With Emergent Drums 2 on sale for $79 right now, this is the most acknowledgement I've put towards the program/company since its initial release not too long ago.

From what I've seen and heard, it just doesn't seem very impressive to me, especially for the price. I remember thinking this when it was initially $100; and ever since then, they've steadily been bumping up the price to where it's now $249.

For those of you that have it, I have a few questions:

• How often do you use Emergent Drums 2 in your workflow?

• Does it feel more like a tool or a toy?

• How satisfied are you with the samples that generate from the product?

• Do you often use Emergent Drums samples as placeholders, and later load in other samples when you find the right one?

• Would you earnestly recommend Emergent Drums to a friend for $249? $149? $79?

If you've listened to some 90s and early 00s ambient-oriented tracks and tried to recreate their sounds with just a synth, you'll notice that downsampling and bitcrushing won't get you the same kind of sound you hear in there. It will sound dull(er) and less... complete, lush, rich? That is because back in the day artists sampled their synths and the technical side of that process had some cool side effects.

You can sample in two different ways. You can sample whole chords, where your parallel harmonies and frequency stretching will combine into a weird but cool sound. Or, on the topic of this video, you can sample an individual note from a synth and have your frequency stretching happen with different magnitudes for every note of the chord. That will create an interesting and rich sound!

This Thought-Forms video will show you an exact how-to with some tips on how to develop that sampler sound once you get the basics. It's quick, concise and really informative.

I hope you find this technique useful. AMN out!

There are a lot of great stereo imaging tools and spectrum analyzers. Most of them aren't free though. Having a good way to visually analyze loudness, frequency distribution and stereo image is incredibly important. Unfortunately, it is often the case that most default or free solutions are barely functional. They don't provide you with enough information to shape your mix or don't present it in a simple, clear and understandable format. (I'm looking at you, FL studio visualizers!)

SPAN is a spectrum analysis tool that will let you monitor your peak volume, RMS and LUFS. It shows you the frequencies that are passing through the plugin and you can customize the spectrum view by changing time, frequency and level ranges. If you want even more precision and control, you can adjust the fast fourier transform sample size, it gets that technical! You can also compare channels, left and right of the same channel or two different ones. Two channel comparison is the limit of the free version, SPAN Plus allows you to display as many channels as your DAW will allow. It also features a correlation meter that measures your phase alignment (1=fully aligned and -1=completely misaligned). It can also track your loudness stats thoughout the playtime to iron out any kinks. Handy, functional and no-nonsense tool.

MSED is a stereo analysis and encoding tool. It can help you manange your side and mid channels: your stereo image. It comes with a basic set of tools that allows you to pan, change levels, swap left-right channels and flip phase 180 degrees. The visualizers are pretty simple, you have your correlation meter from before, stereo pan meter and plasma-style vector scope. You might think you don't need it if you DAW provides stereo imaging functions of its own, but often times you're going to be playing guessing games in terms of how that audio will actually get processed: some DAWS merge your stereo tracks to mono, some don't. MSED takes care of that ambiguity and puts all of the necessary tools and monitoring in one spot.

These plugins are available in VST, VST3, AU and AAX for free! I really can't recommend them enough if you're starting out producing or are in need of simple tools that won't take a toll on your CPU with fancy advanced processing.

SPAN Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/

MSED Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/msed/

Just found this website where you can select your heaphones from the database and automtically generate different outputs for various EQs to adjust for linearity to help you with mixing.

Just wanted to write out this post to the waveform community and say my thanks to everyone who's been participating and lurking in this community so far. It's amazing to see your posts and projects here every day and it genuinely makes my day a little brighter to know that something I posted helped someone on the other side of the screen!

Anyways, I'd like to ask you all to help me bring you better content. I can't really post Kush, In The Mix, or random youtubers everyday, I find a lot of channels don't go nearly in-depth enough on a lot of topics and just scratch the surface, and well established youtubers just post the same content and advice over and over again. We should all benefit from different perspectives here!

I got a new job (yay!) earlier this week, so I'm gonna be a bit short on free time, which means if I don't do something about the way I search for content it'll be hard to make it consistently.

Finding noteworthy youtube channels can be quite time consuming. Writing a quality post also takes time: watching, researching, writing, reviewing, all that sha-bang! Takes me on average about 2-3 hours to do all of that. I might have ADHD or some form of inattention so that might explain if those hours seem like a bit too much.

