Sound quality of my productions ?

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bazsound
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by bazsound »

getting seperation between all the parts is key and part of that can be achieved through EQ however there are other ways to get things to cut out above stuff.


having multiple tracks that are all consuming the same bandwidth can end up in a muddy mess.

Its a frequency management thing, like alot of engineers reserve a certain part of the mdirange for vocals and will purposely remove midrange from offending tracks to make space for the vocals.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

Thank you.

Ii's prob the hardest thing I have encountered when learning to make music.
pinellos
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by pinellos »

maybe this can be intresting (a pdf about expressiveness in electronic music):

http://www.dei.unipd.it/~musica/IM/espre.pdf

bye!
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

I thought I had already responded, but it seems I have not.

Thank you for that read, although it was not much fun.

I have started to use soundfonts and wave files, for now mostly for the drums, but its already an improvement.

I am not satisfied about how my creations sound yet, but I am making progress.

Currently I am looking into chords ( progression)

I often think of something Jean Michel Jarre said. He spends a lot more time on finding nice sounds, then he does on writing melodies / music.

Although I sometimes get frustrated, about the progress I make, I am also having fun.

Two days back I listened to a popcorn cover I made earlier.
I had to ask people on the lmms forum if it was in tune. ( a year ago or so )
Right now I cant believe I did not hear this myself. It sounds awe-full. LOL

I am also learning a lot of new things.Flanger, reverb, compressor, echo, delay and as most here will already know, that list goes on and on and on.

I heard a few tracks made with lmms, who do not sound bad at all to me. So there is for me enough room to improve.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

For those interested, and or willing to give some feedback:

https://soundcloud.com/user586365033/asend
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by bhilmers »

What kind of monitors are you listening through? You're not using headphones only, are you? Your mix has a narrow quality to it I hear when people either A) are using poor speakers or B) have good speakers but don't have enough experience with them. Since I don't know what kind of sound you are going for I can't say for sure how close you are. My personal opinion is that the sounds are a little dry and flat. Overall it's pretty good, I would say you are about 80% there.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

thank you.

My speakers are a headset sennheiser pc160 ( I am also a gamer)
So yes, I only use a headphone.

If I understand you're feedback right though, we agree.
But for now I don't know how to do better.

For the moment, I am using just my ears and a 10 band equalizer, (ladspa)

I have tried to use two graphic equalizers to help me, but I could not get them to to work in lmms on Linux. (openSUSE)
( i could try them on windows, but I do not think I have to explain on this forum why I don't wanna do that.
I am 99% of the time on opensuse, but also have windows 7 for games that don't have a linux version)

I am quite happy mostly with asend, but to me it does sound a bit blend ( if that's the right word)

I tried through vestige: blue-cat-spectrum-analyzer and Voxengo ( windows .dll plugins)
But both refuse the draw any graph.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by English Guy »

Good advice I was given was to mix quieter because your ears work better
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by bhilmers »

Gps wrote:So yes, I only use a headphone.
While it can be done, it is very difficult to get a good mix using only headphones. I would suggest saving up for a pair of decent near-field monitors. Unintuitively, A good set of monitors will make your music sound better in headphones. Your mixes have a flat, narrow quality that is characteristic of headphone mixing.
English Guy wrote:Good advice I was given was to mix quieter because your ears work better
I would go a step further and do mixes at different volumes and see which is best for your monitoring environment. Speakers are designed to sound best at a certain volume. You need to push the right amount of air without overdriving them. If you play them too quietly the frequency response gets uneven.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

Right now I can afford anything, I hope to have a job again one day.

Can you point me in a direction of good speakers? Which brands to pick from and which to avoid ?

