Music Production

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This is Music Production. A place to share anything and everything you want about your music making journey! Learning is the goal, so discussion is encouraged!

RIP Waveform.

Rules are as follows:

  1. Don't share other people's music without commentary, analysis or questions. This is not a music discovery community.
  2. No elitism or bigotry towards other people's music tastes. Be polite in disagreement.

I will update rules as necessary, but I promise we'll stay light on them and only add new ones after discussion!

Here are some useful examples of what a great post would be about:

(in no particular order)

  1. Stuff you made/are making. Get valuable feedback and criticism!
  2. Learning resources - videos, articles, posts on any topic concerning a production process, be it composition, sound design, sampling, mixing, mastering, DAW workflow or any other.
  3. Free plugins, presets and samplepacks. Giveaways and self-made stuff included!
  4. News about production software, releases and personalities.
  5. Questions and general advice about music production.
  6. Essays on your favorite productions. Inspirations and insights!
  7. Your physical analog gear! Let us know how it performs!

Good to know: As a general word of caution, avoid posting complete compositions, mixes and tracks on the internet before backing them up on a remote and reputable server. Even small snippets or watermarked tracks should be posted AFTER backing it up to cloud. Timestamps from cloud services will help you in case of theft. And, as a public resource, lemmy is not a safe place to post your unpublished work, so please make sure your work is protected.

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Very inspiring stuff

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I found this gem and wanted to share it with you. Reaper being available for Linux is a pretty great thing but generally I didn't find many audio plugins being made available for Linux, especially plugins that try to recreate vintage hardware.

Anyway, here's a project that has a lot of those being written directly for Reaper using its DSP language and I can confirm they work on Linux.

https://github.com/TukanStudios/TUKAN_STUDIOS_PLUGINS

The dev has a YT channel where he shares progress: https://www.youtube.com/@johnmatthews8435

Happy music making!

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I have an app and it lets you skip certain words you custom add.

Like

  • the/a

Sorta like how Russians always leave out articles to no ill effect. Moose eend sqwuirrel

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I'm wondering if the attack of sounds can be generally modulated after the fact to an arbitrary audio file and similarly for a piano-pedal sustain type effect.

Can they be gradually and arbitrarily modulated?

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  • Does it lower the decibels of ambient above-surface noise, to what extent?

  • Is it preferential to filtering out low or mid or high frequencies or do they all move through it as a medium about equally in terms of perceptibillity by the submerged end observer?

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Recently I just got the Pulsar Audio 1178. Clean interface with really easy to understand controls and meters, can't believe how readable this is compared to most other plugins. Also has a fun "All ratio" setting and adjustable saturation settings, from clean to clipping and a few in between.

I am like the Toy Story meme of "I don't want to play with you anymore" with all of my other compressor plugins right now.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by nnullzz@lemmy.world to c/musicproduction@sh.itjust.works
 
 

I don’t think there’s a way to do a proper poll so if you don’t see your DAW mentioned in a top level comment, make the comment to the post. If it’s already listed, maybe just upvote it? That way we can get a representation of what DAWs are more among subscribers here.

I’m curious just because it’s always neat to hear what people use and how, but also to see how possible tuts or techniques can be explained in a way more people will understand. Or provide a variety of examples for various DAWs.

EDIT: Actually, I don’t know the best way to list the ones I use without making a few comments to this post. I’ll just upvote them if I see them listed.

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Another great look at the gear and process behind a classic track. I love to hear musicians set the record straight on what techniques they used to achieve iconic sounds.

Edit: the video starts out as a correction/follow-up on a previous video “Nuthin but a G thang” by Dr Dre | Minimoog G funk Lead, but expands beyond that

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So not entirely music related, but my don't-use-reddit policy and this looking like the closest not entirely dead community has led me to post sooo...

I have an audio question about recording levels. I'm doing voice-over stuff for some really bad Youtube videos I'd like to make and it never sounds remotely good.

I get that the recording volume should be just the green side of clipping, but how do you take a track, and then add it to other tracks and balance the whole thing to not sound like ass?

It always seems that it's either too loud or too quiet and I'm baffled as to how to tweak the mix correctly so that things sound right.

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This is a simple technique that creates a beautiful spread on acoustic guitar. It requires a few things first:

  • Acoustic guitar recorded on two tracks.
    • One track with a mic capturing the neck. I like to use a small diaphragm condenser.
    • Another track with a mic capturing the body. I usually go large diaphragm condenser.
    • (or go with some other XY/stereo mic config)
  • Two aux channels with a reverb. One aux panned hard left the other panned hard right.

Usually when guitars are mic’d with two mics like this, in the mix you pan them hard left and right. Like body left, neck right.

The trick here is that for the guitar track you pan left, send a bit to the reverb aux panned right. For the track panned right, send to the left reverb aux. What happens is that the reverb will fill the opposing sides and creates a super spacious and wide sound unlike just sending both guitar tracks to one aux. You can get an even better effect if the reverbs each have a slightly different setting. That’s all dependent on the sound you’re going for though.

That’s it! I hope the explanation is not too confusing. If so please let me know so I can clarify any questions. Give it a try!

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Any projects or demos you'd like to share or talk about? Exploring any new sound design or composition techniques?

