BloomingLate

A while ago I stumbled upon this website that offered helpful content for someone like myself who is trying to grow in the different areas of music production. It is a project called "Play with your music", which came out of a university in New York (I think). They set it up as a kind of free and online learning community where you can do group assignments, but from the looks of it the project has been abandoned for some time. Finding your way around the forums is a bit tricky, but I wanted to share at least one link that I found useful: Listen like a producer and engineer There is text and also video to help you understand what is going on. I found the visual aids particularly helpful and the whole thing helped me pay closer attention to what I hear in music. The content is organized in theory and assignments which you could do with a group. They also had stuff about basic music theory which, though not new to me, did help by using that same visual approach. Its too bad that the project appears dead. I think it had potential. The homepage shows some of the modules they were going to offer, which seemed interesting to me.

Reflections on being an artist in a modern consumerist society and the role of social media in re-shaping the relationship between artist and fan By René Mulder (a.k.a. Blooming Late) \ Written February 21st 2019 The title of this article is somewhat of a mouth full, so allow me to break it down a little before we get to the main text. My concern in this article is to deal with the following phenomenon: I am an artist among many artists in the world; I, like them, live in a time and in a place when there is an overabundance of art for people to consume; Thanks to social media our creative expressions are rapidly distributed, judged, consumed, and shared by an unimaginably large (potential) audience; Those same social media outlets allow fans for unprecedented means to connect with the artist; The overabundance of available material plus the consumerist attitude of people in general combined with negative side effects of interaction through and behind a computer screen drastically re-shapes the relationship between artist and fan (the art-consumer); The artist in such a world is challenged by a number of important questions and issues that he or she must face before deciding to pursue the life of the (professional) artist. On a personal level I find myself disappointed, discouraged and somewhat disgusted by what I think I see going on around me. I am challenged to reconsider the purpose and value of entering the public arena as a producer of art (in my case as a musician. I used to be a visual “artist”). Do I want my work to simply be consumed by an anonymous group of people that will quickly demand more or turn attention to something else? Do I want to keep up a complex social network strategy to please people? Can meaningful relationships really emerge out of connections with fans and is that pursuit even desirable? Is it healthy to open up your life to the audience that way? Why, in the final analysis, is the pursuit of becoming a publicly known artist a good thing? We will begin exploring these issues. One artist among many The world has always known its share of artists. It is probably safe to say that history is filled with more creative persons than the few famous examples we can come up with. Not every individual made it to fame and glory. In fact, being a full time artist – like a painter – was not exactly an easy path to walk. There is a reason why we have the term “Starving Artist”. In a lot of cases the fame and glory part only came after the death of the artist, who could hardly imagine the sums of money people pay for their works today. Making a living as an artist is still challenging in our time, though conditions have improved a lot since the days of, say, Van Gogh. One particular challenge I have personally experienced is simply getting noticed, standing out in an overwhelming sea of creative works, particularly online. With the world wide web and online platforms such as deviantArt (a place where I tried to share my visual arts in the past) it has become possible for creative people from all over the world to gather in one place and share their works with one another. This provides tremendous opportunities, but also those challenges. The same goes for musical artists. With radio, TV and online streaming services being widely available, you are now competing with the entire world. And with advances in education and technology, many more people have access to the knowledge, tools and techniques previously only available to a select few. To put it bluntly: everyone can be a filmmaker, photographer, comic artist or music producer. Now I'm not saying everyone will be a great or even good filmmaker, photographer etc. What I am saying is that the availability of these tools enables more people to glut the stream of art that is being produced, which makes it harder to get noticed, at least online (which is where a lot of the action is taking place in our time). Perhaps in the end it will be those seriously committed to their art-form who will get the furthest, but even then we will find ourselves being one artist among the many. Art as a consumer product If you ask an artist why he or she produces art, invariably they will answer somewhere along the lines of, “Its who I am.”, or, “This allows me to pour something of myself into [words/images/sounds/shapes]” Art is usually self-expression. That is why art can be both interesting and attractive as well as boring or repelling. We don't always like what is coming out of the deepest corners of someone's soul. Art is inherently personal, but there are ways to create something that has appeal to the masses. Rather than exploring what is just inside me, we can explore what is inside all of us. The more general the more people may be attracted to it. Enter commercialism: the turning of art into a consumer product. Modern technology allows us to create things fast, easy and to make duplicates in a near instant. Chances are high that the nice painting you find in your neighbors house is not exactly one of a kind. You can get mass produced still lives and natural sceneries for a few bucks at all sorts of stores. Though that fact does not necessarily take away from the beauty of the work, it does take away some of the value we assign to it. There is a difference between owning the original and only copy of Rembrandt's De Nachtwacht (The Nightwatch) and being one of a million people who have a mass-produced reproduction of it. Granted, the value we assign to items based on rarity is somewhat arbitrary, but it does show that we appreciate the amount of labor, care and craftsmanship that was poured into the making of a masterpiece. Speaking more to my own field of creativity, I find a classical work of Mozart to be of much greater value than I do the latest dance track that was produced in a couple of hours by some dude with a computer. In fact, having personally discovered how easy it is to make the kind of music that was popular on the radio back when I was a teenager has made me value that kind of music less. It also made me think less highly of the people we practically idolized for making that music. Now, with art having become somewhat of a mass-produced consumer product we also face the problem of the consumerist attitude that comes with it. Works of art can become easily disposable, much like we dispose of other products we're done consuming. With a constant stream of new images, sounds and things coming out it is easy to forget about the images and sound and things we so enjoyed yesterday. Considering the claim that people can maintain only up to about 100 connections with people, how are we to oversee the ever growing and expanding list of images (for example) we “Like” or “Fav”? How meaningful a connection can we establish with every new piece of work that comes out? How much lasting effect does it have? Or are we quick to jump to the comment box and shout: “More please!”