Malcos

Lol, yeah kinda takes the piss me just talking about it. Here are some sound examples of what kinds of things I have so far. I just slapped the preset I made on most of these, although I made them tweakable to suit the needs of any song: 'Aphex' type exciter This song is called 'In Space', a song I did a few years ago. I've put the exciter in between the mixer and the mastering combi for best results imo. Exciter kicks in at 0.14, (not that I needed to tell you that). Bass boost with exciter Came up with my own type of exciter here, with added bass saturation as well to balance things out. Not that this song needed any more bass. Today's example A sample of a song I did today, had to add the exciter as well! Kicks in at 6 seconds, leaves at 18 seconds. This is more realistic of how it would actually be used. Drum kits Just layered factory soundbank samples with some processing all wrapped up in combis. Rexstutterer Ok so basically this uses a delay to hold the sample for a short period of time. It's better to program the automation for the 'hold' button on the sequencer otherwise it's very tricky to get the timing exact. This is most of what I've got so far!

Ok I've made about 4 different types of exciter now. I'll be tweaking them over the next few weeks and making a lot more combis. I can see why people use these a lot - after trying them out on some old songs, taking it off makes the whole thing sound so flat! Definitely best used subtly though.

I used to have massive problems with eq, compressors etc until I stopped overusing them. Similar to what Tensei-San said, depending on the style or even instrument, you may not need to use any eq at all, perhaps just add a little reverb and that's it. I hardly boost with eq, most of it is cutting. As you keep developing your ear, you will find that some parts will need just a touch of a particular effect. My mixing is ok now, but it has taken me years, I would say don't get disheartened and keep practising.

The sound of this is great, and I like the tone. However, the playing style really makes it sound as if it is part of a larger arrangement with drums and bass. It's almost as if you made a complete band song, then simply soloed out the guitar parts. You also have quite a bit of distortion going on in the louder sections of the song. I would say either flesh this out with some other instruments or do another more acoustic sounding arrangement, ie something that doesn't sound as rigid. What is here sounds very good, needs more. NO

The piano intro could really have done with some sustain. As Liontamer said there is a lot of empty space here, partly to do with the eq, but more to do with the arrangement. The timing is very off, and the bass is very fragmented. The bass and the low piano parts also get in each others way a lot, which makes it all sound quite muddy and undefined. I think I know what the remixer was was going for, however the execution needs a lot more work. NO

I definitely think we should go the gather and then release route. We could then have it on places like combinator HQ (when it comes back). What should the refill be called? 'Fun machines' sounds a bit lame to me. I'll check out your combi later on today Avaris. EDIT: Checked it out, very nice on marc strings! It really intensified them and made them a lot thicker. Perhaps you could make one of the combi buttons take off the reverb? After hearing that, I'm gonna start on some combis today!

Yeah, what I want to do though is go more for the exciter/enhancer thing, although most of those include a compressor in the processing chain (by mixing a compressed version of the 'enhanced' signal into the original one). I'll experiment and see what I can come up with, although I don't think it will be possible to approximate any commercial compressor, Reasons ones are already great; although I have already built a couple of combis that are specific effects that use compression as the main component It will be a big challenge for me, and lot of fun along the way hopefully. Avaris, if you could build some combis for the refill that would be really kool (if you'd like to), you've got some great ideas there. However, a harmonizer in Reason?! I can't even begin to image the amount of work that would have to go into that. Getting to select the right key, etc. Although you could do it with multiple matrixes, and you could tune with the vocoder through a Malstrom... Hmm this has got me thinking about the possibilities! I'll need to do research as I do this and see what other types of audio processing units are out there.

Round 2 now active!

I had this idea the other day, of making a refill of combinators that processed sound in different ways, as well as coming up with some useful instrument combinators. One of the main things I'm thinking of doing is making some exciters/sonic enhancers. I'll base the audio processing on real-life exciters/enhancers and how they manipulate the sound. This will be a massive challenge for me and I hope I can complete it! I'm looking to finish in mid-late August, and I'm just in the planning stages now. Does anyone have any other ideas of audio processing units that could be built with the combinator?

Round 2 starts Friday! Any ideas of how we can get this some more attention? I don't want to really post it in the competitions forum because technically it isn't a competition...

The sources were very short indeed, and this arrangement blends them all nicely. The guitar had a pleasant tone to it, although I found it too stiffly quantised, and so because of that it sounded somewhat unnatural. The beat that came in 0.44-0.59 with the guitar had a nice groove and pulled me in. Strings at 1.59 did sound very fake indeed, perhaps because of the reverb used on them? I think this does need some more tweaking to get it to sound better, but this was not far off the bar for me. NO (Good candidate for resubmission)

It is definitely worth it!

