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neil (spatialize)

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Everything posted by neil (spatialize)

  1. Routing your reverb into your drum bus can help too.
  2. I use the spring reverb in reaktor. sounds good enough to me.
  3. Maybe try buying some IR downloads? A cheap way of injecting different sound.
  4. you use logic? There's a Big Drum Room impulse in there. That is very nice on snares or on a full loop (filtered a little maybe). Plus I find a bit of either spring reverb or plate on top of something like that is the way forward. The big drum reverb to add depth and the spring (or a plate) to add a bit of a ring or upper / mid freq spaciousness to the sound.. So yeah I find a couple of subtle applications of 2 types of reverb works best for me.
  5. with all the software around these days i'm not sure that you anyone really needs more than a couple of external midi synths. but they are nice to have all the same
  6. quite a lot of external gear these days has a usb connection that you can use instead of midi. all my external synths can all be controlled by usb....but i still use midi for them. I use the midi output on my novation SL. there shouldn;t realy be a time delay on midi. but if you're using logic and you are experiencing this make sure that your latency compensation preferences are set to "audio and instruments" rather than "all". "All" is for if you are using external effects like UAD on a group bus.
  7. it's a general trend across the musical board isn't it? I agree though that more ambient music (particularly soundscape) should be allowed to breathe. If you push the limiter more than a 1-2 db on a soundscape tune, it can sometimes do very strange things.....as ambient is all to do with distances and spatial relations. When you squash those together it can lose it loses its spaciousness a bit, which is a bit of a sacrifice for the sake of turning amplifier up a little bit. Look at Eno's early work. No limiting on that. The majority of the sound at -6db. psychill can sometimes have a full bodied sound with drums / bass etc (very much like a full band production track) and can handle a good couple of db of limiting. I do find that a limiter can sometimes pull the track the track together a bit but personally I think anything much more than 2 db is just increasing the volume for the sake of it. Anyone used the Sony inflator? I know lots of people use it to just add whacking great loads of volume but you can set it gently to add soft saturation / prescence. It's a very nice plug in for that and could be used like that on a group bus to add a little bit of oomph (though I haven't done that yet)
  8. ah Gong. Yes. One of my favourites and in 2000 they were really cooking with Zero to Infinity album. At that time they had a GREAT live band and they concentrated more on the spacey funk / jazz side of their style. Late nineties were a really good time for music in the UK. Trance music was just developing and a lot of those were from the psychedelic scene. Eat Static, Ozrics and Banco de Gaia even got in the charts for a short period.
  9. It's one main tent that runs from 5pm until 6am. Like a club in a field. Whirly gig is the club night from London which has been running for years now. From ambient electronica to trance. Live acts up until about midnight and then dj's until dawn.
  10. i've already used a couple of those breakbeats matt.
  11. For me, classic sampling techniques. All the modern time stretching malarky is all very well but a good old classic free pitched sample, when spread out over a keyboard, will, some where along the keyboard have a sweet spot where it suggests a completely new world. Then when filtered and effected you suddenly have a very interesting textural bed to work from in a track, which then inspires you to build the track in a certain way. If you're sampling other music then it imbues a sense of something else into the music that, left to your own devices, you might not have created. Actually for me that's the downfall of some modern electronic music. All synths, synths, synths. A synth is quite often at its best when it doesn't completely sound like a synth.... Too many synths all on their own can sound a bit sterile, but synths within the context of a nice textural bed have a nice contrast and take on a different flavour. Quite a few of my tracks have started with some sort of sampled bed along with a low pad from the prophet V, which you wouldn't really notice unless you took it away. That sort of thing often forms the body for my more dreamy tracks.