? When I was still a graphics artist, it was this mentality that I saw around me, and you can still find it on places like YouTube. Imagine this: you just uploaded your latest work that you poured your heart and soul into and all you get is, “Nice work. More please.” All that effort only to fill someones belly and have them beg for another bite. Before long the artist has become the slave of the audience. The provider of kicks and wows; of daily mini-orgasms that always beg for more. Art then is no longer about self-expression and pouring out your soul. It has become about finding out what appeals to the other guy and giving them their fill. You better get cooking! The desire to connect Besides self-expression I think there is another aspect to why the artist does what she does: she is looking for connection. Most people inevitably will want to share what they have created. This will expose the artist to potential harm in the form of criticism but also to potential good: connecting to another soul through the shared experience that was expressed in the artwork itself. Art then is a means to get to something more profound: human relationships. Sure, there can be other motives like a craving for recognition and applause; for validation, or simply for financial gain. I discovered only yesterday that the human connection element is actually something that I am seeking. I wasn't really aware of this before. It wasn't on my radar. It came to me when I stumbled upon a forum post by an unknown (to me) artist promoting his latest album. It was his only post, or maybe one of two posts. It just had links to his works and said to “Enjoy!”. His music was kind of nice, but I had no context for it. I could not find out anything about the person. Pondering the process of getting exposure to an audience I suddenly experienced a feeling of sadness. Is this the way? Signing up on random forums with a link to your stuff and hoping people will “enjoy” it? The person didn't seem to show much interest in the forum itself, only in self-promotion. I asked myself: is this what I would do? Would I sign up for a forum dedicated to trance lovers (for example) and only drop a link to something they can consume? Would my goal be just to get them to hear my stuff, and maybe even buy future releases? Is that going to be our relationship? I don't really care about you, but I want you to care about me and my music? To be fair, I could have contacted the person and find out more about him. In that sense, our modern situation provides us with something we didn't have before: direct access to an artist, even a famous and otherwise busy one. Social media provides fans that link. Even so, connecting via a screen is not quite the same as connecting in person. Therefor, a real friendship is hard to establish. Especially when you are one of a million people trying to gain an entrance with your favorite artist. We all understand that having hundreds of thousands of followers on your social media accounts does not have to mean much in terms of human connection. You can also question the desirability of having potentially unstable people connecting to you so easily. Examples of unpleasant behavior abound on places like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the likes. What is our relationship? This then raises the question about what the relationship between the artist and the art-consumer is. Taking the commercial perspective, the artist is the producer of the goods, and the art-consumer is the consumer; the end user of the goods. You don't have to be friends. You're just business-partners. Provider and taker. But given the nature of art, I don't personally find this a satisfactory relationship. There are also easier ways to make money if that's your goal. Again... “Starving Artist”. So far I have kind of painted a picture of the art-consumer as a selfish, thrill seeking, short-attention-span-having, demanding ogre. There are of course people who don't fit that description. They approach things differently. Maybe they really do care for the person behind the art. They appreciate the craftsmanship and are selective in what they consume. Perhaps these are kindred spirits with whom you could have very meaningful conversations, based on the thoughts and feelings your art has invoked in them. Surely these people would be comparatively rare, just as is the case with friends in general (how many people would you truly consider a good or best friend?). I read an article that talked about so called Super Fans, the small percentage of fans who are responsible for the largest share in your economic success. The article suggests a number of tips and strategies you can employ to connect with them, but it basically boiled down to providing them with goodies and VIP opportunities. To me, that still smacks of the commercial attitude where you do everything in your power to please the consumer into sticking around. If your aim with me is just to keep me coming back to your stuff then I'm going to feel that and I'm not going to like it. So I like that idea of having an audience that you can engage with at a meaningful level. With the art as the means of establishing first contact. Where art is not something I make to satisfy your craving for something new and shiny, but where art is my way of communicating something to you that I cannot easily do with words, at least not initially. Where my sharing of art is my way of being vulnerable and risking the chance of getting hurt while also creating opportunities for people to respond in openness themselves. Maybe that is asking a lot, and maybe the artist (or is it just me?) is seeking things in the wrong places in an unhealthy way? Perhaps it is simply unrealistic to demand that kind of relationship with random people who are interested in your product. Especially in the context of social media. A smaller audience of real-life friends may be more suited to the purpose of sharing yourself, with or without the means of art as a catalyst for conversation. At the end of the day, it still comes down to this: you want your art to be seen/heard/experienced by other people. There are certain mechanics in place that will determine whether or not you achieve that goal. Part of that has to do with advertising: exposing people to your works and ideas. Actually, that's probably the biggest part of it. This requires effort and networking, and finding the right places to distribute your art. During that process you are going to encounter all sorts of people: consumerists, potentially dedicated appreciators and everything in between. Not everyone is going to “get” you, and yes, sometimes people will stomp on you. The question is: is what you create worth it? Is making the art worth it to begin with? Do you really have something to offer to the world, or are you simply adding to the already fast pool of throw-away stuff? This I ask myself too.

