Not had much time for music lately but wanted to put something out anyway for the fun of it. This one needs more mixing, and an end section to finish it off. Any suggestions for improvement welcomed.
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Man, what are you using to get that stereoized sound on this? Can it be done with only native plugins? If so, how? Anyway, the track sounds great, the upper bass-drum is a little boxy on my end, like it’s also getting the stereo treatment, and losing some of it’s frequencies in the center. The sub-bass bass drum is slightly quiet, and it might be the stereo effect on the entire mix thing again. Feels like the center frequencies got spread out, lost their “punch”.
Still, even with all my bitchin’ about your bass drums, how? How is the rest so spread out? I’ve used the built-in stereo tool for a ton of stuff, and yeah it spreads the sound out, but not like that. Is it a matter of having too much stuff in the audio spectrum? Like, maybe I just need only two, maybe three sounds playing, and they’re all way into their own frequency range?
Finally, the graphics? What tool might you be using for that? Reaper led me to a plugin called Signalizer, which finally got me a reactive Lissajous oscilloscope, but I can’t actually export it as a video WITH audio yet (simultaneously). Not sure if it’s possible the way I’m doing it. Soundflower don’t work either, so what the heck?
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Yeah the bass sucks ass on this one, I was actually having trouble creating a nice kick drum sound for this and got fed up trying to get it right. I was meaning to try again to make something better but didn’t.
Mostly the stereo effect comes just comes from a process I did to make glitched hats for the, the basis of it was just done in a destructive editor manually chopping up an audio file. I don’t remember the exact steps I did but I basically just did some kind sound design session where I ended up with a long audio file containing loads of short high frequency clicks at varying volumes. I think I might have then split the stereo file into two mono files and either delayed the left channel or randomly rearranged it because almost none of the transients on the left and right channels in that audio file sync up.
So for instance click one’s left channel was slightly louder than it’s right, click two’s right channel is way louder than it’s left, and click three’s right channel has two hits while it’s left only has one, and so on. Basically then clicks are is just jumping around the stereo field in a semi-randomised manner. After that I just whacked on some random pitch automation, chorus, & phaser, and used a send track for some reverb to simply add movement to the sound of the clicks. I suppose know that I think of it the chorus and phaser would add some width to the sound as well.
The same process was done for the intro glitch sounds, which stop when the drums come in and then get re-introduced when the vocals change to a higher pitch just to add more layers and depth.
The pad and vocals use the HAAS effect, left and right channels split to mono files, hard panned left and right on individual tracks, with one track delayed by a few milliseconds.
The kick is actually a stereo sample that I forgot to convert to mono but it has very little width so it doesn’t really add anything. And the snare is also stereo that I didn’t convert to mono cause I like stereo wide snares.
As for the visuals, I just use images from Giphy.com. Download some geometric gif I like that fits the mood of the song, stick it into either iMovie or PremierPro, add randomly selected effects, loop it, chop it, re-arrange it, then export it, easy as ya like.
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Cool bits to try, thank you for getting back to me!
No problem, sorry I can’t give a more detailed answer I tend to make things, move onto new stuff, and then forget exactly how I made my old stuff.
If this had some dark vocals it would be a killer.Good work I hope you take it further.
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It’s very detailed - I also figured out another thing to do, before your answer. I put in a short reverb BEFORE a stereo plugin. Using the send only on the particular sounds that needed to be wider, versus the entire mix. So, I get to keep my bass drum clean, and the other sounds are panned then super-spread via the extra boost of reverb. That being said, I’m keen to try some phasing.
As for your click method, I found an easier way! You can either draw your samples, or bring in a click sample. On the panning, volume, and pitch options in the sampler, add LFOs for each of those, and adjust according to your tastes. Less work all around. Less sample size too. You can draw 'em. Heck, want timbral change? Add the filter and do the same thing.
Then, pan the samples L/R where you want them, while the LFOs are also panning them randomly. Nice and wide.
I just figured out another thing, opened the mix right up. I have the pad sound occupying a bunch of audio space it didn’t need, so I digital filter’d the thing using Chebyshev, and the -2dB setting, cutting out a ton of space it wasn’t really using. Then I panned the FM’y synth with the LFO technique above. Now it’s zooming all over the place. L and R and wow jarring in a good way!
Seems we’re working on some similar techniques. It’s all tiny microscopic stuff.
As for the bass drum, I found they had a really great bass-drum synth in one of the patches built in. Being the nerd that I am, I replaced all the samples to make it aurally my own device. It’s a loud and heavy bass drum, so if you want something that sounds really good, that’s the one to pick. Adjust the settings accordingly and you’ll have a big 'n beefy bass drum in no time.
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Great!!!
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