timaeus222

Yeah, the piano is really quiet. Bumping it up by around 8~12 dB should get you close to normal. The panning on the strings seems fine to me. It's 1:02 that seems awkward. Correct me if I'm wrong, but while the percussion is panned left, it's typically panned center. The weird thing is, this picture shows the percussion on the right, this one shows percussion on the left, and this one shows percussion in the center...

Haha, no problem. Actually, I'd be correcting myself too with that remark of mine.

Yeah, you're right. It's an E. Piano. It also explains why 0:25 had such a clean fifth harmony. Regular electric basses don't harmonize quite that well.

This is really nice. I can hear that there's a LOT of reverb, but ultimately it's still a-OK with that treatment!

If it comes to a point where people want their tracks mastered (or mixed down) by someone else, I'd love to volunteer. I still want to make and put up more examples, but here are the ones up so far.

I don't think the high strings (what if you're using viola too, right? Then it wouldn't just be violins) are too dry, but I do think they are too late in the timing (the transient is lining up after the beat). This isn't absolutely necessary, but you could automate the volume on the choir to add some swells and make it more dynamic. It definitely sounds like a soundfont or a bare sample library, and it would really help the realism to do that and to overlap the notes. It's especially a problem at 3:14 - 3:32 since you can most easily hear the detached feel there. This arrangement is actually nicely interpretive. The main issue I'm encountering is that the strings are a bit mechanical. Simply varying velocities won't work; if someone were to visualize a sequenced performance, it should seem natural. 3:32 to the ending is the most noticeable with the strings because they're playing larger/more extended and connected phrases and not just single, separate, distinct staccatos. The piano sounds great as it is. The tone is very clean and full. I also like the mixing on the double basses. Even based on the small problem with the strings and choir, if you were to sub this right now, it has a decent chance of being a borderline pass in my opinion, but it may even be better than that.

I find that grouping things together in a way that you can understand them helps you remember it more easily. For example, I had to memorize a list of 53 pKa's for Organic Chemistry II (40 on a sheet of paper and 13 from a table), so I found relationships between each acid and grouped them together. Maybe you could analyze the song you want to try singing, break it down to what words each section involves, and just think about how many words into each verse you have to know before you can figure out the rest without explicitly remembering them. Find the differences in context between each verse, and find the choruses. Form a general structure to the song in your head. There have been times when I've messed up badly, and honestly, no one really noticed. The first time was my audition for playing the piano at the talent show in my senior year of high school. I knew it was pretty bad, but I just kept going (and made one more mistake), and then finished, and I still got on the talent show. No one even asked about anything remotely related to the mistakes. Now let's go back to sophomore year. I played Mario for the talent show, and I knew I made a mistake live. I randomly forgot what I was playing right in the middle of the performance, and I paused for about a second. I went with it anyways, picked a note to fill in the gap, and continued playing where I left off. I think my mind went blank for a moment, but I don't know if I just got lucky or I improvised my way through (aka BS). I feel like that would help. Of course, it may just have been easier because I was shorter than the piano when I sat down, and the piano was facing perpendicular to the audience, not to mention the stage lights made it impossible to see the audience.

Yeah, that's exactly it. The better you can describe the sound you're looking for, the more easily you can find it. Often though, you'll need to tweak the sound more than a few changes here and there. The timbre might be really close, but the number of changes made will vary with the sound. You kind of have to be willing to just go for it and have a clear direction as to how to go about it. For example: "I want a saw wave synth lead sound with heavy delayed vibrato, a little bit of delay/echo, room-ambience reverb, and a long filter envelope that decreases the cutoff frequency from a high value to a low value." (You can do the heavy vibrato by linking an LFO to the pitch and linking the amplitude of the LFO to the modwheel)

I think you either mean a refined EQ in the sound by default, or the sound is easily fitting; well, no sound is more fitting than another. It's really case-by-case. What would be really useful is a hoarde of many sounds that you can pick and choose, or synthesize.

