Infinite Mousehole

ok i'm listening now.... first impression on the drum beat - i like it! it's got a nice organic feel and flow to it with some interesting aspects. the filter effect works well on the snare, the rolls sound fine to me and i don't even mind the drum sounds, in fact i like them. my only real criticism is that's it not loud enough in the mix, lacks top end sparkle and it could do with couple of breakdowns. when you do the double speed drumming bit kind of works, but maybe don't just stick to double speed - try some other tempos maybe to mix it up a bit.

i'd try multitracking all the drum parts separately into different channels, then carefully fine tuning the volume on each channel to beef up the kick slightly and add a bit of loudness to the hi hats. play around with the individual EQs for each channel until you get a nice even mix where you can hear every part of the drum beat occupying it's own part of the overall sound, paying particular attention to the mid range. once you have the basic beat recorded and EQed nicely in a multitracker, you can then chop it up in there to liven up the pattern a bit and create some changes - maybe reverse a couple of snare hits at random intervals, or apply some extreme reverb to a clap hit, bit only that one hit.... stuff like that can make an otherwise boring repetitive beat quite exciting.

another thing you can do to make more exciting drum patterns is just to layer them up - so for example do a really simple pattern with the snares on steps 5 and 13 (or whatever you like) and a few hit hats sparsely littered around, then do another pattern with no snares but claps instead, with different kick drums and hit hat noises etc, place the kicks and claps on different steps to the original beat, then layer the two over each other - instantly got a more complicated and (hopefully) more interesting beat. also, when you have two (or more) beats layered over each other, you can easily mute bits in and out to create changes and fill ins etc in your track. apply the random reverses, reverb hits etc trick over lots of layers of drums and you'll end up with all sorts of mental beats.

peace.

When you make a track you're not entirely happy with, it can be really, really helpful to have someone say "well, this isn't what, exactly, didn't work for me, and why" <-- in fact, this kind of criticism is often much more helpful than the people who go "ooh ooh that's great, yeah!" to everything you make. (So yeah, thank you hugely for your actual comments, BCM.)

(It's just hard sometimes to wade through ad hominem BS on a board like this to get to the constructive bits.)

However! The most important thing I've learned today off this thread wasn't even posted on it - but I learned the difference between Sidechaining and Parallel Compression, and even though sometimes, people will refer to Parallel Compression as "Sidechaining" (even in tutorials) actually sidechaining is a quite specific trick generally only used in certain kinds of electro and French house - and what I've been doing all along is actually Parallel Compression. So you live and learn. Especially from the mistakes!

also, a good way to start thinking about tunes from a rhythmic perspective is to try to make a whole completed track using nothing but drums. make basslines out of kick drums and toms, make some lead lines with an effected cowbell, use snares instead of acid - go bananas.

forget my advice, go fuck yourself

lol

  On 6/14/2010 at 8:28 PM, BCM said:

also, a good way to start thinking about tunes from a rhythmic perspective is to try to make a whole completed track using nothing but drums. make basslines out of kick drums and toms, make some lead lines with an effected cowbell, use snares instead of acid - go bananas.

This is actually one of the best pieces of advice I've heard yet. An incredibly good idea, and I'll give it a spin this weekend. Thank you.

  On 6/14/2010 at 9:49 PM, vamos scorcho said:

forget my advice, go fuck yourself

Thank you for your criticism. ::moves along::

Ha ha. Seriously. All cool now. Thanks to everyone who listened and offered commentary. It has been helpful.

  On 6/14/2010 at 8:23 PM, Masonic Boom said:

However! The most important thing I've learned today off this thread wasn't even posted on it - but I learned the difference between Sidechaining and Parallel Compression, and even though sometimes, people will refer to Parallel Compression as "Sidechaining" (even in tutorials) actually sidechaining is a quite specific trick generally only used in certain kinds of electro and French house - and what I've been doing all along is actually Parallel Compression. So you live and learn. Especially from the mistakes!

Oh and you were so eager to namedrop sidechaining every chance you got when you thought you knew what it was! Bummer... Well, i guess now you got sorted a bit you might stop capitalizing run-of-the-mill technical terms? No? OK. It's probably a thing that only people who Modulate Scales and do Modal Counterpoint and think in Quavers and Paradiddles when they're on a fucking grid get. I don't. Why don't you also keep time with a mechanical metronome instead of a click track? That'd be WELL PRETENTIOUS INNIT? Would sound fucking tops when you namedrop it in a thread in defense of how shit you are.

It's awesome that you blocked me because i can call you a daft cunt without getting tattled on.

lol

daaaaaaaaaaaang

It just keeps getting better...

Should I do it? Should I do it for the lols?

