Hi Music Friends!

... I thought about creating a seperate community to post this (and any future ones) but since the last contribution on here is already a while back, I'll just go with it for now...

The next paragraphs will be a somewhat lengthy Introduction explaining why I'm here and what I'm doing here now :)

I'm a Musicology student from Vienna, Austria and usually research topics such as Electronic Music and technology in music as well as surrounding culture and practices. However, over time, I became interested in Media Studies as well, primarily investigating Social Media and Streaming Services .

With this research account I will now begin my journey doing Hybrid Fieldwork on the Fediverse for my MA Thesis.

Planned as an (auto-)ethnographic research project, I will write about The Bedroom Producer in the era of Enshittification

background

I've been wanting to write about Music Production for a while now, but wasn't too sure about a precise topic as I began my Master's. As I engaged myself in literature on the history of Music Production, I became quite fascinated with the narrative beginning around the turn of the millenium, hailing the internet as an opportunity for DIY Musicians (or Amateur Musicians) as a place to share their Music, to build an audience, or to find like-minded Artists via online forums.

Almost a quarter of a century later, many of these aspects are still true, while the online world surrounding Musicians changed drastically with the emergence of streaming services and social media platforms. Today, BigTech companies inherit monopoly positions not only concerning the computer techologies allowing such online communications, but also do so in gate-keeping positions within the Music Industry and beyond.

As an autodidact Bedroom Producer myself, I spent the last decade on such online platforms and was able to witness the changing media landscape towards an increasing number of privacy-invading business models oriented towards infinite growth, which are so prevalent today.

It was probably not until I began researching such platforms and online communities as an undergraduate student that I became more invested with and wary of these technologies. Around 2 years ago, I also found an interest in FOSS and decided to start my Linux journey, which further fostered this idea of wanting to write something incorporating all of these topics.

Further down the line, I also stumbled upon the Fediverse, which I have been using personally for a while. I now decided to give Mastodon and Lemmy a go as my research field, especially after having considered issues with other platforms that are often used in Music Production contexts such as Discord YouTube or Twitch (that I wish to not participate in any longer).

about the project

I hope the title is self-explanatory to most of you: Doctorow's Enshittification applied to a Music context - focussing on hobbyist Music Production.

The Ethnography focuses on practices, perceptions and perspectives surrounding Bedroom Producers. While research will take place on Mastodon and Lemmy, it does not mean that topics are restricted to those platforms or that experiences do have to be connected to platforms at all, it can be anything connected to Music Production and Media/Technology use. I mainly chose these platforms as I do 1) feel comfortable doing research here and 2) I'm looking for alternative voices and experiences. As I consider many Fediverse-users as tech-savy, I hope to get some insights that I would otherwise not be able to find - topics such as selfhosting, discussions about OS compatabilites or issues with Music technology as well as FOSS or even infosec are highly encouraged

I wish to get a better understanding of

• how Music Producers make sense of today's (online) world,
• which choices they make concerning technologies used for Music Production,
• how such technologies are used in everyday life and why,
• which strategies they might have found to navigate privacy-oriented media participation,
• further challenges and sentiments along the way (mental wellbeing, competition, peer pressure etc.)
• [...]

Initially, I hoped to being able to outline the needs of Musicians in order to suggest solutions for alternative media platforms, opening new perspectives for a possible emergence of new platforms. I won't be able to do so, as there is a lot to write about already, but I hope I can contribute to that goal somehow, or at least spreading awareness on (the importance) of some of these topics.

some more details

Research is outlined as partcipatory fieldwork. This means, I will actively participate in discussions, sharing content and ideas on here while I do also observe what I encounter online (which I will mainly note down in a research diary but may also take screenshots of etc.). I mainly thought about sharing some thoughts based on literature I read or some of my own observations while engaging online here and there to encourage discussions.

Another aspect is that this research is also autoethnographic, which means my own experiences will play a huge role in the end result (I chose to do this mainly because it is difficult to find any literature concering how some of the major music platforms operate behind the scenes and because I felt inspired by reading Eshun's More Brilliant than the sun, which gave me this idea of giving this thesis a slightly techno-dystopian undertone).

