ectogemia

OMG YES.ddddd

My first gig was writing music for Maddox's YouTube show. He paid me $100 for maybe 6-8 minutes of music which, in my opinion, was totally fine for my first gig. It's not exactly market rate, but I was just getting my feet wet, and at the time, I wasn't as polished as most other pro/semi-pro composers, so he got what he paid for, haha. I know musicians hate the "exposure card," but to be able to say I wrote music for Maddox was enough for me, and I ended up being right. I've gotten more commissions because of the work I did for Maddox, so sometimes, working for exposure CAN pay off. But I certainly wouldn't do it again unless I knew whoever had hired me really did have some serious clout. The $100 was just icing on the cake. The dude was a hero of mine back when I was a teenager, and I still think he has a ton of relevant commentary coming out. Plus, I knew hundreds of thousands of people were going to hear my music, and that was and still is so cool to me. Here are the tunes in case you're curious. Conspiracy Infomercial Unused funk tune There are so many production and composition changes I'd make to both if I were to write them again with the skills I have now, but I think they're still fun to listen to

Production is my favorite part of writing music. Y'all jus' h8n.

Yep, critical thinking is the most powerful tool for self-improvement. The more surgically you can identify your shortcomings, the more focus you can apply in addressing them. Personally, I find those two parts of a mix to be the most difficult as well, and I've been loading in reference tracks in a similar genre (hard for me to do since I write weird shit, but something similar enough) and A/Bing mine with effects vs. the reference without effects and EQing til I'm close to the reference track. It's really helped my baseline sense of what good highs and lows sound like.

Figuring out a production workflow really helped my speed and direction when writing, and I accomplished that by watching and reading tons of tutorials on production, talking to producers who are more skilled than I am, and analyzing .flp files included with FL Studio. You can't really have a good production workflow unless you have a good background in production theory, or so I think, at least. Composition is rarely a hang-up for me during the writing process anymore, even though I have a ton of improvements I can make in that realm. It's sort of a "good enough" thing at this point. Until pretty recently, my biggest obstacle was usually a disconnect between the soundscape and sound quality of what I was hearing on playback vs. what I had originally planned in my head that slowed me down and had me overthinking things. Getting over that hurdle and being able to make quick, workable production decisions has drastically improved my case of Dicks Around With Knobs Syndrome, or DAWKS, which accounted for like 90% of my writing time. The better you know what your knobs are doing, the easier it will be for you to find the combination of sweet spots that get you the sound you want. Also keyboard shortcuts and all of that. Templates are nice, too, especially ones which load an EQ into every mixer track and have pre-built drum buses, parallel compression, reverb and delay sends, etc. just in case you need them. Presets are good, too, especially for EQs that don't start with a high-pass as the lowest band or a high-shelf as the highest. And check out Neblix's Kontakt routing template thread if you use Kontakt. Because fuck routing Kontakt every time I start a project. I was born in 1989, I'm going to be a doctor in hardly over a year, and even I think that's fucked up and not ok.

Slow down, man. It was a joke.

Yeaaaaaaaahh, that's what I was thinking. Someone's never played a Genesis. Timaeus, you've gotta speak less authoritatively when you're giving your opinion.

It's some super-distorted simple waveform. It might have a low pass filter with key follow on to let those high notes be really squelchy without having the lower ones be quite so shrill, but iono. Pretty much any synth + some distortion could make this.

