neil (spatialize)
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Posts posted by neil (spatialize)
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Very considered and mature production this. Allows you to draw yourself in towards the music which is not something that can be said about a lot of electronica.
Lovely atmospheres, deep basses. Cool beats and synths.
Audio slips down your lug-holes like a cold one at sunset.
All from a very decent English chap. I say, What-o etc...
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definitely appears that the album is King around here.
On a thread on another forum recently there was a guy asking whether he should release 2 or 3 tracks per week to keep his fans happy.
He obviously believed that this was a fairly normal ratio and that quantity was king (how you maintain any sort of quality control releasing that volume of music I don't know).I can only think that artists / labels are using shorter releases to maintain a facebook prescence. Maybe it works if you want to play that game continually but it doesn;t look like it's fooling anyone here. But then again these forums are usually for the smart, engaged music listener. Who knows what the wider public think?
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i think my preference for shorter albums comes from listening to 45 minute cassettes growing up. From lying in a hammock in thailand listening to Solid Aid over and over again probably.
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Most people so far have shown a preference for albums. I prefer them too.
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I like both but like Gagarin for some reason I tend to focus more on full-length albums, maybe even take them a bit more seriously. Spatialize, if you feel you'd rather put out a full-length album with a long story than several autonomous EPs, which might feel a bit unfinished to you, I reckon you should go for the LP. Otherwise it doesn't really matter, as long as you alone are pleased with the final result. I'm assuming you're a realist and don't expect to make any serious money from releasing psychedelic downtempo, like arakoon said.
You assume correctly.
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it's quite exciting to think...oh I'll do a dance EP or a dub EP or an ambient EP
I guess to a certain extent you just have to please yourself (as a producer that is).
It probably doesn't matter that much at the end of the day.
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50 minutes is long enough for an album. I think anything much over that length has a negative impact on the album.
take me for example, people are just getting to know my music (4 previous albums) and maybe a few Ep's now would help the name get around the web a bit more and perhaps help to get some more gigs.
Or do multiple EP releases just feed into the modern day phenomena of there being just too much information out there?
if I did a few EP's, in conseqence it would be a good few years until another full length album would be ready....and that would feel like a pity.
Or is that just old thinking?
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Just noticed that Bluetech is apparently lining up 4 Ep's.
What do people think about this approach?
Is it nice to have a drip feed of music (3 tracks at a time) or would people rather wait for an album? Does it reflect people's attention spans these days or are artists doing it just so that they have something to promote on facebook? (it makes you look busy and the bandcamp discography looks more full).
Certainly as an artist I like the idea of writing a few tracks and releasing them in a small packet. Keeps things feeling fresh. Albums can take a long time and once you've heard a particular track X amount of times over a few years you start to lose excitement for it.
I could probably put out a couple of EP's next week if I wanted to but had always been saving the tracks up for an album (to the extent of turning down some requests for compilation tracks).
Perhaps that approach is a little out of date?
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I don't find the semi modular set up of the Ms20 particularly intuitive. There's a few routings I know how to use but I don't go particularly far into thatside of it . I just clear the leads (on the software) as there are modulation options aplenty anyway.
Whilst we're on the subject of gnarly analog synths...I do like the imposcar. Sits well in a mix and does a lovely range of sounds very well.
If you haven't tried that matt freak f I would really recommend it.
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Good plan to restrict what you use. :-)
Having too many synths means that you're always learning instead of just making music. And anyway omnisphere has great digital synth sounds, fm and VA. And you've got the excellent diva for your analogue.
You could do everything for a very long time with those 2 synths.
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yeah chopping up loops and reordering them in ableton is all very well. but if your music, like mine, is fairly structured then, even if i chopped it up, i would probably play it back in a pretty similar order. So basically you end up standing there waiting for 8 bars to pass so that you can trigger the next scene.
Personally I prefer to play a synth and tweak fx. But that's a matter of personal preference for sure.
Re mainstage: It really is a solid bit of gear. I have set up an live ambient looper system in mainstage using a Korg Nanokontrol for my experiments in silence project. The system really does work well. But yeah, lack of midi files is a pain. If you could set all your audio and midi files in Logic and then import them into Mainstage then you would have a very functional and stable bit of gear right there.
Alongside the Audio player plug in they just need one midi file player and it's there for me.
