Iacchus

Hi all, thrilled to announce my new album 'Betwixt' released yesterday. Hit me up if you want but cant afford right now and want a dropbox link. https://iacchus.bandcamp.com/album/betwixt 1. Phillax - Hyperspace (Iacchus Remix) 2. Legion 3. Titan and his Minions 4. Spore to the More 5. Together as One VIP 6. Between Apologies for Disfunktion

I don't actually use the knobs on it, the VST UI is better - tabs, modulation matrix with dropdowns, waveforms you can drag with the mouse, etc. Some prefer to twiddle knobs but I prefer the UI. You are basically buying a ton of DSP boards and an exceptionally good analogue modelling algorithm, fine tuned and coded for the circuit boards it runs on.

That's just my experience of gear progression and acquisition others will have a different story and a fondness for other synths that may be cheaper. I just feel you have to bring out the big guns to outdo soft synths these days.

I wouldn't recommend spending <500usd on a synth, I think its a waste of money. Save up and get a good one, and for 1000usd I would get a Virus TI desktop. Fully integrates with your DAW, you dont even need to save the patch on the synth, saving your DAW file does it for you, and it will run 16 instances at once, thats 16 synth patches running live at the same time in your track. You can even leave the dust cover on, as long at is it powered up, it will work and you can control it through the VST user interface. There are other synths that sound great too but, becauese of the total integration and the effect it has on your workflow, the Virus TI is and will always be my recommendation.. until something better comes out, been waiting 10 years for that to happen though...

I wouldn't bother with starter synths, I got an electribe, then a novation supernova, I outgrew them both quickly and it was just a bit of a waste of time and money, only the best hardware synths outperform VST's now anyway. Consider a Virus TI Snow as a cheaper option, it has the same sound engine as the full model, it just runs less instances, so you are not compromising on sound.

I use the Virus TI as my main workhorse, use FM VST plugins a bit for growl and stuff but for warm squelchy psychedelic noises, can't beat the Virus.

Generally always try do things with the DAW. Including modulation of parameters (I'd rather use the Bitwig LFO than any built in LFO) It's more consistent, you dont have to learn so many different tools and know exactly how you expect them to behave in every circumstance. You can also switch out the synth or whatever for something else with minimal effort

Tell a lie I have actually been using FM8 loads now come to think of it

I can hear two synths around that time The first is a more moody atmopheric pad, this is actually a omnisphere preset. I rarely use presets or soft synths but it has some great sounds for moody atmospheric stuff It is quickly followed by a more standard psy squelchy noise This is made on my Virus TI. It is a saw wave patch with 2 x unison and a bit of spread, ring modulator, and formant filtering, ie two band pass filters giving it that 'talky' element. Could give more deets or upload a preset if you like

Hi all, I gone done released a new album! CDs and digital. If you are skint drop me a message and I'll give you a download code. Available on my bandcamp (above) and also at the Mystic Sound bandcamp https://mysticsound.bandcamp.com/ Enjoy! Iacchus x

I usually start with an element that has inspired me in music I've heard recently.. maybe a bass, a percussive thing, a stylistic influence such as a new genre that has interested me I start with that and then it usually morphs into something totally different as new sounds you make in the process start to fit together and inspire more ideas.. usually the bit I was originally trying to imitate gets left in a graveyard at the end and long forgotten I think it's starting that's the important bit, any way for any reason. The songs kinda write themselves after that.

I dont really use vocal samples anymore.. especially the whole terrance mckenna style hippy gubbins samples started to sound really cliche and tiresome to me

The problem with vocals is that consonants are effectively white noise. If you de-noise it using de-essers etc, you remove the definitoin of the talking and left with something more 'vowelly' There are expensive forensic cleanup suites that do a reasonable job of reducing noise and leaving the vocals as unaffected as possible but to be honest, why not leave the noise in? nothing wrong with a bit of noise in a track If you don't like how the noise starts and stops suddenly with the vocal track, take a bit of the noise when the voice isn't there, loop it, and fade it in and out before/after the sample.

Depends what you are trying to mix it with, and what the sound of the voice is like! But generally I would probably compress it if there is dynamic range i dont want, and roll off the bottom to keep it away from the bass and kick. I certainly wouldnt try to tune it, it is spoken word, not singing, by its very nature it is not supposed to be in a tune.

Ta And if you are trying to get something like that Kayla Scintilla sound i'd say you've nailed it, I'd have a hard time telling them apart in a double blind trial.. good sounds, good drums (especially like the triplet fill-in type things), and nice squelchy noises. In terms of structure, the song starts a good groove, then carries on for 3 minutes in that same groove.. I'd say at least a song should have a breakdown in the middle and some kind of build up to a second drop, ideally with some major differences to the first bit. eg different drum groove, new synths or instruments perhaps that start to come in over the breakdown My favourite songs are real journeys. Consider a song like 'Around the world in a tea daze' by shpongle, skip through the track and listen to how many different grooves it does, how different the end is from the start. That makes for epic songwriting in my opinion. I know psybass is going to be a bit different as it's more 'dancey' but I think having any track evolving is a good principle. I tend to listen to my stuff repeatedly on headphone when its work in progress, in bed our out and about - do I start to lose interest towards the second half? Would i be tempted to skip that if i was listening to it on a train and it was someone elses music? Is the end bit less good than the first bit? If so, it needs to change. Sometimes making that decision, sitting down for a few hours and starting 'a new bit' in the track can take it in a new direction that improves it as an overall piece no end

