timaeus222

You should post the remix for context.

0:11 is NOT a bird chirp at all, it's a cross-panning resonant filter sweep. 0:39 did sound like a transition, as I mentioned earlier. It does sound like you added a sine wave to the pad, but edit the patch some more. Maybe you can link an envelope to a slightly overdriven resonant filter (norly)? I think 0:39 - 1:04 can work fine if you make the pad more evolving. It would help if you do a few notch filters / thin peaking bands to have the guitar plucks pass through and leave the piano a little in the background. A few delayed ambient House claves might do the trick in the intro as filler. 1:22 - the strings are too soft. Bump them up by about 3~4dB. They sound like they're near -40dB to -30dB. Yes, the piano is exposed, but there are some strings there, so try bumping their volume up. The drum intensity is fine. I would sharpen the high end on the kick, though. Maybe you can try a Korg-DDD-5 kick if you can find one. The snare still needs some more high end snap. It could be good to do a little notch filter in clashing instruments' EQs where the snare fundamentals are to bring out the low end thwap.I dunno, I'm just not liking the sine wave bass. It gets pretty grating to me, especially with the House kick. The choir pad is fine, but I don't like the sidechaining on it, or the volume on it either. Should be softer. The new instrument sounds like a piano+bells layer to me.2:46 was a pretty sudden change to me. Needs a heads-up! It also warrants a longer breakdown section than that. 3:04 needs a really nice synth lead. Maybe a quad-voice legato saw wave? Something awesome. Hit me up if you want me to give it a shot. 3:36 needs a transition. There's literally nothing, in case you were still working on that.3:45 - too bare, needs a quiet pad in the background just filling up space. 3:58-3:59 - I think the second note should be softer, and the first note should be louder.

That's true. Sometimes if I'm really inspired, I just rework the melody's rhythm right then and there, and create some bass/rhythm to go with that instead. Actually, that probably happens more often for me than writing the bass/rhythm first.

You should try a subtle, broad high pass on the rhythm guitar, reaching 0dB at about 100Hz. As for the bass, maybe give a small boost at 200~250Hz. Then give a small notch cut at 200~250Hz in the rhythm guitar, and in the rhythm guitar EQ, leave the sub-100Hz for the bass.

I work on my mixing first and arrangement later, as well.

Looks like Gibs lended Mordi some free energy. ...Get it? xD Fantastic, sounds like something I would do.

I sit down at my keyboard, pick a semi-random sound, and audition it. If it's inspiring, I try to create a hook with it. Then if ideas pop into my head, I write out the intro, and ideas flow from there. If it doesn't turn out to be inspiring, I pick another one or take a break, and then try again later if I took a break. I write intro, next, next, next, end. Pretty straightforward. I polish the mixing as I go, and fix velocities as I go. I know velocities will sound good because I play piano, so... yeah.

Wow. I asked that once and I never did get a straightforward answer. Thanks, now. Yeah, I think writing the melody first just hinders the rhythmic contrast you're inclined to put in a song. I prefer to write a rhythmically interesting bassline or drum part first with the source to reference. Sometimes I just write whatever part will make me remember my arrangement best, and then as I go, I'll fill it in with whatever else is still in my head.

I think he knew the guy in high school or something, so I have no clue if he knows where the guy is anymore.

lmao, I know the guy who's friends with the guy with the keyboard cat.

The lead guitar articulations are pretty static to me. Sounds like you just played casually while watching TV. As a result, it sounds really unexpressive, especially at 1:32. The rhythm guitar isn't quite as punchy as it can be. It all sounds like straight soft-sustains to me, so there aren't really any powerful hard-sustain chords contrasting any sort of mutes or soft sustains. Is there a tiny bit of chorus in the rhythm guitar? In sections like at 1:42, it's really packed, and the kicks are hard to hear, and the bass is too soft. Piano sounds stiff quantized. Re-record with little quantization? The rhythm guitar sounds better right after the piano section. 3:46 would work much better if you automated a fade-in with a power chord or something like that. Or just an e^x slope reverse cymbal.

I dunno, I still feel like the panning is excessive. The constant cross-hard-panning is bugging me. Sounds overcompressed when the lead comes in. Drums are soft, lead is even softer. Maybe the bass is too loud. Arp is too loud and feels weird cross-panning so quickly.

Actually, the "bird chirps" are probably just automated really resonant filter sweeps. The intro feels overly long, as it's about 1:30, in a 3:42~4:10-ish song, for which I'd expect closer to a 1:00 long intro. I feel like the pads are a bit plain once you reach 0:41. The long sustains on the bass and pad(s) sounds pretty static after 0:41, so maybe you can clone the pad instance, edit the patch, and give it some sort of evolving texture. It sounds like the chimes would be a great transition to that level of interest in the song. 1:24 is where the piano seems to sound a bit cheap. Try to find a better piano sample. This one seems to be too focused on the low end key-down noise and as a result isn't all that bright. I think a new piano sample would help a lot with the atmosphere, as the piano seems to clash a bit with the xylo-like mallet instrument between the impact frequencies of the xylo and the key-down frequencies of the piano. I'm not sure the bass with its portamento is quite safe. It's basically jumping right into a frequency clash and right back out. Maybe you can adjust its timbre a little to make its better frequencies stand out more, then lower the volume on it, to give more room for your piano to breathe. I just think the piano is a bit overpowered by the generic bass (sounds like some sort of sine wave hybrid), but mainly by the volume, not by the frequency distribution (sine waves, obviously, are very easy to fit into a mix). Yeah, the cymbal is pretty cheap-sounding. Actually, it sounds like a vintage cymbal, which wouldn't really work here. Try one with a higher cutoff, and then try lowering the frequencies made by the drumstick impact to "soften" the cymbal transient. Right now it's too "hard".

