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[Music] Maker's Thread.

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Posts

  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    edited May 2018
    I remixed another Metroid tune, this time the Brinstar theme from the original Metroid.

    edit: Warning. Loud!

    edit: link disabled for now

    I just got into this whole music production thing a little over a year ago. Half the time I feel like a fucking wizard and the other half I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. It's weird.

    Marty81 on
  • nightmarennynightmarenny Registered User regular
    Hey so I've had some major setbacks with my music emotionally and I wanted to talk about it. About a month ago I had three events sort of lock me out of music and I've had a really hard time getting through it. I'm sure from the outside they are extremely petty things that seem melodramatic but I'm gonna talk about it anyway. So I do a performance analysis class at my community college in which each semester I've gotten a group together and had a piece performed. The last three semesters have been very successful although I've been frustrated with the lack of constructive criticism. I finally got it this semester. I wrote a piece for Altosax and piano and lined up some players. After the two got together I talked to the pianist and she had some very strong things to say. She was very polite and her comments shouldn't destroyed me as they did but man I haven't been able to look at that piece in a month. I can't believe I'm so fragile but here we are.

    In the same week I got into a terrible fight with a friend who has long insisted that I am rude and dismissive towards his beliefs about ancient aliens and the like. I've long felt he was on a hair trigger and would quickly start yelling an insulting me at any perceived slight. After thinking about it for a long time I chose to send him a message telling him I didn't think it would be healthy for us to be friends anymore. He sent back a message where he told me that if this was going to be the last time we talked he wanted to tell me one thing he has always held back(although he actually tells me this all the time) that the music I make is far to complex and he thinks I need to simplify things if I'm ever going to something with it.

    And also in the same week my girlfriend with BPD* had a breakdown and said some stuff she didn't mean including calling me stupid for pursuing music as a career and asking me why I was even bothering.

    I've been trying to write a rock album and get a series of instrumental pieces finished for a body of work that I hope will lead to a career in movie/video game scoring. I'd been finishing a piece a week but this last month I've more or less shut down. After speaking with a friend recently he suggested I throw away the album and work on one song at a time and to also make each one guitar/bass/drums and exactly what I want to put out into the world and so far its gotten me back to work and hopefully I'll have a song finished in a week or two and that makes me happy. I'm now working quickly to fix the piece for my class and feeling a bit better.

    Thanks for reading guys.

    *Sorry to anyone offended by the terminology I'm using. I'm still learning how to talk about this and I haven't really talked about it to anyone but her.

    Quire.jpg
  • IrukaIruka Registered User, Moderator mod
    @nightmarenny

    It's going to be hard to compare to you technically since I dont do music, but I totally understand where the frustration sets in. Criticism is both hard to get and hard to take. You are working hard on improving so just getting "I donno, it's okay" feels useless, but getting a rough tear down of your work can feel devastating. "I've come this far, how could all these things still be an issue?" gets to me a lot.

    I encourage myself by remembering that there's not a set timeline for learning. Some concepts and techniques are going to set in faster than others, and if you are reaching for something and looking critically at your own work, you'll continue to improve. It's also important to consider that all critique isn't created equal, and trying to take them all in and implement them without any personal agency can really take some ownership of your work away from you. We've all seen the person who is terrible and wont take any advice and has a overly heightened sense of their work, and that's scary. At some point I realised that just because you dont agree with a critique, or dont have time to implement feedback right on the spot, or think that it doesn't work now but it could work later doesn't make you that person.

    Wanting music to sustain you financially for sure puts a lot more pressure on it, that's true of any of the arts. You'll need to be able to take some instruction and feedback, and possibly make work that you aren't 100% in love with, but falls in line with the industry that needs it. Recognizing that and not taking it personally is necessary to be creative professional, and it's also exhausting.

    I've had a lot of people, including other artists, tell me I'm wasting my time in one way or another. A TON of people think the arts are a huge waste of time or not worth money. It's hard to not let it get to you, but personally, I think developing some armor against it is part of the skillset.

  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @Marty81 — It weirdly makes me think of The Pogues and their particular brand of "Celtic" Punk — pretty cool, but uh, the production is harsh. Just brutally loud and shredding my ears with high frequencies. I'm not sure what sort Mastering tools you have access to, but I certainly recommend studying up on Compression/Limiting and (if you're not already) you probably want to be mixing at lower volumes to preserve the health of your ears.

    @nightmarenny — Listen to Iruka.