Chord tone = a tone in a given chord. So in Cmaj7, the chord tones are C E G B. A non-chord tone is a note in between the chord tones. In C Ionian, those chord tones are connected by d f a, the non-chord tones (respectively referred to in jazz as the 9th, 11th, and 13th rather than the 2nd, 4th, and 6th because if you keep stacking thirds on top of, say, C E G B, you can create extended chords containing the 9th, 11th, and 13th). In C Lydian, for example, the chord tones are connected by d f# a. So if you play the chord tones and non-chord tones in sequence, you get a scale (e.g. CdEfGaB for Ionian or CdEf#GaB for Lydian). Altering the chord or moving the root can get you different results. Flat the 3rd and 7th of Cmaj7 to make a Cmin7 chord, then connect the chord tones (C Eb G Bb) with the original non-chord tones, d f a, and you get the Dorian mode which is defined as 1 2 b3 4 5 6 b7 relative to the Ionian mode. To tonicize means to play a I chord. If you move back to a I chord from something and it's in the same key as chords which came before it, you're simply tonicizing the chord progression. If the I chord is now in a different key than chords before it (say, you utilized secondary dominance like Neblix and I talked about), then you've REtonicized because your tonic chord is no longer the same as your previous tonic chord; it's in another key, perhaps even in another mode. When we're talking about resolutions, we're talking about resolving dissonance into consonance, about resolving or ending the chords pull or "need" to move to something else. Dissonance doesn't mean something that sounds bad or inharmonic, it means something which sounds harmonically unstable. Consonance is something which is harmonically stable. What harmonic stability refers to is a chord or harmonizing melody's pull in a certain direction. In this vein, we're mainly talking about tones leading a half step into the note above or below them, or any other sort of less strong suspension based on whole steps or non-chord tones, like a sus2 triad with the 2nd resolving into the 3rd or something. Basically, if you play a triad which includes suspensions like a sus2 or sus4, those suspensions sound slightly dissonant compared to having just sounded the chord tones together. In jazz theory, for instance, the 7th of a Cmaj7 chord is the leading tone (the 7th tone) of the C Ionian scale, thus it wants to pull into a C very strongly. That's why a fair number of major jazz tunes end on a major 6th chord rather than a major 7th chord, because it eliminates that dissonant leading tone and thus eliminates the tension of the chord, giving it a sound of resolution. I try to put in bold the really important, high-yield info in long posts like this so it's easier to read and refer back to, but I sorta felt like all that info was pretty boldworthy

Looks like this thread is slowly becoming sticky-worthy. This is a shit ton of reasonably well-organized jazz theory.

Yes. Learn the roman numeral (figured bass) notation for major and minor scales, both for triads and for seventh chords. Then you'll know how each chord in an unaltered scale will sound, and that makes writing progressions easier. It also helps drive home the relativity of all the scales and how writing within a scale is essentially just using chord tones and whichever 2nd between these tones you want will suffice. By changing the chord tones of a chord in a given scale, you are changing the scale(s)/pool of notes which would sound best over that chord. Example: Play a I chord in C major (chord tones = C E G , but add a #11. Now you're playing C E G B (D) F# which means F is no longer really in your scale because you've sharped the 11 (which is sorta kinda the same as the 4th, or F), and F# is -- so you're now playing a C Lydian scale (1 2 3 #4 5 6 7) rather than a C Ionian (major) scale. And that's how to use modes! That was pretty theory heavy, so if you have any questions you need to ask to clarify, ask away.

Yeah, I fucked it up. Oops. That's what I get for being hasty + a DIY musician.

No prob. Don't know what else to say except nope Maybe you're confusing it with something else? Woopz, just caught that last line after the edit. Maybe it is specific to jazz theory, iono. I'm not terribly interested in stuff that isn't jazz theory, haha. Irrefutable Source

