Rising Phoenix - a long time beat 78 bpm - a beat for poets

http://soundcloud.com/now-in-stereo-sound/rising-phoenix-a-long-time-beat-78-bpm-free-to-download

Tasty sound! Good choice of the samples and instruments. In my opinion snare is too punchy. If you make it a little softer, it will better blend with general sound.

Thank you for your comments :0)

maybe a bit of compression on the snare would soften the blow?

I have finished this one and will take your thoughts into consideration for the next beat I produce :0)

Why not? It is your creative choice. Usualy I add compression for more punchy snare sound, but if you tune the setting it can add some softness. Maybe this setting for native Compressor can help:

Sometimes adding few Compressors can have interesting results.

Good luck in your work!

Thank you kindly

Why is the snare panned hard to the right? It might cool on speakers, but not on headphones …also as there’s no “counterweight”, the hats sound (maybe illusion because of the snare) a bit on the left, but not enough to compensate.

its the panning of the original sample, should I hard center a snare sound?

It is an artistic descision. The snare - it is one very dominant part of the whole concept of the rhythm in this tune. Balance is another concept I like to embrace - also with panning, if something puts a heavy load on one side, some counterweight needs to be on the other as to not “skew” the feeling the tune is bringing. This “skewing” can be a nice effect if used deliberately, though I find it is one considerate move in regard of the listener to at least maintain some sort of balance on the long run, i.e. bringing back the balanced feel after some voyages to the left or right. Well…this effect depends, sometime I might find pretty hard panned stuff throughout the song can work out, even with headphones, but this heavy snare panned in this way makes the tune a bit like the fucking tower of pisa for me. The snare is the loudest component in the tune without any similliar component in terms of punch, volume, and spectral properties, so shifting it to the side will make the skewing effect most heavy. Maybe really try to use it center-panned, and then add some depth on both sides equally i.e. by adding subtle reverb or so, in case centering/mono’ing it makes it sound too plain. But this is just my personal preference. Would even be better for me if it changed…left, right, left, right, to make the pisa tower wiggle fancy but at least not loom to fall over…

Anecdote: I once knew hip-hop-heads worshipping aggressive, direct sounding snares as they “shot right through the middle of the head”, and who liked turning up headphone volumes to embrace this effect…Yo! From the side is not directly through the forehead!

Another stuff: I love heritage music (you seem to use lots of cool stuff for your sampling in your tunes, heavy respect for digging that great stuff up!!), but very often recording engineers of that time just had that simple record player with two speakers somewhere in the room setup in mind, and listening via headphones makes it sound very…strenuous, often having instruments panned to the hard left or right. So you’d need some plugin to ease headphone listening if you scan through such stuff for longer periods (yeah, there are special processor plugins to ease listening with headphones!). Think about consumers nowadays running through downtown with their heavy headphones on and nodding to the music that comes from their cellphone. I bet they will appreciate if the shit comes easy through their earwarmers!

Wow you have some great analogies, your reply was educational and also made me giggle, thanks for your input, I will try and be more careful not to topple over peoples brains in future :0)