So I thought we'd pool some interesting channels and websites in this thread, that way it'll be easy to reference for newcomers and I'll be able to curate the best content in here. It will also be interesting to know what your guys knowledge levels are and what areas of production you find most difficult: mixing, mastering, sound design, songwriting, etc. It will help me curate the content better as right now I really have very little idea about all that. And also, your likes in terms of genres and artists would be cool to share in the community. Let's see what kind of music we like to make!

Here are the discussion questions in a nice order. You don't have to answer every single question and it's completely okay to answer just one! All of these have full potential to be a really interesting standalone comment!

1. Tell us about yourself! How long have you been making music and how much time do you spend producing a week (roughly)? What made you start your journey?
2. What are your favorite genres to make and/or listen to? What unites them or makes them different to you?
3. What are your most favorite artists? What makes them great to you?
4. What resources (websites and youtube channels) do you use for learning? How do they help you?

I'll start with myself in the comments to this post!

Making a great sounding pad is actually more tricky than getting some cool synth and drowning it in tons of reverb. I know I tried that the first time. And failed miserably. You don't have to!

Will is gonna walk us through different tricks and ideas to flesh out an ambient pad. Using a root tone, texture tones for highs and lows, some effects and simple automations will allow you to create a cool and easily customizeable(!) pad from scratch with any and all wavetables that you want in there!

Hope you find it useful, guys! AMN out!

Making a great sounding pad is actually more tricky than getting some cool synth and drowning it in tons of reverb. I know I tried that the first time. And failed miserably. You don't have to!

Will is gonna walk us through different tricks and ideas to flesh out an ambient pad. Using a root tone, texture tones for highs and lows, some effects and simple automations will allow you to create a cool and easily customizeable(!) pad from scratch with any and all wavetables that you want in there!

Hope you find it useful, guys! AMN out!

For a set of headphones that is so extremely visible online and offers quite a unique feature, I couldn’t find much information on it that wasn’t hyperbolic. So here I hope to provide a nuanced view.

Note that my current set of cans and therefore comparison are the Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro. I realise this isn’t a fair comparison as they are not only more expensive and not wireless. They are also open back.

Wireless

Wireless low-latency headphones are awesome. Yeah it’s noticeable to me but barely. The range is pretty much studio range. Don’t expect to wear them into a different room but walking around your studio without getting tangled in a long cable works very well. I can keep them on and hop from drums to piano without any interruptions.

User Experience

Getting set up was easy. No installations or software packages. Just plug in an analog signal, pair the transmitter and the headphones and go. There is volume control on the headphones which was set really high to begin with causing a hiss due to the high amplification. After turning the headphones down and the input signal on, it works fine.

There is no battery level indicator. Would have been a useful addition.

Audio Quality

Now here’s the downside. They don’t sound anywhere near as good as my current DT 1990s. I’d describe the quality as nasal and slightly boomy. It’s really disappointing but in hindsight to be expected.

Keep it?



I will live with this set for about a week and use them in the studio. I will decide whether or not to keep them after then. I suppose the big question is: Can I live with the reduced audio quality just because they allow me to hop onto my drum kit without switching headphones?

Lo-fi balcony - Like it or not ^^

😅

Dubstep growls may sound like they're simple, but getting a good growl sound is way more than just distorting some waves to all hell (though it may be a part of it). Using your envelopes and LFOs to shape the sound through filters, distortion and other effects will get quite a bit more complicated.

Noah will show us how to get a high quality, clean and powerful dubstep growl in the style of Virtual Riot, so you can put those skills and ideas to use in your own synth patches.

P.S: My posts will slow down from here on out as I have a bit more going on IRL than I did when I started. This one today is a quickie in between my schedule, but bigger posts will still keep coming and I hope you find it interesting nevertheless!

EQ is a really simple tool, but the way it works is anything but that. Different equalizers use different algorithms to process your audio, and most of them will affect your sound in unexpected ways.

The video will give you an overview on some technical reasons why phase weirdness happens with most EQs and also how an asymmetric EQ setup can give you unexpected Haas effects.

And man, does Sage Audio's video feature some sick beats!