So let's assume we're in C major. Keep in mind that II-V-I is really ii-V7-I in most cases. There's common alterations to that scheme, but ii-V7-I is sorta the "standard jazz progression." II-V-I is an unfortunately common way to write the progression, but it's a bad practice because it's really nonspecific. ii-V7-I is the most common way to do it, but you can alter those chord to your heart's content. ii = D F A C (minor 7th chord) V7 = G B D F (dominant 7th chord) I = C G E B (major 7th chord) A basic "rule" in tonal music is that the chord of the fifth tone of a major scale, the dominant, resolves well back to the chord of the first tone in the major scale. This goes for triads and 7th chords. So let's look at that. V7 --> I = G7 --> Cmaj7 = G B D F --> C E B G The 7th tone of a major scale is called the "leading tone" because it leads very strongly back into the tonic. In this case, it would be B leading strongly into C. Since C is the tonic, leading back into it provides a strong sense of resolution of the chord progression. So that will sound nice. In "normal" jazz voice leading, the 7th of one chord leads well into the 3rd of the next chord, likewise the 3rd leads well into the 7th, and that sounds particularly nice in ii-V7-I progressions because it fits the movement of the notes in the chords. The 7th of G7 is F. The 3rd of Cmaj7 is E. So that's a half step distance, almost like the F was a suspension which was just waiting to resolve into that E, and it sounds good when it does. The root and the 5th of the G7 chord, G and D, don't really strongly resolve in any direction. The G doesn't move anywhere, and the D is a whole step away from C, so there's not a ton of tension there. So the pleasing quality of V7-I is from the movement of the 3rd and 7th. And that's actually very, very common in jazz. Apply those same principles to ii-V7 and you see the same pattern of resolution. The root and 5th movement from ii-V7 is sorta ambiguous. The 3rd of Dmin7 resolves into the 7th of G7. The 7th of Dmin7 resolves into the 3rd of G7. Playing these chords in block form in root position is also not doing the progression justice. Try this: DFAC -> DFGB -> CEGB -> CEFA and so on. I threw in that last chord as just another example of 3rds leading into sevenths. You can keep cycling through that forever. You're essentially just moving the root of each chord up a 4th each time. In fact, that's another important point to make. A lot of jazz moves in 4ths. It doesn't have to, but it's very common to see progressions move like that to create a string of very pleasing resolutions as described above and slight modulations at times before the progression does something a little more unpredictably jazzy. So look at a ii-V7-I. The reason you don't start on a I is because you are resolving INTO the tonic, into the I chord. And you are doing it by moving in 4ths. The root of ii is a 4th from the root of V7 is a 4th from the root of I. If you started on I and moved in 4ths, you'd get I-IV-bVII. Not exactly as pleasing as ii-V7-I, but not bad. Also, there's not nearly as much harmonic variety. Those are all maj7 chords. ii-V7-I is three very different qualities of chord. When I'm talking about moving in 4ths, I'm not talking about quartal harmony which is a totally different thing. That's constructing chords by stacking 4ths rather than 3rds, which is a super jazzy thing to do; it's like automatic Coltrane Mode. I mean that you are moving the roots of the chords by a 4th. One way to use ii-V7-I is to simply use it at the end of progressions to lead you back to the tonic because it does so about as strongly as music based on 7th chords can just as IV-V-I does in music based on triads. So x-ii-V7-I might just be the best progression in jazz, where x is equal to any combination of notes creating a 7th chord. Go! You can also create little harmonic runs by doing cycles of ii-V7 or V7-I. So like Dmin7-G7-Amin7-D7 would be an example of a ii-V7 cycle. The first ii-V7 is in C major. The second is in G major. WTF MAN, YOU CHANGED KEYS. Yeah, that's jazz, and changing keys is particularly pleasing when you go to a new key which only has one accidental different from the original key. So from C (no accidentals), modulating to F major (one flat) or G major (one sharp) would sound nice because there aren't too many differences to jar the listener. Also, it's jazz, so fuck it. Modulate 3 keys away from time to time. Modulating is a great way to abuse ii-V7-I and milk that great progression without it sounding stale in the same key over and over. It's also an essential part of jazz. You know how when you're listening to jazz and there's this sudden shift in the feel of the track for a few bars even though the progression doesn't *really* change to your ear much? That's key modulation. What's an easy way to modulate? Well, a dominant 7th chord strongly pulls to anything a 5th below it for reasons I've already discussed. So if you want to modulate into G major from C major very smoothly, play a D7 chord which contains F# in it just like G major's key signature, and then resolve that D7 (the V7 in G major) down to a Gmaj7. Ladies and gentlemen, we have departed C major and arrived at G major. This principle is called secondary dominance in case you want to read about it more, and the roman numerals for it are V/x where x = the roman numeral of the chord in the original key. So in my example, the D7 chord would be an alteration to the ii chord of C major, making it a V/ii chord rather than a ii chord. That V/ii implies that we are using a ii chord of one key (C major) as the V chord of another key (in this case, G major because D is the dominant/5th in a G major scale), and the spelling of D7 (D F# A C) reflects that. That is how you spell the V7 chord in G major. But wait, isn't the ii of C major a D MINOR 7? How can you just play a D7 and pretend like you even give a shit about theory? How can you make that sound good? Write your melody in such a way that it works with a D7 chord better than a Dmin7 chord when you move into that chord so that the modulation goes down smoothly. So maybe instead of having an F in the melody when the D7 plays, play an F# instead, something to have that altered chord make sense. In fact, whenever you alter a chord, and any alteration to the I-ii-iii-IV-V7-iv-vio/ framework is fair game in jazz, you should do it in such a way that it makes sense with your melody. So alter your melody in a similar manner. Or don't It's jazz. Fuck it. Sorry my answer was so brief, but I hope that addressed just about anything you could ask about ii-V7-I and how to use it!

