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saltbearerYesterday, I posted this on Bluesky:
Saltbearer:
... but, y'know, in the form of a screenshot of text, because that many characters puts it at almost 1.5x the character limit! Whew!!!!! Remember to thank Reader Rabbit for inventing reading.
(do you like css baby's first speech bubble, I like it except for the formatting expectations I might be starting to set for myself)
I copied the post over to some places that weren't Bluesky, where a few people actually asked things that I gave short answers to! But not short enough to post directly on Bluesky! Not even short enough for its oddly-relatively-spacious alt text fields! I enjoy pointing at Bluesky and saying it's terrible and shouldn't exist.
If people read this and ask more questions to better develop the picture of a slacker stubbornly and inefficiently jamming sounds into a music project file, I'll do more of these posts.
Y'notice if you're on a main blog page that the read-mores here can be expanded by poking those tiny arrows? That's convenient.
duckbagtm:
re: minimally compressed, I stick a Compressor module on everything just for the peak visualizer (SunVox quirk), but looking at some of my project files at random, I'm seeing a bunch of kicks that just literally don't even come close to touching the compression thresholds, and a few with just bricked transients
I don't have a really consistent idea of How To Process A Drum (or anything? or I just don't talk about it enough to feel like I do) but I'll take (a simple wave with ADSR and perhaps white noise, or a drawn wave cycle in a Sampler for finer envelope control including pitch bend, or the Kicker module for a generic kick sound, or one of acheney/vekoN's drum modules, or a stock sample, or something from freesound or similar that I grabbed at some point for whatever reason) and then add distortion and filters and usually-narrow reverb until whatever qualities of the sound that have actively bothered me are no longer as bothersome
I think the closest thing I have to Secret Sauce that I've been doing lately is phase-modulating kick transients with like a short Kicker impulse, or a branch into a Compressor with the threshold at the bottom and a short attack... and I just saw people in Maj7 praising parallel compression (mixing a compressed signal with a dry one), so I'll probably be thinking about that for a while
re: usually-narrow reverb, I generally like things with at least a little bit of stereo smeared onto them, but it varies — sometimes very quiet and subtle and short and narrow, sometimes it feels good to smash full-width low-end reverb into a limiter
duckbagtm:
some pad texture starting points:
- superwaves, classic
- samples of frozen reverb
- SunVox's SpectraVoice module, which generates additive synth (FFT) textures that have some innate stereo movement
- granular synth cloud, often with one of the above and maybe with some of the below as a sample source
some effects I've applied:
- reverb, of course
- a flanger/vibrato that may or may not be branched off and may or may not be widened with haas delay — sometimes slow and subtle, sometimes fast and low-amplitude for a smeary detune
- automation of multiple resonance peaks
- gating/bipolar dc offset/bit reduction/sample rate reduction for sharpness, with EQ to emphasize crackles in whatever range(s) you want — a lot of things say to always cut instead of boost but shouldn't it not make a difference which way you do it? but it does make a difference and the answer is to always boost and sometimes a lot at narrow points
sometimes one pad isn't enough, sometimes pads are best layered and mixed, or assigned different zones in stereo space
[sometimes the answer is to cut instead of boost but you have to be aware as you're doing it that you're letting those people on /r/edmproduction whose posts you read a decade ago win]
timconceivable:
in the past, I used to think about (and sometimes actually write down, with a notes widget on my phone's home screen) things I Didn't Hear in music — things like "everything is completely mono until a climactic moment", "every melodic phrase ends on the same note", "a note is added to a phrase each time it repeats", "the kick is a once—ping-ponged sample", "EDM with main melodies and perc quiet and incidental sounds overpowering", "EDM with no bass and shrill/piercing/noisy highs", "EDM with perc and bass panned significantly to one side", "microsound dubstep", "7-bar 4/4 loop" etc. etc. etc.
