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So I can whip up a nice beat, throw some deep bass in, and make a bare minimum skeleton. Now how the hell am I supposed to make more sounds that compliment the beat and bass, besides just loop what I have and fuck around with a synth for hours on end with no avail. Oh and Happy New Years.. if your into it, anyways...

Are u talking about melodys and stuff? or just stuff to complement your beats like incidentals?

Both... but its more like I have a lead bass but want more+different sounds to fill it out and add to the melody, without the song sounding like a monkey looping random sounds together...

alexvont12 wrote:Both... but its more like I have a lead bass but want more+different sounds to fill it out and add to the melody, without the song sounding like a monkey looping random sounds together...

This is one of the hardest parts of production, imo - and there is no black/white answer. You just need to practise. Try sending different sounds/synths to the same channel for similar distortion/fx.etc. helps tie them together nicely, but doesn't always give the intended results.

If you're looking for that "something extra" that elevates or dissipates the excitement level throughout the mix then you should try creating some risers, bass booms and reverse hits.

A riser is a simple sound that grows in volume and ends before the next 4/4 bar that you typically place before a drop to raise the intensity.

Bass booms are typically 808 kicks with a long tail, reversed. I'm pretty sure there's an 808 sample called "boom" but I could be mistaken. These are placed at the beginning of a 4/4 bar, usually accompanied by a crash symbol.

Reverse hits are just your drum samples reversed and are placed right before the 4/4 bar switch. For example a popular reverse hit would be a big crash with a long tail, reversed, to create a woosh sound that elevates in intensity/volume before the crash is applied on the first beat of the next 4/4 bar.

Another trick to flow is having low volume pads behind your instruments to create atmosphere.

Give your ears a rest first off listening to the same loop for hours will cause ear fatigue your ears know what to expect so it can be hard to imagine where your tune should go next.
Have a brew/spliff/crackpipe then stick yoyr tune on turn your screen off imagine your in a club and try to picture what would sound good next then make it.
It usually works for me

adding and subtracting drum parts can have a huge effect too. even something as simple as a pitch bend on a sound can work too.

Try duplicating channels and then changing how you process things.
Especially eq duplicated channels so only has 200-1000hz and one has 1000-10000hz - stuff like this.
Then process them differently, change the patches that you're using.
Do it with your bass for a pretty traditional "layered" bass.
Then think of elements in their relationship to each other - so you want your bass to kind of talk with the kicks and the other elements to have a conversation with each other and the percussion at the same time. It's not just mixing - composition should be considered as well.

Ah I love this forum... thanks for the tips everyone!! Also since I have a thread already, I've been trying make a good lead sound like vvvv

in Massive, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. Mine all turn out way high pitched and whiney or too much like bass. I'm probably missing something really simple here but I'm trying not to use presets and I'm still a beginner. Much appreciated!

http://vimeo.com/3595144

have you seen this? this could be exactly what your looking for... Rusko himselfs production masterclass, if you listen to his tunes youl know hes pro at putting in things to "spice it up" and in here he demonstrates exactly how he does it

if you want your wobbles to sound different, try fiddling with your lfo modulation, i pretty much never have a basic lfo modulation on the cutoff of a filter, sometimes i have the green bar covering the whole dial then the silver bar covering hitting the max so half the lfo is going to the max then the other half is maxed out, or sometimes i just bring the max point of the lfo down if i want a lower sound

im no genius but ive learned most of my stuff from mucking around for hours and hours and hours and more hours

Open a sampler and fuck with as many parameters as you can randomly, then raid your sample base and click whatever sample most attracts your attention, nice way to do incidentals, and it's the most logical because they truly are incidentals, if it sounds good, it sounds good, if not, it doesn't sound good, find one that does. Rinse, repeat.