    That said, the conclusion of your post makes it sound like you've actually crossed a certain threshold, that you possibly took the words of the pianist and your kooky alien-loving friend to heart (along with the words of your other friend) and have transitioned into composing a form of music more true to your desires. So good luck — even if luck has nothing to do with it — and whenever you get a chance to share something in this new style, please do.

  • KhavallKhavall British ColumbiaRegistered User regular
    I think there are two things to keep in mind when getting criticism, to help with feeling personally crappy about getting criticism. Also, though, the best way to get better at anything is just to do it a bunch, and taking criticism is a thing that works that way too.

    The first thing to remember is pretty simple: You are not your work. Even if it's something that you poured your heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears and any other parts of you into, it is not you. It is something that you made. Critiques at the thing you made are not critiques of you.

    The second thing I like to think about is that I always think about taking criticism as basically trying to learn how to be better at self-critiquing my own work. It's really hard to step back and approach your own work with critical detachment, and it's really easy to sort of gloss over certain things because you are super invested in it, or have gotten used to things.
    An example of this is that you often see young composers' music basically being super schizophrenic, and that's because they haven't yet learned the difference between "I'm bored with this" and "The audience will be bored with this". When you're listening to something that you wrote, you've probably listened to it hundreds of times, and so you're obviously going to get bored faster. Being able to step back and say "Well I may be bored, but let's find a way to think about someone who's never heard this piece of music before" is super difficult, and takes a lot of practice.

    In taking critique, think about whether the critique is because you made a decision that the critiquer disagreed with, is it because there was something that you just didn't think about, or is it something that happened because you lacked a specific knowledge? If it's a decision that you made, well, how sure are you in that decision? This sort of critique is the easiest to deal with, because you can basically come back and say "Well yes I thought of that but I have very good and specific reasons for doing it this way". Your goal is basically to get to a point where these are all the critiques you're getting.
    Is the critique something that you just didn't think about? This is the kind of critique that you need to go back and go "Well ok, why didn't I think of that? Can I think of that in the future? Now that I'm thinking of that, can it be improved?"
    Is the critique something that happened because you just lacked knowledge? Well, studying theory and performance practices of different instruments can help. If you had a big ol' clarinet solo in the throat tone range, that's just something that can be fixed by learning what the throat tone range is and avoiding doing that. Did you have a piano playing single melodic line notes? Well if that was a decision, then sure, but that's probably not the best way to use a piano, and learning about how piano's work will help that.

    Basically your goal is to get to a point where almost all the critiques you get are "I disagree with the informed decisions that you made" and almost none of them are "Well this isn't how this instrument works" or "You forgot that my instrument needs me to breathe to play it". To do that, you need to look at the criticism that you are getting that is about not thinking or knowing about stuff, and try to internalize them so that the next time you're writing something, you are thinking about those things and you do know exactly what you're doing.


    Ultimately, the best thing to do is to just keep writing a bunch of music, and keep getting criticism about it. Eventually you'll reach a point where you can figure out where your strengths and weaknesses generally are, and what mistakes or issues might arise while you're writing, and you can just get better at revising your own stuff so that you can see the criticism yourself.

  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    Thanks metaghost. I've added a warning to my link. Hah. I've never heard of the Pogues but it sounds like a cool band to check out! Don't worry, I'm working at low volumes. All of my reference tracks are mastered to something ridiculous like -6 to -5 LUFS and I find my tracks don't have the same impact unless I turn them up to a loudness approaching that. That's something I'll have to work on.

    @nightmarenny I listened to a few of your tracks from earlier in the thread. They're not too complex, so you can ignore that criticism right away. Music is an artform, and you cannot please everyone. Also Khavall is right that Basically your goal is to get to a point where almost all the critiques you get are "I disagree with the informed decisions that you made." Finally, I agree with your idea to release one track at a time, get feedback, improve, etc. You can put them all into an album later if that's the route you want to go. You will need to think about exactly how you plan to leverage that into a career, but for now the main focus should be on self-improvement and the music itself.

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    @nightmarenny Thank you for sharing. There's already a page's worth of good advice, but I'd just like to add: How badly do you want this?

    You either keep composing and improving, despite the shame and pain of negative feedback, or you stop. Sounds like you've chosen the former. You're now stronger for the experience, and armed with unbiased feedback from the pianist to further improve your craft. I'm looking forward to hearing more of your pieces on here.

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    edited April 2018


    I've taken a stab at compiling a demo-reel. Feedback regarding pacing, quality, and demonstration of variety would be MUCH appreciated. As always, thank you for listening.



