T w e n t y S i d e d
The usual disclaimer applies: I don’t know what I’m doing, this is more a journal of learning than instruction, follow my advice at your own peril, etc.
My experiment last week was educational. It highlighted several things I’ve been struggling with. There are three major things negatively impacting the quality of the music I’ve been making:
- Mixing failures.
- The tools I’m using.
- The unfortunate ratio between my abilities and ambitions. Either the former needs to somehow increase, or the latter needs to be reduced.
Let’s go over these in turn:
Mixing
You know what a spectrum display is. It’s that thing that makes the bars bounce up and down while you listen to your MP3 player. The really high quality ones even make the bars different colors!
This is how loud all the various parts of the spectrum are at any given moment. In the above image, the purple represents the pounding, low-frequency kick drum. A little above that is the musical bass line. Somewhere in the red-orange range is the high-frequency stuff like cymbals. Most of the actual music will fall in the middle. (I carelessly cropped out the decibel numbers and range labels above, so we’re sort of eye-balling it here. But you get the idea.)
If you want to mix like a pro – that is, not at all like me – then you need to be aware of what’s going on in the spectrum. If my kick drum is pounding away at the low end of the spectrum, making lots of purple noise, then great. People will feel that beat though the walls and it will make them want to dance even if the actual melody is boring. But then let’s say I add a really low-frequency bass to the mix. It sounds super groovy, so I make it loud. It occupies the lavender part of the spectrumI’m deliberately avoiding naming the parts of the spectrum in terms of Hz to avoid the ‘Well, ACTUALLY…’ corrections from music nerds. Wish me luck!, but it also bleeds down into the low purple parts. The problem is that my bass now maxes out the low end. When the kick drum hits, the hardware just can’t make any more purple noise, and so the kick drum ends up muddled and lost. This is exactly what happened last week.
This is the peril of listening to a single song for too long while you work on it. I could still “hear” the kick drum because I was used to it. It wasn’t until I came back laterAnd only after people pointed it out to me. that I realized the kick drum was barely audible.
The secret here – which is what I learned from a few helpful videos people posted last week – is to “sculpt” the range of each instrument. Maybe in the bass I can use an equalizer to cut off all the purple frequencies, leaving only the lavender stuff. Then it won’t be stepping all over the kick drum, and the drum will punch through clearly, producing the desired level of ass-shakery.
But this is difficult because…
My Tools Suck
MAGIX Music Maker lets you “sculpt” the spectrum. However, you can’t see the spectrum. It only shows you how loud a particular instrument is overall, but not what areas of the spectrum it’s using. There’s a spectrum window for the entire composition, but not one for individual tracks. So you end up with two totally different windows: One where you make changes to THIS instrument, another where you see the results of those changes mixed in with ALL instruments. In effect, they’re only useful if you’re playing a single instrument in isolation and can’t actually hear what the final mix will sound like.
You can make changes, or you can see the changes, or you can hear the changes, but you can’t do all three at once. This results in a lot of groping around, guesswork, frustration, and juggling different windows that always seem to get in each other’s way.
The only alternative is to move to using better tools, but I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. Anything that’s an upgrade from MAGIX is going to be way too expensive. If I was making a living with my music it would be one thing, but it doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars – perhaps close to a thousand – on a tool that I’m barely qualified to use. This is a hobby, not a career.
Of course, part of the problem with this is that…
I Suck
In my defense, I suck less than I did 6 months ago, when I sucked less than the year before. It’s not like you should expect to be able to make pro-level music just because you dabble with it once a month or so.
Still, it doesn’t feel good to post dross.
Speaking of which…
I Posted Some Dross
And the track map, for the curious:
Footnotes:
[1] I’m deliberately avoiding naming the parts of the spectrum in terms of Hz to avoid the ‘Well, ACTUALLY…’ corrections from music nerds. Wish me luck!
[2] And only after people pointed it out to me.
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Im not sure thats true any more.After how much knowledge does “I have no clue” become “Im semi proficient about this topic”?Id wager you are already past that point.
It’s a subjective thing. It sounds like music to us, so thus he is a musician. But we havent been trained in music so we don’t see deeper problems in his work because we don’t know the problem of making music. Thus our opinion frankly doesn’t mean anything.
