Music Production Club - Round 3

clubs
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So, in the process of making my submission for this week (will probably post tomorrow), I found this website made specifically to list/discuss production techniques related to dub techno and other dub-inspired electronic music. I believe its from early 2000s.

I’ve been interested in this kind of sound for a long time. The sound design and atmosphere created by these techniques make for very unique pieces of music. My favorites right now are this one and this one. it’s verging on “ambient” music which i adore. I’ve been trying to emulate some of that warmth and grit that dub techno greats seem to have down to a T.

Anyways, I felt like sharing the website because some pages in it have a lot of great wisdom from established dub/dubtechno artists – down to very detailed descriptions of “best practices” in emulating the sound. However, outside of this being interesting for fans of this music, there is a great deal one can extract from this page and its underlying DIY philosophy.

For example, they have a page for techniques on replicating/creating effects commonly found in his kind of music. Here’s some examples:

  • When recording vocals, put a large cowbell (or long steel pipe) and mic up to your mouth while singing or chanting to get a cool natural-sounding reverb effect.
    submitted by Apostle Solomon Jabby “The Dub Revelator”
  • If you are the lucky owner of a spring reverb: Kick it and it will utter wonderful thunderous noises. (Done by the late great King Tubby)
  • If you don’t own a spring reverb: Go to your local flea market or pawn shop and you might find one. Many older guitar amps incorporate spring reverbs: Just kick them hard to find out. (The sales person probably won’t like it though…). You may find other cool stuff too like for example old tape echos, old synths, … (Since you’re already sitting in front of a computer screen you might try ebay too.)
  • try adding chorus to an entire finished track, for a quite trippy (and smooth sounding) finish. use a pedal or fx unit or anything that’ll give you a bit of chorus (like a sample editing program or whatever)
  • BMG’s effects manifesto : “The basic tools of dub are: Your brain and creative rearangements of reality. The goal: To make the music come alive with madness, to be constantly inventive, deep, liquid, organic. Technically, classic dub uses 3 main effects: tape echo, analog phasing and spring reverb. The order of the effects depends on your mood. No dub player lets the efx unit stay in the same position for a whole track, dub is about playing the efx unit. King Tubby was the maestro of the echoplex, Lee Perry could play the Bi-Phase and Space Echo like no other. get inside the effects and learn how to turn the knobs so the music comes alive. You can’t automate this and no plug-in can truely immitate tape delay feedback and if you aren’t using analog pre 80s efx, then you are just a step cousin of dub!”

(you can tell the age of this page because “old synths” now are quite expensive!!)

Here’s some advice of their advice on sound sources to use in music:

  • All samplers offer a method to loop samples and you will have a hard time to create a natural sounding smooth loop with anything else than a synth wave. So why give a damn? It’s very fun to make bad loops (for example with voices, instrumental sounds or even drum hits or percussion) and use them as effect sounds or for very strange melodies. Ever played a melody with a looped snare drum?
  • Use unusual sound sources like radio, TV, video, old computer games, ragga dancehall tapes, records. If you got loads of bucks go for the Portishead approach: Hire and record a classical orchestra. Cut the session on a dubplate and use it for scratching.
  • A neat dub technique is to run an AM radio (with a knob) into effects and slowly tune between stations - really trippy static/pink noise, and you can get snippets of music or speech.
    submitted by davyvelocirapt0r
  • Use cheap toy walkie talkies near each other for delay,static, and distortion. Employed by KMFDM
    submitted by davyvelocirapt0r

Even if I don’t end up employing any of these exact techniques, it is helping me unlearn some “rules” about music production and mixing that I’ve picked up over the years. Because I learned most of what I know about production from youtube videos, my process sometimes is very by-the-book – especially when making music exclusively with a laptop like i’ve been doing these days. Finding a way to bring playfulness and experimentation into the creative process is something I struggle with and reading this page has unlocked a lot of that for me. There’s also something cool about making music with stuff you find around you/used stuff you can find for cheap at a thrift store :)

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82

here’s my submission for this round. it’s kind of a mess lol – drenching stuff in delay and distortion is fun but is a headache to mix. but this time i learned that sometimes restraint is better when it comes to sound design and even song arrangement. i went for a hazy and somewhat dark vibe for this one.

the track started in a more ambient direction and then i abandoned that when i introduced the percussion. next time i think i’ll pick one or the other. i saved some of the sounds i made for this for use in a different song, think i’ll start from scratch tbh. eitherway this was quite fun to make.

went in an quickly remade the track with a slightly more toned-down approach.