    @marty81 I'm pretty much in agreement with metaghost - the celtic touch is dope, but it gets lost in the production. I fall into the mentality in compensating my mix with volume, especially when the tempo is high, but boy does that listener's fatigue kick in.

    evocurio on
  • RothgarrRothgarr Registered User regular
    Those sound really good, @evocurio . I tried going back the last few pages and listening to you other pieces but it says the URLs are all invalid.

    Are you planning on sending this demo reel out or something?

  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @evocurio — My initial impression is that the sequencing is probably the weakest aspect of the reel.

    While I think you wanted to start at a point of "high energy" and capture the listener's attention, that opening fragment is so frenetic that it's disorienting, and it seems to lack some of the narrative-emotional expressiveness elsewhere in your work (it's more like... Beatmania music than RPG BGM). The opener should function like a thesis statement, with the remainder of the reel serving as the evidence to support that thesis — here you've let your desire to present variety diminish the coherent depiction of your musical identity.

    If you feel like getting a little ambitious with your reel, bring the various excerpts into a single session and try to compose the connective tissue that would transition between them, as doing so could reveal an inherent tonal and thematic structure, regardless of whether the transitional bits become a component of the final reel.

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    @Rothgarr Thank you very much. I am in the process of mixing/mastering my favorite pieces from last year's material. Much of it was sketches of someone trying to learn how to compose, so I took them down from the Soundcloud.

    Likewise, @metaghost , thank you very much for your insightful feedback. You bring up a great point regarding the establishment of a musical identity. It was something that was considered, but with my limited repertoire, I felt it weighed less in comparison to the "best-foot-forward" approach. IMHO, Sagittarius II (the first piece) was needed to for the initial hook. If I could trouble you for a bit more feedback, out of the pieces present in the reel, how would you sequence it to capture the audience?

  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    evocurio wrote: »
    @marty81 I'm pretty much in agreement with metaghost - the celtic touch is dope, but it gets lost in the production. I fall into the mentality in compensating my mix with volume, especially when the tempo is high, but boy does that listener's fatigue kick in.

    Ok, point taken y'all :). I'll try to work on the harshness more for next time. It would be nice to know if anyone has any immediate ideas offhand for how I could have treated it better this time. I don't think it's an overall eq issue. I think the problem was more with the violin than anything else.
    metaghost wrote: »
    @evocurio — My initial impression is that the sequencing is probably the weakest aspect of the reel.

    While I think you wanted to start at a point of "high energy" and capture the listener's attention, that opening fragment is so frenetic that it's disorienting, and it seems to lack some of the narrative-emotional expressiveness elsewhere in your work (it's more like... Beatmania music than RPG BGM). The opener should function like a thesis statement, with the remainder of the reel serving as the evidence to support that thesis — here you've let your desire to present variety diminish the coherent depiction of your musical identity.

    I actually disagree completely. I thought the opener was well composed and not at all overwhelming even on the first listen, and I thought the segues and pacing were fine. The first tune was obviously rpg battle music (probably for an action rpg), and since it's a demo reel I expected a variety of themes and styles and got exactly that. Well done, I say.

    The only thing that needs some improvement imo is the mixing on the first tune. To me it sounded a little dull, and a lot of it was lost when listening to it on my phone vs on my speakers. The other tunes don't have this problem. They jump right out of my phone and sound great.


  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @evocurio — With what's there, my instinct would be to start with the Zelda-esque chamber piece (1:03 - 1:40) > Chrono's Haunted House (2:23 - 3:04) > Castlevania Arpeggios (1:41 - 2:21) > Tabla Slow Jam (:28 - 1:02) > Sagittarius

    The structural intent would be to make a statement about your influences and ability to synthesize those sources with more contemporary sounds (like the Trap hi-hat patterns on the Tabla tune). That said, the Zelda excerpt doesn't really serve as an appropriate opener, lacking the up-tempo energy of the Beatmania bit or the Castlevania tune. I'd want something with the punch and bombast of Sagittarius, but a simpler melody that sticks in your ear, something between Holst's Mars and Magus' theme.

    For reference:

    Mars —
    Magus' Theme —

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    @metaghost Funny you should mention Battle with Magus. The looping structure of the theme actually inspired the initial riff for Sagittarius II (not presented in the demo)! While I don't think I'll be making any changes to the current reel, your input is very much appreciated and noted - as with all things music, there's so much to consider in creating a reel so it's great to hear the reasoning behind your approach.

