Bigger sound!!

[Genophonics]

I really can't figure out for the life of me how to make anything sound bigger or more realistic than kind of dull. I've searched and searched board after board and tutorial after tutorial on how do get those huge sounds and nothing. I know it has something to do with laying but I can never find anything in depth on it so I don't really know how to do it.

I'm talking about if you go to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30i3d...eature=related and listen to every single song in that dubstep channel. The basslines are so meaty, the synths blare out of the song. Even the little FX sound like they have some power to them....Can someone point me in the right direction...because i feel I'm starting to get better patterns down and construct some pretty catchy songs. Just the problem is when it's finished it sounds dull and lifeless overall. Is there an effect that people put on their sounds that makes it overall sound cleaner because all these sounds are sounding about as clean as you can get them and they still sound huge. I have sat for hours on end for about a week now just trying to just get a 2 bar bass riff sounding super awesome and huge and i fail every time. Internet tips?, tutorials? places to read about this? personal tips? By layering i hear you should actually bounce your bass or synth or whatever to an audio wav? then bring it back in?

[benjam]

EQ and compression go a long way if your trying to achieve a phat clean sound. I think your talking about resampling man
and frequency splitting type these into the search bar as theres a few quality threads recently that covered this lately. Maybe if you post a clip of your tune some helpful people could give you a few pointers???

[briskisgoodforu]

My first thoughts are good mixing just so each element does stand out, and secondly, effects that widen for example reverb, chorus, delay. Also panning imo is great for opening up the sound of the track. Making sure to use different frequency ranges as different times.
TBH i understand your frustration as its something i struggle with as well, but some of those tips I listed have been improving my sound.

[Genophonics]

No all this totally helps a newbie like myself haha.

But okay as examples I uploaded two things I was kind of playing around with last night.

http://soundcloud.com/dlinkwent

The day and night dubstep and drugs are bad songs.

Both those and pretty much all the songs I work on or do all sound like they aren't very big and are very thin. In the summers up and the coldest winter ones i manged to get everything sounding a bit bigger but don't really know how haha.

[nowaysj]

I feel you bro. I'm gonna kind of answer your question, and them I'm not, because I can't.

First off, there are four things that will really help make your mix more clear and powerful:

1. Volume - things that are more important should be louder, things that are less important should be quieter. A good mix engineer can get a mix sounding pretty good just by setting the levels of each element correctly. This is not as easy as it seems. In fact, it is counterintuitive sometimes. I recommend looking at the waveforms of mixes you are trying to emulate to see the relative volumes of various elements of the track. When you look at a waveform, up (and down) are volume, so things that go further up are louder. You can see how loud the drums are, how loud the bass is in relation.

2. Eq - this doesn't necessarily mean using an actual equalizing device to trim or boost certain frequencies. This means be mindful of where (and when) sounds occur and the frequencies they contain. Make sure that sounds do not overlap in time that occupy a similar frequency range. You can use equalizers to help in this process, by reducing unwanted frequencies or augmenting necessary frequencies. But using an eq like this can do more harm than good if you are not paying close attention. For more on this, I refer you to posts by user name "Macc". Remember also that a sound's body might reside around 200hz, but it may have a very important spirit up around 2000hz. This higher freq can really help define the shape of the lower, more meaty corporal aspect of the sound. It is always suggestible to eq in context when you are fitting sounds together. Do not solo a sound and adjust it's eq. Eq it in the mix. Anyway, eq is an extremely powerful and complicated concept, you can learn about this for decades.

3. Dynamics (this is related to #1 in a pretty big way) - The way that individual sounds come into, sustain, and pass out of existence is hugely important, and potentially even determinative in the way a mix works. Compression has been, and remains very difficult for me. But I will say that compressing a sound and then using make up gain to bring it back up to it's former level will make a sound appear louder. Pushed too far, and you may receive death threats. The loudness war is getting heated. I wish someone who understands compression and limiting better than me could contribute.

4. Stereo Field - Placement of sounds in the stereo field can really help them stand out and secure a position in the mix that is less dependent on their volume. If you've got all of your sounds coming right down the center, and you put a little shaker in there, you're going to have to turn that shaker up pretty loud (using up your headroom, and creating mush in your mix) to have it heard, but if you move it to the right, all of a sudden it can be quite a bit lower in volume, and still be noticed. Another thing to consider with the stereo field is fx such as chorus which expand sounds out wider to the right and left. When you hear a sound and it is just huge, and it feels like you are inside the sound, rather than the sound being over there kind of in between your speakers, usually some type of chorus effect is being used.

