timaeus222   Members

Well, I just had a lot of practice, and I try to listen attentively to the changes I make in my reverb, even if I had to exaggerate some edits along the way to hear them. You may want to try the ArtsAcoustic Reverb demo to have a flexible reverb that should help you learn more via the visuals. ----- FL Studio comes with four sends by default on the far right (they're labeled mixer tracks 100-103). Instead of putting reverb on the Master track, I put reverb designed for specific types of instruments on each send (such as drums [except kick], strings, brass, woodwinds, etc). Sometimes you could even separate them based on their reverb response if that helps (bassy, midrange-based, trebly, etc). Since each type of instrument is not expected to reverberate the same way in the same room (the walls of the room reflect certain frequencies differently than others), you now have the flexibility of accounting for that. Typically, you don't really want to have a low low-cut frequency for bass instruments, for instance, because it would then leave in the wet mix that is, say, below 200 Hz. That adds some mud to the mix, since it can add reverb to a bass, making it a little more "boomy". Similarly, depending on the situation, you may not want to add trebly "hiss" to certain instruments that you want to be distant (to feel muffled/dull), in which case you should then not have a very high high-cut frequency (the higher it is, the more "hissy" the treble reflections become, since the higher frequencies in the wet mix are still present). Blending notes basically means changing the way the room's walls reflect overlapping frequencies so that the instruments sound like they're in the same room. Some reverb plugins (such as ArtsAcoustic Reverb) allow you to adjust the amount of low, midrange, and treble Damping ratios, which aids in that respect.

New instruments. No specific problem parts, just something in general you could try. Maybe around the second half of the remix? You did have some shakers going on. So for example, you might add more auxiliary percussion (like tambourines, fingerbells, shakers, sleigh bells, etc) with a long-decay, high high-cut reverb.

Since the section patches are pre-blended, and the solo patches aren't, ultimately, layering those (assuming the section patches sound thick) would make it still sound like a solo instrument atop a section. If that's what you're going for, that's what you'd get, approximately. If you just want a thicker section, layer section patches, like french horn + trumpet or french horn + tuba, depending on whether you want a thicker midrange or thicker low end (respectively).

Hey, this sounds pretty great! I like the atmospheric/underwater feel. I would say to check the bass mixing at 0:12 - 1:25. It sounds a bit muddy. Maybe try raising the low cut on the reverb for the more bassy instruments. I'm finding your bass to kinda blend in a little too well. I like the low dynamics at 1:54 - 2:12. Goes to show that atmospheric music can have dynamics. The background plucked instrument at 2:15 - 2:48 that repeats the same arp pattern feels a little weird in the soundscape. I think the spatial position is good, but it feels a little "cheap"/tinny in comparison to the rest of the soundscape, IMO. Maybe replace it with something with more body or round robins? Other than that, I would suggest maybe playing around with more upper-treble ambiences to contrast the low-midrange/midrange-heavy warmth in most of the remix.

Uh... http://cgi.ikmultimedia.com/ikforum/viewtopic.php?t=11043 Unless I'm looking at the wrong Miroslav library, or if you simply didn't get the full version, it looks like there are some velocity layers. It's not the same sample at different velocities. ----- You say it as if you can't adjust FL reverb presets, when you can. Did you try adjusting the low cut and high cut to blend the low and high sections more? Did you try increasing the room size? Did you try lowering the crossover frequency so that it's not at 500 Hz? Did you try adjusting the Damping? I do think the French Horn sounds like an ensemble, but it's not very thick, which would indicate that you didn't layer slightly different timbres together. It doesn't matter how large the sample size is; if you didn't take the effort to thicken up the sound yourself via simple layering, you can't make the excuse that the library developer didn't do it for you.

At this point, I'm a fan of the snare + toms on Drums1 and the kick on Drums2. The hi hats are pretty similar across the board, so any version of them work. In comparison, in Drums2, the snare tuning just seems odd to me in the first few seconds where the snare is hitting multiple times quickly, while in Drums3, it's something with the reverb low end that makes the snare feel a little distant.

Very interesting take here. I liked the way the acoustic guitar was used to emulate the sci-fi effects in the original. Not much personalization in terms of the actual melody notes, but pretty sweet cover either way.

