Something i've noticed (during my time and in general) is that while we are all happy and eager to know what others think of our latest work, few of us actually shares what makes them proud of that work. Personally speaking whenever I wanted to hear critique (or let's face it now, praise), it was because at the root of the track I had tried something(s) new. I had expanded my skill set in someway that excited me.

So I wanted to try something different, and this will also help me re-engage this community and get to know the current crowd that lives here.

Show me your latest track. And teach us all what you learned from it. What did you try that turned out great!

It doesn't have to be a huge technical accomplishment or a three paragraph essay. Even something like "I just realized if I EQ and group all my sounds, I can make it LOUD without making it MUDDY".

No skill barrier. From beginner to expert, I want to see it all. For the more advanced of us, take this opportunity to share your knowledge in the hopes of furthering the skill set of something shared here.

Fresh off the oven. What I learned:

1) Atonality doesn't need to be an absolute thing.

2) Orchestra works with everything, including breakcore.

3) Also I'm flexing off my unmatched perc programming skill.

One last thing, always break the rules. Fuck theory.

All excellent lessons to be learned. It's interesting, in your description you mentioned sound design as a process. I got into sound design as a full time gig for several years and one of my industry heroes quotes "it wasn't until I became great at sound design, did I get good with music production". His point being that once he learned how to manipulate the frequencies of all sounds and gained the ability to listen to all sound critically, did he learn how to use those techniques to sculpt traditional instrument sounds better.

So good on you for taking the sound design element of music production seriously.

I do not agree with your sentiment with theory, but I don't want to make that a focal point of this conversation. Good job dude, enjoyed the track!

Do you know how long I've been waiting for you to reply to one of my comment, bruh. Nearly 13 years.

You are the reason I make music. You and Danman87. :D

Also NGAP isn't the same without u.

Yeaaah I did weasel my way into game industry for a while before dropping off the radar. I just can't stand the fact that I have to sacrifice creative production for profit. Main reason why I'm still on NG. I left then come back, left and come back again. Now I'm stuck here eternally.

Sound design is my strongest suit. It has been my bargaining right (and sometime bragging) when come to getting gigs in the industry. But beyond that, I don't know, I'm not that keen on other stuff. My dream of becoming an audio tech is long gone. I'm too old for those.

The theory thing is kinda my inside joke thing. I'm known around the NGAP for being the chud that rejecting theory, not because I hate it, deep down I just suck at comprehending it, that's all. I can't read sheet music nor understand jack shit on theory. I learned everything through trial-and-error and by ears. I still can't play the piano, nor blow any trumpet. But I can write 10 minutes pieces for fun eh?

You have been my biggest inspiration throughout years. Although now that I stop trying to be you or anyone else, I still look up to the fact that you have been my secret mentor for that past 12-13 years, since I was a village idiot. Sigh...

My dude, this is STILL me today lol... I still cannot play an instrument. I cannot read music sheets. At least not in the traditional sense.

I CAN read a midi score sheet (Fruity user since FL3). If you can look at your midi screen and you know approximately where you want to put your bass/treble/mid notes and WHY, than you too can read music. This is the music sheets of our age. Hans Zimmer is in the same boat as us.

I am proud to have inspired you when you were younger. In a way, it helps me to think the spirit never died in me. It just left and moved onto bigger and better people :). I hope your spirit never fades.

It will never fade. I still remember all your alt accounts :P lol.

I've been an FL user too and hadn't moved off despise the FL video player bullshit thing hasn't been officially fixed. The painstalk action whenever you wanna press Ctrl + 2 to resize the columns in the piano roll, but you accidentally pressed Alt + 2 instead, and it launched a demo track, deleting your unsaved project. Yup, I love being a masochist FL user.

You know if you ever wanna chill, I'm also in Toronto and would love to chill with ya. There was a NG meetup hosted by Chronamut and Evil-Dog last year but I missed it out. Chron left NG again :(.