  12. I plan random accidents to happen every Thursday between 5 and 7pm ;-)
  13. Re the compressor I think there are a couple of important differences between a studio that records people and a typical project studio that creates electronic music. In the project studio you are creating the track from scratch and gradually building it up. Now if anyone else is remotely like their master channel is clipping all over the place during the creative process. My track volumes might be running stupidly high for a while as I don't really want to stop the creative process to balance the mix. If u had a compressor in the mix I would be constantly having to watch the threshold and that seems like just another thing to distract my attention. Whereas in a studio clients are walking in with pre made music in a way and all the studio needs to do is record and mix it. So I can very much see why a compressor is used at that point as it can give a smoother sound to the production from the get go and, like your say matt, maybe even knock out the need for processing at a track level, or at least minimise it. As a compromise, maybe I could introduce a compressor on the master at a point when the track is starting to coalesce and it's getting time to think about mixing it properly. Cos personally I don't compress or eq too much during the arrangement / creative / building part of the track (though there are exceptions) .
  14. NICE one!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks Matt. :-)
  15. Would seriously love some vinyl breaks my man :-D Love a good hip pop drum loop me. I like the warm, groovy simplicity of stoner hip pop. That was kind of how I started off making music actually ; floating spacey synths over hip pop loops (which were ten a penny with the old akai samplers).
  16. Listening now... Artifact EP really has an effortless quality to it. Geoglyph definitely has the knack of spacing a number of different parts together so that they all work seamlessly together. that gives it a meandering, laid back quality that I like in music. Very nice flowing musical arrangements.
  17. yep I play synths and a bit of piano (when I feel inclined..jazz / classical). I'm would say that I'm a moderately ok player. I do play synths at live gigs, ozricy solo sounds on my Roland Gaia SH01. Played bass in quite a few bands too which I find particularly useful for sequencing. I spent 2 hours the other night trying to get the right bassline for a track using the keyboard and trillian. Was getting nowhere fast. So I picked up my bass and the first thing I played was exactly right. Sometimes I will play air bass if I'm nowhere near the bass! :-) he he. Re: free download. No worries mate. I put it up there on a pay what you want basis. We're all spinning around on the edge of forever, clinging to this beautiful earth. What's a bit of money between a couple of homo sapiens? A FB share is always a nice gesture if we want to support our friends. Which reminds me, I need to check out your album Geoglyph.
  18. www.aerodrums.com Anyone seen this?
  19. all of the above mate. A good groove is often a nice blend of all of those. Tuning yes as well. That's important on all the drum parts. In terms of full drum or hand percussion loops, at the start of a track when I'm forming synth sounds etc I sometimes use a drum loop at that stage, a bit like scaffolding. it's a quick way of getting the track off the ground and getting the vibe going. Then as the synths parts solidify I will go back to the drums and overdub / program kicks, snare hi hats. After a few overdubs, I might try taking out the original loop. Or sometimes I build the groove up from programmed parts and then see if there's a drum loop that will bring just a add a bit of groove. But you have to be careful with loops. If you throw multiple loops on top of each other the track can start to sound crowded very quickly. Sometimes a loop will fit sonically but will be a bit too busy. ... so if you use a rex sampler you can always "thin" it out by removing midi notes, keeping the main part of the loop, or just resequence it, in effect using it like a drum kit. I think the key with drum programming is feel and groove. If you are drawing in your drum parts with a mouse it's more difficult to get a flowing, loose sound going. I always "play" mine in with a keyboard and then use and 85-90% quantize value. Using an arpeggiator on hihats is a neat little trick as that will often impart a nice groove. I will also use the midi delay in logic regions to either bring the parts before or after the beat. That can range from very subtle 1 tick changes to larger values. Personally I tend like a fairly organic drum sound. So I use Spectrasonics Backbeat which is a collection of lightly processed live drum loops / kits. I will often audition one of those loops to see whether the sound fits, and then play in the groove from the keyboard, cos it's a rex sampler and spreads the hits out over the keyboard. That underprocessed live sound really helps to give a bit