters of individual elements, does it make me a mastering engineer if i bake it into the process of making the track? probably not
id rather make a shit track that isnt mixed and mastered than a good track that is mixed and mastered. i dont think im a good person to get production advice from. i like to mix as i go, and then why do i need to master???
or the dubba jonny one