That breaks my heart. Theory merely ought to be viewed as a philosophical worldview that reveals the secrets behind organizing the ever entropic nature of sound.

This is a good idea for a discussion.

Though, if someone asks, I would be glad to tell them how I approach music or tips I've learned from professional engineers on mixing and how I apply them, I assume that most aren't that interested so I don't want to be that guy that talks against the wind.

I love reading how others approach their music and what they have learned from writing it so I'll be coming back to read what others contribute.

But for the sake of this good topic, I'll participate in good faith that someone actually cares:

First thing: For the NGADM, what influences someone to write in a particular style/mood in 2 weeks? Well in this case, my history of participating in the contest and losing consistently in the first and second round influenced me in wanting to write something that is more ugly, angry, and foreboding.

Now that I got the initial mood in mind, and since the deadline comes extremely quick and I cannot wait for inspiration, ghost writing becomes very helpful in this regard. I found this track to embody the mood and timbre that I initially wanted to go for:

https://soundcloud.com/8dawn/8dio-case-strings-calminity-by

Thirdly, 8Dio has a percussion library coming out soon, so I figured that would be my baseline of sounds to go with this kind of mood.

Now it's time to start putting the piece together. While I was working on my sound design, rhythm, and melodic content, I also thought about 4 specific people that I enjoy music here on Newgrounds. Mutual, I0ta, etc. for poly rhythms/baseline, Lich for atmosphere and arpeggios, Anchorwind & TheHeartgrinder for sound design and style. I use the descriptions lightly as all 4 influenced certain elements in this track interchangeably. It's mostly using the impressions I got from their music that have impacted me as if I would now be using their spices in my cooking.

Eventually after I begin ghost writing, my music starts becoming it's own. I use another track just to get me going, and the pieces I start putting together is enough to gain the needed inspiration to finish.

The second half of my piece was conceived from what I would imagine doing if I were the composer that did "Calminity." It was such a teaser that I would've wanted to hear a continuation of some sort.

Now, it looks like I took the essay approach with your topic, so I'll stop at the introduction of how my piece was conceived. If I were to get into the details of theory and mixing, it would be too long winded for this kind of thread.

Hmm this is interesting. I might do this for each new track I release. I think some of my production skills are unique and people might be interested in what I have to show.

This is an important aspect of being a professional that I don't think enough people understand before they make that leap. How important it is to be able to ghost write or quickly use various techniques to get a desired mood quickly, even if inspiration is not there to guide you.

Resisting using another's melody or structures simply for the sake of staying original to yourself is a great way to corner yourself.

Fascinating Phonometrologist. I enjoyed reading your approach to this track as well as the track itself. I really like your style of music, and will be listening to more of your work.

Was there any specific skill or technique you're most proud of in this track?

Neat idea for a topic! Have enjoyed reading thus far.

Newest thing: https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/878309

Forgive me if this is a bit esoteric.

What I (re)learned: Phase is super important. By taking the time to make sure that the phase of the close mics on the drums fit nicely with the overheads, I saved myself from having to overuse EQ and compression to compensate for signals that clash with one another. This has the added benefit of letting the drums punch through the bass and distorted guitars without having to have an internal loudness war in the mix. Given, the kick is still hitting the master bus pretty hard, but the mix sounds plenty big without the waveform looking like a solid brick.

Other general things re-learned in hindsight:

-Procrastinating is bad, and you will settle for parts that you could have performed better (i.e. all my leads)

Alright. Only taking solo tracks for this one; my most recent piece is

And the thing I learned here wasn't musical, but more to do with lyrics.

When writing this one I broke down because these were the words that my fiancé said to me, words that I desperately needed to hear from someone beforehand that I never got to hear, especially from my parents. But even that bit did not complete the song.