I hope I can find some people here that are willing to talk about their experiences and opinions not just on this platform but also in interviews - which will form another big chunk of the thesis. I am aware that research of this kind on here and conducting interviews with you folks may be a bit tricky as many people value privacy a lot. In general, I have to comply to ethical standards, so everything I will use for my thesis will only happen after I get each user's permission. It will always be possible to be anonymized or contact me after an interview if you changed your mind on anything you said or if there are any other concerns until I will begin the process to analyze all the collected data and begin writing results (which I will announce beforehand).

I put some time/effort/thoughts into planning this project, so I will try to make this as transparent as possible and hope that I can make everyone participating to feel safe. It's a bit weird to ask, but please feel free to block me if you feel that way. I also want to mention that, as I have done research of this kind already twice, this time I will also keep an eye on my own well-being, so bare with me if I will be offline for some days or won't share too much personal information.

I will use dedicated devices for this research to keep things a bit seperated. Also, I will store whatever I collect on a seperate and encrypted device, no Google services, iCloud and such involved. For the writing process, I will use LibreOffice (Markor and just regular pen and Papep for note-taking and planning, Obsidian for University-related stuff), I will still need to find a suitable solution for Interview transcripts, so any recommendations are welcome.

Concerning communications, I haven't decided on how and where to do interviews yet (jitsi?) but most likely will also make it possible to contact me on Matrix. Signal would be another option, as I have registered a number to use for online accounts (just in case), but I get the opinions to not use Signal beyond close personal contacts. I wish I could offer any other solutions but I'm also limited to my skill set - but again, any help is appreciated!

Everyone who does produce Music as a Hobbyist (or Ex-Hobbyist) on some kind of DAW is very welcome to participate! Unfortunately this means I will exclude people with a purely analog, DAW-less setup that might frequent this community as well. Genres do not matter really, and it is also not about skills in Music Production (as mentioned, I'm self-taught in this as well).

The current plan is to do research until January, but I may extend it to April.

Thanks if you made it this far ;)

That's all the info I have for you so far. Feel free to let me know about any ideas, opinions, concerns or if you feel I should create a seperate community for this. Your input is appreciated! Please use She/They pronouns ;) I'm also on mastodon if you prefer that way of communicating.

As a final word, I'd also like to thank Beto for supporting the project and providing the space here!

Hope you have a great day, x

Let me create a stunning animated music video that captures the essence of your song. Learn more or whats app me: +8801621487540

#singer #musician #songwriter

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.studio/post/2255587

Inspired by Koan Sound I wanted to record some double bass and get creative with it. Fortunately, I have a very old and kind of broken double bass at home. However, I have no idea how to play it properly and decided instead of trying to play it how it is supposed to be played, record a bunch of sounds & noises (I apologized to the double bass afterwards) and try to arrange them into something afterwards. This is the result. It's not perfect but I am fairly happy with it. :)

What I took away from this project: Starting with a few samples can really spark creativity for me. I would have never come up with this on a blank canvas. Listening to the double bass recordings I noticed variations in volume/articulation/... which gave me ideas where to place percussion and other accents. Then the track built itself from there.

Let me know what you think!

Anyone have tips on digital additive synthesis? I'm looking to define a curve for the overtone series to follow and generate and combine sign waves from that. Looks like there is a way in Python?

https://medium.com/@noahhradek/sound-synthesis-in-python-4e60614010da

Anyone have thoughts or experience with generating sounds in Python? Are there any artifacts I should watch out for? Is there an easier way to generate tones from equations for their overtone series? Thanks!

Looking for a unique way to promote your music? Let me create a stunning animated music video that captures the essence of your song. learn more: https://www.fiverr.com/fakhrul894/make-a-hand-drawn-lyric-music-video or whats app me : +880-1621487540

Looking for a unique way to promote your music? Let me create a stunning animated music video that captures the essence of your song. learn more: https://cutt.ly/EwZaqKwa or whats app me : +880-1621487540

I know there's a lot of distribution services to choose from, but if you spend a few days or a week googling and/or searching u-tube for the best one, I suspect you'll conclude that Distrokid (DK) is the most popular distributor for mid-to-nobody-level artists like me.