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83

here’s mine. i had less time to work on it this round than i’d hoped, so it’s a little bit duct-taped together… it’s supposed to be a smaller-scale sort of piece. i’d envisioned it as an intro to the album i’m sort of working on, bringing in the ideas i want to work with - the lyrical themes, leaning harder on guitar. originally there was a very soft synth pad working in the background, but it felt a little off with the other stuff so i took it out. might toss it back in.

i think the melody/lyrics are strong, and the bones of the arrangement are there. i used a lot of acoustic guitar on my last album and i want to use more electric guitar this time, so i like that the song transitions between them. i need to play with the arrangement more though… and redo the vocals. just needs some fleshing out.

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84

i like this! i do think the second draft feels more… itself, a little more coherent as a whole, and it fits the hazy/ambient feel more closely. but i really dig the moment in the first draft where the percussion comes clattering in - maybe it doesn’t work for this particular song, but i think it would work really well in another context. i like the way you treat the vocals too, it’s a really cool effect.

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85

Just listened to this while preparing breakfast. i loved how this one turned out. i like that we both went with elements in the track that were heavily distorted!

the way it builds was well done and can definitely see it as an intro. love how the distorted guitar sounds. if i had to make one suggestion it would be to have the vocals reflect some of that distorted sound as well, i think it would fit thematically with the theme as well as sonically with the distorted guitar. as the song builds, its like the backdrop is changing but the voice stays the same and part of me wants it to match the vibe as the song progresses. as you can see i love distorting vocals to the point where you can barely understand it so take what i say with a grain of salt hehe

i can’t comment much on the mix because i lost my headphones :( but it sounds good on my phone and laptop speakers!

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86

yes definitely agree. i think that having the percussion be such a prominent element in the track but not starting with it when i started producing the song was the mistake. next time i will start with the beat and build the track around it.

thats what i tried doing the second time around but i rushed that one as well. i dont mind not having had time to do a proper rework though, the exercise itself was rewarding and i learned a couple of things about using delay as an instrument/sound design tool instead of just an effect.

as for the vocals, i used this free plugin that sounds very good on basically anything, it adds texture when used correctly, this time around i used it to create a a “fake” clipping sound to add heavy distortion and then EQ’d it to get rid of the low and high end. i think i also used it on the drums. and lots of delay as well.

i followed the advice posted earlier and put a chorus effect on the whole master and i gotta say it sounds way better than expected and didnt mess up the mix too much.

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87

so cool, the model:cycles is such a cool instrument and this guy really knows how to work it. i think it will become a classic in a few years!

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88

This channel ruuuules. I found it earlier this year when I was looking for video of someone jamming on a Volca Drum. His vids were easily the best I could find. It baffles me how small the channel is!

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89

His Volca Drum vids are incredible. I own one and he makes that thing sing like nobody else – its not easy! With how big synth youtube is, it’s baffling that so many ‘product’ demo videos feature such plain music to showcase the product.

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90

Just popping in here to say if you haven’t already, do check out Surge XT for all your digital synthesizer needs. I use it extensively in my music and it does just about everything in terms of sound design. It’s seriously abundant in its features and has quality in-house effects. It’s quite powerful and imo very intuitive to use for beginners.

FM Synthesis, wavetable synthesis, additive synthesis. It can do it all fr.

It’s also free and open source which gets a big Hell Yeah from me.

(I promise this is not a sponsored post, it’s just real Good and I wanted to share.)