Then there was someone who came to Soundskills one day who, like me, was disowned by the family for pursuing music. She had an amazing voice, but she was crying so badly and on the verge of just giving up on life. All it took was for someone to listen, and hopefully, relate. Hearing her story helped me not just developmentally, but also with finishing up the lyrics to this one.

I think the lesson I learned from this is simple: you never know what you'll find when you just stop to listen, especially to those who need a listening ear the most.

You know, i've never actually played too much with phase in my mixes, and perhaps this was a big underlying issue that made me miss out on getting more out of my low end.

Do you use a built in DAW tool to do phase mixing like this, or do you use a more sophisticated tool like izotope to build a chain with phase being one link in the chain?

No, in this case it’s just done via linear editing. In Reaper, I use the nudge command, and in cubase I would just manually drag. Bumping up the peak display amplitude helps you better line up the waveforms. As an experiment at some point I may even try printing all the drums’ insert fx to their respective tracks (since they also inherently affect the phase) and realigning them afterwards to see if it makes any more difference.

Wrote this thread about it but I'll share more here

I was always jealous how able Thomas Bergersen did it with the wide mixing shit, and I don't think many musicians have done similar stuff to what he did. Well, I attempted. I got grumpy about mixing ever since CloakedSoup said my shit sound weak on Chips Discord, and have been working hard to improve it.

This track is the statement that I've done it. My way.

The atmosphere is the main focus. I wanna create as wide and massive sounds as possible. And that means it must sound good on the speakers. Brass was layered with 3 libraries, I brought out the heavy guns: CSS Brass, Jaeger and Frozo. Backed it up by bassline made in Serum and Zebra. The rest of the synth were done in Massive, Harmor, VK-1 Viking, Dexed and of course, Sytrus. Perc were large range of libraries, from DM-307, HZ Percussion to Stormdrum 3.

Fun fact about this track, it was done in less than 5 hours in one night, despise all the planning. :P

I tell you now, the next track gonna be something much more massive than this one.

Very kind of you to say.

In regards to any specific skill or technique, I wouldn't use the word proud as I don't think that quite fits. Usually I'm "proud" of works when I spent a lot of time exploring the theory behind a piece, but this piece was more of a discipline to present at least something in a short amount of time.

That being said, I was surprised that I was able to pull off sampling a previous guitar solo to fit into this piece. The guitar that is heard are actually bits and pieces of extra/unused parts that I was comping from another piece that I wrote about 3 years ago. With the quick deadline, I didn't have time to schedule recording a player and to have them learn and play the part. I wanted to see if I could just take old recordings I had, and change the pitch and move the rhythm to make it sound like they were actually performing to this one. I was happy that it worked out, albeit I still believe it would be better to have a musician be able to respond to the music. It was good to know that I can sample recordings that I captured in the past to fit into a new context. In theory it might seem obvious, but it is very tricky with guitars.

Moreover, I received this feedback from 8DIo, "the guitar overall seems like it could use some refinement, timing/structure-wise it seems to fight the piece overall instead of complement it, as the piece is so rigid and structures and the guitar is so free form they clash." I agree with what they are talking about, but when you're working on something so quick, it's easy to miss things like that. It's helpful to get as many ears involved to get a well-rounded mix. After reading that, I quantized the guitar part to precisely hit the beat, and so the version that is heard here on Newgrounds is now the previous mix. It makes sense to make the guitar player perfect on the metronome when this piece is heavily reliant on rhythmic instruments.

I wonder what he meant by that. If I were to guess, it would be having one loud dynamic all the way through without having a "quieter" section to contrast it. Just as in Rock music, songs will get produced having a single instrument or vox playing right before the whole band jamming to create that illusion of loudness/power. Hence the mix sounding "big."

Quick example that popped up in my head was "Black Dog" by Zeppelin, but its really everywhere.