I didn't start with DK. I went with CDBaby for my first album because the pay-once-and-you're-done model really appealed to me. Just google "CDBaby", and you'll see in the first result that they are advertising "No recurring fees" because they know musicians don't want to have to continue paying distributors for distribution that has already occurred.

So, I logged into CDBaby in order to start entering all the data that would support album #2. However, things weren't the same as they were with album #1. CDBaby, like every successful company wanting to increase earnings, had added to its offerings as well as its conditions. I get it; you're doing well, and you want to do better.

Maybe some of y'all are strong with industry terms like "mechanical distribution", "publishing", and whatever the term is for songs that are made available for TV, movies, or commercials, but I'm not. I certainly tried to learn what these terms mean, but these expressions don't find a long-term home in my brain without a special effort, a multi-day effort I decided I didn't want to make. Maybe that was a mistake. Either way, all the legal talk motivated me to give up CDBaby and go with DK since so many people seemed to really like it.

Of course, I checked out Tunecore and some other slick services. They all seem to be enthusiastically seeking ways to increase satisfaction for their investors. I am not against capitalism, but I am sensing opportunism at work here - an effort to increase income by hook or crook.

I REPEAT: I'm aware it's on me to learn about it all. I'm just disgusted that I have to protect myself from companies acting like "We're awesome! Source: Trust us". That's why I watched many videos and read a number of comments on Reddot and u-turb about distribution services, and that's when I decided to say, "Bleep it; I'm going with DK cuz they're so easy." So, album #2 went out via DK.

However, DK seems a little sneaky in their approach. Just this week I got a charge to my credit card in the amount of $11 for "DISTROKID EXTRAS". I googled that very expression, and found a website that really jumps into the issue. (FYI: I have not vetted this website; looks safe, but could be a hacker site for all I know.) For example, they have a product called "Store Maximizer", which takes note of the fact that new streaming providers come to exist. Pay for "Store Maximizer", and your songs get pushed to the new providers. I also found a DK support article that kind-of addresses the issue.. I guess the conclusion I should make is that the internet is a very dynamic and changing thing and that these charges keep my songs relevant to the internet as it becomes and not as it was.

I realize that CDBaby doesn't give artists 100% like DK, but I'm starting to wonder which is truly the better deal.

I know about "Leave A Legacy", which keeps songs online after our credit cards stop working. I certainly would like to leave the door open to releasing more music in the future, but I just don't understand why anybody would remain a DK member for that purpose.

Anyway, I don't think I'm the only DK customer here. Please let me know why you keep paying DK's ongoing fees. Thanks.

...

What software/hardware did you begin with? What were your biggest hurdles? Was there a moment when it suddenly "clicked" for you?

Howdy!

I've got a question that isn't explicitly music production oriented, but it seemed the most relevant. All my music is completely vocals-lacking so I've always shunned a mic, but now I'm working on a series of tutorial videos. Given the target audience is musicians, I want to get the audio right, and that includes my talking.

I was dabbling in mics and I've landed on the Rode Procaster as overall it seems to offer the best sound for my purposes and seemed to play the best with my room acoustics so far. My problem now though is that I do still get a little (tiny, maybe imperceptibly to everyone but me) echo in my recordings, and I know that is easier to clean up before it gets into the recording.

The room I'm in is an apartment bedroom (well technically it's set up as an office, but I digress) about 10'x10' in dimensions. I have desks and a bookshelf in there, but otherwise the walls are fairly bare. Given it's an apartment I can't really glue stuff to the walls.

What would be some suggestions for addressing this? Right now I'm considering either putting some foam up using some thumb tacks, or just cleaning it up in post using RX9 since I have that available too. Thoughts?

If it would help, I can cough up some recordings for reference.

Thanks in advance!

If you’ve listened to some 90s and early 00s ambient-oriented tracks and tried to recreate their sounds with just a synth, you’ll notice that downsampling and bitcrushing won’t get you the same kind of sound you hear in there. It will sound dull(er) and less… complete, lush, rich? That is because back in the day artists sampled their synths and the technical side of that process had some cool side effects.

You can sample in two different ways. You can sample whole chords, where your parallel harmonies and frequency stretching will combine into a weird but cool sound. Or, on the topic of this video, you can sample an individual note from a synth and have your frequency stretching happen with different magnitudes for every note of the chord. That will create an interesting and rich sound!

