Do you hear the sound?

D

DanDnB

Bass and Drums
Joined
Jul 24, 2009
Location
Miami, Florida, USA
Hey dudes,



Lately I've been hitting brick walls. I sit down at the chair, got all the tools I need to make sounds but I'm just going nowhere.

My ultimate question to you is this, do you first think of the sound you want to make? Or do you think of the pattern and then the sound? Or the song STRUCTURE and then the sound?

Sometimes I think of 'what kinda sound would sound WICKED right here' and i try to make it. Then when i do it just doesnt sound good enough.

Other times i got a good beat going and i accidentally make some stupid patch that sounds psycho with my beat. Like one of those 'good accidents'. I hate when that happens, i feel like the song isnt my own musical capability but an OOPS.

F-ck me.
 
DanDnB said:
Hey dudes,



Lately I've been hitting brick walls. I sit down at the chair, got all the tools I need to make sounds but I'm just going nowhere.

My ultimate question to you is this, do you first think of the sound you want to make? Or do you think of the pattern and then the sound? Or the song STRUCTURE and then the sound?

Sometimes I think of 'what kinda sound would sound WICKED right here' and i try to make it. Then when i do it just doesnt sound good enough.

Other times i got a good beat going and i accidentally make some stupid patch that sounds psycho with my beat. Like one of those 'good accidents'. I hate when that happens, i feel like the song isnt my own musical capability but an OOPS.

F-ck me.
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Mate i really feel for ya.

I had the same thing a few weeks ago.

Hadn't made nuttin' in weeks, everythin' that i tried sounded bollocks, i was gettin' proper pissed off.

Then a few days ago back to normal.

In the space of a week im workin' on my second tune.

Dont know why people get "writers block" or whatever just one of those things.

To answer you other question i start makin a dirty synth sound, get something i really like.

Then sort out a beat something pre-made ideally (so you can just wack your ideas down quickly).

Get a rough sketch of what you want (tune wise) then iron out the creases as you go.

Take it easy at the end of the day, your not a robot, sometimes your mind is elsewhere (women troubles etc) and you dont even realise it.

Makin' ya tunes should come naturally, you can't force it.

Well ya could but where's the fun in that ??

Regardless or not that you had a "happy accident" at the end of the day YOU still made that patch, synth etc..
 
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something i have been doing lately is going through presets, working them to make them sick. i find the weakest, crappiest one and try to make it sound as sick as possible. then i save it, and repeat. after a day or two, you will have tons of new sounds/inspirations.
 
DanDnB said:
Other times i got a good beat going and i accidentally make some stupid patch that sounds psycho with my beat. Like one of those 'good accidents'. I hate when that happens, i feel like the song isnt my own musical capability but an OOPS.
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I kinda understand this feeling but I reckon 'fuck it'
A painter doesn't have to make the paint to be great. They just have to know how to use it.

Some random patch accident (I personally love them) is fine if you can use it to create something bigger than the sum of the parts.

A bunch of paint is a bunch of paint in my hands. In someone else's it's the fuckin Mona Lisa.

It's the end product that counts.
And you're the only person with the skills/inspiation to come up with the tune you make. No-one else in a million years would have come up with the exact same thing. You recognised the sound and shaped it in a certain way. (whether you had it in your head beforehand or not, whether you understood the synth or not)

My theory is (like my bit-on-the-side-what's-it-called says) this: Every future song, every classic, already exists. The maths, the physics, all of it, it's already there floating around waiting for somebody to recognise it and harness it. It's in the sound of the birds, the tube, the machines, the 'happy accidents'. All we have to do is hear it and capture it.

What a fuckin load of twaddle eh.

That's my take on things anyway
 
DanDnB said:
My ultimate question to you is this, do you first think of the sound you want to make? Or do you think of the pattern and then the sound? Or the song STRUCTURE and then the sound?

Sometimes I think of 'what kinda sound would sound WICKED right here' and i try to make it. Then when i do it just doesnt sound good enough.
Click to expand...

Good question. Either i start with a bass/leadline i whistled into my handy while i got inspirated on the road (its hard to get inspirated exactly when u sit down to produce) or im fiddling around with synths and find a sound thats new and like somehow. Then to "test" this sound i try some keyboard lines or u can use in Reason the Arp , hold some chords on ur keyboard, vary gatelength speed and so on. Some setting of the arp or general ur midi notes will obviously only match with a certain ADSR/pitch of ur sound.