Hi Cyril, I checked out your tracks for The Shell game. The first two tracks are very nice, capturing that mood for water/beach environments. The other two were also well done. Despite being somewhat more aggressive the battle theme does have some elements that tie it back in with the others. Overall the OST very much feels like a video game soundtrack, so good job

I just posted my second try at replicating the feeling of the trance music I listened to growing up. Trance became my favorite genre around the time I started going to high school. Life for me was very difficult during those years due to bullying and general difficulties at school. Music was one of the things that helped me get through and has inspired me for years to come. I pushed myself to get this track beyond the level where I usually give up. Not only is it much longer than my usual stuff, it is also more varied. I'm very happy with the result and am afraid to tweak it further. Enjoy Yesterday is Gone (Moving On) - on Soundcloud Registered Soundcloud users can download this track for free.

Thank you kindly for your feedback :) Glad you enjoyed it. SS is a very dear track to me and has been ever since I first heard it some 20 years ago (!). A friend later introduced me to OCremix and one of the first tracks he shared was a remix of this same song. That just opened up a whole other world for me. Remixing allows us to put a fresh spin on old favorites. I'm glad you pointed out the thing about the melody sounding too close to the backing. I think this is especially so during the second part when the drums kick in. Part of the problem has to do with the VSTi I'm using. For some reason the volume of some in between notes drops considerably. It doesn't respond to velocity changes. I tried compensating using EQ at the risk of overamplifying the note next to it. I'll have to check if maybe the "variation" setting is causing the random velocity spikes/dips. The instrument itself is quite soft on its own and the volume is already set to 400% :D Thanks again!

I decided to import my older remix into FL Studio and see if I can make it better using proper VSTi's. The result is a more relaxing version which features some of Spitfire Audio LABS' free stuff (synth pads and frozen strings). It still needs some tweaking, and I'd like to get other people's opinion on the overall balance between the different sounds/layers (my ears are toast!). I'm definitely happy with the vibe of the piece though it would be nice if it were longer. Then again, longer might make it boring after a while. Things I'm already aware of: pads need smoother transitions and maybe some dynamics automation drum beat needs to be less robotic What do you think? Anything I'm missing? Previous version for reference:

Welcome to the forums Palas (and other recent joiners). I hope you'll find what you're looking for here. Looking forward to hearing your works.