This Thought-Forms video will show you an exact how-to with some tips on how to develop that sampler sound once you get the basics. It’s quick, concise and really informative.

I hope you find this technique useful. AMN out!

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/273815

I know this isn't strictly music production related, but it might be a good way to share what we make with the rest of the fediverse. If people don't think this belongs here, let me know and I can delete the cross-post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2650755

We Distribute is bringing in a new feature - The Mixtape! We create playlists of songs that broadcast through Radio Free Fedi, and share it with the wider fediverse. It's an opportunity for people to discover music by Fedizens, and help support artists on the network.

Our first playlist is themed around hot summer vibes.

There are a lot of great stereo imaging tools and spectrum analyzers. Most of them aren't free though. Having a good way to visually analyze loudness, frequency distribution and stereo image is incredibly important. Unfortunately, it is often the case that most default or free solutions are barely functional. They don't provide you with enough information to shape your mix or don't present it in a simple, clear and understandable format. (I'm looking at you, FL studio visualizers!)

SPAN is a spectrum analysis tool that will let you monitor your peak volume, RMS and LUFS. It shows you the frequencies that are passing through the plugin and you can customize the spectrum view by changing time, frequency and level ranges. If you want even more precision and control, you can adjust the fast fourier transform sample size, it gets that technical! You can also compare channels, left and right of the same channel or two different ones. Two channel comparison is the limit of the free version, SPAN Plus allows you to display as many channels as your DAW will allow. It also features a correlation meter that measures your phase alignment (1=fully aligned and -1=completely misaligned). It can also track your loudness stats thoughout the playtime to iron out any kinks. Handy, functional and no-nonsense tool.

MSED is a stereo analysis and encoding tool. It can help you manange your side and mid channels: your stereo image. It comes with a basic set of tools that allows you to pan, change levels, swap left-right channels and flip phase 180 degrees. The visualizers are pretty simple, you have your correlation meter from before, stereo pan meter and plasma-style vector scope. You might think you don't need it if you DAW provides stereo imaging functions of its own, but often times you're going to be playing guessing games in terms of how that audio will actually get processed: some DAWS merge your stereo tracks to mono, some don't. MSED takes care of that ambiguity and puts all of the necessary tools and monitoring in one spot.

These plugins are available in VST, VST3, AU and AAX for free! I really can't recommend them enough if you're starting out producing or are in need of simple tools that won't take a toll on your CPU with fancy advanced processing.

SPAN Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/

MSED Product page: https://www.voxengo.com/product/msed/

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/241390

Making a great sounding pad is actually more tricky than getting some cool synth and drowning it in tons of reverb. I know I tried that the first time. And failed miserably. You don't have to!

Will is gonna walk us through different tricks and ideas to flesh out an ambient pad. Using a root tone, texture tones for highs and lows, some effects and simple automations will allow you to create a cool and easily customizeable(!) pad from scratch with any and all wavetables that you want in there!

Hope you find it useful, guys! AMN out!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1335528

Dubstep growls may sound like they’re simple, but getting a good growl sound is way more than just distorting some waves to all hell (though it may be a part of it). Using your envelopes and LFOs to shape the sound through filters, distortion and other effects will get quite a bit more complicated.

Noah will show us how to get a high quality, clean and powerful dubstep growl in the style of Virtual Riot, so you can put those skills and ideas to use in your own synth patches.

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/154053

EQ is a really simple tool, but the way it works is anything but that. Different equalizers use different algorithms to process your audio, and most of them will affect your sound in unexpected ways.

The video will give you an overview on some technical reasons why phase weirdness happens with most EQs and also how an asymmetric EQ setup can give you unexpected Haas effects.

And man, does Sage Audio’s video feature some sick beats!

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/136498

I was looking for some good videos on automation and it surprised me that there’s not a lot of content relating to the decision making process, despite automation being a standard feature in any modern production software.

Automation is an important tool in any music producers kit and learning how to use it well is just as important as arranging your tracks, if not slightly more so for electronic tracks. One could say that in electronic music it is a part of arranging.

There are a lot of fun ways to automate your productions, like creating macro effects for your synths to use as buildups or additional texture. Today though, we’ll take a look at how Fabio from Noize London approaches making transitions, building and releasing tension, and working with emotion through gain automation.

