demagogue on 14/11/2019 at 02:36
I produce on Cubase, mostly just because it came on a USB with my Mox8. (Back in the '90s and early 2000s it was Cakewalk, but that's kind of a dinosaur now.) I used Ableton and Fruity Loops before, but they never really stuck. But I think it's just a matter of using what you know best. Once you know the UI you can do a lot more even with a lot less.
Cubase is really pared down and simple for me. I've got VSTs I like, my favorites being Absynth and Modo Drum, and I'll just hook them to my keyboard through Cuebase and play them directly into a track. And the native patches for the Mox8 sound good. (I'm just now realizing the synth options on the Mox8 are also pretty versatile, which I had no clue about until very recently. It has atrocious UI, but if you dig there's a lot in there.)
Then I'll just play in music track by track. If there's a sequencer, I don't use it. And there's quantization which I don't really use either. Like if there's a thubbing base line, I'd sit there and just literally thub the key every time in real time. At best sometimes I'll just drag in a sample whole cloth, like a drum track, and just copy/paste it in a long ass line, with bloc fills and alt versions interspersed.
In that respect I'm old fashioned maybe, but I like just looking at all of the tracks and wysiwyg. IMO it makes my music a lot more improvisational, more likely to have flubs, but at least more unique sounding.
Gray on 18/11/2019 at 05:17
Your method is quite different from mine. I'm quite untalented, so I need stuff like sequencers and quantization. If I was just to record using my actual hands it'd come out like crap, I'm clearly not a gifted musician. I see myself as, um, I hate to sound pretentious but I will anyway, more a composer than a musician, in the sense that I dream up stuff in my head that I can not actually play, and try to make machines do it for me instead. I lack the manual dexterity to perform well, my main instrument is keyboards but I suck at that, and when trying to learn how to play the guitar I quickly realised I'm a much better keyboardist. So, what I would need is some convenient software that can do that. However, the more I look into what my options are, the more I'm seduced by the idea of getting the Roland System-1. Not only because it sounds awesome and can do all sorts of neat stuff, but also because it will force me to play it with my actual hands. I know I suck at it, but that is sometimes how I come up with the melodies I like and the backbone of a song. Perhaps it will force me to take a different approach on how to make music. Or more likely, just be another expensive toy that I will find new and dull ways to suck at. I'll have to ponder this for a while. Perhaps it'd be wiser to get Ableton or Reason instead. I'll have a think.
PigLick on 18/11/2019 at 10:55
stop telling yourself that you suck, thats the first step to greatness!
demagogue on 18/11/2019 at 13:21
I should add that I don't think continually thubbing an electric baseline in real time is actually a good idea. I think I probably should be using a sequencer and quantization but, you know, old habits die hard. There's always new things to learn, if you want to put it that way.
That's something I love about music. No matter where you are, there's always something you can be doing to learn more and develop yourself. It's a bottomless well.
Gray on 18/11/2019 at 15:35
When I say that I suck, it's because I mean it. I've been making pretty bad music for over 3 decades, and I know that I'm not talented. The main reason I keep saying I suck at it is because I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not one of these clueless, deluded pretentious fools who think they're the next rock star. That's not me. That was my bandmate back in the 1980s. I know that whatever I can come up with will be mediocre and a mishmash of whatever stuff that inspired me, it will never be original and groundbreaking, and I'm fine with that. I just make music to please
myself and nobody else. By saying early that I'm terrible is my way of not getting people's hopes up whenever I post new stuff.
I may love how it sounds, that's the whole point, but chances are nobody else will. Hence the frequent sucking mentions.
Right now, I'm working on v3 of Näe, and I'm really in love with the new and improved noise level of the bass growl, but I seriously doubt whether anybody else will notice the change or care. I'm making it for me. If someone else likes it, good, but I'm not expecting it.
[Edit]
Right, v3 of Näe is up. To the casual observer, it's not better, just longer and more tedious. To me, I'm getting really pleased with how I got the bass growl to distort the way I want it to. I keep turning up the distortion FX every time, until it sounds too horrible, then have to dial it back down a bit. I'm very pleased with it just now, but for v4 I might yet again go nuts with it. Also there's some added crap near the end that almost nearly has a melody, but don't get your hopes up. It's just more of the same old shit.
(
https://soundcloud.com/user-188042036/nae-v3) https://soundcloud.com/user-188042036/nae-v3
demagogue on 24/11/2019 at 13:04
Well I've just found a new drug, (
https://vcvrack.com/) VCV Rack.
I have like 800+ modules already downloaded, and the crazy thing is they're all open source and freeeee.
I've already got ideas to make some of my own.
I'm not making too much music with it yet, or let's say I'm making a lot but it's still kind of bland, but I'm learning a lot and it's amazo-fun!
This is what someone that knows what they're doing can do with it.
[video=youtube;wQL-LsXn47Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQL-LsXn47Q[/video]
Jason Moyer on 25/11/2019 at 13:46
Quote Posted by Gray
I'm a shit keyboardist, I'm not a performer, more of a sound technician and programmer. I can only pretend to be an actual musician for so long, but give me a noise machine with knobs and I'll twiddle away until I starve to death.
[video=youtube;TmcFYVxq8NY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmcFYVxq8NY[/video]
[video=youtube;-iL3AA0rn4E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iL3AA0rn4E[/video]
demagogue on 18/12/2019 at 12:35
VCV Rack is a lot of fun to play with, and I feel like I'm learning a lot.
But it's also hard to get nice patches out of it, or I just haven't learned enough yet.
Anyway, this one turned out not-completely-awful, kind of wistful even.
