Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 8:25 pm
by dubesteppe
kaiori breathe wrote:Figured I'd contribute something.... Not sure if any of the sounds I've made are really that complicated, but some of them might be interesting if you're a beginner I guess.
I used fruity loops for this, no reason why you couldn't do it with something else, but I worked with the 3xosc, for those of you who don't know what it is it does what it says on the tin really. 3 oscillators each an octave apart from the last, which you can set to a few varied settings, sine/saw/square/ramp or a sort of half square half saw wave thing or white noise - I think those are all the options. It's pretty basic but easy to quick to use. you don't really have to use the 3xosc, you can mess around with more complicated synth set ups to get a similar or probably better effect.
Open a 3xosc, leave it as sine waves, write a short 4 chord sequence that will work when it's played backwards, make all the notes legato slide to each other to get that weird liquidy feel out of it.
Open another 3xosc, program in the same notes, again, use that legato slide, but use detuned saw waves, cut the low end - all you want is the high-mid/high end grit. Send both of the 3xosc to the same channel, apply a small amount of chorus and maybe put a flanger on it to make it sound a little more wet and juicy.
Open up yet another 3xoc, again, program the same notes in, set it to square waves, don't detune it, send it to a new channel and filter out the low end and the high end, should sound kinda like when you listen to music on a bad 80s radio, it's missing a lot, but it sounds pretty smooth, add a little chorus.
Sine wave 3xosc should be the loudest of the three, the saws are just to add high end color so they should be pretty quiet, the square wave osc should be in the middle somewhere.
Now export it as a wav, bring it back in, process it a little more if it needs it, then reverse the entire thing.
Write some simple piano riffs, plaster them in delay and reverb, then export, bring it back in, reverse it, and layer it in. Do the same with lots of other instruments that have a sparkly high end to them.
'Snare' Sound Layer a shit load of claps over each other, but don't let them all hit at the same time, have some of them hit slightly before where they're meant to (in this case the 2nd beat) and some hit slightly after where they're meant to. Layer in the sound of a running tap. Layer in lots of junk sounds from the EGOLESS sample pack (I highly recommend it)
4 minute mark onwards = Paul's Extreme Time Stretch. Great tool. I use it to slightly better effect in this track, where it kicks in around the 1.17 mark:
That track is amazing! that sounds like something I'd hear in a movie during a really sad scene. Literally this is one of the best songs I've ever heard. Then I went on your soundcloud, and damn is your liquid dnb stuff amazing. I have a feeling that most of your classical sounds are sample based, but if some aren't I'd like to know what you are using for your piano sounds and orchestral sounds. Also, do you have a classical background of music theory? I'm trying to learn it right now, but I am really confused most of the time. Do you have any book recommendations or other pointers?
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 8:27 pm
by dubesteppe
Ascian wrote:A couple of basses I made just for this thread as it is awesome and people are coming up with some great things.. Think I'll make some sort of granular atmosphere next
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 2:59 am
by kaiori breathe
dubesteppe wrote:
I have a feeling that most of your classical sounds are sample based, but if some aren't I'd like to know what you are using for your piano sounds and orchestral sounds.
A lot of the time I'm using fruity keys, with a bit of processing you can get a good piano sound out of it, especially if you use it in conjunction with reason's reverb units, which are phenomenal. Most of the 'classical' sounds are written by myself, the orchestral sounds are mostly done in reason, using the nx-19 (or whatever the sampler is called) and i'll just upload a cello sample, a violin sample and a viola sample, then start writing using them. It's all about the processing really.
dubesteppe wrote:
Also, do you have a classical background of music theory? I'm trying to learn it right now, but I am really confused most of the time. Do you have any book recommendations or other pointers?
Sort of... I learned the theory. Not really classically trained as such, but I checked out what it meant to be classically trained then kinda did it myself if that makes sense.
I think, in terms of books, the ABRSM music theory grade books are your best bet, they're laid out in a pretty intuitive way to build you from the ground up and give you a solid base to work from, they're not too confusing or hard and they're detailed in a way that's easy to understand, so if you work through them from from 1 to 8 you should see some pretty good results fairly fast. You could work through the bulk of it pretty quickly.
When you're done with that you should be able to read and understand almost anything. There's a lot of work out there available free on the net if you do a bit of digging too and wikipedia is surprisingly accurate when it comes to music theory.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
new reese, made in pretty much the same way as the skrillex bass one...except this one is toned different and all glitched up. and its part of a neurofunk dnb wip I'm working on.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
A pack called "ToneScape Animato" was posted on this forum a while ago for free, not sure who put it together, or where you'd find it, but it has a lot of really cool natural sounds.
I'd recommend more but a lot of the samples in my collection are labeled incorrectly, because I'm messy lol.
You just kinda accumulate good samples over time naturally anyway.
Ascian wrote:
Also, there are two instruments playing the melody in your track "If I Could Live In That Moment" that I would like to know more about. They both kick in at 28 seconds.. One playing a more prominant melody and is more up front in the mix, the other playing more sparsely and sitting further back - Sounds like a Japanese string instrument of some sort. What are these and what software are you using to play them?