    @Marty81 Likewise, thank you so much for the input. True to your assessment, I've heard that production is a glaring weakness in my work. It's an area of focus I have for the year. That said, while I'm in no place to give advice on your violin mix, I'd like to throw in my 2 cents. Having listened to the piece again, the instrument very much stands out as a synthetic sound (not in a good manner) relative to the other instruments. With the distorted guitar in the backdrop, it only leaves the higher freq for the violin to stand out. If anything, I'd try rearranging the violin in a weaving, contrapuntal role. For example around 1:07, imo the violin could be removed without losing on the Celtic groove. I'd experiment with a distorted bass, lead guitar, contrapuntal violin/fiddle, and perhaps some horns.

  • hemmelighthemmelight Registered User regular
    Here's another practice piece that I made on the 4th (hence the name). Hope to start doing these more regularly. This one has my first attempt at doing some quick string parts. Sorry for the crap mix, I tried to EQ out any really resonant low notes, but I think one or two still came through.

  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    Cool stuff hemmelight. Sounds pretty good to me. The only thing I don't know about is the hard-panned violins starting at 1:15. I think you might want to pan them a bit more centrally.
    evocurio wrote: »
    True to your assessment, I've heard that production is a glaring weakness in my work. It's an area of focus I have for the year.

    We all need to get better at mixing, huh? It's also one of focus areas for the year. Are there any competitions you're doing or major resources you're using to get better?

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    edited April 2018
    @Marty81 One of the main things is simply learning my DAW (reaper) inside-out. As for resources, I've been meaning to check this video out, which was suggested more than once in my brief research.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEjOdqZFvhY

    Akash Thakkar of Hyper Light Drifter fame also has a series on sound design which I've been working through; much more digestible considering the 5 min length.



    Competitions were never really in my scope. Have they been helpful in your experience? Any recommendations?

    evocurio on
  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    @evocurio

    Whoa, I checked out that first video and it's pretty trippy. I've thumbed through the guy's book before and I think it's a useful way to visualize the space but it's probably nothing revolutionary. Nevertheless I'll probably watch the whole video sometime this coming week to see if there are any gems in there. I've been devouring mixing knowledge from a bunch of different sources lately. My most recent favorite is the book Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, which I started reading this week (for free through my library). There's all kinds of useful info in there that I've never seen on any free mixing websites or videos.
    Competitions were never really in my scope. Have they been helpful in your experience? Any recommendations?

    I started off by doing ocremix competitions. They helped me work out my workflow by forcing me to do a lot in a short amount of time and I'm still doing them but I think I'm starting to outgrow them. This month I'm also doing the Reaper mixing competition, where you have to mix a project using only stock Reaper plugins. There are usually 10-15 submissions each month and it seems like at least a couple of the regulars know how to mix decently. At the end of the month all of the mixed sessions are available for everyone to look out to see how everyone else did their submissions. Competitions have never been about winning for me. Instead, they've always been about giving me an excuse to go "ok, this time I want to focus on getting better at X," and then giving me a deadline and some source material to push me into doing it. In that regard they've been helpful. Other competitions that I haven't taken part in but am curious about are the KVR one synth challenge (make a song using only one synth! New synth each month) and the (former-KVR) mixing challenge at http://www.mix-challenge.com/ .

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    Hi everyone,

    Dropping by with my latest offering. A WIP character/scenario theme for a druid's grove. May my labors please you.


  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    Evening,

    I just finished a number of additions to my D&D bard playlist. Ch-ch-check it out!



  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    That's very kind Rothgarr, thank you :)

  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @evocurio — I meant to comment back when you posted it, but Malo's Grove is excellent. I love the woodwind arrangement and the progression of rhythmic development — lots of great textures created by the twang of upright bass and layered percussion. My ear does wish there was a shift in the foundational vibrophone? melody as you hit that climax (at around 2:55), but that's mostly a reflection of my own hyperactive musical sense.

    It's been a while since I've posted anything, mostly due to struggling to finish anything, but also because shortly after upgrading to Reason 10 it was broken by an update to OSX. Subsequent patches have made it more stable, but it still crashes and hangs a lot, making focused composition a finicky task. I'm not the best at saving frequently, so I lose progress often and then take a couple days off.

    Anyway, this is an older excerpt (from last Spring) that's part of a much larger brass-focused session; I'm currently working on a much different sort of thing, but I was poking around in older sessions for some inspiration and thought might be a fun thing to share.