Would this be something ?
Looks expensive, because if I get this right, for stereo, I would need two of these.

http://www.bax-shop.nl/studio-monitor/k ... oCKJXw_wcB
Speakers are designed to sound best at a certain volume


I have noticed this with my sennheiser headset. Volume can be to low, for mixing. ( and to load too of course)
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bhilmers
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by bhilmers »

Gps wrote:Can you point me in a direction of good speakers? Which brands to pick from and which to avoid ?
Right now any decent pair of near-field monitors will be better than headphones only. Those KRK speakers are fine until you get a better feel for music and production. Eventually your needs will change and so will your monitors. Generally speaking, the more you spend on monitors the better the quality will be, but how "good" a pair of speakers are depends on a lot of subjective factors (listening environment, music style, etc...) The advice I give everyone is this: When you are ready to buy a pair of monitors, get the ones that are just slightly more than you can afford or are willing to spend. You are going to have those speakers for years and good monitors are a worthwhile investment. Your music is important, so strive for excellence.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by rango »

Hi Gps, it sounds like you are making great progress. I re-read these pages a couple of times and did not see one thing that can make a big difference? How are you inputting MIDI data? Most modern keyboards can send additional MIDI data like velocity (how hard you hit it) and aftertouch (you push down a bit harder after initial attack and the sound can be further modified). Some simple keyboards do not have velocity, AND EVERY NOTE IS EXACTLY THE SAME VOLUME AS ALL THE OTHERS. Kind of like all caps. It can be boring and reduce what you are saying. There are other continuous controllers like pitch-bend, breath controller and a modulation wheel. Those names are their original intent, they can be remapped to do many different things. If you are step-entering note-ons with a mouse, you have a prescribed level of volume right there.

I am an old/former sequencing fanatic. There was a time when I did it every day just for fun. Some of it was magic, and some of it was tragic, but it was almost always great fun. I stopped sequencing and starting playing in a weekend bar band. Then marriage, life, jobs intervened. Over the last ten years I have dabbled with Ardour off and on. Recording real audio is great, but I have recently started trying to re-visit my sequencer roots. Here is a snippet of a sequence of an Atari 1040ST using Steinberg Pro-24, later to become Cubase. In many regards this is pretty coarse and simplistic. There is practically zero dynamic range. It is all *loud*.

In other ways, this was pretty hot shit for the late 80's. All synth/drums were recorded on the Atari 1040ST, and played back after (extensive) editing. I had a very simple rackmount Akai 6-bit sampler that could record about 10 seconds of audio, and let you fire it off with MIDI events. Primitive editing, there were physical sliders on the front to trim the sample, and these very strange spiral track 2.5 inch floppy disks to store it on. I was listening to Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" and noticed that the guitar intro was all hot and dry in one channel, and very mooshie reverb on the other. I sampled the hot and dry one, and off I went. There was no time-stretching on that thing, so I sped it up a bit to fit the other things I had in mind.

All together on that recording, there was an Oberheim Matrix-1000 analog rackmount synth, the first Alesis drum machine, the cranky Akai sampler, a very simple Yamaha DX-100 FM keyboard and a Peavey DPM-3 synth. Plus, there was the very exotic (joking) Fostex 4-track. That let me record a guitar. The Atari could sync via SMPTE (details here) to the tape. I had to dedicate one track for the SMPTE noises, which gave me a 3-track in real life.

The time-honored way at the time was to bounce tracks on a 4-track. You had to commit early on to a drum mix (for example), and record some (or many) tracks to one un-used track, then you could re-record over some of the previous tracks. This was often a fast track to a lot of mush. Actually committing to any mix early on is a bad idea unless you have golden ears, and a lot of experience with your gear. The combination of the Atari ST and three tracks of tape meant that all of the synth/sample tracks could be played "live", and the 3 available tape tracks could all be first generation. Playback to mastering was the finale.

The guitar was a Strat, played into an old Bandmaster amp. There were no speakers, the amp's output went into a homemade direct box then to the tape. It's whole sound is loud, nasty and strained. That's what I was going for. It was fun that it only existed as a line out and the room was silent!

The hardest part of this whole thing was the backward guitar solo. SMPTE won't sync backwards. This is yet more story and this is already too long.

This whole song is mutations and snippets of some of my favorite things. Led Zep. Loud guitar. Spacy analog synths. A blatant rip-off of the final riff from 'Radar Love'. Chunky bass. Chimey Strat. It is far from 'art' but it was very fun and I learned a lot.

