The Vagrance

I'll try to avoid an argument about sampling and instead post a couple other VG beats/remixes I've heard. Percee P - 2 Brothers from the Gutter (Feat. Diamond D) Oh No - The Ride (Feat. Medaphoar) And for something slightly different:

Sampling is more of a compliment than an insult.

http://soundcloud.com/fli/beatrice http://soundcloud.com/fli/slave-notorious-b-i-g-dead-wrong-remix

WTF is up with all of these people finishing? Everyone knows the proper way to do projects is to post up a WIP early to instill hope and then be prodded again once the project is 6 months overdue.

Ok, first off I'll say all three basslines are different sounds (last one especially so) but the general technique is the same. Here are some general tips. 1. Its worth noting that a lot of dubstep artists are using Massive to make their basslines, not saying its essential but on some tracks (specifically Excision's) you can tell what waveform they're using. 2. Its not likely you're going to get the desired sound completely dry and having some decent effects helps out a lot, especially when it comes to distortion. 3. Frequency band splitting is extremely helpful for these crazy bassline sounds. What I mean is, run the output of your synth through three or four different audio tracks then on each track only let a certain frequency range pass (like lo, lo-mid, mid-hi, hi). 4. A lot of it is in the LFO speed and what all its controlling. Filter is the most obvious choice, but it may not give you the desired sound. If you're using Massive or any other synth with some kind of wavetable control, then try controlling the index. The amplitude and distortion amount are worth trying out as well, but ultimately what you control is going to be determined by experimentation. 5. As mentioned earlier, LFO speed is vital and is often used to give the track more rhythm. Definitely sync it to the tempo and automate it throughout the song, or alternatively tie the sync rate to the velocity of the note hit. Anyway, hope that helped.

Nice find, it seems to be an increasingly common trend for rap artists to use VG samples nowadays.

- I'll be goddamned if that isn't one of the best choruses ever. Also, late 80s but the Pixies are essential, as is Nine Inch Nails' first album, early Fugazi, Minor Threat, George Clinton, Giorgio Moroder, and a lot of others as other posters have mentioned.

Song structure, melody ideas, incorporating some general techniques as far as mixing and processing go, but ultimately its all about making sure your music is well rounded. Its easy to go "I want to sound like Deadmau5", listen to every Deadmau5 track and then rip off a Deadmau5 track, but ultimately all you're going to be is a poor man's Deadmau5. I'm not trying to specifically help you learn a specific technique or anything, I'm just giving general advice: Get off of the forum, listen to music you normally wouldn't, and experiment, you may be surprised by the result. Music is music is music.

Its up to you entirely, I'm just basing this off of personal experience and artist interviews (Everyone is influenced by Miles Davs) but at the very least its reinvigorated my producing as of late. It can also be some older electronic music as well, but something that gives you a new perspective on things. There's no better time than to do this than now. It may not necessarily seem like the type of music you'll want to listen to initially but once you start broadening your views you'll find yourself surprised at how much great stuff there is that you like. Personally my iTunes library ranges from Dieselboy to 5th Dimension (these guys are fucking incredible at points) to Dillinger Escape Plan to Flying Lotus and it all has at the very least made me think about different approaches to making music and conveying emotion and there are things worth picking up from all of those artists. The whole point is to not get bogged down in one sound, you're only as good as your influences and if you want to make a Zircon-styled song and you listen to is Zircon, then chances are its going to sound like an uninspired Zircon rip-off, at which point I'll just listen to the real thing. I'll end this by saying that my advice may not necessarily be true for everyone and keep in mind that the most I've accomplished in making music is a couple of OCR-posted songs and a mound of unfinished pieces so I know for a fact I'm not the best resource to go to. Try reading some artist interviews with artists you really like, artists that you think have really made it and see what they have to say about their techniques in songwriting, influences, etc.. Its often an enlightening experience.

Forgive my ignorance, but what genre do you typically produce/listen to? Whatever the answer is, my suggestion is to listen to something else. Whether it be rock, rap, country, R&B (new and old), whatever, expand your musical boundaries to the point where you want to write those types of songs. Listen to old R&B and pop songs and figure out how their structure is laid out, in a sense all modern music is based off of that time period. Basically anything that came out on Stax or Motown applies like Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Stevie Wonder (this man released 5 brilliant albums in a row in 6 years, what a legend), Booker T & the MGs, Marvin Gaye, etc. as well as The Beatles, The Zombies, The Rolling Stones, and any other big name band that your parents listened to. A lot of modern music has some interesting arrangements as well, specifically the mathcore genre as well as a lot of other rock stuff and even some rap artists (Daedalus being a recent fav). The whole point of this post is to say that there's not going to be a tutorial that will magically make everything better. There are definitely useful techniques but ultimately the best thing you can do is to listen to as much music as possible and experiment as much as possible.

A lot of times there will be an acapella release if the song is popular (this is most common in rap music, for example Jay-Z's whole Black Album has an acapella counterpart) as well as for remix contests, etc.. Other ways to get acapellas is if they're leaked somehow (like a bunch of Motown ones), play with inverting the phase on some tracks, creatively EQ and sample so that its mainly just the voice you're hearing in songs (common in a lot of electronic music), or in some cases even recreating the sample/phrase you want to use. EDIT: Not illegal AFAIK but acapellas4u.co.uk has a bunch.