  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    I was digging through e-mail archives while prepping my bandcamp and found a neat almost-finished song fragment from 2014:



    I think this was one of the last tracks in which I had access to a place where I could record live drums, so the primary percussion is a bit more loose and grittier than my current sound. According to the e-mail to which this was attached, I wasn't very happy with how it was developing, and it's obviously a lot of "wait, why did that just happen?" — but that's kind of how my music always is. Regardless, it eventually got iterated upon and became the previously posted track titled "Left Unsaid".

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    @metaghost Thanks for the feedback! You've definitely got a point with the unchanging vibraphone - I was trying too hard to force an ostinato there. Having taking a break from the piece for a month, there's definitely a lot of things I would change. Maybe I'll do a revision in time. I also really need to learn to use my strings better...

    That's a great groove you you've got going in the Brass vamp. Very noir, as if I'm speaking in whispers while sipping scotch. Bar 7 kinda struck a weird note for me though - my ears really wanted to hear a descending, twisting resolution there instead of simply returning to the top of the head. I think the track could also benefit from a less meaty snare: either something higher and impactful like rimshots, or the lighter, scattered sounds of brushes. IMO, those would really round out the feel. I really enjoy the transition to the new section btw. The thing that stood out to me about this piece is your development of the three-note motif, which lent cohesiveness throughout and built enough tension to make the new section stick. I'd love to hear more from this piece.

    Hybridzation Experiment sounds MEAN! The harmonies past 1:12 kinda lost me, but everything before that sounded dope. Was the bass recorded live as well? I especially dig the instrumentation in this piece.

  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    A new piece, written for an in-development SRPG game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics. Check it out :)

  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @evocurio — I take it that's intended as a sort of "menuing" theme for post-battle processing, where something like rewards and experience points are distributed? I'm not quite sure what to make of the opening, but I assume that's maybe more standing in to illustrate how the body of the piece transitions from a battle theme. Regardless, very cool stuff and awesome to hear that you're working on game project. Do you have collaborators? Or are you handling the music yourself?

    ///

    I'm in the process of moving, so my gear is all packed up and I'm maybe just a bit too stressed to work on music anyway. However, I did more digging through various emails and came across a couple fragments that were made around the time my band started falling apart in 2009/2010. These are interesting to me mostly because they were my attempts at appealing to the interests of my bandmates in an attempt to motivate and reengage, so it got me practicing different guitar techniques, and none of its especially "overthought" (or finished).

    This first thing, cobbled together from three clips, is a bit of pop-metal. One of my bandmates had also been playing a metalcore group at the time, so the goal was to present something tangent to those interests. I've never developed any great competency with more advanced picking techniques, nor did I traditionally play with distortion, so making this sketch was really difficult for me.



    This second fragment was built around what I believe are dotted 8th-note triplets at a fairly slow tempo, so it has this strange sort of lurch to it (and gosh was my guitar out of tune, ugh). I think I was trying to do a kind of Godspeed! You Black Emperor thing (with a dash of Morricone?), as the bassist was very much in a "all post-rock, all the time" phase of his life.



    Yep, that's more metaghost musical history. To wrap it up, here's a little bit of the thing I'm working on now, albeit from a much earlier iteration. I've been exploring some of the new voice synths in Reason 10, so it's been fun to work on choral harmonies and whatnot.



    (@Radiation)

  • Theodore FlooseveltTheodore Floosevelt proud parent of eight beautiful girls and shalmelo dorne (which is currently being ruled by a woman (awesome role model for my daughters)) #dornedadRegistered User regular
    hey a music makin thread! with people in it. i've got a three-month-old at home at the moment so time has been.... lacking for making stuff I'm proud of, but here's a few things i've done semi-recently, ish

    listening in this thread really has me wanting to upgrade computer-wise in order to open up some more possibilities, as virtual instrumentation isn't exactly my 2010 MacBook air's strong suit, but it's been keeping me going through my garageband days



    and here's a few songs i did as BGM for an TTRPG podcast side project, i'll just link the playlist of (currently) 4 since they're fairly brief. making neon octopus in particular was a pretty enjoyable process of just laying down a live arpeggiated synth line that sounded cool and then trying to shape it into something cinematic and dramatic

    f2ojmwh3geue.png
  • metaghostmetaghost An intriguing odor A delicate touchRegistered User regular
    @Theodore Floosevelt — I really like hotbox; the 8-bit harpsichord and laid-back guitar licks definitely give me something of an MGMT vibe that I can just zone out to. To some extent I think it takes too long to introduce the guitar, but that's a very nebulous thing to argue for or against.