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91

Just watched this talk by Disasterpeace last night. I found it very enriching and decided to write down some reflections as I apply it to my own music creation process.

I think it’s a great talk about the parts of creativity that always gives me trouble: just starting!

I’m much better about starting songs than I used to be. For example, for a long time I was against using reference tracks in my music. The process was too clumsy for me and I felt like I was doing it wrong. I’d start sessions on my DAW and drag a song I liked into it, but it felt tedious to mark every single new part of the arrangement. Picking it apart felt infuriating because I had a hard time replicating certain sounds, and this overall feeling stained the entire concept of using reference material.

Obviously, using reference material is a prevalent practice in visual art for example. My partner is a very talented artist (I’m biased I admit) and they use reference material extensively in their work.

If I had to analyze why, I’d say that my hesitation to use reference tracks came from a perspective of feeling like I could never match the quality of the referenced track, and this would discourage me from doing so. Better to start by using my own elements rather than use a predetermined starting point – this way my own standards don’t stare me right in the face as I work. A counterproductive way to think, honestly.

Furthermore, the idea that each session in a DAW had to result in significant progress towards a finished track was self-defeating. I understand the urge to work efficiently and get down to business ASAP instead of staring at a blank project, but once I unlearned that not every music-making session is meant to contribute to an actual song, it opened up an aspect of music creation that I had not know before: the creation of collection of my own sound design. This meant creating my own synth presets, saving samples of my own programmed drums, effects chains, etc. I noticed that by dedicating sessions to: let’s make a pad sound using FM synthesis, I began experimenting and learning at much more granular level than before.

Disasterpeace in his talk gives several examples of how to do “rolling starts”, meaning how to ensure that you don’t start from the ground level every time. Not that there is a problem with that, but sometimes having stuff in your back pocket that can get you started does lead to more focus and less stress at staring at a blank page.

To give an example from my own music, I used a song by one of my favorite electronic music artists, Actress, as a reference for my own track. His track is called Angel’s Pharmacy and I was drawn to how he can create very distinct moods through a combination of sound design and spacial effects like reverb, panning and delay. Listen to the first seconds of the track to get an idea of what I’m talking about:

This track makes me think of night-time in a big city but there’s nobody outside. The mood is a bit somber and perhaps a bit unsettling, but there is a groove to everything that makes you want to stay and hang out a bit. I’m very inspired when an artist can capture this feeling, because it’s not straightforward. My thinking was: if the elements that build this track give this overall effect, then attempting to replicate those elements in my music would allow me to get close to the same feeling. So I gave myself the goal to use it as reference track, and pay close attention two things specifically: the arrangement of the track (Angel’s Pharmacy surprise drop after the intro was intriguing, as I think those things are usually telegraphed in dance music) and the sound design: a mix of delay, atonal percussion and soft, slightly detuned pads. Here’s the end result:

It’s not perfect, and listening back to it there’s a couple of things I would have done differently, but I can recognize it as a good attempt.

The breakthrough that not every music-making session needs to end in a releasable song also opened my thinking up to something else that Disasterpeace mentions in this talk: using non-music sources as forms of inspiration. He talks about how reading the manga Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind inspired him in creating the music for Hyperlight Drifter – the worldbuilding and atmosphere of the story informed his music creation process in a significant way. The point is that keeping an eye out for things outside of your medium that still inspire you is a valuable way of avoiding the musical equivalent of writer’s block.

Video games are a huge source of inspiration for me. A recent example is playing through the first parts of Koudelka. The old house, narrow corridors with creaking wood, the sound of a fireplace and the atmosphere of a pitch black night were so evocative for me that I felt immediately inspired. I very quickly had a a good chunk of a track that I later released. Same thing has happened with playing Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII: distilling particular elements of those things ultimately served as important inspiration for works outside of that particular medium.