Haha, I'm guilty of a lot of vague and artsy-ness myself (well, maybe not so much with my music these days, but definitely with my old photography and poetry when I was younger...). It is interesting to think of our natural surroundings and to come up with music that supposedly reflects things, like a feather or breathing. What makes us associate certain sounds with objects anyway? Sometimes I get a piano sheet with some vague title like "Sand Castles" and I ask myself: "How on earth do I get a sand castle from that!?" (Or something about summer...or rain or whatever) :D Maybe I'll give that a try myself!

I like it. It's kind of relaxing and light...like a feather I guess What inspired you to write this?

I also have fun childhood (er...teenhood?) memories playing this game and yes, the soundtrack was one of the things that made the game exceptionally memorable to me. SS Anubis and another track I can't remember the title of are ones I'm particularly fond of. Getting a real orchestra to play something like that sounds great, but I'm afraid Meteo Xavier is right to point out the obstacles to making that a reality. I know of at least one guy who did a cover of SS Anubis, using great samples, but I guess that's not quite what you were hoping for.

Hello fellow music lovers, I recently uploaded a new recording of one of my first piano compositions that I'd like to share. I initially tried to write a "battle" theme for a Javascript browser game I was creating for myself. I felt like it didn't sound battle-y enough so I ended up counting it as a personal "single". The title was a play on the concept of random battles that keep happening to players in classic RPG's. Now it refers to the many battles I have had with my chronic fatigue. I recorded the song in parts to my digital piano and made it pass through GPO5's Stage Grand to make it sound much better. Granted, the performance could be better (I have a better and full recording where I was less trying to control everything, but I'll keep that for later when I do more harmonization). Speaking of harmonization: I have a couple of ideas, but for the most part it is tricky for me to include more notes, given the speed of the song and the shortness of most right hand notes. Would this call for an additional instrument maybe to do more harmony or maybe a counter melody/2nd voice? I guess I'd prefer to keep this a piano solo that I can actually play. Anyway, here is the piece:

I know you guys don't appreciate midi, but I want to share this thing anyway! This isn't necessarily for constructive feedback. It's just something that I spontaneously created today. Some of you may be aware of the 21 days composition challenge hosted by Video Game Music Academy this month. I decided to participate, but not on a serious, competitive level. I'm just exploring what it is and using the Quest Logs to direct the creative process somewhat. Today I came up with a loopable track that's right out of the classic Game Boy era (without actually sounding like the GB mind you). I think it is somewhat inspired by Volley Fire and perhaps Power Rangers The Movie (both Game Boy games). I'm actually kind of happy with the result, even if it uses simple Musescore soundfonts. Its the process that counts for me right now. Anyway, here's the track. Maybe you'll find it catchy enough too (After the piano bit it will loop and repeat, just f.y.i)

Aww, that website won't allow Europeans (or just Dutch people) ;_; Anyway, my piano does have a recording function that allows me to record to the device itself, which is pretty neat. I can also save recordings to SD card and put them on the computer. Or record directly to something like Audacity. I don't have the Producer Edition of FL, no (couldn't convince my wife that it would be worth it getting that version :P). I am planning on upgrading eventually. It just takes some time to save up money Then again, I don't expect to get other instruments than my digital piano, so hmm... The thing is that it is annoyingly difficult for me to learn a song well enough to make a decent live recording. The piano part in this mix is just beyond my current skill level to actually play. Either way, without the better FL version I won't be able to do much with recordings in the first place. Ooooh. Yeah, sorry, my bad. I thought you had moved on to a different point by then, but we were still talking about humanization. Okay, yes I actually do make longer patterns for exactly the reason you mentioned. But in this case I did do some copy pasting. Changing velocities is easy enough, but shifting the notes... I find it difficult to make it so that it doesn't sound like the "player" is continuously off beat and doesn't know what he's doing. Especially with the piano it can sound cringe-worthy. But like I said, I'll just need to practice that more. Hmm, come to think of it. When moving notes slightly across the grid, should you kind of go by groups of notes, rather than individual notes? If I move individual notes from a legato 3 note arpeggio I have to keep them together close enough, right? Thanks for that updated link I still can't believe how different that can sound with humanization! Correct, at least with most of the instruments in the libraries that I use. I haven't come across something that uses CC11 yet.