I was looking for some good videos on automation and it surprised me that there's not a lot of content relating to the decision making process, despite automation being a standard feature in any modern production software.

Automation is an important tool in any music producers kit and learning how to use it well is just as important as arranging your tracks, if not slightly more so for electronic tracks. One could say that in electronic music it is a part of arranging.

There are a lot of fun ways to automate your productions, like creating macro effects for your synths to use as buildups or additional texture. Today though, we'll take a look at how Fabio from Noize London approaches making transitions, building and releasing tension, and working with emotion through gain automation.

This is addressed to somewhat experienced users who worked with both softwares:

What made you choose one over the other on the long run?

I have been with Reaper for quite some time but considering mixing and mastering my next project in Ardour. Not sure if it's worth putting in the time to learn it from the ground up.

Please don't make this about free vs. paid software.

Thank you!

Do you ever feel like you can make a great loop but you can't make a great song? I don't know if that's your experience, but I've been there before, and let me tell you, it's a nightmare. It brings to question all of your skills that you have developed so far, because you've been able to cruise through without thinking about it. But now it just isn't enough! I needed more variety in my tracks.

So if you're like me then this video is just for you. Nathan goes into a key concept about arrangement that will help you think about it in a much more constructive way. Every instrument can be played with different articulation, loudness, rhythm, etc. and it doesn't have to play all the time. So Nathan poses three big questions of arrangement: what is playing, when is it playing and how is it being played?

This video will show you how these questions give you insight into what you were doing subconsciously (and how to answer them in a creative way). It will provide you with a simple thinking process for arrangement decision-making that will ease up some of that tension between hearing the song in your mind and putting it into your DAW. So try it out!

I'm in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.

Whether I'm sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I'm generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I've created.

The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it's just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that's been slowly tacked on over time.

Alternately, I'll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars... these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don't tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I'm working on.

Interested in hearing your tips and tricks for switching up melodies.

As you might've noticed if you visited our community page after this post, I made a very cool looking banner (or so my mum tells me). Thing is, I don't use that many plugins on my own, and what better way to make the banner look interesting than to put your favorite plugins in there? This page will also serve as a cool overview of different plugins our community uses, so be sure to post all of your favorites! I'll pick the coolest-looking ones for the banner!

This post is gonna stay up until I decide that the banner is done (and perhaps we'll make it a seasonal thing to swap it out, who knows?) I'll update this banner in my spare time when you guys post some things to add.

To get on the banner, comment the name of a plugin and the company or a name of the person who made it. You can also post a link to its page or your own screenshot of the plugin, if you want.

I don't know what the limit is to how many plugins I can put in the image, but we should have a lot of space (and we're not limited to the amount of spots currently on the list). I suppose as long as every individual plugin is recognizable when shrinked, we're all good!

Right now the banner features:

(in order: columns from left to right )

1. Pro-Q 3 by Fabfilter ^posted^ ^by^ ^many^
2. SPAN by Voxengo
3. MSED by Voxengo
4. Sforzando by Plogue
5. Vital by Vital Audio
6. Decapitator by Soundtoys ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
7. 1176 Collection by Universal Audio ^posted^ ^for^ ^being^ ^a^ ^classic^
8. Pigments by Arturia ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/DASEIN^
9. Saturn by Fabfilter ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
10. Zener-Bender by Softube Chandler ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/ebauche^
11. Aalto by Madrona Labs ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/DASEIN^
12. XO by XLN Audio ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
13. 2500 Bus Compressor by Api ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
14. Comper by Analog Obsession ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/goosehorse^
15. Surge XT by Surge Synth Team ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/mokpo@lemm.ee^
16. Sausage Fattener by Dada Life ^posted^ ^by^ ^chaos^ ^incarnate^
17. Replika XT by Native Instruments ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/ebauche^
18. Permut8 by Sonic Charge ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/DASEIN^
19. Omnisphere by Spectrasonics ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/Shadowbait^
20. Shaperbox by Cableguys ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
21. Nova Dynamic EQ by Tokyo Dawn Records ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/goosehorse^
22. Super VHS by Baby Audio ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/Shadowbait^
23. PaulStretch by Sonasaurus ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/mokpo@lemm.ee^
24. EQ232D by Bettermaker ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/DASEIN^
25. "Space Echo" Delay Tape-201 by Arturia ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/michaelfone@vlemmy.net^
26. Supermassive by Valhalla ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/mokpo@lemm.ee^
27. Gullfoss by Soundtheory ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/Shadowbait^
28. Raum by Native Instruments ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/Shadowbait^
29. Deelay by Sixth Sample ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/mokpo@lemm.ee^

I'll swap out the placeholders for your submissions and credit you! Like this:

Stuff by Cool People ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/supercoolperson^

And that's about it. Sh.itjust.works and waveform.social will have different banners (in the same style), so we can do something different with both of them! Post away!