Done

  On 6/14/2010 at 10:43 PM, Lube Saibot said:

  On 6/14/2010 at 8:23 PM, Masonic Boom said:

However! The most important thing I've learned today off this thread wasn't even posted on it - but I learned the difference between Sidechaining and Parallel Compression, and even though sometimes, people will refer to Parallel Compression as "Sidechaining" (even in tutorials) actually sidechaining is a quite specific trick generally only used in certain kinds of electro and French house - and what I've been doing all along is actually Parallel Compression. So you live and learn. Especially from the mistakes!

 

Oh and you were so eager to namedrop sidechaining every chanced you got when you thought you knew what it was! Bummer... Well, i guess now you got sorted a bit you might stop capitalizing run-of-the-mill technical terms? No? OK. It's probably a thing that only people who Modulate Scales and do Modal Counterpoint and think in Quavers and Paradiddles when they're on a fucking grid get. I don't. Why don't you also keep time with a mechanical metronome instead of a click track? That'd be WELL PRETENTIOUS INNIT? Would sound fucking tops when you namedrop it in a thread in defense of how shit you are.

 

It's awesome that you blocked me because i can call you a daft cunt without getting tattled on.

  On 6/14/2010 at 10:43 PM, Lube Saibot said:

  On 6/14/2010 at 8:23 PM, Masonic Boom said:

However! The most important thing I've learned today off this thread wasn't even posted on it - but I learned the difference between Sidechaining and Parallel Compression, and even though sometimes, people will refer to Parallel Compression as "Sidechaining" (even in tutorials) actually sidechaining is a quite specific trick generally only used in certain kinds of electro and French house - and what I've been doing all along is actually Parallel Compression. So you live and learn. Especially from the mistakes!

 

Oh and you were so eager to namedrop sidechaining every chanced you got when you thought you knew what it was! Bummer... Well, i guess now you got sorted a bit you might stop capitalizing run-of-the-mill technical terms? No? OK. It's probably a thing that only people who Modulate Scales and do Modal Counterpoint and think in Quavers and Paradiddles when they're on a fucking grid get. I don't. Why don't you also keep time with a mechanical metronome instead of a click track? That'd be WELL PRETENTIOUS INNIT? Would sound fucking tops when you namedrop it in a thread in defense of how shit you are.

 

It's awesome that you blocked me because i can call you a daft cunt without getting tattled on.

at least she admitted she had been using the wrong term.

many people would find it difficult to admit their mistakes.

pretentiousness shows it's head in mysterious ways.

oscillik's gunna go balls deep in the boom boom room.

just calling it as i see it

this thread is awesome, it's got it all.

Wow. I can't imagine how impoverished your social lives must be if the *only* reason you can conceive for one person to be polite and reasonable to another is because they want to fuck them.

It must make ordinary social interactions incredibly tense and fraught with insecurity... Ah. Actually that does goes a long way to explaining the behaviour of certain individuals on this forum.

Re: Mistakes. As the immortant Bob Ross once said, "there are no mistakes, there are only happy accidents." (Also, in the Oblique Strategies - "honour your mistake as a hidden intention.") I brought it up because sometimes in the learning curve process of attempting to do A, you fail, and end up doing B instead, and B turns out to be more interesting or appropriate for the piece. It goes along with what Zoe was saying on the Aphex subforum about not being afraid of failure. How else do you ever learn anything?

Re: Technical language. The world is divided into two kinds of people. The first, when confronted with a term they don't recognise, will find their curiosity piqued, and google it, wiki it, look it up in the dictionary. The second will make certain value judgements about what kind of person it is that uses said technical language (and often decide that it is with the deliberate intention of making them look dumb or stupid because yes, the entire world is all about them.)

I work in IT now. A lot of technical jargon gets thrown around in my office for expedience. I make decisions about what kind of language to use when I'm talking to my Sys Admin, or when I'm talking to our (totally non-tech) Marketing department. I made a similar sort of assumption about the usage of jargon on a forum called "Expert Knob Twiddlers," that people here might be secure enough not to get freaked out if a person brings up fairly common musical terminology.

Anyway, I did what BCM reccomended about routing all the drum sounds individually and working on the EQ, added some reverb and a tiny bit of distortion to get that messy, slightly dirty sound that I liked in the original default drum samples, and did a lot of work in getting the sounds in the kit to sit together well without the rest of the music. (I now think that the drums are way too loud compared to the rest of the music.) Bored with this song now, but there's been some really helpful advice on this thread, so thanks for that. And the LOLs.

(but especially the LOLs.)

  On 6/13/2010 at 8:48 PM, Masonic Boom said:

http://soundcloud.com/evrenkader/infinite-mousehole

  On 6/14/2010 at 12:02 PM, Masonic Boom said:

...I've spent 25 years doing music...

Maybe you're just not cut out for it

masonic boom...

now with more than previously conceivable

christ boys, looks like we've got us a run of the mill "bitch" with attitude

burn the witch, the witch is a cunt

oscillik and MB sitting in a tree

MB intellectualizes the science behind their kissing

lets learn how to make better beats next time

The End

The End

LOL

It was a pleasure to read this, thanks everyone.

Great Job!

+1 thread.

+3 thread