Quote from: attila on October 05, 2016, 11:21:45 pm

GWAR during the 2008 election was amazing

Russian Circles and Cynic aside from that. Crazy musicianship.

ok dude, you're officially fucking dank.

Haha us music nerds have to stick together.

I'm mildly shocked; after spending most of my childhood on the Gulf Coast I can't believe someone in Lafayette is aware of any of those bands haha. I always felt like I was on an island musically down there until I moved to DC.

Quote from: attila on August 24, 2016, 08:02:42 pm

Here, there and everywhere. My drums usually comprise 30-40 tracks

Are you a magician? and if not can I get a rough explanation? I would be infinitely greatful. 

Yeah of course. So let's this track I'm about to track vocals for


What takes a lot of time for me on drums is the number of kits I have to design for any given song. I always have at least two-one really punchy acoustic and one full electronic kit.

First, I sequence all my drums in Battery on the acoustic kit to get the idea down. Then I split Battery into several channels to have more control over every sound individually. That'll usually be my first 10-15 tracks or so. After everything's split I'll always reinforce the acoustic drums with some electronic ones to fill it out a bit and give em dat pop sparkle (with additional harmonic excitement of course). Then I'll split off a couple extra channels to have control of overhead mics. It's admittedly kind of an old school approach. Usually this take me to 20-25 tracks.

Then I make my electronic kit like most others. Just sample hunting and finding what works. I have a lot of little percussive sounds and accidental shit that I pepper around. I come from 10 years of live drumming so it's a very obsessive approach for me. For example, the rim clicks that come in at 0:45 are 4-5 channels of rim samples that are all subtly messed with. There's just a lot of stuff like that throughout. The claps during the chorus are the same kind of situation. Honestly, this song was probably closer to the 50-60 track range for drums. Once you start chasing a believable acoustic drum sound with samples you have to pay really close attention to everything. You either get it right, or terribly, terribly wrong.

tldr; acoustic drums design with one shots is really time consuming to pull off convincingly and will bloat your project.

edit: also not to sound high and mighty, but if anyone actually wants a serious in depth explanation I'd be happy to talk one-on-one or like on a skype call or whatever

Who do you guys think are good sound designers?

Honestly, Tipper is pretty much the indisputable king of sound design. You won't find a cleaner, more defined mix anywhere else in the world, though I will admit his music is very polarizing.

To answer your second question, a song with a good pad is a song where you don't notice the pad at all. In a lot of cases you can get away just fine with pretty much any sustained sound in tune as long as it's pulled down far enough. Sometimes it's cool to make a statement with them though (the short breaths in Black Skinhead for example).

Well, has it helped you? Just be honest on it

Yes it's helpful. Especially when you're working on something more cerebral and technical like sound design. If you have your reference already, you can focus 100% on improving. Otherwise you're jumping between writing and sound design and never really engaging fully in either.

At least that's how my brain works. 

Just had a quick crack at it, forgive my shitty backing chords and getting lazy on the second half-isolating that little tom thunk from the vocal was taking too long. Wasn't too much happening really, that sample had a lot of nice harmonics that punched through really well with some distortion.

Split it into two tracks, one more mid heavy and one more hi heavy. Focused on getting a good attack out of the mid track and getting more enunciation on the hi track.

Effecting it was basically taking the same principals of producing pop vocals and just going more overboard.

Chain for mids was:

EQ-Supercharger-Driver-Ohmicide-C1 Comp-Transient Master-Imager-Harmonic Exciter

Chain for hi's:
EQ-Supercharger-Ohmicide-Imager-Exciter

"Son, if you want a girl, she's yours."

A few messy breakups and several rounds of therapy later I can confirm this to be inaccurate.

Thanks Dad.