Q: What do you do, when you need that snare or kick drum to become louder?
A1: Normalize the sample (bring the volume to the maximum level without distortion)
A2: Duplicate the sample. Renoise will then play the sample twice as loud
A3: Turn up the track volume by use of a gainer
It’s not always possible to (A1) - the sample might already be at it’s top level. Also, (A3) might have some side effects if other sounds are used in the same track, etc… Which leaves us with (A2), which also happen to be an age-old tracker trick: simply copy/paste the note column for instant (sample)volume gratification :: and beware of blown speakers ::
to prevent clipping, put a maximizer on your master with no boost, and maximum threshold… the slower the release, the louder it will seem like the loud sound was. PSYCHOACOUSTICS FTW
Agreed. Even though I meant a loud sound in the literal sense, if your speakers are precious to you, messing around with dynamics is the obvious next step after having created an impossibly loud signal with the duplicate sample trick
Won’t work if the sound is already as loud as possible, normalized/maximized volume and all.
The same goes for a compressor or gainer - it can’t pinpoint individual sounds.
In the first pattern, the bassdrum is playing a at full volume
In the second pattern, the deep kick part of the bassdrum volume is tripled.
I’ve added a huge big reverb which drown everything and avoid blow speakers
But wait just a second… so this means i can duplicate a kickdrum a million times and when I press play I will set off a nuclear bomb and blow up my speakers? ever heard of the digital zero?
…simply doubling samples wont make the sound louder in all infinity since they also modulate each other. Eventually the sound will hit the ceiling and clip/distort.
if you want your 0db to sound louder than your previous 0db:
get a maximizer / limiter on the master, set the ceiling to 0db and crank the shit out of the threshold.
if you want your sound to be louder coming from your speakers: insert what maskin said
adding and multipying samples on several tracks is seriously silly btw.
all you do is creating redundancy which is absolutely superflous.
Hehe Well, I never said it was “best practice”. Quite the opposite, actually. OK. So, it’s a bit of a controversial trick, which has it’s uses for lazy-ass composers like me, who don’t really mind that my patterns become a bit messy… But it just saved me from having to adjust the levels of 15 individual samples