Yeah, even I thought my name was unique on the web, but as eternal zero said, you can never really have a nick that is 100% yours. You can always do what I do and put 'the' before your nick, ie 'themalcos'. It is funny when there is another user with your name on some weird forum.

I do agree with Zircon on the harshness of the melodic elements, particularly in the first section of the song before around 1.10. The energy, sound choice and arrangement are definitely a pass for me, however I would like to see the mixing/eq given some more attention because to me it is enough of an issue not to pass it at this time. NO (please please resub)

Rofl! Yeah you're right, I did say I'd make a post about it, I did somewhere. The thing is, I learnt a lot from James Bernard and Peff at the conference. I thought I knew a lot about reason, but there is MUCH more I have to learn, particularly as I'm not that great with synth programming yet. James Bernard talked us through mastering, and about the 'small compression' method, whereby instead of making a compressor an insert, you make it a send effect, so that you have the compressed signal playing alongside the uncompressed signal. That's how a lot of hip hop is mixed these days. I'd already heard of small compression, but the way he explained it was very good. He has a preset for this in his multiband mastering refill which you can get from the propellerheads website. He will soon release another version which uses the stereo wideners instead of the vocoders for splitting the frequencies, as the vocoders colour the sound somewhat. Peff talked us through advanced combinator programming, and about control voltages that you can use for modulation. His lecture made me realise that not all elements of the song need to be 100% played in, and a mix of performace and pre-programming can be really fun. He showed us a variety of techniques on the combinator. I've made a combinator with some help from his book, which I bought after the conference. It automatically slices up a rex loop based on delays and changing the start points so basically you can come up with new variations on the loop simply by changing some values on the machines you have set up. There is a version of this in the song I did for the reason competition, although I have recently made a slightly improved version. The conference definitely made me think more about sound design, and programming using the combinator. I didn't know that you could instantly copy any sequencer track or device by dragging it while holding ctrl, although you must manually cable it afterwards. Create a subtractor, flip it, then connect the 'LFO1' output to the 'Gate' input. That alone opens up many creative possibilities.

First round is over! I've received 2 new unfinished songs. Round 2 starts soon. Anything we can do differently for the next round?

Ooh, the first round will be finished tomorrow! Get your rns files in, and send your unfinished ones too, because there are none in the queue at the moment...

Whew, much has been said here, and I don't really have anything new to add to the debate, other than to state my vote. As you know, if I can't hear the source first time then I'm inclined to think that it is somewhat too liberal. I'm not too familiar with this particular soundtrack, and it seems that even those who are very familiar with it, still can't hear the ties to the source. This is a great piece of music, but I do believe that it is somewhat outside of some of OCR's guidelines. NO

This does sound like a sonic upgrade (in some ways) from the original. The drums have a boost on the kick that sounds unique, however the choir sound sounded too think, whilst other sounds that were playing the lead were quite thin and somewhat in the background. The melody/lead parts were almost identical to the original, as was the drum beat throughout. For this to be OCR standard, there would have to be more original material added. The sample that comes in at 3.21 and lasts until 3.41 sounded very unclear and muddied the track, and the ending was rough around the edges. This has some potential, but needs a lot of work. This mix needs more re-arrangement, and some work on the mixing/eq side of things. NO

Wooo, Sir Nuts, this is sweet!!! It clips, but I'll let you off this time . I've edited the first post so any files submitted will be added there, as they are submitted.

I have a multiband compressor combinator! Just have to ask man. www.malcos.co.uk/Multiband_Compressor.cmb Or if you want something a little louder, I came up with this, although it's not tweakable apart from the maximiser module: www.malcos.co.uk/SuperLOUDmaster.cmb

I've never thought about it that way, but yeah I suppose that is what makes some music sell well, because it will even sound powerful on shitty speakers! It makes me laugh when someone has a weak system, cranks up the volume to stupidity and then says to me ''Oh wow, the bass!'' Er no, it's just distortion. Can you not hear the speaker flapping about like a noisy fart?!

Damn, I had no idea so many people on OCR were doing music degrees! I've got City and Guild levels 1-3 in Sound Engineering. That probably won't mean anything to anyone outside the UK though.

Thanks, the last one was particularly good.

Yeah I find it very strange that DVD's have such extreme dynamics compared to cds. You don't see movie studios getting into this type of compression loudness war. Hopefully things will be changing soon. It's all about consumer power.