EXPERIMENTAL Action-Dubstep/DnB/Drum & Action/Orchestral

[Sevenola]

This track has several genres about it,

Dubstep, of course, but a experimental sub-genre called 'Actionstep'.
Then adding experimental DnB, some aspect of a genre I'm trying to create called "ED-Core", at about 3:04.

I recommend playing from 1:35.

Soundcloud

[gen_]

Bare cheddar in this record imo, I can see what you're doing though. Some pretty awesome bits too though. Your drops are conceptually solid and the actual sound design is great, they are just mixed a bit thin. Some people just mix like this though, and do all the fattening in mastering so YMMV. Just know that it sounds a lil thin right now and needs some low mid thickness in general.

Break at 1.07 needs more reverb and width. You should octave those strings down too, you aren't gonna move hearts and minds without thickening things up a bit in general.

2:11 onward should be a different tune imo. You're spending too much time building new elements and not enough time polishing over what you have already made. Split off the project, make 2:11 the intro and the new tunes drop at 3:30 and till 4:02 then try the bit on ward from there as the first tunes middle break and second drop.

Imo, there's way too much connection lost when you make the DnB switch, and you need more lows and much more reverb in the midrange on the vocals and spatial positioning.

The last vocals are a bit loud too lol, scared my cat.

Anyway, I'm a judgmental prick and probably should keep my trap shut but I haven't been around for a bit and thought I'd come and share some love on the dubs for feedback channel. Pick through my thoughts and do what you will

[Sevenola]

I really appreciate all of this feedback, suggestions and tips
I'm also glad you liked it for the most part.

I totally understand what you mean by it losing overall aspects in different switch ups, I was kind of uncertain about that even in the make of it. I do mix thin and I try to get away from it, but... for some reason my ears default to mid - high, it could be my sennheiser 428 hd headphones... but another thing I think that it might be that my computer just won't allow me to do is switching the project sample rate from 44.1khz to 192khz so that the low - mids are easier to thicken and give the mix more shape. So I'm working on getting a better processor for that And also making mixes more "full" and having more low - mid foundation than floating on mids and air.

You know it might be a bad thing to say but I first started this track Tuesday night with an idea, and switched it up the next day having another, so it's honestly a bit of a mess that I tried to fix near the end, yet, I didn't worry about it because I just wanted to lay down a new track. I personally want to get rid of the pitched up vocal bits and re-edit the orchestrals better by WAVing them instead of running them on MIDI.

"Imo, there's way too much connection lost when you make the DnB switch, and you need more lows and much more reverb in the midrange on the vocals and spatial positioning." - Totally, taking that consideration.

"...you aren't gonna move hearts and minds without thickening things up a bit in general." - Going in one of my conscious quotes.

And I will try not to scare your cat next time :p

Note that I do frustrate with computer lag and freezing, I don't use monitors, and I have $70 studio headphones xD But I promise when I get the materials I need, I'll do much better !

Thank you again

[gen_]

Cheers for not taking it the wrong way.


On the technical side (cos I am a Commercial music degree student and trained under a two times grammy award winning producer so I'm not talkin out my ass) 192 will not help you trust me. Your DAW mixes internally at 32 bit floating point and going up past 96 is pointless unless you are making sample libraries or mixing audio stems. Even then 96khz only really helps the top end between 5khz and 22khz (the limit of human hearing). Don't bother trying to go past that as you will benefit much more in the future by keeping the extra CPU for your processing.

Finally, it's not really the low low that needs a bit of love, mainly the 300-500 range that could do with a bit of a boos overall. It probably is your cans though. As far as cans are concerned I havent listend to a huge amount but I know the cans I DJ'd with (AKGs, and once upon a time a Sony MDR and Senn 220s as well) were all shit for production.

I have Audio Technica ATH-M50s atm though, mainly to give to vocalists when recording them at home and even though I don't trust them below 200hz, above that I have on two occasions forgot to even take them off and thought I was mixing on my Adam A7x's becasue they are really good up top and a lot more trustworthy all the way down to 200 than anything else I have used. If there is one steal of an investment you can make, it's probably them.

[Sevenola]

Hmmm.... I definitely trust your 192khz knowledge, but I mean, what I am doing this very moment is remastering the track, taking it from WAV, and resampling it under 192khz in FL, and I can hear a decent difference between project rate 44.8 and 192, like a big one... it's sounds much more clear and distinct, the bass is much smoother, and the spatial spectrum is a lot easier to distinguish to me... I also gave a little steroid shot to the mix as in height and depth, not to mention feeding it some of the frequencies you might have been looking for, it sounds a little more of quality now, I think, I mean it's banging my cans how I want. But it does suck up all of the CPU-in the end the sound is soooo worth it though. I'll upload the updated HQ version for you if you want to review it again.

"Cans" - I love that interpretation of headphones I'm from the US so we don't have cool producer lingo like the the Uk.

I'm quite grateful for the ones I do have, but these are the best I've ever had xD so no doubt that I'll be blown away by your suggestion and then so on. I haven't worn many studio headphones or tested them, so my only issue right now is getting to be comfortable with the set pre-EQ they would have if I had to adjust and train my ear again; but who knows it might be for the better !

