Wednesday, March 17, 2010

NOTES FOR 3.18.2010


Todays Session Above

Well, good 4 hour session today. Got interrupted by my landlord coming to the door and saying that some repair guy needs to check my ceiling. The scary thing is, my wife has glass blowing shit in the dining room...we have a cat (not allowed cats here), and the place is a disaster. I was like (hold on a sec) while I cleaned up, and then came back to the door and he said "Oh, whoops, its the neighbors house". Phew! Scary thing is, he had keys, so he was going to come in either way. Wake up call....shit.

Anyway, progressed a little in that same track I was working on. I came up with some good ideas today.

A nice breakdown is to just delete EVERYTHING in a break, and toss in a sub bass. Then come in with anything you want. Its a really surprising hit if you start from halfway in a bar or something like that. I have 4 of the same style hit throughout the song. Sounds really cool.

I love asian sounds...specifically Chinese. Using midi effects like chord and scale make it really easy to make nice Chinese melodies. Without using them, its usually all black keys on the keyboard....but, if you want the whole thing in a different key, using those tools are really nice incase you cant remember the chords. I double layered a synth melody, and makes a great chinese beat.

Also, when something sounds just a little bit dull, or sharp....chorus can take care of that. It really makes a nice sound when used in just the right amounts. I did it on the melody like this -


Lately, when I have been making the backbone of the song using session view, I have been switching between basses within the same track. Thats easy for ableton to do, but not easy for a mixing engineer to EQ each one separately. When you send off tracks to someone, they are all audio files, so without looking at the waveform, or knowing the song, its hard to know where all the basses change especially if they change very subtly. When I finish with this track, I will separate my basses into different tracks. Just make sure the sidechain is on all of them when you do it.

Crash cymbals are a bitch to get just right. I always feel like they stand out awkwardly. I need to make some new racks of all cymbals so I have like 200 crash cymbals to choose from. Because the head of an actual crash cymbal is so big, there can be different tones within them. So getting one tuned just right to match the song can be tricky.

I made a pretty cool sound with a crash cymbol today, using a drum rack and crash sample. Then I put of the LFO and modulated the rate faster and faster. Also put a low pass filter that has a modulated LFO at the backwards rate of the sample LFO. Sounded rad.

I was recording my synth melody, and for some reason, the whole thing changed keys. I looked within it, and nothing was changed. I cant figure out why its doing that. I looked at all my envelopes too, nothing was on. I wonder what thats about.

All of my tracks seem so different from other peoples tracks. Besides the first one I finished, they all seem like a story...each with little tiny parts of different elements. Other people seem to be more smooth and maintain the same sound throughout. Maybe it comes with being ADD....and the way I DJ songs more quickly than a lot of DJs like to do....so I figure, make the tracks the way I would want to DJ them. If I want to play a 6 minute track I made....at least it really switches up and doesnt seem the same.

Thats it for today.

Peace!

FroBot

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