So much good stories. We need a lame one. Here it goes:

I was into movie effects! Like ... really bad. Watched DVD extrtas, documentaries, got into 3D modeling, compositing, making reaaaaallllyyyy lame little videos with my friends. Few of them are still there, DON'T !!! ... try to google them, or I'll hunt you down and torture you!

...but then, i was like 16, doctors told me I'm partially color blind. That explained some stuff but also crushed that dream quite heavily. A colorblind graphics guy? Yeah right. I was too dumb for serious programming, so I searched what else cool can I do with a computer. Downloaded FL studio, drew few notes, sounded terrible, closed it and didn't touch it for like a year or two.

Then I got into listening to electronic music. ATB in paticular. That Trilogy album is still cool imho. I saw some footage from his studio and thought, wait a minute, I was experimenting with this stuff back then. Lemme try again. But I took it properly this time. Reading Wiki on Opera Mini on my old T630 phone during classes, learning about notes, intervals, chords, scales. Essentially trying to understand some theory first. I didn't have any music lessons as a kid, so this was kinda challenge. ...but I've learned thing or two. Then forum time era along. Trance.nu. Listening to old good Tiesto and Armin and PvD compilations back in 2008 - 2011. Anjunabeats then. Matt Lange, Andrew Bayer, A&B of course. So much to aspire to.

Definitely Airbase, everything he made back in the days was superb.

RIIIGHT?!?!?!

...well and it kinda stayed with me, this hobby. Now I try to fit in to that all mr.SuicideSheep / Liquicity territory. Loving guys like Ramesses B, MitiS, KOAN Sound, Sorrow, Etherwood. Those inspire me today.

Hope it wasn't boring too much.

Ok, guys, sorry If I turn the vibe down a bit, but ... I kinda can't hold it.

I think I might not be the only one here who felt in love with this hobby some years ago. It's awesome hobby, probably coolest there can be, but sometimes it has it's dark sides. (Vader jokes in 3...2..1... ) What I mean by that is, eventhough it's first and foremost about the music, about the emotions, you can't stop the world around you. Trust me, I've tried.

First two or three years it's so cool. You work on your new hobby. BTTF shit. You're life's completely unwritten. Who the hell knows what it might lead to? So liberating from the real world ... and cool at the same time.

The next three years, you start to doubt, if you just didn't find a right source of information to learn from, or if you're just useless. Especially as younger guys then you start to appear with songs you'd kill for to be able to make. (That one really hurts at the time.) ...the hobby's still really cool. But the lifes starts to throw some reality checks in your way. Colledge, uni, life plans, money... Everything somehow connects back to the hobby. You need time for it, place for it, some gear for it. Also your friends invest their life in different hobbies, doing well. But damn. That piano, that synth, it always works right? It gets you out of everything.

But then another two years pass and ... your friends still support you, but not becouse your hobby is cool anymore. It's becouse it's just you now. That unwritten life starts to define itself pretty clearly. You're that guy, who tries to produce for years, who's never satisfied with himself. That's just it. And what's worst, sometimes even that piano and synths don't cure it anymore. Believing in your own stuff becomes hard, becouse you know you're gonna listen to it few years later and cringe. You start to procrastinate from the hobby you've put a big chunk of your life into. ...and that sucks, becouse you know it can make you happy. It just isn't that frequent anymore...

If anybody's been through something like this ... what got you out of it? Becouse I feel like i need to find something ASAP.

...also, for the newbies: That saying: Keep your feet on the ground and eyes in the skies. Don't forget about the feet part. It might kinda hurt in the future.

I'm with ion here. It's big rectangle with orange elements on blue background. Hard to ignore. Also, the person will probably listen to your track for the time he reads one page of the thread anyway. It gets you the play count, yeah, but .... dunno.

...or read something about fletcher-munson curves and you'll get how they do it. Also you'll kinda understand why it's a sh**ty thing to do.

iZotope was developing something for extraction without phase invert in the past, but it went silent. I guess it just wasn't reliable enough.

If you give one of these a pre-delay of 8 ms and give the other layer a post-delay of 8 ms it will sound waaaaay wider.

...and then you play the track in mono and get ugly phasing. I'd try to detune them diffrently.

There's amazing chapter about it in one of the Owsinsi's book. Imagine it as a theatre play. Each instrument is an actor. If you leave all the instruments in the middle, they stand in line, so you can't see some of them properly. If you hard-pan everything, then you have two lines of actors on each side of the stage. Still wrong. It can lead to "big mono" effect, essentially having so much stereo information your ears give up on figuring out the soundstage. What you want is to make the stage somehow interesting. Place them incrementally around the stage.