It’s similar to how a kid can learn to use some “hacking” tools and for his friends he is suddenly this master proficient hacker who knows all these ways to figure out their passwords, when in fact he is literally following instructions he read on the internet without caring to learn why he is doing this this way. He is a master hacker for them because they can not perceive the depth of the problem and how much he has yet to learn.
I think you are talking about Dunning-Kruger effect. In short, unskilled people are not even skilled enough to understand their incompetence. We are all prone to this effect but by acknowledging the existence of it, it can be ‘fought back’. I think Shamus’es disclaimer is a very healthy attitude here.
Haha, I replaced every instance of the word “hack” or similar variants with “computer tech”, and this is exactly where I am with regards to my friends, family, friend’s family, neighborhood, etc.
I clean ONE virus or I make firefox load properly and suddenly I can make a 10 year old computer zoom like a ferrari on the internet today.
“You should work for the best buy geek squad!” Uh, no, I just google every service running on your comp to find out if it’s good or not, usually get sick of doing that 1/10th the way through, and run half a dozen anti-virus programs until it goes away.
Back in the 80s, my dad would say “the computer guru is the person 10 pages ahead of you in the manual”. While I think “guru” may be as dated now as the concept of paper tech manuals, the principle remains in force.
Very much this. Not so much with my friends because I have some very competent IT people in the circles I move in but my family, especially my mother (the motherly pride probably factors heavily into this), are often determined to see me as some kind computer use and maintenance prodigy and expert. No, I just know enough to be able to search for solutions and to understand instructions like “type into the command line” or “search registry for”. am patient enough to double check what risks performing that action entails and am willing to make decisions on taking said risks regarding my own machine.
This is exactly what I was talking about, because often for the uninitiated hacker = comp. technician = programmer = computer sorcerer, and the last is excatly how much they understand about the field. All they know is that you do something to computers, and so they have NO IDEA about the relative effort needed for any of the tasks.
But there’s a continuum between being the sort of person who has a mastery of the field and someone who just knows where to look for the answer to a particular question, right? It’s not a matter that some people are on one side of a deep divide and others are on the other side; or that one day people who are on the one side make the jump to the other. You start by learning the hacks and the tricks and using them without deep understanding, but the more you play with them and add to your knowledge of them, the better you understand what’s going on until you are capable of inventing hacks for yourself.
I’m not sure where the threshold for “semi proficient” at music is, but I’d say the shift in his topics in this series is evidence for a marked increase in his proficiency. Shamus started off worrying about keys and chords and progressions, but it’s now clear that such things are not central to what he wants to learn and experiment with; given the kind of music he enjoys and would like to make, mixing and instrumentation are far more important. And figuring what it is you need to study to reach your goal is at least 3/4 of the battle, I’d say.
What I was talking about was OUT perception of HIM. How we who haven’t been initiated into the secret knowledge of music making are not competent to decide if he has crossed the threshold or not. Only someone who has crossed that threshold a while ago can do that. A student can not grade another student as well as a teacher can.
But the more you learn the more you will understand where do you lay, and the more you learn the more you will understand how much more is there to learn, and that you will NEVER be able to learn ALL.
EDIT: Oh you were replying to my replier. But my point still stands.
I think I *was* replying to you — but it’s really hard to tell when the nested replies get thick — but I don’t think there’s an argument between us. I completely agree with what you say about who is and who is not best situated to make these judgments. I only wanted to emphasize that a lack of evidence (evidence for Shamus’s increased musical learning) is not evidence of a lack (a lack of his increased musical learning). Also, I wanted to point to one place where I think there is good evidence that he’s strengthened his grip.
There are lots of aspects of music that one needs to master. The traditional musical concepts related to harmony and counterpoint are the obvious ones; they are the places where Shamus started, and he learned enough there that he can deploy some simple but solid chord progressions. Instrumentation is another area, and these days mixing and other technological tricks are a third. As I said above, given the kind of music he likes and wants to imitate, the latter two seem to be more important than the first, or at least are the ones that are better learned first. And to reiterate what I said above, I think the fact he’s shrewdly figured that fact out is evidence that there’s nothing accidental about his progress.