    As to the playlist, I think the second tune was my favorite, though Neon Octopus is clearly the most fleshed out. A little sad that Octopus fades out right as it transitions into the low-res percussion groove.

  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    @evocurio nice! I really like it.

    @metaghost I think that Pop metal fragment has some real potential.

    @Theodore Floosevelt hotbox the helm is pretty catchy. It's still stuck in my head here a few minutes later.

  • Theodore FlooseveltTheodore Floosevelt proud parent of eight beautiful girls and shalmelo dorne (which is currently being ruled by a woman (awesome role model for my daughters)) #dornedadRegistered User regular
    thanks you two! I appreciate it. @metaghost re:hotbox i was of a similar mind regarding the guitar, worried I'd lost a bit of perspective on how engaging its simple opening was. i find myself having a hard time letting musical moods or phrases just sort of sit still and build often enough that here i thought i should err on the side of restraint for once.

    the octopus fade-out is entirely a product of my building off that first synth line and treating that as THE duration of the song, no extensions, but it makes me sad every time too. it fit the podcast's time needs but i really should lengthen that section out and have some fun with it some time.

    f2ojmwh3geue.png
  • evocurioevocurio Registered User regular
    edited August 2018
    Hello friends, dropping by with the latest: a pair of day/night location themes. These were composed with a heavy emphasis on motifs. Thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy :)





    @metaghost You nailed it. "Daylight (Victory!)" was intended to accompany the victory screen (exp, loot distribution, etc.). The first section of the piece would be played when the last enemy falls - I wanted to capture the feeling of that final clash of blades, before transitioning into a sense of relief during the victory screen. To clarify, my capacity with this project (Celestial Arms) is limited to that track at the moment; the roster is still to be finalized.

    evocurio on
  • traibtraib Registered User regular
    evocurio, I love that Heavy Fog theme! You managed to get a really full sounding mix with just a few instruments.

    Hey music thread! I've been messing around with Reaper a bit and ended up making a small mashup album to help learn the basics. Next step- actually composing stuff instead of just combining others' work :P

  • SolventSolvent Econ-artist กรุงเทพมหานครRegistered User regular
    Hello thread, sorry for the late catch-up:

    @metaghost I really like that brass vamp! Very lounge. Sounds like you're remixing some Blue Note classics for a cocktail bar. I echo evocurio's comments on the snare though, to me that particular sound doesn't seem to match the style.

    @Theodore Floosevelt I also try to make music in those brief moments between when my toddler goes to bed and I do. It's tough.

    I've really been wanting to invest in some music equipment, but I'm also thinking maybe I'll try to move on from my current city before too long so I don't want to buy bulky and hard to move stuff. Particularly, I want to grab a bass guitar and pluck around on that again. I don't even have a midi controller, and I feel like that would really relieve the tedium of drum programming - but maybe I'm wrong.

    To give myself a break, recently I have been trying to compose a very simple video-game platformer style tune. I think, to me, this is feeling easier than the other stuff I've been writing, probably because that kind of style obviously lends itself to 100% digital production. Often I feel I'm mimicking stuff in a DAW that would really be better served by physical instruments. I'll put it on soundcloud when I'm done if anyone wants to hear!

    I don't know where he got the scorpions, or how he got them into my mattress.

    http://newnations.bandcamp.com
  • SolventSolvent Econ-artist กรุงเทพมหานครRegistered User regular
    So I kind of 'finished' this track:


    I was just messing around trying to channel an old-school, platformer video game kind of vibe.
    Let me know if you like it! Writing this kind of tune is definitely more straightforward from a laptop than the other genres I'm more interested in.

    I don't know where he got the scorpions, or how he got them into my mattress.

    http://newnations.bandcamp.com
  • Marty81Marty81 Registered User regular
    Feels a little dark for that, but otherwise pretty cool!

    The first 13 seconds made me think it was going to turn into some EDM thing and I'm glad it didn't. The chords at 0:43, 0:51, and 1:09-1:19 are particularly sinister.

  • SolventSolvent Econ-artist กรุงเทพมหานครRegistered User regular
    Thanks for the feedback! The bridge is meant to be a little dark. The other parts not so much, it's just a iii - vi - ii -V - I progression. It's probably the chord voicings giving it a certain tone.

    I don't know where he got the scorpions, or how he got them into my mattress.

    http://newnations.bandcamp.com
  • Space PickleSpace Pickle Registered User regular
    Hey everyone, one of the bands I play in finished a short album recently, here it is:

    https://thegetband.bandcamp.com/releases

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