The one right in front of the mix is a few intruments layered, it's a kalimba with some percussive hits layered in to give it more punchy attack and I think I layered in a couple of pitched african instruments too.
The higher plucked string sounds that come in there are sampled from Pipas & Guchins. I didn't actually program the notes for those, I just cut out notes, from an audio sample of them being played, that were in the right key, then laid them down and moved them around till I had a bit of a melody line going that sounded kinda natural.
As for software, I just dumped the audio files onto fruity loops arrangement screen and started chopping and moving them around there.
Ascian wrote:
Also, there is a downward transposition at 37 seconds of a pad type sound... Did you make this pad in key, bounce and transpose down? Please tell me more about that sound.
I drew a chord, think it was like an inverted minor flat 6 or something, in the 3xosc then used the portamento note tool to make the whole thing slide down so every note moves by the same degree at the same time, I think. You could do it by bouncing and transposing too though.
Hopefully that helps :s
Thanks for info.. You've given me some great ideas that I'm currently writing up into a song
There are some awesome samples in those packs that have got my sound design juices flowing!
Thanks again
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 8:00 am
by thedefinition
All these posts of the reese bass have actually inspired me to do a bit of resampling and I ended up with this.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 8:35 am
by Mammoth
thedefinition wrote:
YES! I think we need to build a separate section of the forum for "How to make Skrillex Bass" and just make you the sole mod of it.
3rd sticky down in the production forum
That isn't saying that his sound shouldn't be in there though lol.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 8:42 am
by thedefinition
Mammoth wrote:
thedefinition wrote:
YES! I think we need to build a separate section of the forum for "How to make Skrillex Bass" and just make you the sole mod of it.
3rd sticky down in the production forum
That isn't saying that his sound shouldn't be in there though lol.
I know where it is mate and I'm glad he took the initiative to post his results there after reading my post. Now I just hope that we can lock that thread now that it's been beaten to hell and back.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
22 minute ambient piece, made using Paul's Extreme Time Stretch (google it, it's an amazing tool) and writing using some more complicated compositional tools like pitch axis theory.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:07 am
by jrisreal
Kaiori, that is truly beautiful. I definitely got to get myself back into music theory, I forgot nearly all of it. How does 'pitch-axis theory' work? If it isn't too difficult to explain.
and btw, just downloaded paul's extreme sound stretcher.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:21 am
by thedefinition
I'm a big fan of atmospheric sounds and eerie spine chilling bells so I came up with one that changes timbre based upon keytracking.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:24 am
by thedefinition
Kaiori, you've been posting some amazing pieces in this thread. They are both truly luscious and emotional tracks and you can definitely consider me a fan after hearing that last piece. Absolutely stunning!
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:29 am
by jrisreal
yo Kaiori, thanks for the tip! Just out of curiosity of what it could do to a sound, I applied it to my track "Revalation" and it sounds SOOOOO ambient now, I love it man!
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:23 pm
by kaiori breathe
jrisreal wrote:Kaiori, that is truly beautiful. I definitely got to get myself back into music theory, I forgot nearly all of it. How does 'pitch-axis theory' work? If it isn't too difficult to explain.
and btw, just downloaded paul's extreme sound stretcher.
The time stretcher is great if you use it tastefully. Sometimes that is a bit of a chore to manage mind you, lol.
As for pitch-axis theory, is basically a system of writing using modes that opens a lot more doors for key changes that would normally sound quite jarring and dysfunctional and creating atmospheres and harmonic/melodic textures which are normally fairly uncommon. It can be quite alien sounding.
< example of it in practice.
< another example, this entire track sounds alien, especcially the theme that kicks in at 0:49, and a lot of it is because of pitch axis theory and modal interchanges.
I'd try to explain it, but, to be honest, I'd probably fuck it up and just confuse you. So, here are some decent wiki entries, all accurate as far as I can see.
Bella Bartok wrote using a system under the same name, but that's something somewhat different and relates more to serialism and atonal writing than it does to the use of modes and tbh I think it's probably fallen into disuse now what with pitch class sets defining most of what goes on in atonal music, from an analytical point of view anyway.
Ultimately though, as I'm sure somebody else will point out, these are all just ways of explaining certain sounds that other people probably created just out of their own creativity and trial and error, it's just that knowing the functionality of how they did it can sometimes help you emulate it.
thedefinition wrote:Kaiori, you've been posting some amazing pieces in this thread. They are both truly luscious and emotional tracks and you can definitely consider me a fan after hearing that last piece. Absolutely stunning!
Cheers man
jrisreal wrote:yo Kaiori, thanks for the tip! Just out of curiosity of what it could do to a sound, I applied it to my track "Revalation" and it sounds SOOOOO ambient now, I love it man!
