Track I Made Using No midi, only audio samples, and sequenced in Audacity

  On 2/11/2016 at 1:04 AM, Brisbot said:

 

Oh I forgot to add. The trick to making the formant filter sounding like a vocoder, beyond using FX to boost the sound up, is, when you're 'adding' the formants together, make it sound like it's saying something, or making an 'ahh' or 'ohh' or something. Like in Hash Swing, I got it to say 'hey' and 'way' and 'nessie', things like that.

One good way to get quick ideas for it, is to use randomly generated midi, which allows you to very quickly get ideas, or hear ideas in whatever's generated. The trick is to listen intently, and whittle down what 'doesn't make sense' in the context of what you're trying to do.

 

thats really interesting. thanks for sharing. I was playing around with formant filters in my D16 LuSH-101 but I never played multiple formants together

  On 2/11/2016 at 1:04 AM, Brisbot said:

One good way to get quick ideas for it, is to use randomly generated midi, which allows you to very quickly get ideas, or hear ideas in whatever's generated. The trick is to listen intently, and whittle down what 'doesn't make sense' in the context of what you're trying to do.

 

Yes. I deliberately create chaotic, random compositions by mixing random sounds and tracks together and then search for cool/meaningful moments and keep editing until it all makes sense. It is a concentration-heavy approach as you have to listen extensively and repeatedly but it is often worth it.

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will somebody explain this swing thing to me? :(

Depending on the track I'm making, I can sometimes swing things by about a 16th note, usually late, as opposed to early. The reason that track is named swing is because I have drums and audio bits 'swung' slightly at times, and the drumming is loose. I honestly didn't put much thought into the naming.

the 't' refers to triplet, and both swinging a note and using the triplet notes make for a looser feeling track, but are different things. You can have swung triplet notes for instance by swinging the triplet by a further 16th or so. It can be more or less a 16th as 16th notes are pretty short.

I have the 'swing' slider too, but I totally ignore it and prefer to use my ears to feel a track out when it comes to swing, because it can either sound good, or VERY bad, and not every drum or note will sound good swung.

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thats really interesting. thanks for sharing. I was playing around with formant filters in my D16 LuSH-101 but I never played multiple formants together

oh hey, that's a cool synth. I've tried it before. Though it's a CPU eater which is a put off.

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Yes. I deliberately create chaotic, random compositions by mixing random sounds and tracks together and then search for cool/meaningful moments and keep editing until it all makes sense. It is a concentration-heavy approach as you have to listen extensively and repeatedly but it is often worth it.

and people end up thinking you're just some kind of automation guru when in reality you're just using your ears to stitch together audio that makes sense :). Though it does require some knowledge to know if something is likely to work beforehand.

  On 2/12/2016 at 12:38 AM, Brisbot said:

 

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Yes. I deliberately create chaotic, random compositions by mixing random sounds and tracks together and then search for cool/meaningful moments and keep editing until it all makes sense. It is a concentration-heavy approach as you have to listen extensively and repeatedly but it is often worth it.

and people end up thinking you're just some kind of automation guru when in reality you're just using your ears to stitch together audio that makes sense :). Though it does require some knowledge to know if something is likely to work beforehand.

 

To me, it is just a filtering process that is no different from filtering ideas our brains give us. In both cases a taste controls a final product.

I wouldn't really use the word "knowledge". To me it is just a taste thing (which naturally develops).

Knowledge - awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Knowledge is both abstract and/or practical. You can know facts, or have an intuitive understanding of things through experience.

Yeah it does feel like a filter, but as a side note i've learned that you should often challenge that filter, otherwise you may become set in certain ways, or are very quick to listen to your intuition and do something a certain way you know is likely to work. I guess the art there is knowing how often you should challenge yourself and how often to listen to intuition *shrug*

nice little track, I love how liquid the acid is, especially in the part when it plays alone (at 2min). Which synth is that?

  On 2/11/2016 at 1:47 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

will somebody explain this swing thing to me? :(
lol is it the same as making your beats on the piano roll in the 1/4T 1/8T 1/16T measures? i have this doubt because in certain drum machines and fruity loops you have a swing knob, or you can quantize your stuff using some swing presets, but, if i use this knob or swing presets, the stuff will neither be in double times neither triplets... and then when i'm gonna add stuff i don't really know what signature i set on the piano roll to get stuff matching with the stuff i swing with the knob, only time this works is if i set the swing to about 50% which makes the stuff fit the triplets division... now, i guess that's the point, having things not match completely on the piano roll, but on fast breaks, if things are not clinical, it gets messy, right? i understand that in slow stuff like glitch hop hip hop etc you don't even have to think about this because you just play it on an mpc and probably it's easy to make a beat without grid, but on fast stuff, it fucks my head....

