Harmony
-
Posts
1,081 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Articles
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Harmony
-
-
I use a lot of SONAR’s default Sonitus plugins, but here are my favorite other free mixing/mastering plugins:
Dominion (saturator/harmonic exciter). I primarily use it for the high frequency exciter. It can add brightness and clarity to your mix without the harshness of just amplifying the high end with EQ alone. The saturation controls also add some subtle warmth. This one is great for individual tracks as well as the master bus. X-cita is pretty good too, but it didn’t play well with SONAR; I kept getting crashes so I kicked it to the curb.
W1 Limiter (limiter): Great simple brick-wall limiter to get mixes that should be punchy, punchy. Supposedly a clone of the popular yet expensive Waves L1 limiter.
Blue Cat FreqAnalyst (spectrum analyzer): nice spectrum analyzer that gives a lot more detail than the default plugin in SONAR. Very useful for trying to weed out troublesome frequencies, or even to attempting to match your frequency spectrum to your favorite zircon or DJP track
T-Sledge (multiband compressor): I don’t use this much because I have better non-free ones, but it does get the job done. Put it on your master bus, select one of the mastering presets and most likely your mix will sound better balanced than it did before, even before you start to tweak.
On vocal tracks or a vocal master bus I’ve recently become a fan of Spitfish which is a de-esser. Works much better than MDA de-ess imo and is easier to get right than simply using a multiband compressor to kill those annoying SSSSSS’s.
Just make as much music as you can and don't stagnate. Try out new techniques and new software all of the time. Try to emulate a sound you like...that has helped me a lot. Read a guide on mastering and try some of the stuff out. I don't think there's a secret. Practice makes perfect.I want to hear what you, personally, did with your time to figure things out. -
and I'll second how really awesome it isIt took me FOREVER.
-
Wow, I see that little thesis project has really taken flight. It's got the specs and the look (not to mention the price) to be a real contender now. And I wonder what exactly this is supposed to mean:Read on and look at Studio One, which is what this should've been."Most intuitive MIDI-mapping system available"
Do they believe their PRV is awesome, or are they talking about assigning midi channels or something along those lines?
-
Donated. This place and its people have been so great to me for the past 5 years. Thanks OCR
-
That's pretty cool for a thesis project. However, in terms of usability...
2 VST insert slots per channel
...what am I supposed to do with that!? Gate -> Compressor -> ohnoes!
Same here. But I have seen the terms used in this way outside of OCR.On a related note, the way people use the term DAW around here was always a misnomer to me -
Aw man, that was my game back in the day! In the first level where he flips the coin across the room into the jukebox and Smooth Criminal comes on...ahhh, memories. Definitely one of my favorites on Genesis, but I'm an MJ fanboy , what can I say? That's why any Michael Jackson related music gets a thumbs up from me, especially if you use sfx from Moonwalker. Nice work Txai
-
Bah! Thou shalt not speak against my favorite piano plugin.To be honest, I've never really been a fan of this, it has weird key release noises which, while realistic are really annoying.To disable key damper noises:
1) From the midi mixer page, click the green edit button. This should take you to a page with 3 horizontal yellow bars. The lower left one represents the damper release sample trigger.
2) By default the sample is set to play when you release a key (as in a real piano). That's what the "RelTrig" stands for. Click on "RelTrig" and change it to some midi controller that you don't plan on using (say, (80) Gen. Purpose).
3) Now the horizontal bar should have a numerical value (between 0 and 127) displayed somewhere along it. Click the number and drag it left to zero.
To disable pedal damper noises:
1) By default the pedal samples are mapped to the D7 and D#7 keys and are triggered at random. Towards the bottom of the edit screen, set the "kbd select" mode to "individual regions"
2) Click on the tiny white (or yellow) rectangle just above the D7 key on the keyboard. If it wasn't yellow already, it should turn yellow to indicate you've selected it.
3) There are a number of ways to eliminate the sound, but the easiest is probably just to turn the volume down. With the D7 key selected, lower the volume knob towards the upper left of the screen to -inf. Repeat for the D#7 key.
