Using the same instruments & sounds throughout an album

it depends on the style of the music. regarding preset sounds...

personally I like them to a certain extent. i think electronic music needs to head more into the area of composition and music and away from just technology and sound. obviously all sides should be accounted for by the musician.

still I don't think it makes sense to discount a piece of music for uses recognizable presets, though that can change. for instance if a piece by Bach was played on the Yamaha Piano Studio preset in Logic, it would still be carrying those same notes. a lot of the time I think the notes and structures are more important than the instrument playing them, though that does change depending on the style.

On the other hand if I hear an Ultrabeat sample or Battery sample in music I feel like it's totally ruined. that might just be a matter of deployment, and the sound being recognizable because its a bad sound. presets aren't always recognizable.

^yes

I like how this way of working focuses me to work on song structure and harmonics

Sometimes it's fun to take sounds you view as cheesy or just plain bad & try to make songs using just them. After a while you start to play with them in new ways you hadn't previously thought of, & begin to realize that the sounds themselves aren't bad, you just associate them with bad music they're used in a lot.

Limiting yourself to just one synth can be a nice enough starting point, but once you think "ooh, it would be really good if I added some orchestral strings here," you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you steadfastly stuck to the rule "no, with this track I'm only using my SH-101!" Arbitrary restrictions can force you to stop worrying about what doesn't matter and start actually writing something, but they're there to serve you, not the other way around.

You also don't want to be overshadowed by the tools you're using to get the job done. People want to hear what music you can make, not what music a particular piece of equipment can make.

Remember that thing about audiophiles? A fan of music uses a hi-fi to listen to music. An audiophile uses music to listen to his hi-fi. Be a musician, not a synthesiser fan.

  On 3/27/2012 at 6:40 AM, modey said:

I dunno, people seemed to lose their shit when Squarepusher did it with every track on d'Demonstrator containing 909 and vocoder.

Wasn't mastered well to be honest too.