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for me it’s difficult to give an opinion just from listening to only one song especially if the person who has made it is fairly new to creating (electronic) music. you either don’t know in which direction you want to go with your music or if you do you don’t have the experience to accomplish it. i assume that you’re still in an experimenting phase so i can only encourage you to continue, make yourself familiar with Renoise, create a bunch of songs and see where it takes you. i don’t know if mixing and mastering should be your first concern tho.
i personally think that the song is okay, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. i would have used different instruments, maybe more acoustic/natrual sounding ones. this would probably get rid of some of the “buzz” you’re talking about. you have to be careful when you use simple wave forms like sine, triangle, square or saw because they have specific characteristics and they can be quite overwhelming if you use them wrong. compressed or distorted drums can also give a very harsh sound.
the melody is a little bit unusual but why not, i wouldn’t object to it right away.
your song reminds me of a certain type of game soundtrack and an anime soundtrack i’ve listened to a few years ago. maybe you could explore this aspect of your music further?
i’m looking forward to more of your songs.
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You say your songs buzzes and lacks depth and i think the first thing you should look at is filters. You should put a filter on most tracks to prevent them from interupting with other sounds in your mix.
You may also try to use a gate which can be used to cut sounds, either cut straight off or smoothly, when the sound goes below the defined volume. It’s very good when you need ‘quick’ sounds.
The lack of depth may also improve with the right reverbs and delays. I mainly use Renoise’s own effects, but lately i have grown fond to a VST called “Ambience” for reverbs, which can be dl for free.
I couldn’t find your thread in the help section, but here is how you use vst’s:
Go to Preferences in the Edit menu in Renoise>push the bottom left button ‘plug/misc’>you see at the top it says VST Plugins, push ‘browse’ and go to the directory where the plugin is installed>push ‘rescan’>now you can find it at the bottom of your Track DSPs menu and use it as any other effect.
I use C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins as my VST folder, most free plugins are one .dll file, then i just download and drop in that folder.
If this doesn’t answer your question i don’t know.
general advice: when you are done loading your samples, switch the top view to the Spectrum. see what your track is doing, frequency-wise. you’ll probably have a bunch of low-frequency-stuff going on that you don’t need. lots of sounds might sound high up but carry other stuff down the bottom. what i always do is just put a low-cut filter on everything. even kickdrums and bass, but just a little bit on those because you want those low-ends. solo sounds to hear them for what they really are, smack on a filter with Butterworth 8n, HP, and 0,13khz. that will be fine for most sounds. in fact, save that as a preset. also, save a preset at 0,03khz for stuff you want to have low-end. try how far you can move the filter up while still retaining the original sound. this will give your song more space for more sounds.
when stuff does not sound ‘roomy’ or ‘airy’ enough, try a reverb, a chorus, a phaser, a stereo enhancer or just plain panning to space things out a bit. watch the Pulse Meter to see if it is working.
in the end, just keep at it, keep reading tips and advice, try out stuff, and you’ll develop a feeling for it and get better at it. practice makes perfect. don’t give up, and enjoy.
good luck.
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I’ve recently gone back and edited songs using this advice. It makes all the difference in the world! Sounds much better now.
I listened to the first two songs so far, and I wish I had this kind of skill and creativity starting out, especially since these two tracks sound like they were conceived ‘outside the box’. I got to get outside the box as in a lot of what i do its just build patterns and repeat them and go back later to hack at them lol looking forward to hearing more!
First of all:
You’re off to a great start!
There’s a great sense of fun and mischief in what you’ve uploaded so far, certainly not dull.
I get the impression you want to keep alot of your sounds “clean and bright and synthetic sounding”, and individually the instruments you are using are good. It’s when they mix, that having many spectrally rich sounds can begin to have problems. Your ears are your first port of call here, you should think about what sounds complement one another, which ones seem to cut across one another or detract from the enjoyment of the others. Filtering and EQing are good ways to do this to start, remember also that you can alternately pan sounds that clash to some extent.
You can automate just about everything too, so a filter needn’t reign in a sound all the time, just when you want it
One thing you should think about is your use of reverb, Try moving the reverb part of your effects chains onto send tracks, or even just to a quick check by killing the dry level, to see what the reverb alone is contributing to the overall mix of frequencies. Reverb and delay potentially adds lots of frequencies back into the mix, so you should almost consider them instruments in their own right. If you put reverbs onto send tracks you can have better control their spectra by using filters, EQs etc. Using sends used to scare me a little, (seemed like a lot of effort or something?) but they give you a lot of freedom and are actually a great way to keep things organised and let you hear what the wet sound is like on its own.
Play around with effects and sends, they are important in whatever capacity you use them.
Another thing I would recommend is playing with the tuning of your instruments a little, just a little. This can go a long way towards helping competing instruments blend a bit better. Play with dynamics, the loudness and panning of individual notes.
Some of your simpler waveforms, squares and saws, are a little sharp and present for sustained listening, attenuate some of those higher frequencies.
There are endless ways to use the signal follower device to give precedence to one instrument when it needs it, not just via compression, but via EQ, controlling reverb levels, dry/wet of various effects and other things.
Thanks for your in depth response.I have been hesitant to start using send tracks because I fear them! Haha but I’m definitely going to start experimenting more now that I feel a lot more comfortable with the program. Thanks for the instructive and direct feedback!
Thank you so much! I definitely feel like I like to make the music that I want to listen to, that I haven’t heard before. Thanks for the positive feedback.