and I'd often take one or more of those ideas with me going in, in part to be Weird For The Sake Of Being Weird, and then commit hard or to a sensible limit if something emergent called for deviation
I think I burnt out on doing that so directly, and now I just act on cool-enough idle musical thoughts — sometimes reasonably-well-formed ideas, sometimes just a drum pattern and/or particular synth texture which I might then feel inspired to build off of... I'd like to do more with lyrics, if I can manage to
sometimes I'll be directly inspired by existing music, and I often write down notes as I'm working on something (as names of empty patterns on the project timeline, out of convenience) that include the names of songs that are the closest existing references to whatever ideas I might have
vekoN:
re: sound design process: my process is that I stack a bunch of effects to tweak a timbre toward the Rich and Clean hyper-specific thing in my head and then fall painfully short of it, but hopefully what I manage to generate still sounds cool
sometimes that involves branching parallel signal processing chains, and/or feedback loops, and/or layering, and/or isolating changes/artifacts through filtering or parallel-inverse-polarity canceling or something
I worry about stripping away the richness of any particular sound more than I do muddiness, so I don't like to do a lot of cutting just to make things play nicely together, and when I do, I find myself wishing multiband or dynamic sidechain compression were a little simpler to do in SunVox, before maybe settling on just hooking a bandpass off a thing to a Sound2Ctl (converts signal amplitude to parameter value) to an equivalent peak filter (EQ band)’s gain, with high amp narrowly smashing away a range conflict
vekoN:
re: microtonality, I've been loving SunVox's recently-added-in-terms-of-version-history Free keyboard mode, which makes it easy to tap and (if necessary) drag (while step size = 0) to ± the exact tone you want to input — to reach out of 12TET for spicier/~creamier~ tones. I am A Dumb when it comes to formal music theory or precise mathematical formulas relating to scale construction, but A Feeling Creature when it comes to sharpening or flattening things and drooling over the magical and exciting Rare Intervals with the Forbidden Consonance that scratch deep itches inside me that send my spirit to times and places that never existed.
I don't feel so tempted to play around with n-EDO tunings, or seek out compositions within specific ones to make them feel familiar. I like how The Tuning System That The Vast Majority Of [Material Constituting My Experiences With My Favorite Artform] Was Composed In sounds, generally, and really enjoy That, But Sometimes A Little More. I've been granted the power to easily step outside The Box, so stepping into another box would be... annoying, probably? there's something to be said for working within constraints, but I think composing by ear/heart while untethered speaks louder.
Saltbearer:
I've felt vague impulses to Write Something about Doing Music because sometimes I like to Write Something and I Do Music and sometimes people are like "wow how do you do music like that" so I feel like I should do a mashup of Writing and Music but iunno what specifically to write about in relation to Doing Music so I think I need a prompt so is anyone actually curious about how I in particular approach some specific kind of music thing
... but, y'know, in the form of a screenshot of text, because that many characters puts it at almost 1.5x the character limit! Whew!!!!! Remember to thank Reader Rabbit for inventing reading.
(do you like css baby's first speech bubble, I like it except for the formatting expectations I might be starting to set for myself)
I copied the post over to some places that weren't Bluesky, where a few people actually asked things that I gave short answers to! But not short enough to post directly on Bluesky! Not even short enough for its oddly-relatively-spacious alt text fields! I enjoy pointing at Bluesky and saying it's terrible and shouldn't exist.
If people read this and ask more questions to better develop the picture of a slacker stubbornly and inefficiently jamming sounds into a music project file, I'll do more of these posts.
Y'notice if you're on a main blog page that the read-mores here can be expanded by poking those tiny arrows? That's convenient.
duckbagtm:
in your dance-like tracks, the drums sound pronounced and deep, yet natural and minimally compressed; what sort of processing do you apply to your drums? where do you find, or how do you generate your drum samples?
re: minimally compressed, I stick a Compressor module on everything just for the peak visualizer (SunVox quirk), but looking at some of my project files at random, I'm seeing a bunch of kicks that just literally don't even come close to touching the compression thresholds, and a few with just bricked transients
I don't have a really consistent idea of How To Process A Drum (or anything? or I just don't talk about it enough to feel like I do) but I'll take (a simple wave with ADSR and perhaps white noise, or a drawn wave cycle in a Sampler for finer envelope control including pitch bend, or the Kicker module for a generic kick sound, or one of acheney/vekoN's drum modules, or a stock sample, or something from freesound or similar that I grabbed at some point for whatever reason) and then add distortion and filters and usually-narrow reverb until whatever qualities of the sound that have actively bothered me are no longer as bothersome
I think the closest thing I have to Secret Sauce that I've been doing lately is phase-modulating kick transients with like a short Kicker impulse, or a branch into a Compressor with the threshold at the bottom and a short attack... and I just saw people in Maj7 praising parallel compression (mixing a compressed signal with a dry one), so I'll probably be thinking about that for a while
re: usually-narrow reverb, I generally like things with at least a little bit of stereo smeared onto them, but it varies — sometimes very quiet and subtle and short and narrow, sometimes it feels good to smash full-width low-end reverb into a limiter
duckbagtm:
in your more ambient works, we often hear complex, scratchy elongated pads with morphing qualities. what are the starting points for these textures? what sort of processing or synthesis do you use to achieve those results?
