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Messages - Arktopolis

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181
Inspiration/Creativity/Motivation / Re: What Makes Music Worth Your Time?
« on: February 11, 2016, 11:31:16 am »
Is it really productive to think of life as a series of sacrifices? You have limited time at your disposal, so you have to choose what you do with it. Might as well be something you have fun doing.

I've reached a point where I've come too far and given up too much to stop writing music. However I feel like I'm having somewhat of a quarter life crisis when it comes to thinking about whether all that time was worth it considering the things I had to give up because of it. I'm at a point where my music isn't good enough to be profitable and yet I've already dedicated so much time to the art.

This line of thinking gets you nowhere. If you don't like writing music, why would you insist on wasting MORE of your life to that?

If you accept music as a hobby, then you really shouldn't stress too much about this. Take a break if you feel like it, and just continue to improve yourself. What is it about Madeon's music that makes it better than yours? Whatever it is, work on that. And don't be afraid of having that nine-to-five job; Einstein did his most important research while he was working in a patent office.

If you do want to make a career out of music, you need a realistic plan for how to make money. It's bound to cause suffering if you just hope that one day you will wake up a rock star.

182
You Might Like... / Re: Haywyre - Two Fold Pt. 2
« on: February 10, 2016, 03:10:38 pm »
Thanks for sharing! I wasn't really excited about Haywyre's older tracks, but this 80's rock vibe in the first two tracks really resonates with me. Do You Don't You is not only a beautiful track but also great ear massage.

183
WIPs / Re: Feedback on this track.
« on: February 10, 2016, 11:56:30 am »
Actually you can embed private tracks, it just doesn't work with the "private link" you get from SC. If you want to embed it, choose the "Embed" tab instead of "Share". From there you can copy the "<iframe ..." piece of code, from which the embeddable URL can be found inside src="" .

E:formatting

184
WIPs / Re: The Place (WorkInProgress)
« on: February 08, 2016, 03:31:35 pm »
Sounds great! I kind of like the extreme ducking, maybe it's because of all the future house bass stuff that I've been exposed to lately... Agree with outofplastic about the sub during the break.

As for the toms, to me they sound a bit too thin. Maybe a tiny bit of reverb would help?

185
Inspiration/Creativity/Motivation / Re: Admit your bad habits
« on: February 08, 2016, 05:17:27 am »
I might write a melody or create a sound really fast as a "placeholder", then never even try to improve it because it starts to sound familiar.

186
Sound Design / Re: Snares
« on: February 04, 2016, 01:14:19 pm »
Depending on the type of music you make you might get some good use out of crispydinner's snares on freesound.org. He also makes really good kicks, just search his name on there.

Thanks, will check them out. Yeah, I completely ignored that snare sounds vary a lot between genres. I'm currently trying to produce electro house stuff in the styles of Madeon and deadmau5, but what I'd like to have is a nice generalist library of samples so that I can easily experiment in styles like glitch hop, neurofunk, and maybe even dubstep.

E: formatting

187
Sound Design / Re: Snares
« on: February 04, 2016, 11:10:54 am »
OK, so I guess "with love" would be a decent summary of how people approach snares. I sort of agree with the sentiments about not reinventing the wheel; for making music, I'd really prefer to use just one sample per snare sound, but I don't have too many quality samples in my library ATM. Are there any must-have free snare samples, or should I just immediately throw my money at some paid ones?

Here are my thoughts on snares

Nice to see some quality tutorials on youtube that are also to the point :)

188
Mixing/Mastering / Re: Mixdown Question (Wrecking my brain over this!)
« on: February 03, 2016, 11:07:47 am »
Not really answering your question (I'm actually struggling with the same problem myself), but I just want to note that upgrading to 64-bit won't help much if your CPU is the bottleneck. The main advantage is to be able to use more than 4GB of memory. Not to say you shouldn't upgrade, just don't expect it to solve all problems!

189
You Might Like... / Re: What producer blows your mind
« on: February 01, 2016, 03:44:39 pm »
Culprate, KOAN sound, Madeon, old Spor... Any good neurofunk producer actually. And after reading this thread, Nhato!

190
Sound Design / Re: 80's style synths, drum processing and effects?
« on: January 30, 2016, 06:40:40 pm »
You probably want to look into FM as well. Dexed can load DX7 presets, so you could play with those to get some inspiration. Especially the e-piano and bass presets are some of the defining sounds of the eighties  :)

191
WIPs / Re: Supersawn n good melody V2
« on: January 30, 2016, 07:51:35 am »
Don't remember if I listened to the previous version. Anyway, to me it sounds like a quality track, and I can't really come up with any major criticism. I like the vocal hook, there's something relaxing about it.

One detail: at about 2:25 there's a small glitch in the supersaw, the level goes down, so you might wanna check where that's coming from. Actually there's a similar thing going on at 2:05.

192
Absolutely nothing wrong with starting to write a song like that in my opinion. When you have that spine, you can start to vary the chords inside the bars by

* creating inversions with the bassline: for example, say you have a progression IV-I in C major, so there's one bar of F and one of C. In the first bar, instead of using just a whole note F in the bass, write F (half note) A (half note), or even F (whole note) A(quarter note) B(quarter note), so you get a little melodic line in the bass.

* thinking of the highest voice in your chord progression as a melody line. You can later move this to another instrument if you like, or just keep it in the pad/piano/whatever as a sort of counter-melody.

* "visiting" other chords during the bar: let's say you have that two-bar IV-I chord progression. Inside the first bar, you could write a small sub-progression IV-I6 (so in C you'd have an E in the bass)-IV

* varying the rhythm. The chord doesn't have to change on the first beat!

Also, check out the other threads on this forum about the topic, I think there's already a lot of good info about the theory behind chord progressions.

193
Composition/Arrangement/Theory / Re: What exactly is a "counter melody"?
« on: January 27, 2016, 11:55:01 am »
Here is another (non-EDM) example that I really like, because it really sets the mood for the chorus, at about 0:40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWFtUbYiCMw. The piano and horn play an independent melody that is slightly more complex than the vocal melody, yet it has a supporting role. Notice also how the melodies join to the same rhythm at points, and then act more independently at others.

EDIT:grammar

194
Sound Design / Snares
« on: January 24, 2016, 07:56:50 am »
It would be cool to hear from people how they approach snares, i.e. do you use samples, or do you synthesize them?

If you use samples, what are your go-to libraries?

If you synthesize, do you have any tips to share? I started digging into snare synthesis, and found this great recent tutorial by SeamlessR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A7oFpmXuls. The basic idea for snare synthesis is pretty simple, but what really makes the sound is adding reverb in the different components, and glueing them together with compression. I also noticed that it's easy to make your snares more interesting by creating any kind of "metallic" sound (e.g. some of the stock wavetables in Serum), band-passing, and setting the envelope so that it gives a nice metallic "ring".

195
Inspiration/Creativity/Motivation / Re: Cooking
« on: January 24, 2016, 07:00:49 am »
Well, I have found myself thinking "needs more high end" when a dish was lacking in sourness :D It's not a perfect analogy, but you can think of the basic tastes as different frequency ranges: a good dish (track) is usually a well-balanced mix of each of them.

Cooking is also almost as much about texture as it is about flavor, which I suppose would then be the "music" of cooking, i.e. harmony and rhythm. If you put all your components into a mixer you just get white noise.

I'm actually now more interested in improving my cooking based on production techniques. Instead of sampling from the store, can I synthesize the taste of chicken? Do I need to sidechain the sauce to give more room to the steak?

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