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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/14281466

I've never seen computer keys used in place of piano keys before though I am sure being able to customize the feel of the switches is pretty nice. Are there production midi controllers that do the same?

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Feedback welcome. Thanks for checking it out!

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Thanks for listening!

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Thanks for checking it out!

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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!

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As you might've noticed if you visited our community page after this post, I made a very cool looking banner (or so my mum tells me). Thing is, I don't use that many plugins on my own, and what better way to make the banner look interesting than to put your favorite plugins in there? This page will also serve as a cool overview of different plugins our community uses, so be sure to post all of your favorites! I'll pick the coolest-looking ones for the banner!

This post is gonna stay up until I decide that the banner is done (and perhaps we'll make it a seasonal thing to swap it out, who knows?) I'll update this banner in my spare time when you guys post some things to add.

To get on the banner, comment the name of a plugin and the company or a name of the person who made it. You can also post a link to its page or your own screenshot of the plugin, if you want.

I don't know what the limit is to how many plugins I can put in the image, but we should have a lot of space (and we're not limited to the amount of spots currently on the list). I suppose as long as every individual plugin is recognizable when shrinked, we're all good!

Right now the banner features:

(in order: columns from left to right)

  1. Pro-Q 3 by Fabfilter
  2. SPAN by Voxengo
  3. Denoiser by Bertom
  4. Vital by Vital Audio
  5. MSED by Voxengo
  6. OTT by Xfer ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/iKill101@lemmy.bleh.au^
  7. sforzando by Plogue
  8. Maximus by Image-Line
  9. XO by XLN Audio ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/can^
  10. Sytrus by Image-Line
  11. 1176 Collection by Universal Audio

I'll swap out the placeholders for your submissions and credit you! Like this:

Stuff by Cool People ^posted^ ^by^ ^u/supercoolperson^

And that's about it. Sh.itjust.works and waveform.social will have different banners (in the same style), so we can do something different with both of them! Post away!

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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!

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Any Renoise enjoyers? (vps586515.ovh.net)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by maror@lemmy.world to c/musicproduction@sh.itjust.works
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Alright, I've had some time to think about it, and we're gonna be staying open to comments. Sorry if this post upset you earlier, it wasn't my intention to be dramatic (though I understand that I most likely was). I'm not great at these things.. yet. I hope Lemmy's cross-instance communication options improve and we can get a better way to comment on posts between different communities later down the line. For now, we have to put in work to make this community and fediverse grow, so we can have a place to share knowledge and emotions that no corporation will run into the ground for profit.

Contents of this post before the decision was made, for reference:

spoilerThis community was created when I just started browsing on Lemmy, so I really had no clue about what is the best way to handle a community here. Considering the nature of fediverse, it's not a question that's easy to answer. And I still don't have a perfect answer, but I think I might be closer to it.

What I want to do is to lock all posts from future comments on sh.itjust.works. I have a couple of good reasons to do this and a couple of reasons to reconsider. I'll go over them in a list and try to keep some perspective on them.

Reasons to lock

I want to direct discussion to music instances for everyone's convenience. A single place for music discussion, so you don't have to switch over multiple posts and check if somebody is talking about the same thing. I understand that the idea of the fediverse is to decentralize, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately, the functionality of Lemmy right now doesn't play well with that idea and provides a horrible user experience in return for following it. Compromises have to be made.

Also, having most music-production discussion, communities and posts in one instance will make it easier to find related content. Browsing communities on waveform is way easier than trying to guess all possible names that a music community might have. For example, if you search for "Music Production" on lemmy community browser, you might not find "Ableton" or "FL Studio" communities that are directly related to it and there are many more community names that are not easily guessable (like there used to be on r***it, with places like r/trees or r/worldpolitics, nsfw warning). I hope you get my point there.

Finally, I feel like a lot of users have anxiety over posting at a correct place (same as me, same as it was on r***it), so restricting comments to one instance will help us reduce anxiety and help first-time commenters and posters make the initial push. (Maybe rewriting the sidebar to be a bit less imposing will help that too)

Reasons to not lock

I understand that some people found this community on sh.itjust.works and appreciate the convenience of being able to do everything here. I don't want to take away from that if I don't have to. Good news is, these problems are known by the devs and better synchronization between instances and cross-posts will come, so the measure is going to be temporary while Lemmy is busy getting better developer support from FOSS community.

In addition, there is an argument to be made about archiving of knowledge and redundancy. If we lock comments to just one instance, if that instance goes down (temporarily or forever), all of the history made on that instance could be gone too.

As far as I know, other servers definitely keep records of servers they federated with, but searching for copies of posts might get more difficult in case of one instance going down as not every server is going to have every community discovered to archive it (and I do not know if there are any other limitations to that feature). Again, that's something I can only partially address as a community moderator, as the issue lies in the platform. It's inevitable that we're going to lose some history if the worst is to happen. Sh.itjust.works isn't immune to that either, so that's that.

Locking down comments won't stop me (or others) from posting here either and I'm going to keep posting here for the forseeable future. So if you're here just for the content, you don't have to worry.

I hope you guys can provide me with some input on this, because as it stands, I don't want to upset what we have right now, so this is something I can only do with your agreement. Let me know what you think about this issue and whether you consider it an issue at all. You can comment here, send me a DM or talk to me on my matrix chat, which should be working. Any feedback will be helpful here. Thanks

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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.

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