But yes I'm going to upload a new version of that track and I really want to know what you think.

[gen_]

That would be down to your Sound Card/Interface then. Your interface has something on it called a word clock. This is what counts 44100 times a second at 44.1k and on every count your card should send out a certain level of voltage (your waveform is literally a long list of voltages) to your speakers/headphones etc.

If your word clock has lots of jitter (which is like a MIDI recording that is poorly quantized and off time) then it degrades the sound that is coming out as the sound your hearing will have a low level of distortion and 'micropitching'. This is because if you squeeze two point of a sine wave together, no matter where on the sine wave it is, technically you have just introduced another sine wave (or harmonic) to the sound. Your entire song can be broken down to a bunch of since waves in combination after all, because a speaker can only move in and out.

Try and stick with me, I'm off on a lecture again lol.

Anyway, 192, or any higher sample rate, is like switching from 1/16 quantise to 1/32. Even if your notes played are still 50% off time, it's now only off by half as much in reality. The thing is though, unless you record in and out of the card, the data in your machine never changes, and I will hear it (with the right jitter free gear of course) at 44.1 just as well as you will at 192.

Anyhow, that's some food for your brain. If you game or use your machine for other intensive work, you might just wanna go and get a 12 core machine and call it a day, otherwise I would consider what card you have in that respect.

An alternative that a friend of mine did, is he bought a little 32Gb SSD for $60 (I think it's that much stateside, it's £40 here). He will bounce a track to stems at 192, copy it to the SSD so that he can play all the tracks at once without killing off his hard drive, and mix them on that SSD in a new project. Then when he's finished he bounces a 44.1 copy and deletes the stems copy off his SSD. It's long for him when he has to re-mix for whatever reason, but he swears its the best for his budget.

[Sevenola]

Not sure I entirely understand, but I'll try to recap.

That distortion from the real waveforms into 44.1 is the downgrading of the waveform, not really noticeable to someone listening off of their PC/laptop sound card next in line any variable of speakers/headphones. So it's basically not necessary to work at 192 unless that individual has great equipment, right ?

(Well, I literally just typed that, listened to my re-upload, and the question was JUST answer for me, haha !)

Here's the re-upload though, not as good as I hoped when I plays at 44.1, but you learn and reassure something everyday.
Also the mixing is unchanged, but I'll go back and fix it soon.

(It does have some unconventional clipping & distortion, not intended, just wanted the loudness, but I won't try to submit anything as such.)

Soundcloud

[Sevenola]

Another clarification;

I noticed on the soundcard settings that the card was adjusted to 16-bit 48khz, sooooo I clicked on it and switched it to 24-bit 192khz, And I noticed Audacity sounds even better. (Also that the actual rate is 192 now instead of 48).

[gen_]

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/zooming.html

Okay so you use audacity. This will be a bit easier to describe. On the bottom two pic of that link, those dots are the individual points that your audio records. Your card is currently not keeping them exactly the same distance from each other when it plays them to you, each one is off by a random amount of percent up to say... 50% for simplicities sake. This creates subtle distortion called jitter.

When you play at 192 there's much more dots so that 50% of distance between dots is much smaller and thus not as pronounced But you would be much better off without having to go up to 192 as you want your CPU cycles for your plugins.

What you have to understand is that the additional dots made by 192khz are so close to each other that the difference they would make are impossible to hear with the human ear. Not because they are small changes, but because the only difference they can make are waves at frequencies far above human hearing. The only time that they are useful is if you are combining that waveform with another, like whilst working in your DAW, but even that is redundant because your DAW internally works at 192 32bit floating point, which is ridiculously high quality 192 anyway, it doesnt need to send that down the speakers once it's done the sums. That leaves three uses for them; one is creating sample packs , the other time is where you are going to bring something from outside a DAW into a DAW to work on, like if you bounce stems for a mix engineer/mastering engineer. Finally if you work in hardware then stuff is coming from the DAW outside and being recorded back in a lot. Once it's inside and/or just going out, it's pointless to work at 192.

Now 24 on the other hand is important. You should work at 24bit. Bits determine how quiet your computer goes before it decides 'this is the noise floor'. Computers work in a way that if you try and add volume to silence, it will raise it across the band and you will actually bring forth white noise, well actually sound works like that in general because there is no such thing as silence plus gain. Anyway, bit s decide how many steps there is between 'silence' and 'max volume'. It basically decides how many steps of up and down on that waveform pic down the Audacity link. You always want that as high as poss so that you can add lost of gain to things without getting background noise/hiss/artifacts.

Finally, I would get yourself a sound card before new headphones if you can actually hear the difference. I used to swear by the old Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium Black and Gold card I had and that was only $70 I think. Three years ago mind. The new blue ones were crap though.

This one I think.
http://techreport.com/review/8884/creat ... rocessor/2

Go to ebay and seee if you can pick one up for cheap, it'll be leagues ahead of what you have.