Hey Timaeus, thanks so much for your time and very helpful advice! This is definitely something I can learn from. There's a few points I would like to interact with a little. This is something I've heard about a lot and I'd love to get better at making things sound more realistic. Ideally I would record myself playing the piano, but I don't have the recording function for FL studio, plus, I am not that skillful at performing yet. I'm using GPO5's piano patch. It sounds wonderful when I plug in my Casio Digital Piano and play "live", but not so much when you just input notes using the mouse. And I think that has to do with what you're describing: velocities and quantized rhythm. I did try to fix that a little by gently slowing down and speeding up the tempo, but I guess that's not enough. I'm definitely going to work on improving this, because I will be doing more piano stuff in the future (Lord willing). The humanized version of the song you shared is definitely much much better sounding. The link to Robotic Rhytm is actually the same as the Humanized one, so perhaps you can fix that so I can also compare Robotic Rhythm on its own? I think it makes sense. By copy/pasting you risk getting "hits" at points that may not work too well with what the other instruments are doing. So I have to keep listening to the whole before I determine when to sound the snare, rather than trust it will be alright if I just let the pattern repeat. This part was a little confusing. What did you mean by long patterns? Were you referring to the different "loops" of the main melody? The second part of that bullet point seems to be unrelated to that. Cinematic Strings does have a "Live Mode" where that randomness of real players is emaluate. That's something I'm trying to do, yes. Unfortunately my library that has the flute and oboe doesn't give me too much control over their dynamics, other than just lowering the main volume. The strings are better, but it is still tricky. I need more practice with that, and it would be nice to have an example of what a real sustained string sounds like. Frankly, the many switches that control volume can be confusing! CS2 has the modwheel (CC#1) control velocity for sustained notes. Then you have CC#7 to control the main volume (which would also impact non-sustained notes, which are controlled by the velocity parameter). I'll have to check if CC#11 is different and better to use than the other options. Yes I did Come to think of it, that wouldn't make sense to do if it was a live performance. I'd have to use velocities instead, as you say. That's about it Thanks again for your time and effort! I'll probably come back to this project to improve it. And if not, I'll keep your suggestions in mind for the next one!

Exciting stuff . Congrats to everyone involved for making it this far. I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys came up with. Especially the battle themes

I'm more or less in the same camp as Jorito. I do remixes mainly because they provide learning opportunities and make for very concrete projects. I love to give my favorite tracks from the olden days a sound update so I can enjoy listening to them even more. I always want to add a bit of a personal touch to remixes so they kind of feel like my own. For the moment I am also my own primary audience, but seeing how many other people love video-game music I figured I could just as well share my productions with them. I'm not in the pursuit of a career in music. I think the opening post did provide some good food for thought. Do I just want fanboys to drool over my remixes and disregard me and my original music? Am I just there to feed their nostalgia? Are the people who grew up with the same games and soundtracks that I grew up with still out there, looking for related remixes? Or are we dealing with a new, much younger audience who's first shot at a Final Fantasy game was FF13? How remixable are modern soundtracks anyway, what with them being already possibly fully orchestrated? In other words: is remixing worth your time and effort in the grand scheme of things? I suppose remixing could be someone's main selling point, but if you also want to be known for your original stuff, that's going to be tricky. When I was still on deviantArt I really wanted people to see and appreciate my original drawings and digital works. Problem was, I had built my audience around nature photography, so no one really cared about the things I really cared about... I think you'll find yourself in a similar situation when you do remixing and original works. PS: I also wrote a massive rant about the problem with consumerist audience, the distance there always is between composer and audience, the question of why you do the things you do to begin with and about TV talent shows and how we're all looking for that ego boost which basically looks like this: “Nice work!” , “Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. (feels loved)”. I was going to post the rant, but on second thought, I better not right now. :D *uses the Force to hit the Submit button*