True; I think that typically the drum loops are used as extra filler material though. I've never heard of a collection of loops that have several rhythmic variations of each kind. If you listen to , I think you can hear it.

Hey dude! Hm... not sure if you had any distortion on the pads, but it sounds like you had a little bit much overload, causing the frequencies to slightly break up at 0:08. It's very slight though. I like the kick, and the snare fits in this context. The bassy e. piano at 0:20 seems to work well playing that fifth at 0:25 (Maybe it's not a bass). Perhaps the ambient bell-like arp at 0:20 - 0:40 can be a little bit louder to make it more apparent that something new was introduced. The square arp at 0:40 works IMO, and it would really only need a little bit of taming of very minor resonances to make it a tiny bit less dominant. Awesome hammered dulcimer at 1:02! Omnisphere? You might find inspiration from this.

This is pretty good, actually. Drum programming aside, the only glaring problem I see is that the drum loops are arranged in a repetitive way, and it seems like you're reusing 3~6 drum loops as the basis of your drums.

Well, you certainly have a lil dubstep to look forward to on Apex 2014! *nudge* ;D

I had gathered all the free piano soundfonts I considered good one day. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/devwt08nbfh82p2/ukKERWCHNY

This sounds awesome man.

Not bad for a first attempt, actually. I'm assuming this is just a little way of practicing it, rather than a serious mix? Nice harmonies though. The drum programming is an important aspect of dubstep, but that aside for now, the wobble seems to be buried before 0:26. After 0:26, the wobble is very basic-sounding; it's a saw wave with an LFO on the cutoff, as generic as you can get. The stereo image of it is great and its volume is fine, but the timbre is pretty flat. From here I think you can start experimenting on getting a good wobble sound that fits your own style. Maybe I made a while ago might help.As for the drums, the kick volume seems fine, but the timbre of it makes it blend in a little too well. The snare has a nice timbre, but you may hear how its tail is bleeding into the soundscape at 0:13, for one. The other oddness is that it seems to be kind of wide, and snares are usually mixed to be mono. The hi hats are OK in this context, even if they are a little mechanical in their velocities, and are white-noise-like.

Happy Birthday Will! Thanks for being the beginning of Impact Soundworks!

I do try to do something musical every day, but it doesn't have to be much. Just some sort of productive thing, like EQing, sound design, or even something as simple as favoriting synth patches in my giant collection.

Offering mixing, mastering, and drum programming for this album.

I call this track.

When is it starting? For the last few weeks I keep missing it and then noticing that it started after it gets posted. I like being able to ask questions and get a reply that I can see. EDIT: Nvm, I got it. Home page, not Videos page.

Oh yeah, I like that sound. 0:23? I haven't been able to figure out specifically how to make it yet, but it's basically a white or pink noise generator, whichever sounds closer, on arpeggiator mode (no actual tremolo involved), with a slow LFO routed to a low pass filter and possibly a short envelope linked to the pitch for that strong hit on each note. You might be able to modify HS Percolator on Zebra2 since it has that similar percolating feel on one of the oscillator lanes if you isolate and find that layer/column.

Alright, cool! I'll outline something tonight and compile a reasonable structure for the video.

I may do a "10 tricks you may find useful in FL Studio 11 and above" video if I have the time. And I mean truly useful, so it's not like "oh, you can do Make Unique to clone this pattern quickly" or "Press F4 to make a new pattern on the fly", because those get to be second nature at some point anyways. It would go into detail with tricks that ultimately improve workflow and production intuition in the end---methods that I don't think most people would think of trying (because it's obscure, not because they don't practice enough). The only drawback is that it's only FL, but eh, at least 50% of the people here use FL anyways (HoboKa, Esperado, Chernabogue... and I didn't even go deeper into the compo thread yet), so it'll at least hit a large target audience.

Oh, I figured out how to fix the brush tool, btw. Hold Shift to use the old functionality (it works when you see red notes).