Voila! No damper noises.
Hmm, that sucks. Works for me in sp3, but I installed it when I had sp2. Guess the programmers got lazy when writing the install program compatibility checks :/"You must have windows xp service pack 2 or better to install this" and I have service pack 3 -
wow, that's sweet man. Network primetime!
-
Congrats man!
-
...and it made me smile
Very fun and even though it's got your stock dance groove as an anchor, there's a good amount of ear candy to keep it interesting. I like how the source is used, and although I'd like to hear more of it, I think it's cool that it sort of teases in and out of the background. Nice work so far.
-
Frank Wen's site used to be www.fluidfonts.com, but it doesn't appear to be active anymore.
-
Vocals? Guitar? Can't help but mention this:
-
-
Not true at all man! If you're looking for cheap, software is the only way to go. Check out zircon's article on the best free software, and the links in my sig. Without spending any money, that'll get you started with tons of excellent effects and synths.the problem is that software ways usually mean saying bye-bye to big amounts of cash. -
If stepping back from OCR in any way gave him the time and focus to put out the awesome stuff I've heard from him lately, then I can't help but be glad he left. Stay away Navid and continue to spit that hot fire!
-
Voted
whoever did the yeti from ski freakI love you.
Seconded
-
I agree, but I didn't have the heart to recommend using that beautiful brand spanking new bell-and-whistles Yamaha as a midi controller
-
With my super cheap Casio, I turn it's volume setting as high as it will go and then reduce the gain on my audio interface until it doesn't clip. That seems to give me the best signal-to-noise ratio. You'll have to experiment with what settings work best for your setup. The first clip isn't bad, but a little noise reduction would certainly help out.
The noise reduction in the second sample was applied way to heavily; you can hear how it has muddled the higher frequencies and given a little of the dreaded warbbling effect. Some noise reduction plugins have the ability to selectively apply noise reduction to parts of the frequency spectrum. If Gold Wave's plugin allows you to do this, try reducing the noise only in the low to mid-high frequencies. Leaving the highest frequencies relatively unchanged works best for me.
-
An audio interface is the same thing as a sound card, so you actually are talking about upgrading your sound card. I can only guess, but the iMic might give you less noise, not because the hardware is any better, but because it sits outside of your laptop away from other noisy components. I personally would just buy the much cheaper cable (and adapter if needed) and start with that. Wait until you an save up a little more money and get one of the better audio interfaces. Some of the prices on that website are alright, but some seem a little high so you should also shop around as much as possible.
EDIT: Oh, and since the iMic isn't Vista compatible, it probably won't work with Win7 either.
-
Hmm, I don’t know where to start. Ahh well, some thoughts:
1) When you connect the headphone out to the mic-in, the biggest issue you’re likely to run into is noise or hiss. However, while it’s not going to be the best recording known to man, the hiss shouldn’t be detrimental. Plus, there are ways of minimizing that hiss using noise reduction programs and equalization (EQ).
2) If you can play and arrange your music the way you’d like in the Yamaha and then use the playback function to send the recording to your computer via the headphone jack, that’s great. It’s not a workaround, you’re just using the keyboard as a sequencer. Plus, music creation is not programming; workarounds are fine. Even the biggest wealthiest producers use “workarounds” of some kind to get the sound they want.
3) If you want to increase your ability to arrange and fiddle with your music more than the Yamaha will allow, then you should look into getting a sequencer (sometimes called a host or DAW) like Reaper (which is shareware). In addition to opening up your creative possibilities with your keyboard sounds (I’ll explain in a second), but it will also allow you to start using thousands upon thousands of free sounds and effects that are floating around out there. In some cases, these sounds will be better than those that came with your keyboard.
