I just started getting into Renoise and tracking and I’m really digging it. It would be great if some of the wise ones here could possibly give me a few pointers about my amateur efforts so far. I finally figured out how to get it onto youtube…
I’ve having a lot of trouble getting levels correct, and it seems that even though my Renoise set is maxing out it still has no chance compete with other Renoise tracks on youtube that look to be metering much more comfortably. Is this because Renoise has a relatively low maximum ceiling and these guys are upping the volume in a program after they export the track from Renoise? Or astute use of compression and maximizers on individual audio tracks? There must be something pretty major I’m missing here. It’s an ordeal too because I think my efforts to try and make the volume more in line with other tracks out there are actually damaging the quality. You can probably hear it and get a better idea.
I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘wise one’ and I am certainly not a chip-tune officianado by any means, however: I really enjoyed these tracks and in my opinion you have an excellent ear for melody and all the parts sound very complimentary. I was particularly impressed with the “danger: candy inside” track and found it very pleasant to listen to (great leads and bass!). My only suggestion would be a little subtle eq / filtering on the individual parts to give them a touch more definition and allow them to sit in their own frequency range a bit more. I’m aware you can’t mess around too much though or you start to lose that 8-bit sound.
On the output / levels side, I pretty much use auto-clipping when I render a song to disk and then do the post-tweaking stuff in an external audio / sample editor. I’ve just started using izoptope Ozone 4, which you can download a free, fully functional 10 day demo of, and this provides a one-stop mastering suite with plenty of presets for the uninitiated (i.e. myself!) which you can then tweak to suit each track. Probably worth waiting until you have a few finished tracks before installing it though, so you can process a batch of them before the 10 days are up.
Anyway, great stuff so far and nice to see someone else taking an interest in the song forum.
Well thank you very much for weighing in Rex, I sure do appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to listen and I definitely think your advice is good. Some eq would go a long way especially since the mix is pretty “full on” and there are parts that are fighting for the same frequency range.
Ozone 4 sounds pretty handy, I will check that out. If there’s a one-stop solution to putting a pleasant sheen on the track and getting the level competitive without jarring then I’m there!