I listened to this song instead of going to help my parents move a bed. That’s an endorsement, right?
“Better than moving heavy furniture” is exactly the kind of praise I’ve been working towards.
Ah, but he’s risking a loss of parental affection to listen to the song. So, “better than a mother’s love” is also a valid interpretation.
Someone get this man in a suit and send him to marketing!
Someone get this man an office in HR!
Can’t get anything right now, busy listening to Shamus’ music.
If it makes you feel any better,Ive enjoyed this weeks ….um song?Melody?Tune?…whatever,Ive enjoyed it more than the last one.Though Im not a fan of electronica,so I never listen any of those more than once.
Anyone tried these in Crypt of the Necrodancer yet?
I would like to echo the others and say this is much better than the lat attempt and I found my foot tapping on the floor along with the song, soooo . . . mission accomplished? And yes it’s mostly down to a clearly audible how do you call it … drum kick.
I’d have been foot tapping if my legs weren’t propped up on a leg-rest.
…So instead, you get toe-waggling from me. Yaaaaaaaay.
You’re better than you give yourself credit for, Shamus.
That said, yes, real professional software is expensive and to get good results in mixing requires years of practice and training, if not decades. It’s a lot easier to get into than it was decades ago – high-quality gear is within the realm of affordability, and free software can get great results – though even the best people using “affordable” equipment generally still don’t quite reach “truly pro” results.
If you *do* want to step up your efforts, I would highly recommend looking at working in a real DAW. REAPER is right up there with other professional studio suites, and is totally free, although since you’re doing electronic music, you’d need plugins to fill that gap. Ableton Live might be one you want to look into in that case, it’s also very capable and fairly affordable (though not free), plus it comes with a ton of built-in samples and is designed specifically for easy and dynamic sequencing.
Though, maybe it’s best you don’t start learning “real” mixing… that’s a rabbit hole from which there is perhaps no return.
(I write and record my own music for fun and have spent hundreds of dollars on equipment and software, and I think I get pretty decent results… but I’m in the same boat, I’m not good enough or dedicated enough to “go pro” and I have another career I’m better at and happier with. It’s nice to just have fun with something and not make it your job, too. Sometimes that dream of being a rock star is better left as a dream.)
If you use MAGIX Music Maker, you can try using a band-pass filter to limit the tracks. If it doesn’t have one included, you can use a VST plugin. Like some of of these
That will only cause it to sound even more flat. Bandpass is only a band aid. The fix is to simply remaster the song so things are balanced.
A bandpass or compression will cause the kickdrum to duck or the bassline to duck when the two overlap which is heard as volume pumping, which IMO is pretty annoying to listen to even if it is intentional (some music have it on purpose).
Compressor pumping is pretty ubiquitous in house music. It certainly wouldn’t be out of place.
As far as free VSTs go, Blue Cat’s stuff is pretty decent (http://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Bundle_FreewarePack/). The free pack has a spectrum analyzer and a three-band parametric EQ, which might be a step up from what Shamus is using now.
There’s a neat trick I picked up somewhere (I think maybe from a BassGorilla tutorial, but I don’t really remember for sure) that’s an alternative to sidechain compression. The short version is to use an EQ in place of a compressor. You put the EQ on your basses group, set the bands and Qs to correspond to the bits of the kick that you really want to shine through. Then, you just automate the gains down whenever the kick hits. I have no idea how involved that is with the software Shamus is using, but it’s really easy in Ableton.
This is a pretty fun track, and I think a marked improvement over last time’s, so you’re definitely improving. Good job! (｀・ω・´)b
The background vocals are kinda funny though: “Here you go.” “Please.” “Thank you.” And then later: “Good evening.”, etc. They had a good rhythm though, so I enjoyed the implementation.
In regards to the limitations of your software, have you considered LMMS? Freeware music studio, and I believe you can get a ridiculous assortment of plugins that might address your issues. At the very least it won’t cost you $ludicrous.
I have to second this.
Unlike basically every other piece of open source software I have ever used, it works out of the box, and feels good to use in the default modes.
Plus, basically every slider and dial on the machine can be automated. You can plot points and jut draw straight lines between them, or you can interpolate a spline curve, or you can just link the output wave from one instrument to a knob on another. This sounds esoteric and pointless at first glance, but there are 1001 uses.