Thanks for your detailed explanation. I'm not much of a social media person myself (at all) so I guess that explains why I'm missing a lot of what's going on. I'm starting to see that having more personal connections is probably more valuable than shooting for input from random passers-by. The reason for my being here is mostly because I've finally got up to a point that I feel somewhat confident enough to put my music out there for other people to hear and critique. That was a big hurdle to overcome in the first place. I haven't really thought about how I should go about connecting to the broader community. You're right about how I should be commenting on people's wips myself That's a good place to start. Kudos to you both (and others) who have stuck around all that time despite changes in how people interact with the site. I always felt OCremix had a bit of a professional flavor. I would hate to see it go down. Seeing how there is still a regular output of new mixes and albums I guess I don't have to worry about that yet. Thanks for your additional comments Gario. No need to apologize though I realize you're all doing this on a voluntary basis (right?) and we all have other things that rightfully demand our attention. I was just curious to learn a bit more about how things are run here, which helps with expectations. Like I said above, I always felt like this place had a professional vibe to it and got the impression that it was full of activity. I was a little confused and mildly shocked to find that it got so quiet around here. Especially with "recent" forum posts dating back to 2009 or 2011. That's why I was wondering if something bad had happened. Something that was best to be discussed in PM, rather than in public. I guess my questions were partially triggered by reading the post about the significance of forum feedback in improvement. So I don't know if this discussion belongs to that, or something else. I'm satisfied with the answers I got, but perhaps if you feel like it is worth exploring more then yeah, we can ask a mod to work some magic on it (Sorry for the double post. The previous one wouldn't let me write more :P)

*bump* It is about to fall off the first page of the forum and I'm still eagerly awaiting review. :) Just for my information: how active are the judges/mods these days? I can't shake the feeling that OCR is not the place it used to be, say 10 years ago. Did something happen besides people just moving on to other things? (feel free to PM me on that, rather than comment here).

It definitely has an interesting, strangely beautiful and relaxing vibe to it. Nice, original take on the source. I would love to see this on ocremix and making its way to my mp3 player :)

After many (sometimes frustrating) hours of work I have finally managed to complete this remix. I turned the second BGM from the classic Game Boy game 'Tennis' into an orchestral piece. This time I worked with FL Studio 20 and more professional sound libraries such as Cinematic Strings 2 and Garritan Personal Orchestra 5. I first expected to just copy/paste the notes from my MuseScore version, but quickly found that working with better packages was very inspirational. As a result I managed to create a much more interesting and vibrant composition than I could not have pulled off with MS. I made some important changes compared to the first version: Added a pizzicato intro that is supposed to suggest a tennis match with 2 points scored before a ace is landed. This is a reference to a feature in the game where the computer will often use a nearly unstoppable move (ace in tennis terms) that got me so angry as a kid playing this game. The title reflects this also: 'Ace on Me'. I replaced the vibraphone and harp with the piano, which just sounds much better. I added more voices and used different play styles for the strings sections. Thanks to this discussion I was able to overcome some problems with getting the volume right. I did my best to make the mix work well, but still need more practice with the mixer, EQ and all that stuff. I am open to your feedback, but also a bit reluctant to touch this project more. I would very much like to submit it to ocremix, so I guess if it is not up to standards yet, I may have to dive back into it. Alright, enough talk. To the mix: Original track: Previous version:

Alrighty, thanks for the additional comments, both of you. That helped in clearing some of the confusion. Random fact: I found out through that tone generator that and the use of some sub-bass that these low tones are generally what cause my ears to plug up u_u; I could hear up to 15.000 but sometimes I needed to turn my head to actually pick up the sound. Sometimes I worry that I destroyed my hearing by not heeding my grandmother's warning about listening to loud music on headphones

Okay, I see. Thanks for correcting me on that. Now I understand why nearly every computer and speaker system I ever had sounded so crappy. I always found myself EQ-ing the lower ends of the spectrum when listening to music 0_0; I don't know what brand of headphones I have, but when I did the research it seemed like it was very suitable for our purposes (no bass boosting or whatever). Random side note: I hadn't been in an electronics store for like a decade so I was in for quite a shock: drones, HD cameras and TV screens...And I learned that they're moving in a completely wireless direction for headphones, which I do not like! I rather tangle with the chords than having to deal with batteries all the time :D