some pad texture starting points:
- superwaves, classic
- samples of frozen reverb
- SunVox's SpectraVoice module, which generates additive synth (FFT) textures that have some innate stereo movement
- granular synth cloud, often with one of the above and maybe with some of the below as a sample source
some effects I've applied:
- reverb, of course
- a flanger/vibrato that may or may not be branched off and may or may not be widened with haas delay — sometimes slow and subtle, sometimes fast and low-amplitude for a smeary detune
- automation of multiple resonance peaks
- gating/bipolar dc offset/bit reduction/sample rate reduction for sharpness, with EQ to emphasize crackles in whatever range(s) you want — a lot of things say to always cut instead of boost but shouldn't it not make a difference which way you do it? but it does make a difference and the answer is to always boost and sometimes a lot at narrow points
sometimes one pad isn't enough, sometimes pads are best layered and mixed, or assigned different zones in stereo space
[sometimes the answer is to cut instead of boost but you have to be aware as you're doing it that you're letting those people on /r/edmproduction whose posts you read a decade ago win]
timconceivable:
where do you get ideas for songs? do you have a plan before you start making a track or is it just improvisation and adding things as you go?
in the past, I used to think about (and sometimes actually write down, with a notes widget on my phone's home screen) things I Didn't Hear in music — things like "everything is completely mono until a climactic moment", "every melodic phrase ends on the same note", "a note is added to a phrase each time it repeats", "the kick is a once—ping-ponged sample", "EDM with main melodies and perc quiet and incidental sounds overpowering", "EDM with no bass and shrill/piercing/noisy highs", "EDM with perc and bass panned significantly to one side", "microsound dubstep", "7-bar 4/4 loop" etc. etc. etc.
and I'd often take one or more of those ideas with me going in, in part to be Weird For The Sake Of Being Weird, and then commit hard or to a sensible limit if something emergent called for deviation
I think I burnt out on doing that so directly, and now I just act on cool-enough idle musical thoughts — sometimes reasonably-well-formed ideas, sometimes just a drum pattern and/or particular synth texture which I might then feel inspired to build off of... I'd like to do more with lyrics, if I can manage to
sometimes I'll be directly inspired by existing music, and I often write down notes as I'm working on something (as names of empty patterns on the project timeline, out of convenience) that include the names of songs that are the closest existing references to whatever ideas I might have
vekoN:
hmm... you could write about your sound design process...
re: sound design process: my process is that I stack a bunch of effects to tweak a timbre toward the Rich and Clean hyper-specific thing in my head and then fall painfully short of it, but hopefully what I manage to generate still sounds cool
sometimes that involves branching parallel signal processing chains, and/or feedback loops, and/or layering, and/or isolating changes/artifacts through filtering or parallel-inverse-polarity canceling or something
I worry about stripping away the richness of any particular sound more than I do muddiness, so I don't like to do a lot of cutting just to make things play nicely together, and when I do, I find myself wishing multiband or dynamic sidechain compression were a little simpler to do in SunVox, before maybe settling on just hooking a bandpass off a thing to a Sound2Ctl (converts signal amplitude to parameter value) to an equivalent peak filter (EQ band)’s gain, with high amp narrowly smashing away a range conflict
vekoN:
... or writing microtonal melodies...
re: microtonality, I've been loving SunVox's recently-added-in-terms-of-version-history Free keyboard mode, which makes it easy to tap and (if necessary) drag (while step size = 0) to ± the exact tone you want to input — to reach out of 12TET for spicier/~creamier~ tones. I am A Dumb when it comes to formal music theory or precise mathematical formulas relating to scale construction, but A Feeling Creature when it comes to sharpening or flattening things and drooling over the magical and exciting Rare Intervals with the Forbidden Consonance that scratch deep itches inside me that send my spirit to times and places that never existed.
I don't feel so tempted to play around with n-EDO tunings, or seek out compositions within specific ones to make them feel familiar. I like how The Tuning System That The Vast Majority Of [Material Constituting My Experiences With My Favorite Artform] Was Composed In sounds, generally, and really enjoy That, But Sometimes A Little More. I've been granted the power to easily step outside The Box, so stepping into another box would be... annoying, probably? there's something to be said for working within constraints, but I think composing by ear/heart while untethered speaks louder.
