New Skies -- chill electro jam

[ectogemia]

link (wip -- much left to be written)

edit: Updated a bit. Looks like it's going to end up being collab with the artist formerly known as chthonic, so get amp'd.

--

Man, it's been a while since I've posted anything in here, eh?

School has been quite nasty.

In lieu of studying for a major exam tomorrow, I decided to write some music because it's just been entirely too long.

Here's what I came up with over the past couple or three hours.

All sounds were designed from scratch except for the lead at the end I've come a long way with sound design. You'll see the difference if you compare this to any of my previous soundcloud mixes.

The beginning needs quite a bit of fine-tuning and processing, but the rest is as it will remain. I'll be adding quite a bit more after the solo.

Hope you like

Critiques??

[ectogemia]

Bumped because it's updated and no one critiqued it, waaaaaaahh.

[Phonetic Hero]

That's because everyone's mad at you for ditching them to go hang out with Ben Briggs

Nice stuff though, although idk if I'd call it chill, since it makes me want to get up and do jumping jacks or punch dance or something. Write more so I can download more than 2 minutes of sexy time

[ectogemia]

that's because everyone's mad at you for ditching them to go hang out with ben briggs

too-shay.

[Ryan Jobson]

OK, first things first, I consider myself to be rather amateurish when it comes to production, so you should take my comments and suggestions with a grain of salt.

I liked this one a lot. I also think you should finish this. Sexy time is good. My only critiques or suggestions would be to add another tighter / higher hihat sound later on to keep things interesting. I liked your stutter work on the kick and the percussion, but you should consider adding some effects to the snare as well. I like the snare a lot and it would sound great if you could incorporate some reversed snare (like copy your snare, put it in another channel, reverse it, and stick it just before one of your snare hits), or stereo delay and stutter as well. Seems like you could glitch it up a bit more. Other than that, fantastic job - love the melody.

I also have a few questions for you myself which are a) what DAW do you use are you using only your DAWs samples / instruments, or are you using any nice VSTs c) you be layering your kick / snare / hihat? Or do you just have really great samples?

I ask because I like the sounds, and when I listen to my music I get the impression it's thinner than yours. I like to learn all the time

Anyway I better get back to work, just realized I've taken a suuuuper long lunchbreak! Curse you OCR!!! (not really <3)

~Syllix

[ectogemia]

OK, first things first, I consider myself to be rather amateurish when it comes to production, so you should take my comments and suggestions with a grain of salt.

I liked this one a lot. I also think you should finish this. Sexy time is good. My only critiques or suggestions would be to add another tighter / higher hihat sound later on to keep things interesting. I liked your stutter work on the kick and the percussion, but you should consider adding some effects to the snare as well. I like the snare a lot and it would sound great if you could incorporate some reversed snare (like copy your snare, put it in another channel, reverse it, and stick it just before one of your snare hits), or stereo delay and stutter as well. Seems like you could glitch it up a bit more. Other than that, fantastic job - love the melody.

I also have a few questions for you myself which are a) what DAW do you use are you using only your DAWs samples / instruments, or are you using any nice VSTs c) you be layering your kick / snare / hihat? Or do you just have really great samples?

I ask because I like the sounds, and when I listen to my music I get the impression it's thinner than yours. I like to learn all the time

Anyway I better get back to work, just realized I've taken a suuuuper long lunchbreak! Curse you OCR!!! (not really <3)

~Syllix

Wooo, glad you like it! I appreciate the thorough critique.

I use FL Studio 9. I rarely use the native samples, and this particular mix has none. I actually got a lot of my samples from halc & chthonic around the time I met them earlier this year. Prior to that, I only had a few samples, as in 15 GB or so , from a friend of mine. It absolutely helps to have a huge library of percussive sounds to choose from, but what's equally important is both your drum programming/sequencing and your processing. You have to compress, EQ, and reverb properly, or you will inevitably have a thin result.

Off-hand, I'm not sure if I layered any of the percussion, but that's something I routinely do, but not every time I write something. If I remember correctly, I don't think I layered anything, but if you check out this, just about all of the percussion is layered minus the open hat later in the mix.