Pitch bending in FL using the standard pitch knob might be fairly unnatural-sounding depending on the plugin (sometimes it feels "stepladder"), but if you want to do it that way, there should be a "2" by default next to the pitch knob (it says "RANGE" right under the "2"). Then just increase that "2" to a "12" to allow a larger pitch bend range and thus one that is more noticeable. If you mean in the piano roll, it's portamento, and it only works for native plugins like 3xOsc and plugins made for FL's piano roll. You can go into the VST wrapper, click the wrench icon, and enable "Mono". That should allow you to "bend" from one pitch to the next (portamento) in the piano roll for native plugins. Or, you could double click one of two overlapping notes in the piano roll for a native plugin and enable "Slide" (the right triangle) to slide from one note to another.

Well, like I said, it could just be because it was fairly quiet both times, and I don't entirely remember how it sounded previously. So it's not just you! Everyone's been there; you're just working your way up! By the way, on the A/B comparison I posted, I was actually turning the EQ+compression on and off. When it's off, the sound is how it was after simply bumping up the volume. When it's on, there is less treble in the hi hats near 15000 Hz, and the sound is a little tighter. I was hoping that would help you with EQing the uppermost treble, and with compression for cohesion. ----- If you render a quiet track and then turn up your speaker volume (scenario A), it's not the same as moving the volume sliders up inside your DAW (digital audio workstation) with or without limiters (scenario B), even if you are listening at the same output volume. The difference is this: - Scenario A gives you a music file that is quiet on an absolute scale (usually indicated in dB). That means if someone listens to the song on your computer and turns up the volume, sure, it would be loud, but for someone whose speakers are calibrated for louder music, it will sound quieter in comparison. - Scenario B gives you a music file that is closer to the common loudness standard: close to 0 dB, but with an applied limiter so that there is no added distortion to the song in the form of crackling, known as clipping. Sure, now you would have to make sure you don't make things too loud, but this way, people don't have to turn up the volume just for your song, and then down again for their other, louder music. Another way to understand this is by the waveform of the song. That's the loudness plotted against the time passed. - Scenario A gave you something approximately like this for your Drum Test 1: - Scenario B would give you something more like this (which is what I ended up with): In Scenario B, I think it's easier to see any unevenness in the loudness of each section in a song. Maybe you can notice that when the kick and toms layer, they are louder than the toms or kick by themselves (which is natural for the constructive overlap of sound waves). Also, scenario B is what I've been seeing, at least in the time I've been writing music.

Trippy! The drum breaks made the weird time sig even more disorienting (in a good way?). I think that keeps the listener guessing (and well, listening!). Maybe the leads could have been louder. Other than that, pretty solid work!

I'm not sure I hear much difference. Maybe it's just because it's fairly quiet overall (I'm finding that it's by about 6~8 dB). For example, this is the loudness I was expecting: https://soundcloud.com/overclocked-records/timaeus222-mmbn-legacy-resonant-transmissions-01-theme-of-mega-man-battle-network-legacy After bumping up the volume, you should be able to hear the changes you make more clearly. By the way, you should also generally mix in context---if you had soloed a sound and adjusted it, then un-soloed it, you won't hear the difference as clearly after hearing it in context. I think the hi hats sounded cleaner. When I look more closely, when the toms layer with the kick, they become collectively louder than the snare. That's a natural thing, but would become an issue if/when you use a limiter, as the limiter would generally push down harder on louder peaks. As an experiment, I bumped up the overall loudness, and A/B compared with EQ and compression, vs. without (note that the EQ affected everything though, including the snare). https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59338379/8bitpunk_before_after_comp.wav

Like I mentioned earlier, Stage 2. That page gives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5gTsuacBss which is the same as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca5rcckLZkg

Yeah, that's why I don't use Serum as much as I use Zebra2. I prefer to not bridge unless I have to, since at least for me, bridged plugins have occasionally unloaded on their own when using 32-bit FL. I also checked, and each instance of Zebra2 uses only about 60 MB of RAM (instead of 200 MB for Serum). In terms of CPU, it's definitely preset-dependent. The more voices, the more CPU it takes up.