of life to the proceedings and you can compress it to your own choosing then. It's a nice contrast to the power and thud of modern sampled electronic kits. A really good recommendation is to get some Akai MPC sample kits / or simple MPC loops. Although on their own you might think "why do I want to use hip pop sounds?" they can really add meat and depth to a groove. Another recommendation is to get any ryhmic electronic loops you have created well meshed in with any hand percussion loops and build around that. Think syncopation. Do the drum parts create phrases? Also make longer loop braces in your sequencer and pepper those upper fx style hits at the end of say 8 bars instead of at the end of every 4 bars. Look up the term Loopitis. Here's a typical list of what I might use 1 kick kits from Thomas penderton through exs24 or a kick from logic's ultrabeat 2 Kick and snare (skeletal drum pattern) from MPC kits 3 Hand percussion loops (bongo, table etc from sample library) 4 Hi hats kits from Thomas penderton or exs 24 5 World percussion kits (logic, samp library) 6 Organic drum part programmed from Backbeat rex parts 7 layered snares from psy trance drum kits / Thomas penderton 8 crashes from rock / pop kits 9 maybe some sort of filler electronic loop - I find vierring from Reaktor (or more recently Glitch 2) very good for generating these type of sounds. Use drum plate reverbs to add a little bit of depth to the sounds without swamping the track with reverb. Also spring reverbs on snares and rhythmic fx parts. In terms of bus processing I will have light compression and stereo spreading and eq on.... 1 main drum part - mpc snares and light kicks / hi hats (the body of the drum part 2 lighter percussive parts (hats, crashes, bongos, rhythmic electronic parts) 3 main kik (on it's own)
  20. Hooray! Fellow Ozrics fan! :-D
  21. Did they squirt out a Pungent Effulgent?
  22. if you wanna learn psychill, 1listen to ozrics until your ears bleed 2learn a couple of synths inside out 3 learn how to play the keyboards / piano 4let the music flow. 5learn your daw and production stuff 6use forums for feedback 7don't rush into releasing :-)
  23. With the teaching, I'm assuming you're talking about teaching from your home studio. I think if you were a techno / house producer (in a big city) with all the requisite production skills, that could be a useful basis to teach from. I'm guessing that's one of the more popular genres and a area where you got lots of dj's who want to get going with music production. Who wants to learn psy-chill? The problem really with teaching on this basis is that if the student has Ableton, but you're an expert in logic, how do you teach? They might be better off using an online berklee course specially made for Ableton. There's millions of synths around too. How can you teach someone something if they have different synths at home? Tricky. Also electronic music production can sometimes be a hit and miss affair. A decent track can sometimes take a good while of phaffing about and experimenting until it suddenly all clicks into place. You can't really go through that process in a short lesson. The best way to learn is from sitting down and producing with someone else for a good day in the studio. In that capacity I have definitely learnt a lot from Ishq and the time we have spent in the studio together (he lives near me). I was wanting to do a deeper ambient project for ages but kept putting rhythmical structures in and formulating sequences. Matt helped me break through that by watching his approach to sound design and arrangements. A very loose, experimental, brave approach.. and then it clicked, and I put together my first Experiments in Silence album. So as a teacher you may be able to teach or inspire an overall approach to sequencing, arranging, sound design etc. Rather than spending ages teaches the ins and outs of production, which can be learned from you tube now to be frank. (forums are a great place to learn and I learned shed loads from the psymusic UK Forum.) In terms of the definition of amateur versus professional, I'm wondering if the definition now isn't based on whether you make your living from it, but by whether your music sounds professional?
  24. Ha yes! Reich and Glass kind of mingle into one person in my head. I'm impressed you noticed! :-D I realised a little while after I wrote it that I had mixed them up, but then I thought no one would notice and I couldn't be bothered to edit it. :-) the drums on Moksha Journey (so you're the other one who's heard the album!) ...quite a lot of them came out of a Yamaha Rm1x hardware sequencer and a korg 01rw through a Behringer DDX3216 cathedral reverb. And a few sample drum hip pop style loops, probably retrigged on the off beat (a nice way to get interesting drum parts) . Loads of parts layered basically. The korg 01rw synth module was a big part of the sound on that album actually. Nice pad and bell sounds. Why did I sell it? Aaarrrggh...
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