I get quite insecure at works that I spent days on it and seeing it get shot down. I mean there were quite sometime in my life I tried to copy MaestroRage, Danman87 and TSFH but basically failed, and here I am :(

Yeah about the big sound thing, there are couple of different approaches to it. The wall of sound thing is classic method, which I used in the past. But through time I discovered it's more of how you mix the sounds than the instruments used. The instruments help sometime, but it doesn't generate the wide sound that these pros were using.

Okay. I work in a different medium compared to the majority of people here. I handle live guitars and multiples of them, The stuff I have learnt is not new knowledge but still relevant, especially for live producers.

Rule 1. The most important rule. Get the best take possible going into your DAW, you cannot improve a bad take, post processing will highlight every mistake. So to get your best take you need to adhere to a few rules. For DI (direct injection) you need a quality preamp, impedance matching and a dynamic compressor. Match it with the maximum volume from the guitar and the line in without clipping. Done right you have a dynamic guitar with an even level and no ground issues which gives you freedom in tone selection.

If you are mic'ing up, again maximize the volume in, use a stereo mic, one dynamic the other capacitive on an xy axis either to 2 mono channels or hard left and right stereo. Both have benefits and draw backs, essentially regarding tone.

Rule 2. Recording multiple guitars? Be brutal in eq, high pass one, low pass the other and pan hard left and right. Guitar is stupidly hard to record, they dominate mid range, thinning out gives the mix more breathing space.Never centre it unless it's bass.

I cannot emphasize enough how important a good take is, the same with eq. Be brutal. I've done 12 guitars in a track before, it took months to get them all to sit.

Glitched Universe

My friend had been reviewing my latest songs, and told me that there were lots of empty spaces, and that I should improve with the consistency of the song. So, I tried to make a very consistent song. I like the glitch genre and songs like Killbot and Dontholdback, so I decided to try make one myself!

I learned that

1) Don’t put empty spaces in your songs

2) Make them consistent

Ok kids. I'm going to do a "tutorial" on my latest song Chambers.

I mainly wanted to do this, because I think me and probably 10-20 other artists out of thousands on newgrounds write Trap music, but I don't think they make trap bangers, or bass nation style music. So here it is. A trap song.

Where do I begin? I'm only going to be doing part of the song since there is a lot to cover. I'll be doing 1:36 - 3:45.

The project and mixer channels:

The project has 40 playlist tracks and 45 mixer channels.

THE BREAKDOWN:

So this part was weird. I had a weird vocal chop which I was inspired by a track on Bass Nation that had a similar vocal chop. So I decided to try and make that my own style. Next I basically layered it with effects and quiet chords along with a quiet sub bass. It's the exact same as the intro, but without the tag. I really like the cool chain sound effect I added. It definitely gives more flavor to the song.

DROP PART 1:

I guess you could call this the drop. There isn't really a "drop" in this kind of music, but you could call it that. Off the bat the most noticeable part is the drums. Very basic trap beat.

Next you hear the 808, which is definitely the idea around the song. I made this cool sort of fade in, which I've seen in different youtube videos and in different bass nation songs.

The next part of the drop is the leads. The leads are the same, but just layered.

Then everything else is effects.

DROP PART 2:

Now here it starts to get a bit weird. Everything is the same except with more effects. The melody does start to get a bit groovy, but that's not really important. The 808 starts to develop more melody instead of one note.

And um. That's it for the tutorial on how to make trap.

Hope you enjoyed it!

This is such a great thread!

I'm not going to post something but just HAVE to say something in response to the "Fuck theory" comment - No no no no no!!! If you're going to learn anything from this thread, please don't let that be it. Of course "screw the rules" is a good sentiment, but knowing the "rules" before you break them is equally important.

I'm not going to go on a ten paragraph ramble as to why music theory is important, so I'll let Adam Neely do it for me. Please watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49alQj7c5ps

I love the idea of this thread! Hey, everyone! My name is Sean and I'm pretty new here, I just signed up today after realizing I should join some communities to help network and land opportunities. I'm currently a college student studying audio with goals to become a post audio producer, composer, sound designer, foley fx artist, and binaural/VR audio engineer.