==

With all that said, you can employ all of the above and have a good solid clear punchy mix that would sound good against any music previously recorded. But then you play some recent track and it just sounds like 10 times louder and bigger than yours... I don't know how those fuckers do it. I refuse to believe it is just a matter of compression and limiting in the mastering stage, as these super huge tracks will still have ample dynamic range... I don't know how they do it. I think it is black magic.

[Genophonics]

Good tips man, a question about the stereo imager. what is that called in ableton? and i have a question about panning as I always hear people stressing panning is key. In my channels in ableton i can see they're all stereo channels because there is two SPL gauges going up. but why is there only one pan knob per channel? shouldn't there be two so i can pan one left a bit and one right a bit?

[Mannyyyyy]

I feel you bro. I'm gonna kind of answer your question, and them I'm not, because I can't.

First off, there are four things that will really help make your mix more clear and powerful:

1. Volume - things that are more important should be louder, things that are less important should be quieter. A good mix engineer can get a mix sounding pretty good just by setting the levels of each element correctly. This is not as easy as it seems. In fact, it is counterintuitive sometimes. I recommend looking at the waveforms of mixes you are trying to emulate to see the relative volumes of various elements of the track. When you look at a waveform, up (and down) are volume, so things that go further up are louder. You can see how loud the drums are, how loud the bass is in relation.

2. Eq - this doesn't necessarily mean using an actual equalizing device to trim or boost certain frequencies. This means be mindful of where (and when) sounds occur and the frequencies they contain. Make sure that sounds do not overlap in time that occupy a similar frequency range. You can use equalizers to help in this process, by reducing unwanted frequencies or augmenting necessary frequencies. But using an eq like this can do more harm than good if you are not paying close attention. For more on this, I refer you to posts by user name "Macc". Remember also that a sound's body might reside around 200hz, but it may have a very important spirit up around 2000hz. This higher freq can really help define the shape of the lower, more meaty corporal aspect of the sound. It is always suggestible to eq in context when you are fitting sounds together. Do not solo a sound and adjust it's eq. Eq it in the mix. Anyway, eq is an extremely powerful and complicated concept, you can learn about this for decades.

3. Dynamics (this is related to #1 in a pretty big way) - The way that individual sounds come into, sustain, and pass out of existence is hugely important, and potentially even determinative in the way a mix works. Compression has been, and remains very difficult for me. But I will say that compressing a sound and then using make up gain to bring it back up to it's former level will make a sound appear louder. Pushed too far, and you may receive death threats. The loudness war is getting heated. I wish someone who understands compression and limiting better than me could contribute.

4. Stereo Field - Placement of sounds in the stereo field can really help them stand out and secure a position in the mix that is less dependent on their volume. If you've got all of your sounds coming right down the center, and you put a little shaker in there, you're going to have to turn that shaker up pretty loud (using up your headroom, and creating mush in your mix) to have it heard, but if you move it to the right, all of a sudden it can be quite a bit lower in volume, and still be noticed. Another thing to consider with the stereo field is fx such as chorus which expand sounds out wider to the right and left. When you hear a sound and it is just huge, and it feels like you are inside the sound, rather than the sound being over there kind of in between your speakers, usually some type of chorus effect is being used.

==

With all that said, you can employ all of the above and have a good solid clear punchy mix that would sound good against any music previously recorded. But then you play some recent track and it just sounds like 10 times louder and bigger than yours... I don't know how those fuckers do it. I refuse to believe it is just a matter of compression and limiting in the mastering stage, as these super huge tracks will still have ample dynamic range... I don't know how they do it. I think it is black magic.

this and also adding voices and detuning is huge to get some phatness in there i finally got a reason to use it

[Genophonics]

This may seem like a pretty stupid question but how do I detune cause i do hear about that a lot to with fattening up sounds. Do i want to detune the oscillators from each other or have two instances of massive with the same sound and detune the synths from each other a bit? Also how is detuning done from the pitch?

[Genophonics]

PS. I just melted my computer haha. Maybe I'm doing something right now....because my CPU on just this sound alone is giving my computer a hard time.....when I've done full tracks and not had this much slowdown with my processor. Plus...it does sound bigger haha but yeah detuning?

[dddemain]

Detune the oscillators from each other, that's what I do anyway. I usually go for something between .7 and .25 but play around until you get the effect you want.

[Genophonics]

But you do it with the pitch right?

[narcissus]

so you want bright vibrant sounds instead of dull ones????

so you're basically asking me for a soul?

i can't help you unless yer name is lucifer..