LinuxMusicians

Hi guys,

I just finished this in Reaper - Linux. I'm curious what you think of it and I'm open to constructive criticism.
I have some problems with mixing as I don't know where to begin with. Just did some panning, EQ (high pass filtering) and little compression ...
If you have tips how the mix can be improved, your welcome I think it could be a bit louder?
It's a bit monotonic but that's on purpose. And I like the part from 2:40 on ...


https://soundcloud.com/lilith_93/moonchild23

Style? Synthwave?

---------------------------
Synths:

Zynfusion
Tal Noisemaker
Some Alesis Drum Kit via Reaper Sampler
MVerb
Dexed & Tunefish for minor special effects
Samples taken from NASA missions

Sounds really good to me. I like all the stereo effects. The hat something slightly unpleasant about it, could do with a bell cut somewhere, 5kkz maybe?

The drums could be fatter, try the js saturation plugin over all of them. Maybe sidechain on the main instruments as well?

Great though, reminds me of Stranger Things.

sysrqer wrote:Sounds really good to me. I like all the stereo effects. The hat something slightly unpleasant about it, could do with a bell cut somewhere, 5kkz maybe?

The drums could be fatter, try the js saturation plugin over all of them. Maybe sidechain on the main instruments as well?

Great though, reminds me of Stranger Things.

OMG, really?? I love Stranger Things and the soundtrack is awesome
I'll make a remix the next days and test your suggestions, thanks!
I have a side band compression in the bass controlled by the kick. "Hat" at which time exactly?
Pretty cool, thank you

I like all the stereo effects.

It's fun doing this in Reaper. Because of you I switched back to it yesterday and finished that song that I started some weeks ago

lilith wrote: I have a side band compression in the bass controlled by the kick. "Hat" at which time exactly?

The hihat that comes in every now and then, starts loud and fades out.
Try sidechaining the paddy synths and maybe effects to either the snare, or maybe the kick depending on the groove you want. On the snare the drums would be more punchy, the kick would make like making you nod your head to the main backbeat. Perhaps a little of both.

lilith wrote: It's fun doing this in Reaper. Because of you I switched back to it yesterday and finished that song that I started some weeks ago

That's good to hear. I've been really enjoying it. Fantastic how you can customise it so much and there is a script for everything.

First thing I did yesterday was to adjust the zooming to the one from Ardour.

You mean ducking also the synths based on the kick?

lilith wrote: You mean ducking also the synths based on the kick?

Yes, or the snare.

Nice. I like the combination of sounds, and some of the panning effects were really great. The only thing I would suggest is a little bit of reverb to glue everything together. For a shameless bit of promoting my project, I'm curious how it would sound with the "Electric Studio" preset of Dragonfly Reverb

Thanks guys Just downloaded the dragonfly plugin and give it a go.

Very nice one, Lilith!

Oh, and that Dragonfly Reverb is great as well - tried it after I saw it in one of Glen's latest videos. Thanks Michael!

Cheers,
Wolfgang

NICE!

The emotion and drama comes through clearly and right away.
You have a good sense of arrangement.

I can tell that your tunes will improve over the next years.
I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I think you got what it takes.

My only suggestion is to keep researching drums sounds for that style of music or whichever style you prefer.
Your melodies and harmonies slightly imply more aggressive and/or technical types of drums, maybe.
But the types of drums you have sound sligtly General MIDI. I don't mean to be harsh in that regard.
It seems like you were excelling with the tools you had available. The tune is still good.
I would render a "Minus Mix" of the tune; everything as is without drums. That way, if you find some drums you like
better, you can mix them in quickly without fighting the older original drums. A minus mix is a mix "minus" something else.

Sometimes I will do a whole complex tune and then throw away most of the entire drums and redo them. It provides a nice opportunity to allow the rest of the track to breathe better or to supplement with rhythm more effectively if needed.

I like your melodic expressiveness and your ability to do harmony.
The other thing is, in music theory, if you can relate, try not to linger too much on either the "leading tones" or the "tonics".

I know I definately have trouble with that on some of my own tunes, but it's possible to manage those if just trying to.
You seem to be good at changing things up to be more interesting, so you probably won't even have this kind of issue in a couple of years. Music making is hard. I appreciate what you've done. Peace and thanks.

@wjl: Danke Dir!

@protozone: Thank you, much appreciated !
Yesterday I played with compression, more reverb and with EQing the Drums. I think it improved already, but I have to do some more reading to learn which compression parameters to choose for the kick, snare, synth, etc.

The Drums are loaded in REAPERs sampler, so I can easily exchange them and see what sounds better. I think these are samples from the Alesis HR16 machine... I also want to route them to separate tracks to adjust EQs and other stuff independently.

The other thing is, in music theory, if you can relate, try not to linger too much on either the "leading tones" or the "tonics".

That´s a good point. Maybe that helps to get the sound a bit more "dissonant" within the scale and less smooth / cheesy.

A minus mix is a mix "minus" something else.

This I didn´t get. What are you doing then with the minus mix? I would just double my drum tracks and exchange the samples and mute the original tracks.

How would you call the style. Someone said it sounds like EBM

I don't think you need to change the drum sounds but I think some more processing would be good. I would probably favour drum bus processing (saturation, compression etc) rather than too much individual processing in this case. To me, they just need a bit more life and punch, sidechaining a bit more and saturation on the drum bus can make that happen.

There are good ideas in there. It's rendered pretty well although I find at bit too up front and well-detached. Just a bit. There's a need to glue things together just a little bit more when it gets going. The smoothest parts are more glued together. The harmonies might remind a bit of Depeche Mode, that kind of drama. Even when DM are very up front with their sound, they still have a bit more glue. All in all a very good listen.

Cheers.

lilith wrote:

A minus mix is a mix "minus" something else.

This I didn´t get. What are you doing then with the minus mix? I would just double my drum tracks and exchange the samples and mute the original tracks.

How would you call the style. Someone said it sounds like EBM

You could do what you are talking about also, but if you needed the final mixdown to be it's own file, then a minus mix is an alternative mix file that can be used in different projects or collaborations where the specific part is left out entirely and/or replaced.

But come to think of it, you are right, then the project "stems" (multitracks) would be wanted again anyhow for proper mixing. But I supposed you'd want to save that as a separate project so you wouldn't mess up your original version.

As for the style, calling it EBM is a compliment but I shy away from genre labels. They mean less and less all the time.
Most genre labels aren't very accurate, even for the bit hits. Also, the music culture changes so much that eventually almost all categorizations become obsolete in the long run.

I'm debating uploading a free sample pack collection I have to this site. But if I do, you could certainly try some of those sounds. I'm just not totally sure about it because it took me months to make that collection by hand-picking and pruning from online free drum machine and drummer one-shot databases. I like to maintain somewhat of my own sound and if I give the samples away then I'm at risk of other people's styles starting to sound like me, and I don't know how I feel about that. But I might do it anyhow. I suppose I could at least put up a kit of a few kickdrums and whatnot. What do you think?

imho, it's like half way between ebm (e.g. Nitzer Ebb) and electro-industrial (e.g. Frontline Assembly), aka "elektro". the instrumentation feels more like the former and the rhythm feels more like the latter. (re semantic fields; in the UK at least, "EBM" can used these days as a catch all for ebm and elektro as well as futurepop and aggrotech/terror ebm/hellektro (see also "techno body music")), though apparently a fan on the continent (or a nit picky fan in the UK) is more likely to be like "really?" to that conflation).