If you haven't heard it, you MUST listen to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports album (I can't remember the specific name off the top of my head). Example track:

This question is also quite weighted as some sounds that can be used (speaking from experience the womp-ey ambience and the arp from my two remixes) are multiple sounds layered on top of each other but to create one specific sound. Also, are we talking strictly different instruments or largest number of polyphony at the same time? Most complex arrangement perhaps? There is no real answer to this question, and music can quite easily turn into pure noise with few instruments anyway (see Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges)

Well no matter what its going to sound like two things layered on top of each other because that's what it is, and you know the process to get there. They're probably not going to affect the sonic characteristics of each other (assuming you're talking about phase issues, etc.) unless they're very similar sounds to begin with, like kick samples, snares, etc.. That said I'm still not fully understanding what you mean by "how they're affecting each other" though. EDIT: One thing that might help the pieces sound seperate from the original two/the/however many samples though is resampling those samples, and so on. Its a ridiculously common technique in electronic music and is usually the answer to "how the hell did they make that crazy sound" questions. Pretty much the process, although the first thought is usually "do I have a better sample than the one I'm using?" There's that half of it (PROTIP: If you ever think "the low end needs be be beefier" on an electronic drum kit, 95% of the time a 909 kick will do the trick) and the other half is straight experimentation. Think about the two sounds and how they're going to sound layered together or just do it randomly and drag and drop them into your favorite sampler/synth and see what happens (light-weight synths and samplers work best with this method, as opposed to OmniSphere and Kontakt or something). There isn't usually a clear flag of "a layer needs to go here" but rather a sense of "something's not right about this sound, it could really use x feel to it" and seeing what you can do.

There are usually one of two thought processes going through my head when I layer sounds, its either "I like this sound but wish it was fatter/twangier/more atmospheric/etc. and adding effects just diminishes the sound" or "I'm bored and I'm going to see what cool sounds I can get out of these samples/sounds". The former occurs most often when layering drum sounds and the latter when layering synths/samples. Layering drum samples is tricky though, and while its tempting to pile on kicks until you get a massive wall of thump you should really worry more about sample choice as opposed to number of samples. Also, make sure the samples are in tune with both each other (especially on kicks, you have no idea how much this can change the character) and the song itself. As for synths and samples, I only have one piece of advice: Any time you come up with a cool synth stab, pad, etc. render an audio file of it and start building a folder comprised of your own samples. Whenever I think about layering a melodic element of a song, my sampler is always my weapon of choice (Usually the built-in one on Albeton. It doesn't need to be as complicated as Kontakt although it never hurts if your computer than do the lifting) and its very easy to get unique sounds that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. EDIT: An quick audio example of layering samples. The two sounds at the beginning are a couple that I made and then the 8 bars after that are them with a drum loop. There are no effects aside from sidechaining and I loaded them up in two separate samplers (controlled by the same MIDI track) and adjusted the envelopes, loop points, and pitch. Its not the most impressive audio demonstration but I did it in literally 2-3 minutes and never would have gotten a similar result if I had tried to do it without rendered audio. http://tindeck.com/listen/gour

For listening purposes? Just convert it to mp3 and use Audacity's export feature (you will have to google for the lame dll file though). If you plan on actually using the recorded audio in a track, however, I would leave it uncompressed so you have the maximal sound quality. EDIT: A minute too slow

Receptor - Princess. Its this years "Girl With Flower" IMO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tR-m1VtdWk

Stop asking so many damn questions, everyone starts off doing music differently and the more time you spend thinking about it the less time you're doing it. Hire a piano teacher, download a demo to a sequencer/synth, jam along to a recording on your instrument of choice, just do something now and don't worry about the rest, it will come to you. I highly disagree with this statement but that's not the point. Start making music however you can and stop getting bogged down in the details. If you find yourself wanting to know more about synths and samplers, then start asking questions once you reach that point, but so far it doesn't sound you've done much of anything yet as far as music goes. Its not something that will suddenly click one day where you go "and now I'm a musician/producer/what have you", its a continuous process.

Who likes RnB-inspired garage rock? (Saw these guys live and they were pretty sick)

I assume the group of people whose usernames are "GTAHater" doesn't overlap very much with people who love the ganj.

At this rate the panel will release it in 3 years

What about my 401k?

I listened to the idea and the original track but tbh the best result I can imagine would probably just be for someone to sample the original track, which wouldn't exactly be OCR standards (but would probably set it off otherwise).

Its not really fully necessary to preserve the sound quality if you plan on submitting to OCR anyway considering it'll get squashed to 192kbs regardless, but I just played through the SC player anyway. I like the overall sound design and theme you've got going but I can't say I'm digging the arrangement, more needs to happen that dynamically changes the song or the pace of it at the very least, but instead it has the same feel throughout which for a distortion-heavy 4:15 long track gets kind of tiring.