4) So if you were to get a sequencer like Reaper, you could use the midi in/out features of your keyboard to control up to 16 different sounds at once. You’d accomplish this by connecting the Yamaha to the computer, and connecting the headphone out the keyboard to the mic-in. Once you get Reaper to recognize your keyboard (this tutorial might help), you can now enter midi data into Reaper. The easiest way to input that midi data for you would be to use your keyboard. You would set up Reaper to record midi data, then play your keyboard normally. The midi data is input into Reaper, that data goes to your keyboard which tells the keyboard to play a note, that note is played and the audio is sent through the headphone out jack back into Reaper. You can directly record that sound as you play in Reaper, or for more versatility, you can just record the midi notes so that you can edit them before recording the audio that gets sent back from your keyboard. Of course all of this still uses the mic-in which will be hissy, but with reaper as your host you can load a variety of plugins that will reduce this noise.
Hope that helps a little.
-
haha, I read the title and had to hear this.
Nice work so far. A few comments: I agree with Doug that it sounds a lot weaker than it should because there's no bass to actually pump up. Bring in some hard thumping bassline and I think you'd really get the crowd (i.e. me) jumping. And personally, I don't like the primary kick that you're using. It's too acoustic sounding and doesn't have the fullness that I'd expect from this type of track. The boomy kick that comes in right at the end would be much better suited to carry the bulk of this track, imo.
Finally, I think if you toned down the reverb it would make for a cleaner more punchy sound. If you add a bassline, you'll probably need to take down the reverb anyway in order to keep everything from sounding too muddy.
-
Luscious, even for the genre; I know Jordan was happy to hear this one. All-in-all, very cool as usual Jimmy. One of my favorite BGC tracks
...man that tape stop is perfectly placed. Love it!
-
Nice creative space Q.K.
-
You know, I've wanted to make a keyboard drumming tutorial for some time now. Mostly for fun, but it might help some people program some more realistic drum parts. I'm not a drummer at all though, so I'm a little hesitant to give a tutorial where I'd have to make up a bunch of drum terminology and have the DrumUltima's of the world laugh at my ignoranceIncredible work. Do you have any training on drums or are the beats just things you picked up from what you heard?Also, I'm curious to know how you have the kit arranged. You've obviously got a lot more of each instrument than what you'd find in a standard GM drumkit setup. What software is hosting the samples you're using, and do you have any tricks you could share about how the samples are arranged? It seems like you've got a setup that's arranged the different samples to make it easy to remember where different sounds are. Also, how did you do the machine-gun snare? Was that something you triggered specially, or did you somehow play that?
You can download the kit from the link in the op to see how it's arranged, but it's basically GM-improved. There are identical kicks at B2 and C3. I have three identical snare samples on D3,Eb3,E3 with the only difference being the velocity mapping of the layers (medium-hard,light,hard). The snare roll at 0:51 is played using the medium-hard and hard keys. My favorite non-GM placement is having identical closed hi-hat samples on Gb3 and Ab3. Putting the pedal hi-hat on the Ab3 as in the GM spec is terrible for playing. Fortunately, most kits I've seen don't do that anymore. Other than that, the only special item (other than 4 splashes...I love splashes) are the choke samples on all of the crashes/splashes one-octave above their standard positions. Sometimes it's cool to have a single generic choke key that cuts whatever cymbal sample is playing, but with the sfz specification that this sample set was arranged in, adding a choke key doesn't easily allow you to control the attack and release of the choke. So I took the easy road out and did individual chokes.
One thing that I have yet to experiment with is placing another kick somewhere else, like B4. That would allow some really cool double-bass techniques that are basically impossible with the kicks so far left of everything else. In fact, I've been trying to learn
for keyboard and I don't think it's physically possible without a kick towards the right of the range
Mixing, Mastering, etc.
in Music Composition & Production
Posted
Just FYI, Kjaerhus Classics are a popular group of all-purpose plugins that look and sound pretty good. TLS Maximizer is similar to the W1 limiter and CLAS works sort of like the WOW button in Windows Media Player: it superficially makes your song sound "better", but can mess with timing and kick out some of the frequencies that you actually want. I'd stay away from it.