Let me know if you also have FL Studio. If so, I could just send you the project file with the samples in a .zip or something and you could look around what I have in there to answer all of your questions. Otherwise, I'll answer everything if you don't have FL

The only x-factor is that I use Zebra2 extensively as my go to synth, so if you don't have that, none of the patches I designed will play (and I didn't design the lead, zircon did -- everything else was me).

[Ryan Jobson]

I use Logic Pro 9. I wanted to go beyond just learning the basics of synthesis before I put any money into some better VSTs like Omnisphere or Massive or Kontakt or any of that stuff. If you don't know how to use the tools, what's the point right? But I do think that having them helps a lot - I have to spend a lot of time working on just one synth track to get the sound I want, and I usually end up wasting space with multiple tracks and layering to get a "decent" sound, when probably one single synth track from a very good VST would be better.

<Sidenote>

Hmmm, randomly I have an idea to start a thread, a VERY detailed thread about how I personally use a compressor and EQ on any given kick / snare / what have you, and then hear back from the community if I'm using them correctly or not, or if I could do something to make them sound better, also it would be great for others to learn from as well.

</Sidenote>

I really lack in the sample department though. I don't have ANY kicks, hats, snares, or any percussive sounds for that matter. I also am missing a lot of stuff from Logic for some reason and I don't have as many drum samples in the EXS or Ultrabeat as others do.

The one thing I have is a few folders of my own "found sounds" that I've sculpted to sound like percussive samples, or just the raw sound itself. My last field recording session was at an old industrial train yard - got some great stuff there

I have watched a few tuts on Zebra2 - I think it is worth getting from the looks of it. Anyway, you don't really have to answer everything. This thread is about your song, not me haha. I appreciate it though. Apologies for being all over the board, that's kind of how my mind works.

~Syllix

[ectogemia]

I use Logic Pro 9. I wanted to go beyond just learning the basics of synthesis before I put any money into some better VSTs like Omnisphere or Massive or Kontakt or any of that stuff. If you don't know how to use the tools, what's the point right? But I do think that having them helps a lot - I have to spend a lot of time working on just one synth track to get the sound I want, and I usually end up wasting space with multiple tracks and layering to get a "decent" sound, when probably one single synth track from a very good VST would be better.

<Sidenote>

Hmmm, randomly I have an idea to start a thread, a VERY detailed thread about how I personally use a compressor and EQ on any given kick / snare / what have you, and then hear back from the community if I'm using them correctly or not, or if I could do something to make them sound better, also it would be great for others to learn from as well.

</Sidenote>

I really lack in the sample department though. I don't have ANY kicks, hats, snares, or any percussive sounds for that matter. I also am missing a lot of stuff from Logic for some reason and I don't have as many drum samples in the EXS or Ultrabeat as others do.

The one thing I have is a few folders of my own "found sounds" that I've sculpted to sound like percussive samples, or just the raw sound itself. My last field recording session was at an old industrial train yard - got some great stuff there

I have watched a few tuts on Zebra2 - I think it is worth getting from the looks of it. Anyway, you don't really have to answer everything. This thread is about your song, not me haha. I appreciate it though. Apologies for being all over the board, that's kind of how my mind works.

~Syllix

My mind works the same way

I actually sucked with sound design until I got zebra. I figured that I knew I was committed to music as a lifelong hobby, so why not get a pro tool to inspire me to make the best sounds possible even during the beginning of the learning process? It worked I love taking a few hours to just explore and get more and more familiar with how synths work.

Zebra is also nice because you can create as many layers as you'll ever need all within a single patch, and it's VERYVERYVERY organized. Massive is a big clusterfuck of options. Zebra hides all of the options/controllers you aren't using and only shows those you chose in the patch creation process. So instead of 15 panels of many knobs, you get 3 or 4. Very clean, very quick workflow.

Unless you're making a lot of ambient or atmospheric, you need to get some samples. I'd recommend the Vengeance series as long as you aren't writing anything with an acoustic kit. It's excellent for just about any electronic music purpose.