This isn't me playing directly. Everything is being run by the patch, well, except the drums are sampled in.
(
https://soundcloud.com/user9513654/i-wanted-to-tell-you-before-you-had-to-go)
scumble on 19/12/2019 at 12:39
Quote Posted by Gray
Can you please elaborate a bit on exactly what you do in Ableton?
I've tried it a few times - it was invented by the two guys who started Monolake if you're familiar with them. They created their work by having everything running live in the studio and fiddling with parameters in real time so Live is actually a software creation coming from their way of working.
The unique thing about it is that you can set up a bunch of looping clips and combine them in different arrangements without using a typical timeline sequence where you have to place regions in a line. I suppose the best thing is to watch a tutorial video to see that part of it.
The other unusual bit is the warping tempo thing that makes it easy to shove loops into the same tempo an tuning.
My experience is to be wary of jumping between software because it's more important to actually create something than worry about what you're working with. These days everyone is overwhelmed for choice with music software and sounds.
Gray on 2/1/2020 at 18:44
Right, I have some news.
It's lengthy, but please bear with me, it will only be dull and pointless until it ends.
A couple of months ago, my stepson asked me about vocoders, and sent me a weblink to a thing he wanted to buy. It was a Talk Box. Granted, they can sound vaguely similar, but the nerd in me wanted to make sure he didn't buy the wrong thing, so I went into a lengthy rant about the difference between vocoders and talk boxes. I sent him links with examples of songs using one or the other. I elaborated in tedious boring detail what a vocoder is and what it does, and what a talk box is. Just to prove my point, for the first time since moving to Scotland 8 years ago, I dug out my old Nord Micro Modular to show off the vocoder programs, but then I realised my microphone was in a box 1137 miles north. So, I bought a new, cheap microphone. I spent ages trying to get everything connected and working, and you know what, for the first time in a long time, I really enjoyed tinkering around with a vocoder, albeit a fairly basic one off the Nord, not a proper dedicated one. More on that later.
Turned out, he was itching to express himself musically, but didn't have the tools to do so. So I suggested he'd get the quick and easy app I use on my tablet, Caustic. It's very convenient to get ideas down very quickly. I don't have a tablet, he said. Aha. Mental note.
Fast forward to x-mas. I got him a tablet, and the £5.99 it takes to register Caustic. Two days in, he knew more about the app than I do. He's a fast learner and a clever boy. He showed me how to work things on it I hadn't figured out yet after only using it for two years or so.
New Year's day. Hung over. Listening to Nitzer Ebb, watching all of these end-of-the-year summaries of how awful 2019 was, and all that was wrong with it. Sure, it was awful. But one phrase stuck in my mind. "it was better in the olden days". No it wasn't. I'm old enough to remember, and it was shit. So an idea formed in my head. It wasn't better in the olden days, but it is much worse now. Hey, that sounds like a song Nitzer Ebb never made. I'll write that, and in Swedish.
So that's what I've been doing for the last two days. I've got all the lyrics done, and the music came to me instantly, all within just a few hours, this is the fastest song I've ever written. Granted, it's kind of a jokey mock-EBM track whining about stuff with a lot of shouting, but the whole concept came to me so quickly, I'm not used to that. Now I just have to get down to the hard graft of putting all of those elements together in what may pass for an actual song. I'm really pushing my limits here, I'm not a singer, or vocalist of any kind, so I'm trying to overcome my inhibitions and shout angrily into my new microphone while standing in the hallway closet so I don't upset the neighbours. All of this crap will be solidly drenched in FX and, indeed, vocoding. I know, I know, nothing about this is new or groundbreaking, and it might have been mildly exciting in 1986, but at least I'm trying to do stuff that's new to me, pushing my limits, face my insecurities and actually record my own voice, crappy as it may be. This post isn't about the end result, because it isn't done yet and once it is it won't be great, it's about me trying to overcome my crippling fear of actually hearing my own voice recorded. Yeah, it sounds like crap, I'll probably just vocode the whole damn thing, but at least I'm trying to do something new.
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
[video=youtube;TmcFYVxq8NY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmcFYVxq8NY[/video]
[video=youtube;-iL3AA0rn4E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iL3AA0rn4E[/video]
That. I want one of those. I don't know exactly what it is, but I find the sound of very synthetic noise extremely pleasing, the more synthetic the better. Perhaps it's a flaw in my nature, and I can't connect with organic life forms. Nah, fuck that, I love to get, um, intimately organic. But there's just something with very synthetic noise that really really gets me, and these two machines seem to do exactly that. Bleeps, blops and bleerps really really appeal to me. Now I have to do some numbers calculations to see if I can afford either.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Well I've just found a new drug, (
https://vcvrack.com/) VCV Rack.
I have like 800+ modules already downloaded, and the crazy thing is they're all open source and freeeee.
I've already got ideas to make some of my own.
I'm not making too much music with it yet, or let's say I'm making a lot but it's still kind of bland, but I'm learning a lot and it's amazo-fun!
This is what someone that knows what they're doing can do with it.
[video=youtube;wQL-LsXn47Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQL-LsXn47Q[/video]
Ok, you've peaked my interest. That looks like the screen for the Nord Modular, and I'm quite intrigued to see what it can do. Curious now.
I have a very short working version of "Ingenting var bättre förr, men allt är mycket sämre nu", (aka "nothing was better in the olden days, but it's much worse now"), but I don't want to upload it yet until I have at least the first verse down, the current version is just the basic 95 second beat, samples and melody, and an EBM cliche bassline I'm really pleased with. I'll post it here if I ever manage to finish it.