Here;s some tracks which I had sitting around in a very rough form. After reading up a bit on this forum and getting some good advice from a kind forum member, I tried to apply some of what I learned to these. They are by no means perfect, but they show they style I’m going for and where I’m at technically. I’m a fan of electronic and jazz, and I’m trying to bring them together in my tracks. As per before, all comments, tips, criticism welcome. Thanks again.
Really digging the first and last tracks!
The first one really reminds me of something, though I can’t put my finger on it. I think it’s the bassline, maybe a plaid or bjork track? I dunno. Anyway, that track has tons of potential. I think the composition is great as it is, and I wouldn’t add any more “music”. What you should work on is getting more textural and timbral variation into the bass and drum parts, particularly at the beginning and end of the song. Keep this very subtle though, I think you should avoid overbaked distortion and filter sweeps. I think you can add lots to the atmosphere of the track by adding some send tracks to take care of some high passed reverb, and some very quiet echoes in strategic places. Make a copy of the track to try things out on. Try very low volume send tracks using some devices like the cabinet simulator, multitap-delay (try bandpassed and highpassed delay loops).
The bass at the start and the end could be made a little richer sounding, you could use very subtle chorus, a little cabinet simulator. Something I do is render multiple copies of a track with slightly different effects and effect automation, though this may be a little tedious.
Everything sits very nicely once those piano/organ chords come in.
The drums are a little too present in the mix I think, I think for this track the musical parts should take precedence for the listener, but that’s just an opinion.
If you want the drums to stay where they are in the mix, though, I would try sidechaining the bass a bit to give that kick the room it needs. Try using a signal follower set to follow the low freqs of the kick (I think there’s a preset called follow kick) use that to either duck the volume of the bass track or raise the cutoff on a highpass filter to make room enough for the kick’s lows, you can do this without noticeably taking away from the fullness of the bass.
yeah maybe I went a little overboard there! Learn to use send tracks. They are the ones after the master track, and you can have as many as you like. Put a send device on the track you want to effect and set it to send to the send track you want to use. Put effects on the send track. You can use “keep” signal on the send device and play with the volumes of the send and original tracks, in this way you have a “dry - wet” control for an entire effects chain!You can also put as many send devices sending to as many send tracks as you want. AND you can put send devices on send tracks. Superb no?
Some other things I said. Highpassed reverb = just reverb with a HP filter before or after it. Multitap delay and delay loops; you can set the delay so that it is passed through a filter every time it echoes, play around with the device to see how this works.
For the “sidechaining”: put a signal follower on the kick drum track and set it to control a parameter on an effect on the bass track, I sugested a highpass filter, which lets frequencies above a certain threshold through; you can set it low enough to let all of the bass through. Set the signal follower so that the minimum value has a low cutoff and the maximum value raises the cutoff; you’ll have to play with the sensitivity and decay, and lookahead values to get it sounding nice.
AWESOME. Thanks again. I’ve got lots of research and playing around to do now!
What do people think of the sound I’m going for? I’ve been experimenting with fusing electronic and jazz a bit. It’s pretty ambitious because I’m not a ‘real’ musician.
Really nice tracks. You have found great mid sounds, I like the pianos and strings! I am a newbie in mixing, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But the last one might be too boomy for average speakers (too much bass). And watch out for making drums too loud (avoid too much peaks in rendered file). Of course, this is a matter of taste too.
Burital: I’m glad you like it. I want to create tunes which have atmosphere and I feel like that one is getting closer to my goal.
tomij7: thanks again. Yeah, I think it sounds more complete with some mid-range sounds in there. I’ll try to keep balancing my tracks so they’re full but not crowded (if that makes sense!).
I’m finding it really hard to get a mix that suits all situations. The tracks sound VERY different from Renoise to my stereo/headphones to Winamp to SoundCloud.
I’m finding the low frequency sounds particularly hard to get right, because (obviously) it sounds so different through my headphones and through my stereo. I try to go for a middle ground but it doesn’t always work out.