Left front: ooen-control controller (in a 3D printed case) (https://kblivesolutions.github.io/open.control/)

Right front: Phanstasmal Force (https://www.tindie.com/products/distropolis/phantasmal-force-micro-midi-controller/), spray-painted orange.

Behind: MIDI Fighter Twister (more just for scale than to suggest it's a boutique thing) on a 3D printed stand I found here, and spray-painted orange:. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4782849

I love these little controllers. They can do stuff I've not found on any other controller and are totally customisable so they end up being unique to your own style (although I've never owned a Push and reckon they probably have a lot of the same functions). I use Control Surface Studio to create scripts for them in Live - and that's another thing that has totally changed how I use Ableton for mixing, but mainly performance. They're also tiny so are easy to carry round in a laptop bag.

I've just realised in coming across like a salesman or something, haha! Anyway, along with a Launchpad MK2 this is basically a photo of my live "rig".

Mixing in mono is one of those production "tricks" that have solidified in my mixing routine to achieve clearer mixes. It's a really easy shortcut to hearing levels and even frequencies of everything in your track without the distraction of stereo imaging. It also helps to figure out phase issues between closely tuned kicks and bass and correct your synth sound design too!

But sometimes the immediate benefit it gives us gets outweighed by a longterm one of improving your critical hearing skills. For example, if you use mono to hear frequency fighting between instruments, you're undercutting your learning experience of properly working with frequencies in stereo. After all, it's not uncommon to pan different instruments asymmetrically. Having stereo means you have two different signals that should be shaped on their own terms.

Michael is going to walk us through some of the things that mixing in mono can be used for and give some perspective on how those particular uses stack up in a more robust or specific production workflow. And, I hope this knowledge helps you in your own productions!

This is one of those techniques that can really push you over from intermediate to pro. You need a good grasp on compression: what it does to your instruments and how it affects their texture. Parallel compression is simple, yet subtlety is what makes it work, you need good ears for compression for this to work in your favor.

The essence of parallel compression is immediate and delicate control of the different textures in your recordings or even synths. You make a compressor for different elements of the instrument. In drums it is your punches, your transients and sticknoises, your long releases on snares and the color of all noises: bright, muddy, etc. Sometimes a compressor will affect multiple qualities (but not all of them). Then you make your compressors exxagerate the elements you choose separately. Then you mix the compressors in a way that you find pleasing.

That's what I've gotten out of the video and if you want to get a better grasp for the subtleties with apt explanations from Gregory, then that's the spirit! Go watch it! If you can't hear the differences, try increasing your speaker/headphones volume. The effect is subtle so don't go too loud, just enough to hear the differences described. To avoid any potential hearing damage (in case you do go too loud and/or you listen on headphones), limit your loud volume listening to ~15 minutes or so.

How do you mix lots of instruments? Do you balance them all out so you can hear every single one that's playing? Then this one is probably for you!

In this video, Gregory goes into why you should prioritize a couple of melodic instruments in a mix and also how to think about mixing with the listener in mind.

Personally, it's been very helpful for me to formalize what I was already feeling. Sometimes I make a track with a focus on a couple of instruments and sometimes I try to balance everything out. Whenever I balance I feel like the track becomes too overwhelming to listen to and I was tearing my head apart as to why it happens on certain tracks and not the others. Now I know why, and I hope this video helps you on your journey too!

This one might be obvious to you folk who have worked on pro recordings. Compressing vocals and compressing instruments require different mindsets. Different in the way that you shouldn't be afraid to compress your vocals to -10 and -20db, while your instruments are at a subtle -2 to -5 (and I don't even limit myself there, because I love distorting my drums).

This video will show you every trick you did before: eq, automation, reverb, etc. and compare it to compression in the context of a rock track.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/595211