From a more general perspective, keeping an eye out for sources of inspiration has also led me to engage more deeply with the world around me: architecture, art galleries, live music, nature and books have become an objective of artistic attention. I think this last insight has overall enriched my life immensely. It has even led to other hobbies: my desire to become better at creating my own album art has led me to pick up film photography. Even if I only entertain these mediums as a branch of my main one, the overall experience has still impacted my life immensely. As someone who struggles with depression and anxiety, this feels like a lifelong project with no deadlines or expectations. Absorbing everything in this way feels life-affirming, if that makes any sense.

I think the core gist of the talk, and of my reflections about it, is that maybe creative blocks come from one’s own self-defeating expectations about the creative process. I used to think it was something that just happened, like an earthquake. The best part about the talk was understanding that if you let those expectations go an open up your creative sources to include everything, not just the music you’re into, can give you the direction/inspiration you need and just maybe a more curious (and in my opinion, better) person.

I’ll caveat the above by saying that this might sound naive coming from someone who doesn’t work in a creative field and therefore has no external pressure affecting the process of creation itself. I can imagine that working on those kinds of projects explain the pragmatic tone of Disasterpeace vs the more sappy one I came at this with lol.

There’s also so many other things the above is related to, for example how exactly do you approach the task of creating a personal archive of your music ideas for later use? What creative habits do you think you need to break out of? How does the frequency of creative block differ for artists who mostly work by themselves vs. those who belond to a bigger artistic community (bands, vendor booths, etc.)?

I should get back to work.

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92

hello again!

so this guy has been making his own VST plugins for a while now and his design philosophy is one where he doesn’t really make good looking front-ends for them, just knobs at best – forces you to turn knobs and really listen to the change in the output. anyways the effects themselves are quite good in my experience – ranging from stuff from mixing to reverb/delay/other crazy stuff. he’s well-known I think on other music-making forums for precisely this reason. seems like a cool guy and gets respect from those into the programming side of digital audio production too.

https://www.airwindows.com

the thing is his whole catalog is quite varied and requires downloading many different plugins to find which ones to keep. well worry not, I recently found out that he compiled them all into one plugin – meaning very little hassle in getting this into your DAW and exploring the catalog. a real treat imo and has some really good effects – it’s free but perhaps support on patreon if you like them?

here’s the link to the compiled version

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93

Booooo

time to switch!

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94

making it my goal to work on music for at least 15 minutes each day this year! (because i want to finish this album lol) i finished a demo and wanted to post it. link is here

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95

I loved how you used the harmonized choruses throughout, the minimal instrumentation lends space to the evocative and vulnerable lyrics very nicely. A small unsolicited feedback: I would turn up the vocals a bit more when the chorus of voices comes in because its hard to hear the lyrics.

I enjoyed listening to it and I’m eager to here the album when it comes out! Working on music everyday can be hard (gotta be in the right headspace and all that), but I think it pays off in spades. Good luck :)

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96

thank you for listening, and for the advice! i’m gonna spend some time mixing and mastering this, which should solve the problem with the vocals - i just got excited after laying everything down. can i ask, did the guitar feel natural when it came in? i’m not sure that it totally works.

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I thought the guitar was a nice addition! and it came in at a good time in terms of the arrangement.

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98

I’ve been thinking about what my music creation goals are in the next year and I think that aside of just “make music consistently”, a big one is to figure out how to build my bandcamp following with the ultimate goal of getting my music off of streaming services.

On spotify, I basically get a fraction of a fraction of a fraction (ad infinitum) of a penny per steam vs. someone being nice and dropping $1 for an album of mine they could download for free. So the money isn’t even worth it. And I want to stop giving money to Daniel Ek and all these platforms that treat independent, smaller artists as an afterthought.

Just in general trying to learn how to engage my audience (even if its super super small) in a way that doesnt feel icky is something I want to focus on. Just writing it here publicly so I feel accountable to it lol, and please let me know if someone has figured it out :)

(I hope I’m not coming across as too money-focused, I dont want to start raking in the big bucks just worrying a bit about using platforms that value my work more).

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99

Case in point!

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100

Also can we change the name of the thread to like music production thread or something or is there a better place for this sort of discussion?

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