I have a running bet that you won't last 3 days. (Not really)

If you have the newest FL already, you can just right-click an instrument channel, click Insert, and find Layer alphabetically. It doesn't noticeably save CPU, but it does make the size of your project easier to manage. That's the main thing. Serum does take up a lot of CPU (as well as about 200 MB RAM per instance); that's just how its design worked out. Haven't seen any updates about it. I don't use a bunch of instances of Serum because of that (maybe 3 or 4 instances max). I do use u-he Zebra2, though, which is much more efficient with CPU and RAM consumption, and is arguably as good or even better. I used it almost exclusively on the Rollerball remix I showed you earlier. If you start to wonder whether a song's section is too messy, just try muting each layer and seeing which one doesn't really make a difference. It's possible to get lost in the number of layers you add when you have a lot.

I didn't mind the overall loudness, actually. The main thing I'd say is that the quieter timestamps could have been a bit louder, but not the overall track. Some of the attacks (brass in particular) were a bit slow for the sequencing, so perhaps layering in some short layers (like staccato or spiccato) could have helped make up for it. Other than that, this is a pretty enjoyable, elegant and film-credits-like remix.

Drums1: The kick has a pretty good ~4000Hz click, but it could use more sub-80 Hz for a low-end "thump". Doesn't need to be metal-level, but right now it's just missing the anchor that holds the beat down. The snare decay is a bit too short. If you can give it a longer decay, I think that would help make the 230 Hz-range stand out more. I'm guessing 0:53 with the bitcrushed panned hits are supposed to be toms. They're close, but maybe dial it back (upwards) a notch on the bit depth for the floor and low toms; sounds decay more quickly at lower bit depth (at lower bit depths they shorten more), and the lower toms' tails could be a bit longer. The hi hats could use a tad less upper treble, as they sound metallic but a bit too "hard", if that makes sense. Though the hi hats may just be poorly compressed by soundcloud's 128 kbps, as they lie above 12000 Hz. The rest: The rest are pretty similar in what they lack, so basically the above covers what I would say.

Fun stuff! I love it when I end up having 10+ layers going on at once. By the way, one tip to make it easier to manage is to coordinate the patches (that is, transpose the output inside the synth) in a multi-layer sequence so that you can paste it all into one Layer instance. You have several instances where you put the same notes onto, say, three instruments, when with the Layer tool, you can turn that into a one channel deal that layers all three (or whatever number) instruments. Here's an example where I'm layering snares: For tonal sounds, all you would really have to do is to make sure the same MIDI note could play multiple patches on their intended octaves, which you could adjust within the VSTs themselves. The only drawback is that the velocities will all be the same across the instruments. Usually though, it saves time by letting you write only one set of notes instead of multiple sets. If you really think you need different velocities on each instrument for a particular moment, it makes more sense then to not use the Layer tool.

No worries, I just mean in general, as a hypothetical. It's good you enjoyed making them. And thanks with regards to the remix.

Well, one crit that doesn't seem to be addressed is that the rhythm guitars have a thin feel to them. I can hear a bass, but the guitars are completely missing low-midrange EQ (130~380 Hz, specifically, has zero guitar content), and they are overboosted in the midrange as well (~700 and ~2100 Hz, by about 2~3 dB). The bass also has almost nothing above 200 Hz, so I guess you low-shelved or scooped it that much? As a result, the track feels hollow in the low-midrange. At 0:53, you go out of the key, not in the way jazz does, but in a way that sounds like a mistake. You're using basically a whole tone scale (you play E, G#[higher], F#, D, C, E, D, G#[lower] at 0:53). I dunno, I guess it's maybe because you were playing in F# minor (F#, G#, A, B, C#, D, E, F#) at 0:39 - 0:53, which somehow doesn't jive well with the whole tone scale you used at 0:53. B and C#, though in F# minor, aren't in a whole tone scale that starts on F# (F#, G#, A#, C, D, E, F#), so if you play a chord that uses notes in F# minor, it would usually sound dissonant (especially after some distortion is added to make each note less tonal). https://app.box.com/s/ktj8z3k68qoxessbwhgx6yedsrctmym6