Agreed. And for what it's worth, when I write lead parts, I very, very frequently automate the volume, the vibrato, modwheel-linked parameters, change the velocities, and sometimes create cloned instances of the instrument with different envelopes for a variety in the sound. And having mono/legato leads with an "attack sound" lets you create well-articulated slurs (imagine, say, a saxophonist tonguing the first note and then just fingering the second, or guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs).

That's the main thrust of what I was getting at in the OP. It isn't a studio album. There's sound going on around the music. So my question is basically how do I deal with that? How do I mix my music considering SFX will be happening around it? And when I mentioned looping considerations, I really meant that, say, looping a super-compressed, loud 60 second track for hours on end may not be such a good idea, so I was looking for experienced VGM composers' input on how they would mix/master a loop or emphasize/de-emphasize certain frequencies ranges to minimize the annoyingness which can arise in some loops. Would you use much less master bus compression in most cases? Stereo imaging considerations? And so on. Ahhh, can anyone confirm that? That was something I had thought about. I'm sure there's a lot of VGM OSTs I've heard which were made up of just direct lifts of the in-game version of the tracks. Can you give me any examples of OSTs which were mixed/mastered differently than the in-game audio?

Mutliband distortion plugin ;o

I've been lucky enough to get some VGM composing gigs recently. Aaaand the thought popped in my head that VGM isn't always mixed the same as, say, a standalone studio album. Do any of you experienced VGM composers have any input on how to best mix and master VGM so it isn't too intrusive and loops nicely?

Seconded. For an awesome middle ground between casual listening and studio monitoring, try Sony MDR-7506. I've had mine for a few years, and they still work great. I only use them for all my listening while I'm away from my studio, but even when I was using them for studio monitoring, they did an alright job. They're not as balanced as the DT880s, but they served their purpose when I was first starting out without having to drop a ton of money. I think they're like $75. For earbuds, iono

I think each Anamanaguchi album has its own distinctive sound. But really, I think I prefer their most recent album over any of them. The first third-ish of the album is totally genius, and the rest is great, as well... if you ignore the totally disjointed mastering from track to track. It ain't hard to do because the music is soooooooooo catchy. Helix Nebula and Sting Operation from Power Supply may have the two catchiest melodies I've ever heard, though.

There's a lot that goes in to processing a good dubstep bass, and that extra elbow grease is what sets a badass bass apart from a typical, mediocre "wobble" bass. Messing with unison settings, distortion, FM, resampling, vocoding, filter sweeps, types, and patterns, pitch bending, multiband compression, distortion, pre- and post-EQing are the main tools. The Youtube guy I linked you to will demonstrate how to use all of those things to make dubstep basses.

Well, that's an easy one. Here ya go. Watch the rest of his videos to become dubmaster.

And the kid was 16 when he wrote some of those tracks. It's totally beyond my comprehension. Now I feel bad Shnab is one of my favorite arists, easily. Also, did anyone mention Blitz Lunar's 'Triptunes'? That's a crazy good album. And I can tell you from talking to Blitz Lunar that the album is crazy inspired. The listening experience is always enhanced for me when I know that the artist who wrote the music wrote it for a reason other than $$$$. Does anyone else find that to be the case?

You beat me to it. This is the best chip album I've ever heard, and I've been listening to tons of chip music since 2006.

Another year closer to death! Nice one, guys!