I've been working pretty hard with a few other people to put together a music/graphic design promo channel/community called The Netroom Project. Our goal is to release a free album full of music from lesser known electronic musicians with album art made from lesser known graphic designers every month. Instead of struggling to promote ourselves on our own, we figured there would be strength in numbers. We had our first release earlier this month with 17 tracks! You can find a mini-mix for the album as well as links to download and stream full tracks here: https://soundcloud.com/thenetroomproject/spectroscopicinjection.

It's a community-driven experiment, so if you like the concept, definitely stop by the reddit page here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNetroomProject/ and join the Discord server too: https://discordapp.com/invite/ZEunxeu. We'd love it if you submitted some work or got involved, or just came to hang out and talk!

I don't have any experience using overdrive pedals, but a couple general distortion suggestions:

If you use Ableton, you should definitely check out their Amp plugin. That thing is all over all of my productions, definitely my favorite distortion unit. They actually have a stock Overdrive plugin, as well as a Saturation stock plugin which are both pretty nice.

Other than that, I really like Predatohm. Beware if you want to use it in stereo mode though, it can cause some nasty phasing issues if summed back to mono later on.

iZotope Trash 2 is popular and pretty good, it's flexible and has some nice multi-band capabilities.

Yeahh, it was a quick try. I think I got the general quality of sound just way less refined. I'd bet if you use an FM synth (Serum works) and just modulate one wave with another with the modulator up an octave or two from the operator, put a bandpass filter on it, and modulate both the FM amount and filter cutoff with the same LFO you could get pretty close (this is pretty much exactly what I did). From there you'd just need to mess with what wavetables you're using, the amount of modulation, and prob some saturation/small reverb etc to finish it off.

If you end up getting close you should post what you did!

Hey peeps! I go by Escape Velocity here in music producer-land, and I've got two new drum & bass tracks I wanna show you:

The first one is called Hayashi Limit and it's really intense and about stars: https://soundcloud.com/achieve-escape-velocity/hayashi-limit

The second one is called Food for Thought. It's more mellow and personal, it's about introspection. It features some Alan Watts voiceovers that have had a large impact on me: https://soundcloud.com/achieve-escape-velocity/food-for-thought

If you have any feedback I'd love to hear what you have to say! And if you like them feel free to follow me, I've got more coming 

So, I checked out your music and I think it's really, really good. You just got a new SC follower.

Honestly I struggle with the self-confidence thing myself a lot. For me it really stems from not having the knowledge/resources to make the music that I really enjoy listening to. I want to make certain types of music really badly and I get the ideas for really cool tracks but way more often than not I struggle to recreate them as real songs and they end up sounding terrible. When this happens it triggers a downward spiral of losing any sort of self-confidence, creativity, and productivity I initially had.

To keep this from happening, I really try to just go with the flow. Rather than trying to make a super complicated sound or mix-down that's already planned in my head, I just play around with things until something interesting comes out and I run with it. If I do that it removes any expectations from the song I'm making - it doesn't HAVE to be any specific thing, so whatever it ends up as is the 'right' thing, if that makes sense.


In the very back of my mind I usually still am like "fuck if only I could make one of those Mefjus-style basslines..." haha

To learn the super basics, I took this class on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/digitalsounddesign. Totally free, or at least it was 3 years ago. After that I just read most of the Massive manual, experimented a ton, got really frustrated, experimented tons more, watched YouTube tutorials, more frustration, read FM8 manual, more experimentation, more tutorials, more frustration, etc etc to today where I'm basically continuing that cycle as I dig deeper into the sound design rabbit hole.

Some really good YouTube channels that helped me get on my feet:

DJ Vespers - https://www.youtube.com/user/DJVespers
SadowickProductions - https://www.youtube.com/user/SadowickProduction
Dubspot - https://www.youtube.com/user/DubSpot
ARTFX Studio - https://www.youtube.com/user/ARTFXSTUDIOS
SeamlessR - https://www.youtube.com/user/SeamlessR