More often than not, making a buildup fuller increases the anticipation for the drop. So maybe, you might have some prolonged snare rolls, plus a riser, plus the melody during the buildup, and then perhaps a short fill right before the drop starts, if applicable. A recent example of mine is this: You can tell that 0:33 - 0:48 is a buildup, and that 2:36 - 2:52 is a bit of a larger buildup (due to the more intense sequencing at 2:48 - 2:52). Using the same Rollerball example above: Even though the sound palette is perceivable as consistent throughout the track, it's not so similar that you can't tell where you are in the track at a given timestamp. 0:33 - 0:48 is a buildup, due to the prolonged snare rolls, the riser, and the fuller soundscape at 0:40 - 0:48 adding more hype. 2:36 - 2:52 changes it up at 2:48 - 2:52 and adds more subdivided sequencing for even more hype than the first instance of the buildup. The repeat of 0:48 - 1:19 at 2:52 - 3:23 is noticeably different in the rhythm and melodic contour (if you have to listen back a few times to notice it, that's OK). Even though the sound palette is similar, the composition is varied. There's a low-energy chill solo section at 1:19 - 1:50, with softer half-time drums, greater focus on the e. piano than before, and a more ambient/atmospheric feel. There's a lower-energy breakdown section at 1:50 - 2:21, with no drums except cymbals, greater focus on slow-attack pads, and overall a "slower", even more atmospheric (and cosmic) feel. There's a low-energy lead-in (2:21 - 2:36), with very soft e. piano and bell arpeggios, as well as soft 4-on-the-floor high-passed drums; it leads back to the buildup variation at 2:36 - 2:52. In terms of energy, it kind of went Low (Intro), Medium (Buildup), High (Main), Low (chill solo), Lowest (Breakdown), Low (leading out of breakdown), Medium (Buildup), High (Main v2), Low (Outtro pt 1), Lowest (Outtro pt 2, without drums). If you draw it out, it's basically 1.5 sine waves. Take the time to process this. I think this demonstrates many of the things that I expect there to be in a dynamic EDM track (clear sense of intro, buildup, drop, breakdown section [optional], climax, and outtro; diverse-enough textures). Try to pick out the individual sounds that you can manage, and try to understand their role in the section. I think I mentioned this before, but writing something that you would like is probably more productive in your musical output. If you keep writing what your audience likes, then if you don't like what you're writing, I don't see why you'd be satisfied with that. Audience tastes can be very subjective, so if you keep catering to them (as selfish as this sounds), you might actually be less productive in your musical output. This is just one man's take on this, but that's what I think.

For "Sunshine", the same sidechained saws were repeated quite a bit, so it got tiring to listen to. The buildup at 0:40 didn't really connect with 0:44. I expected 0:44 to be more interesting, but it's the same textures as before plus a violin and some padding. It just doesn't feel as big as it suggests it should be. I think it was a good starting point, but it still sounds like a work in progress. Not really electro house, by the way. It sounds like house or trance. For "Daylight", 0:44 was a pretty good dropoff. It could have used a transition, though. 1:15 needed a clearer transition, one that started at around 1:12, because that was actually a good climax. This is closer to electro house, but it's mostly house. 1:45 needed another transition sound, like a snare roll or something. The ending cut off prematurely. For "Shade", immediately there's a trance-style sidechain. I like the dropoff around 0:40. This is effective. At 1:11, the saw waves confirm to me that it's trance. It's good, but it's not electro house like you had said. The climax is more like electro house, but it took a while to qualify as that. 2:36 - 2:39 gets a little cluttered in the bass. I don't think the vocal clips really added much, but they were OK.

Kinda wish this was still going; I finished my track.

Man, the sound design just nails an unnerving feel perfectly. Sure, it's dissonant, but it's done tastefully. Pushes the boundary of pleasant-enough sound design (in terms of abrasive timbre), but for me it's just about right. Today, I'd probably define music as "the logical sequence and combination of tonal and atonal sounds to generate a harmonic experience." Yeah, this counts. I honestly found this to fit more as a track in an OST than as a remix, since you generally have more freedom in an OST, but this can be some fun listening in the dark.

Well, if you move non-muted notes around in the piano roll, when you don't highlight them, they're going to make sound anyways. An additional thing you could do is Ctrl+Left-click-drag and highlight the notes you want to move, and that will make the note movement silent. So, if you're looking to work in the same project file and have trouble with lag, try that while you haven't yet turned off the convolution reverb. And indeed, Kontakt's convolution reverb can get quite CPU-intensive; I would agree that you could opt to use external reverb instead.