Somehow I managed like 32 bars, but yeah, I never seem to be home when I get the good ideas I want to try out, and I can never type out what I mean quickly enough. Sometimes I choose a tempo and it works for one section of a song, then when I write another section out, I listen to the new section and it sounds too fast or too slow, and I end up doing some sort of subtle tempo changing shenanigans to fix that. Somehow it works at times, but other times I wish I didn't have to try to get around that. Other times, I write a really nice section, but then when I come back later to write the next section, it's like the instruments I chose for that previous section don't fit in with the ideas I have for the next section, so I have to adjust to balance it out or the new section sounds out of place. I usually don't have an issue with finding the right sound, though. If I find one good sound, I find almost all the right sounds to accompany it. Sometimes I luck out and accidentally stumble upon an inspirational sound (like in my Gunstar mix. >), and when I go with it, it turns out badass. Try granular synthesis on a bass with an LFO on a band pass, it'll be sooooo heavy.

You simply can't hate this remark: I thought this mix was pretty enjoyable. Big fan of harpsichords and baroque-esque soundscapes. Guitar at 0:55 was a little reminiscent of Steve Vai, and kinda sounds like the style of Tender Surrender. Some tubular bells in the background were a nice touch, but a bit quiet. Strings were a tiny bit detached but alright. 2:13 phaser guitar was okay, but leading up to 2:20 was a bit sudden. Smooth writing overall, great piece.

The first clap threw me off immediately. Sorry, it doesn't work. It comes in too quickly. The bass at 0:07 is too low passed. Needs more presence in the 90-120Hz range. The ride at 0:30 is too mid-oriented, needs more treble. The arp used is bleeding into itself with the excess delay and reverb that it has, as well as its plain timbre and overly long release. 1:29 is too sudden and needs a transition. Leads are buried in the more drum-oriented sections. Snare-clap layers are missing low end punch. Kicks are missing a high end thwap or frequencies are clashing at 100-140Hz. Needs an ending.

...Yeah. I'm in that rut right now with my Gunstar Heroes mix.

Oddly enough, I partially disagree with that. Personally, I prefer perfecting what I write as I go, and I always find it harder to go back and try to fix the mixing in a section that I wrote earlier, mainly because I could have written it with poor velocities, a bad instrument choice, etc. If I write as I go, my mind is fresh on the current section and I know exactly what I need to fix if it sounds wrong.

Mixing the low end, for me too. Not necessarily the low-mids, mainly the bass and sub bass. I tend to have trouble bringing the bass out, and I have to check between my Grados with clear bass and okay sub bass, and my Skullcandies with muddy bass but good sub bass. I have literally no good way of testing my bass. Other than that, just finding ideas to write a song at all. I didn't start listening to music until the 7th grade, so I have almost no inspiration other than ocremix and a few oldie artists. When I do find my inspiration, it tends to flesh itself out rather easily, within 3-30 days, depending on how complicated the ideas my brain wanted to create.

On the contrary, Argle, I also save a lot of unfinished works in case I want to use them. However, if I know it downright sucks or sounds way too much like someone else, yeah, I don't save it. I think the best information I can think of is how to mix in a quiet sound that is loud. PARADOX. No rly. I figured out how to mix in a sound that does not amplify the final waveform of the song, but is still audible in the song and contributes to the atmosphere anyway. That way I don't have to worry about things not being overcrowded until I layer too much.

He would need to remember to sample some burping noises and process them like Infected Mushroom seems to have done in Frog Machine. =D

I did EQ it down at the mids, but I didn't want to do it that much so the power is retained. It was done inside the UI (which is honestly more practical than EQing in the EQ plugin. Do you get why? It's the fact that internal EQ and external EQ are different). If you're implying an overboost in the mids, I didn't do any boosting in the mids. That is pretty much the EQ that I have now right after considering Melodious Punk's Sausage Fattener post, other than you not having a high pass above around 100Hz. You just have a peaking band. Why would you scoop it at 25Hz instead of doing a high pass? There isn't much of the bass guitar frequencies at 25, so why not just cut out the extra subs? There's also the issue that my bass guitar hits strongest near 60-80Hz (Fundamentals) and does have some frequencies near 100-200 which are the Presence, which is why I did that high pass on the guitar. I could hear the high pass being too much above 100, so I stopped the cutoff around there.

Well, there's something else to remember. If you EQ while an instrument is soloed, you only know how it sounds soloed, and not how it meshes with the whole.

Sounds like he said you didn't implement half of the source.

Be patient, I honestly wasn't happy with my skills until nearly 2 years of experience. Right then, I knew I was capable of producing something of OCR-quality or maybe even DP quality.