Woops, sorry, back to some suggestions. You have gotten a lot of great advice here, I can only agree.

Get some near-field monitors. Home stereo speakers do not count. Headphones can be acceptable to track on, but not for mixing decisions. If your head is the apex of a triangle, you should be able to point your arms at a 45 degree angle. If all is well they should point to speakers about 3 or 4 feet (sorry, USA measurements) from your head. A near-field monitor reduces the need for room treatment.

As mentioned, don't monitor too loud. Your ears get fatigued and you don't hear accurately.

Don't obsess too much. If you can look back at multiple takes, and you get to take #199 and it is 3 am? In the morning you may find that take #4 was the best one after all. Walk away from it for a while. Go outside. Do not listen to music. Eat, nap, whatever.

Quantizing can be a big help, but done incorrectly makes more "I WAS MADE ON A COMPUTER". For most uses, only quantize the note-ons. Leave the little slop that we as humans do for note length and note-off as it was. Experiment with different swing settings on quantize.

Keep it up! Experiment.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

Thank you and you're response is not too long for me.

you need cooling baby
I am not fooling
I am gonna send ya back to schooling :wink:

Love that led zeppeling track, and like you production.

Right now everything is too expensive, (wont bother you guy with all the details, but I am without a job for way too long already)

Not sure about after touch, but my midi controller does do velocity. I generally just play some notes, and then correct it in lmms.
(I do not correct it 100%, but because I can't really play, I have to do some fixing :mrgreen: )

The mid controller I have is an Maudio keystation mini 32, perfect size for use with a pc.

Near field monitors have made it to my whish-list but for now I need to compromise.
http://www.bax-shop.nl/studio-hoofdtele ... fdtelefoon

This is a headphone from a music store, and should not color the sound as much as my Sennheiser gaming headset does.
Some feedback from the lmms forum, is that my mixes lag bass. To keep this a bit short, those basses are there on my Sennheiser gaming headset.
This Sennheiser headset make even 128kbps mp3 almost sound good.

I love what you told about the AtariST, I ones had one, and have been messing with Cubase and a Yamaha dx7 ( borrowed from the computer club, at my work)
Boy was I disappointed that the dx 7 was not multi timbral or not poly phonic, I always have issues to keep those two things apart, but the Yamaha could not play more then one instrument at a time.

About the obsessing to much, that a mistake I keep making.
If I don't get it right, its in my character to try harder, to force it, but that does not work at all when making music.

One remark about how much I am wiling to spend on a speaker. a lot.
If I win the lottery, I prob turn my attic into a studio and buy a few real synths, and some Sennheiser studio headphones.

Today found a great tutorial about how to make reggae, although this guy is using fruity Loops, his explanation, does applies to any daw.
https://archiewahwah.wordpress.com/2013 ... he-basics/

I already knew something about the difference between reggae and ska, vs the other (pop) music, but I could not get it right in lmms.
ONE, two three four vs one, two(TWO) three FOUR, but the missing part was that the beat envolves around the third count.
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Re: Sound quality of my productions ?

Post by Gps »

Still learning, still making music, still having fun.
Still no job, so still no better speakers.

At the moment looking at mixing and mastering vids, and software synthesizers.
It's time I learn to understand zynaddsubfx, to name one.

LMMS does have a simple spectrum thingy, but I got Easy Q and blue cat frequency analyst working in lmms.

Last one does make lmms unstable though, but that happens with more vst.
For some part its almost a miracle they even work on Linux(through wine)

Very happy with latest piece a bit of a classic house track.
https://soundcloud.com/user586365033/ourhousemusic

I will prob upload a newer version one day, I am trying to improve the mixing.
More low end boost, and a cut out around 125 khz, with easy Q.

EasyQ:
http://www.rs-met.com/freebies.html
youtube vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1_nZt1kpEM
The piano in my track is a vst too. 4front piano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi_zySsnPXI
I think it sounds quite good, especially for a free plugin.

Lets hope I do get a job again, and then I want some better (studio) speakers, and prob building a pc just for music making.
Or find an easy way to switch between jack and alsa with pulse audio.
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