U can also think of an overall song struture, say u want to set to music jogging through ur town happening all things. If u have to set to music a film scene, there is not really a other way, because the tention of ur tune must follow the film scene action. Ennio Morricone is brilliant how he has done this in some western scenes.

From my pov thinking about sound in electronic music is really the key question, not only because famous artist put much time into synthesis. Just download some famous song MIDI files from the net. daft punk da funk for example. I played around with this and others. Its nearly impossible for me to make this songs sounding nearly as good with completely other instruments as original used. If u think on da funk in ur minds ear, u have this fat reese sound and line in ur head. Even if us whistle the midi notes u think of this fat reese sound. And for me thats why most of the remixes of any song shound ALWAYS SHIT. U know Dance Club versions of pop songs, played too fast with electronic club sounds, they ALWAYS sound SHIT, just my opinion. The only good remixes i ever heard is black gold of the sun 4hero and puff daddy ill be missing u, which doesnt differ much from police version, main reason why it works. How many instruments u use in combination with distinct midi lines isolate alot sounds that a really usable for the tune. U just cant switch them.

U need to busy ur ears, the less instruments in ur tune, the wider the single spectrum of the instrument, the more movement in the overtone spectrum. U wanna get the spectrum full in the mixdown. Just my rules of thumb at the moment, but it works for me to isolate sounds. electronic sounds u simply can tune fat or unisono in contrast to a acoustic piano where u have to use many octaves, complex chords and composition lines to busy ur ears despite the relative thin timbre of the piano. That why a simple boring midi bass line like in da funk or seven nations army work.

Finding the right sound u have to trial and error, make happy accidents, u cant think of a sound u never heard before :) How do u think jarre, vangelis... made all these sounds. I did some research, and there is currently no theory tellin u how synth physical parameters/spectrum/waveform properties are linked to perception of timbre. There is not yet a scientific classification system how to categorize timbres in different classes like its done in massive (metallic, warm ...). Was the first i was searching when getting into synth programming, correlation timbre <-> spectrum, there r only some general rules from acoustic instruments.

So be rather happy then upset if u make a lot good accidents.
 
What helped me some time ago is instead of sitting down and writing beats and bassline first, I started by writing pads and leads, arpeggios, intros and soundscapes.. Kinda reverse your workflow and inspiration usually comes along.

Or try to reverse engineer some tracks of other peoples you love and that usually gets the juices flowing :)

Also those 'oops' moments are often the start of killer ideas, nothing wrong with that.
 
sometimes if u limit yourself to what ur gonna use it can inspire creativity.

for instance if u say 'for this melody/harmony im only gonna use saw waves' then fuck with them as much u can and write the melody/harmony it can come out phat. then once uve got the notes down u can abandon the saw waves or whatever if u dont think they sound good and use whatever sounds u want in there instead
 
i find it really helps to go into a beat knowing EXACTLY what i want it to sound like, and NOT getting distracted or detured by all the pretty sounds.


but this hardly ever happens :)
 
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Personally its all trial and error,
You jus save the stuff that sounds bangin for a later date!
Iv made synths 3 months ago that im using in tracks today,
And constantly upgrading the way i work the things that iv got,
To make them sound even more amazing
A good friend always told me to have around 3 reference tracks,
And plenty of breaks for resting ya ears and having a cuppa =D
 
everyone gets writers block, its natural.. its the side effect you get from lack of inspiration. go take a walk, listen to some tunes, read some magazines, look at some art, talk to some people.. the list of things to do is endless, you will eventually overcome the dreaded writers block my friend! i always find coming back from a writers block i can make some really sick stuff aswell..
 
I never hear anything, or start off with a plan.
I take how I'm feeling with myself at that moment, happy, chilled, pissed off, etc. Then I'll roll through samples and find things that 'fit' with my mood. For example, if i'm pissed off, I'll be grabbing hard kicks and nasty bass sounds. Then I'll kinda mess around with the beats first, get them into a basic pattern and make a mock track to base everything on. I'll then do the same thing with every other aspect of the track, twist and freak according to how I feel until I come up with something that I like and stick it into the mock track. Then I'll polish everything up, the fluctuations in the beats, the effects on the track, etc.

That's how I do it. Sometimes stoned and/or drunk, sometimes deprived of sleep, sometimes just normal, sometimes in the dark, and so on.
The trick is to shock your system so that your brain starts to scatter off on unusual tangets, and discover new qualities and ideas that were lying dormant in your brain.

I don't really listen to anything when I'm producing, because I don't want anything to influence my music, I want it to purely come from my own spirit.
 
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