Yea, it's a bad-ass tool, only things I've found is that including any sort of percussion can sound a bit naff, kicks tend to sound like wind-swept explosions in the distance and snares sound like waves hitting a cliff face. So I tend not to use much percussion if I'm gonna time stretch. Electric guitar bends sound particularly awesome when time stretched, and the only other thing I've found is that sub basses can go a bit funny when stretched, they tend to turn into an indiscernible rumble sometimes. There's a lot of trial and error in using it well I think. You get a lot of artifacts when you time stretch too, which can be problematic when you're cleaning up your tracks, or it can be a nice addition, depends really.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:52 pm
by hasezwei
holy fucking shit kaiori that piece about the girl is....
yeah i dont know man i have no words. it's gorgeous. last time i was blown away by melodies so much was ital teks's Mako EP, might i ask what music you listen to for inspirational purposes? in the last few months i almost exclusively listen to electronic music because the stuff that used to inspire me was usually very sad to the point of depressing and i'm incapable of producing music (or doing anything really) when i'm too sad.
oh and for some reason the plucked string melody (the lower pitched one) reminds me of 90's jump and run soundtracks, in a positive way. maybe the stock samples of old samplers had a similar timbre or whatever
@topic: i haven't done any production in the last 2 weeks but i'll see what i can come up with today, looking forward to trying out FM8 + Formant EQ'ing and using reason again, i had a dream about using it's vocoder last night
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 1:55 pm
by kaiori breathe
hasezwei wrote:might i ask what music you listen to for inspirational purposes? in the last few months i almost exclusively listen to electronic music because the stuff that used to inspire me was usually very sad to the point of depressing and i'm incapable of producing music (or doing anything really) when i'm too sad.
Cheers for the comments man, as for stuff I listen to, it's pretty varied: Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eskmo, Slugabed, Ben Frost, Bonobo, Swarms, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Vangelis, Thomas Newman, Jason Becker, Jon Gomm, Fall Of Troy, Micheal Hedges, Don Ross, HORSE the band, Thrice, 30 Seconds To Mars, Nuage, Naibu -
That's pretty much a complete list of what i'll go through in a week. They're the bands and artists I never really forget, always listening to them. Don't know how much of them comes through in my tunes. I know there's some Eskmo creeping in, in terms of the percussion and groove maybe, and Satch & Vai have certainly influenced me in terms of modal writing, Vangelis is a big influence; made me think pretty differently about atmospherics and pads, Nuage and Naibu create some really colorful music that's always in my head and I love Fall of Troy and HORSE the band for their complete disregard of structure and form, or rather, their structure and form being so complex you lose sight of what it's meant to resemble.
I don't know, hopefully that helps, you might find something interesting to listen to amongst that lot.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2011 1:55 pm
by kaiori breathe
hasezwei wrote:might i ask what music you listen to for inspirational purposes? in the last few months i almost exclusively listen to electronic music because the stuff that used to inspire me was usually very sad to the point of depressing and i'm incapable of producing music (or doing anything really) when i'm too sad.
Cheers for the comments man, as for stuff I listen to, it's pretty varied: Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eskmo, Slugabed, Ben Frost, Bonobo, Swarms, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Vangelis, Thomas Newman, Jason Becker, Jon Gomm, Fall Of Troy, Micheal Hedges, Don Ross, HORSE the band, Thrice, 30 Seconds To Mars, Nuage, Naibu -
That's pretty much a complete list of what i'll go through in a week. They're the bands and artists I never really forget, always listening to them. Don't know how much of them comes through in my tunes. I know there's some Eskmo creeping in, in terms of the percussion and groove maybe, and Satch & Vai have certainly influenced me in terms of modal writing, Vangelis is a big influence; made me think pretty differently about atmospherics and pads, Nuage and Naibu create some really colorful music that's always in my head and I love Fall of Troy and HORSE the band for their complete disregard of structure and form, or rather, their structure and form being so complex you lose sight of what it's meant to resemble.
I don't know, hopefully that helps, you might find something interesting to listen to amongst that lot.
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2011 10:06 pm
by cmgoodman1226
Just a crazy patch I made in reason 5 a while back. Have no idea how I'm gunna use it but I really want to. Soundcloud
A bit of reese design on a neurofunk-ish track I'm working on. Soundcloud
Re: Post an interesting sound you have made thread
Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 4:26 am
by dubesteppe
cmgoodman1226 wrote:Just a crazy patch I made in reason 5 a while back. Have no idea how I'm gunna use it but I really want to. Soundcloud
this is sick man. it sounds like a boomerang flying through the air and then coming back.
@dubesteppe: Here's a few links that should help you out with music theory and orchestration.
22 minute ambient piece, made using Paul's Extreme Time Stretch (google it, it's an amazing tool) and writing using some more complicated compositional tools like pitch axis theory.
THIS IS INCREDIBLE! very chilled and relaxing
thedefinition wrote:I'm a big fan of atmospheric sounds and eerie spine chilling bells so I came up with one that changes timbre based upon keytracking.
and its part of a neurofunk dnb wip I'm working on.