Want to cut the volume on your wobble bass whenever your drum kicks? Just make the volume on the wobble inversely proportional to the amplitude on the drum kick. Boom. Done.
LMMS is extremely powerful, but the UI can take some time to get a hang of. There’s a big push in development to clean much of this up, but for now it’s something to be aware of.
Most people I’ve talked to online who use it, export each track to its own audio file, and perform the final mixing in Audacity. I’ve done that a few times, but I usually keep myself to using Audacity just for the audio conversion and small bits of audio file clipping.
As for the spectrum stuff, you can add a spectrum analyzer as a modifier to any channel or instrument, so that each one can be independently inspected.
There are several options to upgrade to
Reaper, as mentioned, is nice for a free DAW, though it doesn’t come with a lot bundled (unless that’s changed a lot since I last used it in 2009).
Presonus Studio One Prime is free, though you might be getting less than what you have with MM (never used MM). If you could afford it, Studio One Artist is wonderful for what you get at $100.
Reaper comes with most of the same effects that you find in other DAWs. They are excellent, though they don’t look pretty and are designed to be uncolored, i.e. not emulating classic audio hardware. Reaper also has a plugin engine that lets you build your own plugins using a scripting language, which as far as I know is a unique feature in the DAW world.
They actually offer Reaper’s effects as VSTs under the “ReaPlugs” name. They have fans even outside of Reaper users.
If you’re a fan of Waves and similar, or want your plugins modeled after real equipment, you might not like them, but I get a fair bit of use out of them for especially surgical situations or where I don’t want something to be unnecessarily colored.
Reaper is not free. What you are downloading is supposed to be used for a 60 day unrestricted evaluation.
Indeed, Reaper is not actually free. But it is very cheap – last I checked, just $60 for a ‘hobbyist’ type user. The price of one game. (About 4x that for pros. Still cheap.) And you can load it up with quite a useful variety of genuinely free plugins, if you’re willing to dig around for them. It’s a good choice.
On the pricing of decent tracking software – I started out on AcidPro v3. It’s up to v7 or something now, but the tracking, effects, sequencing, it’s all very easy to get a hold on.
Cursory look says it goes for between $60 and $120, which really isn’t that bad as music software goes.
Due to various crashes and meltdowns, I’ve used AcidPro 3, Garageband, Reason 3.0, and a few not worth mentioning. To this day, what I started off on (and kick myself for not realizing the power of what I was working with) was AcidPro.
A close second is Reason, but that’s more geared towards midi sequencing and building effects racks.
Give it a look, I guarantee it’s a hell of a lot better than FruityLoops or whatnot. I remember being able to chop clips small enough into single waveforms and do simple granular synthesis, and the effects available are near infinitely stackable – to the point where if you know what you’re doing, you could turn the sound of a flushing toilet into a french horn or whatever you please.
It’s a good place to start, and not prohibitively expensive. Hell, I’d kick you a 20 to help out if it meant you could keep up with all this.
Either way, good luck on finding some good gear, and props on the esoteric quest.
Out of curiosity where did the audio clips come from for “Not your waifu”? Audio from beginner Japanese lessons?
Correct. I think the clip is called “Basic Japanese vocabulary”.
I just went to go update my Shamus-as-workout-music MP3 list (it is SO legit) and some of the songs in Button Masher are not available for download. Is there some way I can… buy them? XD
Ah. Soundcloud only allows 100 downloads per track if you’re using the Lazy Freeloading Loser Account. To allow more downloads I need to pay a fee.
I didn’t see any point, since nobody ever complained. But now someone has! I’ll look into it.
Upload everything as an album on Bandcamp. It has 200 free downloads per month.
Or upload the tracks as videos to youtube, still image/slideshow or pianoroll video could be used for the visual.
“People will feel that beat though the walls and it will make them want to dance even if the actual melody is boring.”
If I’m feeling that through the walls, it actually makes me want to use the subwoofer to smash whoever is playing that damn crap through the walls. Especially since you generally can’t hear any other frequencies through the wall, so it’s just a damn wubwubwubwubwub.