I guess the 1/4, 1/8, etc... indications on a piano roll you're talking about are different values of the "definition" that you can choose when programming with a piano roll. For example if you set it to 1/16 and put a hhat on every time in this resolution you'll have 16 hhats in a bar. Always forget what dotted or triplet means but just try it on your piano roll and you'll see what it does (it will subdivide the time divisions in some way, sorry I don't know music theory).

Now swing is something else, basically it moves the position of every second time of your grid. So if you add a bit of swing to your 1/16 hhat, every second one will be slightly delayed, which will give a certain feel to the beat. A little schema to make my wonky explanation look very scientific:

[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]----[h]---- that's our hhat pattern with no swing (straight)

[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]---[h]-----[h]--- now with some swing: every second hit comes a bit later, which gives a certain feel to the whole

swing is great, it can really help make the music live. When I program beats on Renoise I prefer to set it individually for each hit: i find it has even more impact when you don't put it at every moment, when you alternate between straight and swing. For both have a particular impact and playing on contrast maximizes the impact. But that's just an idea, not a dogma.

I hope it helped :/

  On 2/12/2016 at 2:03 AM, Brisbot said:

Knowledge - awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

 

Knowledge is both abstract and/or practical. You can know facts, or have an intuitive understanding of things through experience.

 

Yeah it does feel like a filter, but as a side note i've learned that you should often challenge that filter, otherwise you may become set in certain ways, or are very quick to listen to your intuition and do something a certain way you know is likely to work. I guess the art there is knowing how often you should challenge yourself and how often to listen to intuition *shrug*

 

 

 

 

Can you give an example of "challenging the filter"?

I don't really have any words for it which is why I'm using the abstract mumbo jumbo.

What I'm trying to say is that I feel like, while you become better, you also will become kind of/slightly "constrained" in what you think sounds good, and tend to gravitate toward certain sounds, and are less adventurist than you used to be when you didn't know as much about making music.

By the way I'm not sure if this is true of everyone, but it is true of me. So you may not have any clue what i'm talking about.

So challenging the filter would be knowing about the 'knowledge' you hold about how you go about say, laying down beats/breakbeats. I have a process myself, and it tends to do well for certain results, but I might become better if I try to come up with another way to program them.

Actually I have multiple ways that I go about doing it, and they're good for different kinds of results.

say you have a few different methods, when no doubt those aren't the only ones out there. They work just fine, but you might be able to get beats with a different feel to them if you wanted. Not to mention if you can think of a new process, then you can use both ways of making beats to..make your beats.

Hope that made sense. I just woke up so I probably should have waited an hour or two before writing this.

Btw there was some scientific research that came out, showing that the best way to improve a skill is to change the parameters from which you work up. So for example, they had the test subjects click on dots as fast as they can with a certain sensitivity for 45 minutes, and then 6 hours later do the activity again, but with a different sensitivity. (and another group that just did it with 1 sensitivity)

Long story short, the group that changed the sensitivity up improved much faster. While clicking on dots quickly does not equal making music, I still feel like 'challenging the filter' in both instances would equal you improving your skill faster.

Ended up writing an essay... well I'm trying to get this straight in my head as well so it was worth it.

Interesting.

I agree with that a workflow limits the filter. That is why I like algorithms and random stuff so much because then the filter is really limited by a taste only. I also don't have a strict workflow.

I have seen an interview with Battles where they discussed how tendency to use certain patterns because of muscle memory limits creativity for instrumentalists. I agree with that. That is why I try to generate stuff and create as many of happy accidents as I can.

Yup, I try to incorporate 'picking out randomness' into my music, and then mix that and deliberate music programming. Both achieve different results.

Randomness generates happy accidents, as you say.. well there are happy accidents BUT if you can't hear them and sequence them when the opportunity arises they're just noise along with the rest of what you generated. Doing that is still a constrained process, but it's a different one than relying on your 'muscle memory' for deliberate programming, so you get more interesting results.

Deliberate programming leads to things you already know how to do with some minimal 'newness'. It can get the job done, but it might sound like something you've done before...

I am always looking for more ways to work, and to see what kind of results I get so I know how I'll be able to use them in a track. I believe that's a big part of improving at this skill when you feel stuck.

I absolutely agree.

Sweet, agreeing is always a good thing, but so is disagreeing.

Anyway, I've updated the track a bit. Better mix. This is as far as I'm going, so one last bump is appropriate I think.