sounds pretty good over here man. From this point - mastering… Using software is just going to make it sound more digital/compressed/exhausting… the other option is to send it out to somebody to master it for you hopefully on some sweet analog gear, but unless you know that person’s work, then that can be weird too. I say fuk it, use your ears, sounds good haha
It’s not easy to tell on a Myspace player, but all my tracks sound like they’re a little “flat” to me. Maybe I’m too used to the glossy shit I’ve been making Jungle mixes of with Big Scissor…
then your gonna want to mess around with compressors… there’s like a billion ways to go about doing that though because they are such a versatile tool. What i love about renoise is that it’s easy to render samples with a compressor on them and then you can just get rid of the compressor.
I also like to just open up a send, put a compressor on that and send like instruments to one compressor.
you’ll figure out your own way.
another thing that’s real important is to vary the velocities on all the notes being played… it’s easy to do this wrong if you are simply “coding” everything (not playing it on a midi keyboard or something). but for punchy shit you’re definitely going to want to experiment with compressors a lot. I find that using the maximizer at the end of your dsp chains is a great way to keep good levels too. good luck
ohh and try putting your eq’s before and/or after the compressors
If you want to beef up the dynamics, you need to use a gated EQ like Voxengo GlissEQ… it only applies its eq curves based on when transients hit, instead of all the time. This allows you to do things like make your bass punchy, but not muddy. I also tend to abuse Izotope Ozone… I love using its analog modeled multiband dynamics (compressor, limiter, expander) to bring out the punch in mixes… and its reverb and multiband stereo expander to add a bit of natural roomy feel. Among other things commonly abused is Renoise’s Lofimat… lofi can make the hats and snares in your amens sound significantly crunchier/punchier. Try using more subtle settings, putting quality to around 80, and bit depth at 12.
I love your The Red Mandible stuff … great composition… great choice of instruments… great beats.
The bigscissor stuff is not quite my style, but technically, it’s well done. I’d suggest trying out some non-amen breaks though … I’d love to see what you could do with some of the other classic breaks
Thanks for the advice and compliments. It would seem that I just haven’t found the right combo of compression vs EQ for my “sound”. I hesitate to mess with compression too much, since I’ve over used it in the past and some of my work has sounded “choked” because I set the attack/thresh all wrong.
BYTE-Smasher: is the Voxengo GlissEQ a VST? And where can I find an easily downloadable pack of other breaks? I have a shitload of amens…