timaeus222

For the sidechaining, we are not asking you to put a high release; that would crush the bass presence too much for too long at a time. Try lowering the release and raising the threshold some. Also, currently the entire track is quite quiet. I do hear the kick better than before, though it's still lacking in low-end presence. The snare is also very mechanical in the rolls, and it would really help to vary the velocities on the rolls to make it more realistic. The rhythm guitar can be wider in order to fill the stereo field; right now, you do have lead guitars panned, but the rhythm guitar doesn't have to be so narrow. If you add delay with a very short Feedback time (a bit less than 15 ms) and have it echo left and right (Ping Pong), then it should make the rhythm guitar wider without giving it a noticeable echo. If that is hard to do, try simply doubling the rhythm guitar track and panning one left and one right. By comparison, you should see that this has a wider stereo field.

I don't really see why you've high-shelved the treble on the kick downwards; that dulls the kick, when in a rock track the ~4000 Hz "click" of the kick should be heard (it's the distinctive "thwap" you hear in some metal music with double-pedal kicks). Also, the kick doesn't really need a boost at 20 Hz; it can't or can hardly be heard at that frequency. Furthermore, I get that you want to cut at 50 Hz in the kick to bring out the 50 Hz in the bass, but 6~8 dB is a lot in either case. Try toning it down to a less drastic compensation in the EQ, and then try the sidechaining advice @AngelCityOutlaw gave.

This is something that's easier to get down when putting the practice in... http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/77-Principles-of-Orchestration-On-line

No idea what you mean by "something". If you mean the low wobble, turn the width knob all the way up. If you don't have one of those, try adding a Delay to the bass with a very low Delay Time (such as 0:06 on Fruity Delay 2) and a Ping Pong feedback mode. That would have the bass bounce far left and far right quickly. If it's quick enough, it's perceived not as echoes, but one wide sound (generally, separation of left and right starts getting perceived at greater than 15 ms of Delay Time). It adds a touch of phasing in a somewhat bad way, but it's not that prominent. https://app.box.com/s/ofwwndutyt4ikjzsggun7rhbpzpee1ro Can you tell which one is more natural in producing width? One of these is when using a width knob in a synth, and the other is using the Delay trick. (These are separate keypresses so their phases are different, but that's not the point.) Oh, and your "awesomeness"? Can we not brag about ourselves without proof of recording?

I don't know what OS you're using, but if you have any sort of "loudness equalization" feature in your Windows Sounds settings (or the MAC equivalent), it might be messing with your Sound playback volumes. It doesn't jive well with us music producers---we like to hear what we write as we expect to hear it.

I didn't make this one, but I liked it.

Well, I still have almost the same criticism as before: - The guitars are too far back in the room. Either record them more up close, or use raise their volume and lower their reverb. - The drums are lacking punch in a rock mix, when they should be quite punchy. It's supposed to be energetic, so practice adding parallel compression on those drums. - There isn't much bass, even with a bass instrument. I can barely hear the bass instrument. Raise the volume, or record it with a mic that can actually pick up bass. Cross-reference your mix with this, and you should hear a huge difference in bass presence, guitar closeness, and drum punchiness. I also would not add post-mix reverb. What you probably meant to do with that was to put everything in the same room, but putting reverb on a bass just makes the mix muddier, so you should route your non-bass instruments to a send and place the reverb in a send.

Yep, I saw it live!

Yes, I like that better!

I find that they both are just as useful, but in terms of perception, "This year" doesn't grab me as much as "This month". So, I might find it more practical to merge it so that it's: "Today" "Yesterday" "This week" "This month" YYYY-MM-DD (if some X number of months ago where maybe, X > 1?)

As someone who writes slightly "nontraditional" dubstep, I would recommend Serum. Since one can import Massive wavetables into Serum, it is sufficient to use Serum if you want to make patches similar to those you could make in Massive. The factory presets are terrible, but the sound design capacity, especially for bass, is great. Here's an excerpt from two things I made with Serum (with separate drums, but with other synths removed). https://app.box.com/s/qg3ydqs69llbnha0r0bqf1z9ki4m244u Or, if you want an even better demo, check out zircon's Ice Lock. It's got Serum bass written all over it (and wherever Massive was used, Serum could do it as well).

All my YES. I love that we can actually see the "Yes, let's collab" people who have visited recently, earlier in the sequence. The artist profile link though, that's money in the bank.

Even your first remix was still good arrangement-wise. xD

Can you post a screenshot of your Kontakt-mixer setup while something is playing and would be distorting?

It's crazy how much of a difference OCR has made! Before OCR After OCR It's honestly no comparison

Apparently zircon != Andrew Aversa. http://www.6degreesofvincegill.com/link?a=zircon&b=timaeus222

Did you try lowering the volume sliders in Kontakt, but raising the volume outside of Kontakt (e.g. the Volume Multiplier knob)?

The louder notes still seem fairly hard-toned; I'm guessing it's still from that velocity response (last I checked, you had it set to "Convex - 50" or something like that). Here's something you could try. It might be kind of a pain, but try holding Ctrl and left-click-drag to select all the notes with velocities of, say, 100~127, and lower them all at once using Alt+Mouse Wheel roll. If you don't have a mouse wheel, try Alt+X and set it so the new velocity magnitudes are a bit lower. Then compare back to the previous version to see if the "playing" sounds softer. Currently it sounds like the "pianist" is sporadically pressing down fairly hard on the keys when playing the louder notes, rather than having the dynamics come naturally from the flow of the other notes. As a result, it doesn't quite feel realistic to me.

It's the perceived acoustics of the room due to the recording equipment itself. I've never recorded through a "multi-effect pedal", but it sounds like that would do it. Ideally you should try to record the guitar direct-input and digitally process the recording in your DAW later. That way it's a more accurate representation of what you played. Recording the drums would be harder to get right, since you could either mic each drum kit component individually or the whole kit at once. Or, you could use a sample library like Steven Slate Drums or Groove Bias Drums with a sampler like Kontakt 5. I'd rather not get too much into it though because that's not what this topic is for.

@David "Cookie" I don't mean to be harsh, but the timings on the main elements individually and as a whole are too sloppy; although it's good that it's not mechanical/quantized/robotic, it's "too human". The soundscape is nice, but the performance could be tighter. @Furorezu As Shariq mentioned earlier, the recording is too low quality. I know you haven't added bass yet, but the recording's current state is too distant and lacking in presence. The recording can be described as having a similar frequency distribution to that of the intro to this (0:00 - 0:21), except yours doesn't change.

You don't need to keep posting to bump the topic.

I love it! It was pretty squashed, but it's probably from a buttload of hyped-up Master-track compression. It being too much for some people may also be a result of the long kick tail giving a longer release time for the sidechaining. However, I find this amount of compression to be pretty typical for glitch hop and other 'loaded' dubstep-ish genres so I'm good with it.

Spend years working on bass design and putting it to use. I'm not kidding. Being a tad more serious, you should check out zircon's livestreams on making glitch hop music. This one's pretty good. And I'm going to quote myself (again), because this is really important.

^ This could have been the blog post. Done. Seriously though, thank you for the thorough reviews! Much appreciated!

This album is truly epic, and I don't just throw around that word. From hard-hitting metal, to dub-circuses, to prog-metal and chimeral metalstep opuses... *mind blown* \m/