There are tons of different patches in that song but the bass stab that seems to come in the most and at the start of each phrase sounds like a fairly simple FM patch with some low pass filtering. You can get stereo width using the synths 'unison' property and turning up the pan spread, although try not to go nuts with this as it causes stereo phase problems, not good for bass and mono compatability. Generally with bass noises (especially FM noises) I find it is good to have a separate sub bass doing the bottom end warmth and filter out the bottom of whatever is giving it the texture and 'growl'. Generally you will get 'softer' FM sounds working with modulating sine waves with each other rather than eg saw waves. I knockup up a patch in FM8 that sounds roughly in the same ball park, its obviously not identical and might not be as pleasing to you but tweaking the FM amounts changes the tone quite a lot, I only spent a couple of mins on this but one could potentially fiddle around for hours finding the sweet spots. If you want to do FM stuff I highly recommend FM8 its fantastic, although many prefer Massive which you can get similar sounds out of and its a good all rounder. With this kind of music the trick seems to be to use each sound sparingly but have lots of them Audio https://www.dropbox.com/s/h66qe7910lqcqjl/Bass1.wav?dl=0 Patch https://www.dropbox.com/s/6p280y38fzrcjfa/Bass1.nfm8?dl=0

Generally wobble, squelch and growl are about LP cutoff, resonance, and frequency modulation respectively, and different synths are good for different sounds. Any specific examples of the sounds you want to make? Could potentially help you deconstruct and reproduce.

I would recommend just making them as you need them - different transitions call for different transition effects! How long should the whoosh be? Depends how long the breakdown is, how quickly does it need to fade away? Depends how much is going on after the transition, what pitch should the riser start on? Depends on the key... etc

There are VSTs for this kind of thing, eg The Riser, but I found it's not as good as making your own Whooshes - white noise, every synth should have a white noise source. Add effects - unison, delay, reverb, flanger, freq shifter etc.. then low pass filter to rise/fall it.. I put a delay on end of the whole chain so the noise doesn't stop too suddenly when you take it away Risers - This can be any old synth patch with the pitch bend range on your synth from -12 to +12 and automated... rising! The possibilitites are endless, experiment! so Transitions - a good one is to take a sound that is coming in the new section and do the old reverse reverb trick so it starts before it starts.. google that if you dont know what i mean.. you can do a reverse delay variation on that too On that note a reverse crash/ride always helps a transition nicely, especially if you stick a delay on it too.

Getting good at everything is the name of the game in music production, and yes it is hard but the best things in life are hard work. You still get to do all the emotional and communicating side but you have to do the technical stuff also. You could form an electronic music band and share the work on projects., specialise.. but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who only wants to work on the technical stuff and give you free reign of the creative stuff - you would loose control of the direction of tracks and the overall artistic vision, and having everything exactly as you want it - the benefit of working by yourself. If you find producing a track boring this probably isn't the hobby for you, it takes years of endless dedication to get to anywhere close to where you want to be with it, and you have to be keen to learn and improve in every aspect.

Or by shaping do you mean mixing? Fitting sounds together' is more in choosing sounds that go together rather than any special production technique. Stick an electric guitar lead over the top of a growl bass, a vocal, and a didgeridoo, you will have a horrible time mixing it and it wouldn't make for great listening anyway. Have a bass, some drums, and one lead instrument at any one time - piece of cake, probably only a bit of routine EQing needed.

Finding a good reverb algorithm is really hard.. many sound tinny and unnatural. Keep hearing about these amazing new reverb plugins, trying them out, and deciding they are crap. I have a fairly cheapish Lexicon box which I prefer to most VSTs, with the exception of the Plug and Mix digital reverb which I think sounds great on some sounds and I am using a lot more these days, just because it's nice to work in-the-box where you can! http://www.plugandmix.com/products/p881-Digital-Reverb/ IR stuff can be pretty good too, use that if I want a ridiculously big reverb.

I played with Reaktor briefly but found it a pig to use, you can't just pick it up and start experimenting, I understand you can get lots out of it if you put in the groundwork, but I wouldn't bother unless you found 'conventional' tools were not as customisable as you would like.

Do you mean like sound design? It is one of the tricker things, it's especially frustrating at first to have a sound in your head but have no idea how to make it happen. It takes years of practice to start to get there, but when you have, it is far from boring

Well the flashy ones tend to be for mixdowns is what i meant! Ie saturation plugs / analogue modelling / tube kinda stuff (eg Magnetic 2, Twin Tube), precise and versatile eqs (eg FabFilter ProQ), transient shapers (SPL Transient Designer), width processors (Izotope Imager)... this is all mixdown stuff, I wouldn't use them in sound design, just in sculpting the track to fit together nicely and have a bit of shine In terms of writing the actual track, I'm mostly working with a synth, layering drum samples with some simple filtering, chopping up audio, timestretching, automating simple delay effects, and so on... I can do all this without a flashy VSTs, except perhaps a really good synth if im not using hardware And thanks glad someone out there likes my stuff