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/M: Cyrogenical

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Author Comments

This is a track I started making around a month ago, and ran into again yesterday. Having not terribly much inspiration to build more onto it, I just changed a couple of things around and let the end fade out. (Sorry for that bad ending)

I suppose it can be classified as a sort of minimal techno.

Made in FL studio, using a bunch of single-hit drum samples, a whole load of stock effects, NI Massive, 3xOsc, Genesis. Genesis is a CPU hog.

I hope you can enjoy it, it's kind of unconventional.

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My review, your song:

Kicks kind of dull, it to my ear sounds similar to the FL preset base one. Wether it is or isn't its evoking a negative thought in my head. :P I think a crunchier kick would have done well in the song, then use the low end of the one you have for its body so to speak. It is an easy way to get the timbre you may want (dunno if you had a strugle with the kick or not). Grab 2 kicks, one full bodied deep one and one with a sharp attack and mix the two using the details of each for one another. I find electric/synthy kicks matched with sampled drums attacks gets a good sound.

Early bass sound, unsure what it is, I'm assuming 3xosc. I think you could probably afford to compress it up. Its god a good saw-grit to it but it sounds like the filter settings are clamping its output down an awful lot. Worth trying with the 3xosc, or any synth really is to be very delicate with the filter/resonance ASDR and instead use effects in the mixer rather than in the synth itself to produce the texture/timbre you want. I've found the filter settings on 3xosc to be rather limiting myself at times when I want to get all funky.

1:00 the drums are very engaging. More panning diversity would make it move around a bit more. Another suggestion for trying out in the future is to take a single drum sound and seperate by frequency its panning. Say the wooden click-ish sound had its lower range sounds panned left and its high end panned right, you can get a very simple rhytmhn to become very enveloping ounding without much work done in terms of the writing itself. EQUO works for thi with its pan option, a bit crushing plugin called redu(p)cer works aswell (and is IMO a cleaner sound).

1:10ish, your instrumentation choices all layer quite nicely. Lot of good decisions made. I do not know how you've mixed this but I'd make sure not to clamp down high ends with the EQs, nor reduce the reverb/delay allowed frequency outputs. I found outside from some of the percussion instruments, there wasn't alot of definition in the high end until 2:40. In future projects if you drop a parametric eq on the master and look at whats playing, sometimes you can fill a higher register just by cloning an instrument and doubling up raised an octave. Bit of layering can help cheat your way to a more full sound if thats what you desire.

2:33 is a nice fluffly filter shifty majigger. Feel free to include some details about what you did there in a response. Thats right Mich, I'm assigning you homework in a review.

Fade out boo. Lazy.

Mich responds:

Kick: It's not the preset base one for starters. I actually aimed for a pretty thin click-y kick, to get the minimal sound. It is in fact a layer of 2 samples: A 909 kick of which I've cut off a bit of the decay with a volume envelope, and one that's called "HOUSEKIK", of which I've used more or less the mid, or punch if you will. To add to that, I used to spend without exaggerating half an hour or more on crafting a kick to get the right punch. That lead me to end up with a bit of a drum line and barely anything melodic by the time ear fatigue kicked in, so I started spending less time tweaking the kick and more time just making a song. Thanks for the tip on mixing a synth kick with sampled ones, that should give nice results in the future.

The early bass sound is actually NI Massive, simply because I dislike the sound of 3xOsc's base saw. You'd think they would sound the same, being basic wave shapes and all, but they don't. I usually make a nice base sound with synthesizers and then spice it up to often make it sound completely different using the mixer insert effect. However, I wanted to keep it minimal again, so I opted for this very thin saw here, as a bit of an introduction to the deeper bass. If I recall correctly, I was trying to imitate some elements of another song I had recently heard. Obviously I didn't quite pull it off and made something completely different, but hey, isn't that what being an artist is about? Anyway, I digress and I need to keep an eye on my character limit.

Damnit, people have mentioned the panning things more than once but I forget about it every single time. I'll make a note saying "PANNING" and pin it to my bulletin board so I don't forget. Nice idea splitting the frequency range up and panning them differently. I've been playing with splitting synths over multiple channels to have different effects on different ranges, making it a whole complex mess of sound, but the simplest thing like panning I haven't done. I'll look into EQUO, I don't think I've ever really used it. For bit crushing I usually use Fruity Squeeze.

I hadn't actually realized how much this was lacking in the high end. I mostly fill that up with a pad or something, but because I wanted to keep this minimal, I haven't added pads, and kept it low on synthesizers as well, as to not have the thing all over the place.

2:33: That's actually as simply as lowering the cut-off on a LP filter. Another subtle thing was bringing in the delay effect ever so slightly for just a moment, and then back down when it kicked it again. You can tell what delay effect I'm talking about at 1:55, it builds up from there. The idea is to just make it all a mess, filter it away and make it kick back in, but clean again.

Fade out, lazy indeed. Sorry. :( I was too uninspired to come up with a decent outro.

FANX for the wonderful helpful review once again. I booted to Windows and opened the project in FL just for you, so feel special. :3

Yay!

Well-done m8!

Mich responds:

Thanks!

Love the percussion work on this dude!

Hope you find inspiration to build on this. It has alot of potential! just needs more layers and subtle melodies going on! really like it :)

Mich responds:

I doubt I'll be coming back to it to be honest, and if I do, just to add a decent drum outro to it.

I'm glad you like it, I was kinda proud of the percussion when I was working on this. :)

Credits & Info

Artist

Listens
1,583
Downloads
58
Score
Waiting for 2 more votes

Uploaded
Jun 22, 2011
6:23 AM EDT
Genre
Techno
File Info
Song
7.6 MB
3 min 19 sec

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