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just bash harder
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So does anyone have a list of the major synth vst's that fall into these categories?
there's a million answers to this but here;s a few ideas
analog emulation - arturia minimoog or imposcar software
decent little analog for the studio - novation bass station
VA - Sylenth software - novation supernova
digital synth - korg kronos (hardware beast) or perhaps a korg m1 software synth
fm synth - FM8 software
and omnisphere for everything in between
you could do most things with that lot
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novation sounds seem to sit somewhere in between earth and sky. good for multi layering the mid range I am finding.
i love the arturia prophet V for pads. has body and loads of depth.
actually a lot of my pads over the past few years have been the wavetable based prophet VS which you get alongside the Prophet V in the software. Left dry without reverb it doesn't sound that inspiring but splashed through a decent amount of reverb you get a wonderful deep but glassy sound which, because of the wavetables, has some movement.
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hey up matt
yep..roland pads definitely have some body. korg is up in the sky
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Thanks for the heads up on the crystallizer. Sounds right up my street that.
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For pads that evolve over time you need to use granular sampler/synth or a wavetable synth.
But you don't need to sit down and make one utterly complicated patch. If you lay down in your daw enough separate parts that all have movement it sounds to the listener like a clever patch on your synth. But it's not.
Where's ishq?
Come on ishq. Get your arse over here :-D
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Sometimes the trick is to make pads sound like they're not synth sounds.
For unusual textures you can't beat sampling. Sample anything, even a pad sound. transpose it across a keyboard on a sampler. Somewhere there will be a sweet spot where the sound seems to take on a whole new life....then play it an octave up and an octave down. Things get organic and deep very quickly.
By playing around with the pitch with samplers you get sounds that you just can't make with synths alone.
Sampling is a little bit of a last art. I'm old enough to have owned a mono 8 bit sampler that only loaded 8 samples (max30 seconds sample time). But with that sampler and a reverb unit you could still make spacey music.
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Depends.
For deep ambient - Fucking shed loads of reverb. Up to 100 wet often . To share 100 % wet reverbs via a bus, set your track fx send to prefader, bring the volume right down and use the send in effect as a volume knob. You can send as many tracks as you want very wet to one bus reverb then without maxing out your cpu.
For more standard pads - at the very least modulate your filter slowly with an lfo.
Combination of lpf and hpf pads will help create an all round spectrum of sound.
Also a mix of analogue and digital somehow works.
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The real conspiracy is that people who play off conspiracy theories against each other are trying to degrade the notion that there is anything conspiratorial going on in the world at all and thus produce a generation of sheep who have the notion of conspiracy debunked. thus I deduce Matt the you are a high powered venusian lizard who will suck out my brains with a straw as soon as look at me.
;-)
Matt Freak Flag reacted to this -
Ms20 with the hp and lp filter excels at lovely bandpass squelch
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in terms of section lengths, they should be as long as they need to be but 16 bars is a reasonable figure for an idea to come in, do it's thing and play out again.
it;s a question i think of trusting your musical intuition.
what i would say though if you have a long section in a track make sure that the primary riff has some movement and interest to it. if you build in movement and variety into a synth riff then it can play for much longer in the track and this affects how you make your overarching sections in the track. to help with this you can play in longer sections of the synth riff (instead of looping shorter sections) as you will naturally add variety when playing in the synth riff on a keyboard, even mistakes can be edited into interesting patterns.
getting that primary synth / sample riff right is the key (for me). spending just that little bit extra at the start getting a really nice sound can feed into the arrangement building stage and make it easier. if you are looping a very short part with no filter or note or glitchy variety then the music will become static very quickly.
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you have to listen with fresh ears and work out where the track is dragging or indeed whether the sections are changing too quickly
fresh ears, a piece of paper (let the track play through), a sensible volume and a willingness to be honest with yourself.
in terms of fine tuning the arrangement (when you've already heard it a thousand times) i try to bring my sub conscious into it....staring out into the garden while smoking a roll up / using the internet whilst listening back and just noting what the back of your brain is telling you
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atmos / fx
pads
introducee rythmic synth element (core tonal part)
build more rythmic elements
layer synths / fx on this
add bass
and..................
main drum beat with main bass and core tonal element
build more stuff on top - 2 or 3 x 8 or 16 bar sections of melodies/synth/smaple parts
break the track down - perhaps remove bass - take drums back to their skeletal parts
reintroduce main beat with a different section (contrast is required to maintain interest)- more upbeat or more downbeat - change the key tonal element which may have been running so far in the track - differemt bass line / main synth part / change key? any of the above or all of them
again develop 2 or three sections in this style
move back via transitions to the very first main part of the track to provide resolution
build this to crescendo with multiple parts colliding into one psychedlic kaleidoscope - peak...
build down
remove bass / rynthmic parts one by one naturally until you are left with
one sole rythmic element and / or pads / atmos
what music library/player app do you use and how you organise your collection ?
in Technical: Equipment and Software
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I don't know if it will do what you want but Vox is a useful bit of software for a mac.