I've never been able to work with binaural audio before but I decided to give PlugIn Alliance's Mega Bundle free trial a try (which is worth it, by the way. Entirely!) and that came with two plugs from DearVR. I realized as I was working not only how delicate utilizing these techniques are and how precise you need to be with automation to make it believable, but also how drastically it changes the character.

As a quick insight into this particular piece, I used two celesta's from EW and the Music Box LABS library from Spitfire to layer together a music box. I was struggling with making it sound "smaller" without it being quieter. Basic EQ techniques did help make it sound smaller but also made it sound thin. I already threw in a creepy laugh into the binaural plugs at the end of the song so I decided to see what it could do with the music box. Turns out it achieved exactly what I was looking for!! It helped the three libraries have the small sound we're used to hearing from a music box, condense the three together into one entity, and by being placed in a more defined audio space it's easy to hear even among the loud thunder at the climax.

Bit lengthy for my first post, but this was something cool I felt I should share with you all! :)

• Spirit Waltz [Contains Binaural Elements]

This is a sentiment I think all of us can agree with. Something that really eluded me for many years when I started mixing a bit more seriously was WHY was it that I was naturally gravitating towards some compression tools and others I was not? I still remember, one day I bought a really expensive EQ. It was something like $500 and it was supposed to be the EQ that would end all EQ's.

No matter what I tried and how I tried to use it, I hated that EQ. Anything it touched was almost instantly garbage. My favorite compression and EQ plugin were these cheap $20 ones I bought off some random developer.

Plugins are all made to tackle a specific job, but they all take different routes to achieve it. It is SO important to try new demos and plugins. Stay hungry, stay curious. There exists a plugin that is going to make YOUR style of music and YOUR vision a stronger reality.

amen

Thank you Zelazon, I enjoyed listening to your track having known it's journey.

The day I put a 40-100hz high pass filter on ALL my instruments (even some of the bassy ones), was the day my mixing became 50x easier and my mixes came out way cleaner. There is SO MUCH useless noise when once removed, gives the song so much lift and clarity. Good on you for discovering this gem.

This one I partially agree and disagree with. I agree having speakers is very useful, however be careful in changing your mixing based on your speakers alone. First make sure your speakers don't have a bass knob and that the knob is not dialed up too much.

I always started with a reference track and calibrated my speakers/headphones until they both sounded similar or "good" with the reference track. When that was set I trusted that the track I was producing would reflect off the mixing of the reference track.

Calibration is key before making adjustments to the song based. That said i'm listening to your track now through speakers and it's VERY clean and still bassy so I think you have a pretty good calibration already.

I agree entirely. I tried to create a few remixes in my day using the midi files for those songs. Each one was an absolute shit show. Would have been easier to use them as reference or just start from scratch.

Thank you Felix, I have never ventured into this type of music. It was interesting to learn some neat concepts.

At 9/1/19 03:28 AM, pitbulljones wrote:

I have never done live recordings in my music, but I found this particular tip so fascinating. Where about do you put the high pass and low pass? It's not like a hard split right? For example is it something like

Guitar 1 : 50hz - 2000hz

Guitar 2 : 2000hz - 15khz?

I know Newgrounds is more focused on older techno music, along with some house music, so I wanted to bring some other genres into the mix.

don't split two differently panned guitar takes like this unless you want all the high end of the guitars on one side of your ears and all the low end on the other. you can (and usually should) pan double tracked guitars, though

I was thinking people could take some screenshots of their work. I am a visual learner so that would be helpful.

Thanks for letting us know! I'm actually going to be revisiting a YouTube series I'm starting that goes over cinematic and video game composition and production as soon as the new semester starts and I know what my schedule will be like. I'll get some images of different techniques and projects I'm working on as well and post 'em here for you with explanations of what I'm doing. :)