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/129146

Do you ever feel like you can make a great loop but you can't make a great song? I don't know if that's your experience, but I've been there before, and let me tell you, it's a nightmare. It brings to question all of your skills that you have developed so far, because you've been able to cruise through without thinking about it. But now it just isn't enough! I needed more variety in my tracks.

So if you're like me then this video is just for you. Nathan goes into a key concept about arrangement that will help you think about it in a much more constructive way. Every instrument can be played with different articulation, loudness, rhythm, etc. and it doesn't have to play all the time. So Nathan poses three big questions of arrangement: what is playing, when is it playing and how is it being played?

This video will show you how these questions give you insight into what you were doing subconsciously (and how to answer them in a creative way). It will provide you with a simple thinking process for arrangement decision-making that will ease up some of that tension between hearing the song in your mind and putting it into your DAW. So try it out!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/802615

Mixing in mono is one of those production "tricks" that have solidified in my mixing routine to achieve clearer mixes. It's a really easy shortcut to hearing levels and even frequencies of everything in your track without the distraction of stereo imaging. It also helps to figure out phase issues between closely tuned kicks and bass and correct your synth sound design too!

But sometimes the immediate benefit it gives us gets outweighed by a longterm one of improving your critical hearing skills. For example, if you use mono to hear frequency fighting between instruments, you're undercutting your learning experience of properly working with frequencies in stereo. After all, it's not uncommon to pan different instruments asymmetrically. Having stereo means you have two different signals that should be shaped on their own terms.

Michael is going to walk us through some of the things that mixing in mono can be used for and give some perspective on how those particular uses stack up in a more robust or specific production workflow. And, I hope this knowledge helps you in your own productions!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/742906

If you have Abletone live with Max for Live, you should check out the J74 Progressive.

Once you get the hang of the program, it is capable of producing extremely realistic chord progressions and arpeggios, delivered directly as MIDI clips in Ableton Live Session view.

He has a ton of other tools you can check out on his website.

http://fabriziopoce.com/progressive.html

https://www.youtube.com/@FabrizioPoce

This is more of a podcaster/journalist focused resource, but NPR has a whole bunch of publicly available articles with practical recording and production advice - https://training.npr.org/tag/production-sound/

Old school hip hop producer DJ Premier has a pretty great series of videos on what producing hip hop was like in the late 80s and early 90s (think stories about recording to ten pound reels of tape that could hold 15 minutes of audio and carrying around binders of floppy disks with stems to sessions with Fat Joe and Big L)

This is one of those techniques that can really push you over from intermediate to pro. You need a good grasp on compression: what it does to your instruments and how it affects their texture. Parallel compression is simple, yet subtlety is what makes it work, you need good ears for compression for this to work in your favor.

The essence of parallel compression is immediate and delicate control of the different textures in your recordings or even synths. You make a compressor for different elements of the instrument. In drums it is your punches, your transients and sticknoises, your long releases on snares and the color of all noises: bright, muddy, etc. Sometimes a compressor will affect multiple qualities (but not all of them). Then you make your compressors exxagerate the elements you choose separately. Then you mix the compressors in a way that you find pleasing.

That's what I've gotten out of the video and if you want to get a better grasp for the subtleties with apt explanations from Gregory, then that's the spirit! Go watch it! If you can't hear the differences, try increasing your speaker/headphones volume. The effect is subtle so don't go too loud, just enough to hear the differences described. To avoid any potential hearing damage (in case you do go too loud and/or you listen on headphones), limit your loud volume listening to ~15 minutes or so.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/664074

How do you mix lots of instruments? Do you balance them all out so you can hear every single one that's playing? Then this one is probably for you!

In this video, Gregory goes into why you should prioritize a couple of melodic instruments in a mix and also how to think about mixing with the listener in mind.

Personally, it's been very helpful for me to formalize what I was already feeling. Sometimes I make a track with a focus on a couple of instruments and sometimes I try to balance everything out. Whenever I balance I feel like the track becomes too overwhelming to listen to and I was tearing my head apart as to why it happens on certain tracks and not the others. Now I know why, and I hope this video helps you on your journey too!

cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/80742