PRYZM is right in that I don't understand the dB scale, and timaeus222 was right to catch my frustration with the discrepancies between devices that causes me to adjust mixes to a given device, only to learn that I completely ruined it for another device. My general inexperience and confusion makes me mash two problems together, so you both did me a service by seeing them as two seperate things. However, now I feel like I'm in way over my head with all this talk about mastering and whatnot. I guess this is where I am at now with my understanding: I think I understand that dB level refers to the signal strength and that something called "clipping" occurs when the signal goes over that 0. Not sure what clipping "looks" like yet, but I suppose I can Google that myself. At any rate, I see that the volume level of my device does not impact how high the dB meter will reach, so those are two seperate things. I may be confused about the difference or relation between Hertz and dB. I guess Hertz refers to the range of sound a human hear can pick up at all? Audacity has at least two options: enhance sound and normalize sound. Do I understand correctly that enhancing the sound would raise everything to the chosen value (including the already strong parts) wheras normalize only affects the parts that are subpar at that point? So I need the total output of tracks/channels (the Master) to hit 0dB but that doesn't imply that all individual channels need to hit 0? Its about the cumulative effect? As you may be able to tell I am at seriously n00b level at this point in my development. Like I said in my post about discouragement: it is difficult to know where to begin learning sometimes because stuff can be overwhelming. I found that a lot of online tutorials and articles assume a familiarity with key terms and concepts that I simply don't have as someone starting from scratch. Some concepts like Compression are not quite landing in my brain yet. Am I correctly understanding Compression now as something that reduces the gap between dynamic ranges? Something that may raise the hearability of a sound but not necesarily the power of the sound. That is to say, a whisper will still be a whisper, not a shout, only it will be a loud/hearable whisper? So many questions, so many things to be confused about :D

I knew I was getting myself into controversy once again. Okay, that is good to know. I'm nowhere near the point where I am producing music for consumption, so I'll have to keep this in mind for if or when I get there. At any rate, I suppose there is no way to ensure that a song will sound good for every person on any device, so that is not a goal to pursue to begin with. Now that I think about it, it does make perfect sense to start with my own relative perception. That's an interesting approach. I quickly Googled it and found some online tone generator that helped explain the differences between white, brown and pink noise (a bonus is that I now have a name for that awful sound I hear when my soundcard "crashes"... its called white noise, and I hate it :P). -9 and -6 would be approaching the "yellow" part on the Db meter, correct? I noticed that my recently bought trance tracks are all maxing out into the red area and I generally find that uncomfortable. Between -6 en -4 is best for me. I've been thinking about using an existing song as a reference. Your approach makes enough sense. However, would I be at risk of "blowing up" speakers by turning up the knob of the hardware without adjusting the internal volume? My Trust speakers may need to go all the way up to 75% to sound decent with my comfortable laptop level and at that point they start cracking somewhat. I can hear them produce white noise when no sound is going through (is that normal?). I actually suspect I "blew them up" (not in a definite sense) before, and maybe I've been doing that consistently with other devices because of the hearing thing. Oops! Thanks everyone, for your answers! I think I know what to do now.

Hi there, so I'm having a bit of a problem with mixing which is worsened by the fact that volume levels are not consistent across the devices that I use. Basically this is usually what happens: I start working on a mix on my laptop. Initially I just need to get the right notes in my project file, but soon enough I need to playback the sound to see if what I'm doing is working. At that point the crappy onboard speakers are no good because they lack bass. To get to a semi-workable level I need to set the volume to 40. To get a more complete picture I then go to my headphones, but level 40 would destroy me so I have to tune it back down to like 8 for it to be comfortable. Alternatively, I could use my Trust speakers, but they may or may not be somewhat broken (it is hard to tell because I'm so used to the sound). I have no idea what a normal volume level for that thing would be. I sometimes have to turn the dial way over 50%, while I used to get by with just 25% (though maybe I was compensating with the computer volume control). Yet another alternative is hooking up an external device that lets me connect to my Sharp stereo system. But even at volume level 12 (which is where purchased music starts to sound properly loud for me but too loud for my wife), the volume is just too low. Using my mp3-player headphones I can barely hear my mixes at 50%. With all these relative values and different results between devices I'm having trouble knowing if what I'm doing is actually "right". Add to that the fact that my ears may plug up from internal pressure and now I can't tell anything is balanced or loud enough. Is there a formula or a way to kind of figure out what the "absolute" volume output is relative to these different devices? So that I may have confidence that what I produce is still loud or not loud, irrespective of how a given speaker or headset presents it? Does this tie in to being able to read the Db meters on mixer channels? At this point I suspect my monitor headphones produce the most realistic and best signal, but working with them on quickly wears me down and ruins my hearing.