NICE THREAD!

Some things I've learned...

-Don't over quantize your drums unless you want to sound like a Robot. One way I like to get grooves together is by playing the drums in, then selecting them (in Live) and hitting APPLE-SHIFT-U, and applying small amounts of quantizing, until it sounds tight, but expressive.

- Build up and vary your drum parts by duplicating sections and adding variation at the end of every 2 bars. Rinse and repeat.

- When programming synths or samplers, make the instruments EXPRESSIVE, by f**king with things like velocity, key-range, etc.

- Keep your drums and bass tight, in other words, relevant to each other.

- Ableton Operator- quick and nasty bass: Take the initial sound, then add a little FM with Osc B. Add a little Overdrive to taste.

- There is a lot to be said for standard arrangement styles, verse, chorus, bridge etc.

- Lives Velocity device is great to vary the velocity on your hats.

also, more generally....
- Take breaks from production, and even from listening to music. Inspiration and creativity builds up like a rampant sex drive.
- Stay single, but don't get addicted to porn.
- Getting up early > staying up late
- Have the balls to stick your neck out and express your inner funkster, you're not making music for your mother.
- Get arranging early, finish tracks, don't be too precious. You will learn more by finishing a mediocre track in 2 hours, than spending 4 hours messing around with a loop.
- Don't get bogged down in plug-ins. Get to know one or two synths really well.
- FWIW, my favourite synths are Operator, Sylenth, Zebra II. I also like Synplant for its randomness.
- Spend time familiarizing yourself with your ever expanding sound library. Weed out the crap. DELETE IT!
- Make the music you would like to hear.
- Experiment.

man, i missed the memo on both of these

That was the first thing that I thought when I read those..

Some good tips, just wish I'd seen them sooner..

And I couldn't agree more with getting up early, rather than staying up late..

I usually crash out 11-11:30, and I am trying to get up at 5-5:30, get three hours of work (and surfing porn) before I get ready for work..

Develop a good sample and session organizational method.
Never work in one session file, always start a new one on a new section, new mix etc, so you can look back through the steps you took in making a track. Also, if that one file gets corrupted you're completely fucked.

Once i was done with writing my parts i would always bounce to audio and then mix that way.
Once the mix is done, bounce to a separate 2mix for mastering. I find it really helps more forward with a project.

This might be cheating, I've been keeping a running list of tips and tricks on my blog:
http://jessebrede.com/wordpress/2009/05 ... tutorials/

here's a simple one that make me feel qutie stupid when i realized, make sure that when you put on an arp that you are playign a chord.

warping, then boucning, then warpiugn back to orginal can yeild some cool distortion. also works well with tranposing.

get a good cardiovascular work out a few times a week. really gets the endorphins and creativity flowing. fulflill ithe needs of the mind body and soul first and foremost then the music flow naturally. don't try to make the music fill you up, becuase it simply will not.

i often find myself stuck with the infinite possibilities within the digital world and jsut dont know where to start. so, practice putting limitations on yourself. get out of VST mode. take a sample, and make it work for whatever part you are looking for. for example, i took a harmonica sample and made one of the most lush pads i have ever made. in my last tune i took some vinyl crackle and turned it into a shaker with redux. try something new, and the end results will come.

yeah I think the lack of physical exercise is really taking a toll on my mind. good tips bro

put some swing in your drums by using shuffle in live. don't be shy, make your own grooves too!

alter the velocity within the groove to make an instant envelope.

When I make background atmospheres I like to take random samples from pretty much anything, vocals, car door slams, trains going by, and layer tons and tons of reverb and delay. Resample it and layer more reverb and delay. You can make some wicked atmospheres by doing this.

When you get 2-3 good sounds, layer those all together and you can create some wicked, dark and moving atmosphere sounds.

I guess it's about that time. Here's something I picked up quite awhile back.

Slap an LFO on your kicks to get some sick kick sounds or to "squish" the bass.

BACK FROM THE DEAD A DAY EARLY

Here's my tip: use arpeggiators on drums. Set up a rack of drum sounds, send it a chord, and play with different arpeggiator patterns. Combine that with some volume modulation and you can have glitchy grooves with minimal effort.

This is a great tip. I've been using as much arpeggiators on everything I can to develop new sounds.

Nice.. My use of Arps has been minimal leaning towards the side of never. Will try this, if I ever fire up a session again..

since we're on the topic of arps...i thought i'd give a little idea about rhythmic gating using arps.

use an arp to trigger a percussive sound (or any sound) on track 1. on track 2 (whatever the sound may be ... pad, keys, yodel) sidechain a gate or compressor to the arp'd sound on track 1. automate the arp rhythms & viola! ... go nuts with some rhythmic gating.

add a beat repeat to the arp (track 1) for some additional flava.

hopefully my explanation was clear...sorry so short! plenty more for y'all but i'm gonna go jam.

One thing I like to do is add randomness in various ways - it's a good way to counterbalance my nature as a control freak!

Here are some of the ways in which I add randomness:

Many synths/sequencers/drum machines have an actual "random" function. For example Ableton has the Random midi effect. I like to put Random before my drum rack, and either have it hit random sounds, or hit empty pads, creating random spaces in my drum pattern. If using an arpegiator, I like to employ the random pattern, usually more than any other patterns.

I also really like making my own random shuffle effect on an audio track. This works great on a drum track (say you have your pattern mixed down to a stereo file). Chop up the pattern into eighth notes or sixteenth notes, then move the pieces around randomly, repeat pieces, etc. (dBlue Glitch has an effect that does this as well).

One trick to making random stuff sounds good is the old "record a bunch of stuff, then select the good parts." A lot of random stuff can come out sounding, well, random. Pick out the stuff that came out sounding cool, and discard the stuff that doesn't appeal to you. The point is that you can often be surprised by the very "musical" things that random generation can produce.

scuzzy, nice tips. feel you on the control freak aspect... another fun way to generate random timbres is to switch the algorithm on the operator after you spend 20 minutres making an uninspiring patch.

heres a tirck i recently used... lately my drumz have been sounding so cohenerent, so after mixing them down how i like (with reverb and all) i took the drums, sliced em in to a new midi track and re arranged them from there. this gives some nice choppiness from the reverb trails etc to the drums that can give you that old school mpc feel.

a fun plug-in to achieve a similar beat slice effect without MIDI slicing is Devine Machine' s Lucifer. regardless, MIDI slicing is always fun...just another option.

sometimes it's fun to MIDI slice, then place a chord spanning over every MIDI sliced note (i.e. - if you have a 1 bar loop with 8 1/8-note slices, make a chromatic chord spanning the 8 notes for the entire bar). place an arpeggiator before the drum-rack set on 8th notes & the 'UP' pattern. the beat will be playing straight through (but might sound a little more choppy than the audio ... as some MIDI slices do).

once this is all setup, you can have a lot of fun modifying the loop by tweaking the arpeggiator. a few ideas:

+ modify the gate of the arp. this will give a nice, easy gating effect.
+ modify the pattern of the arp. switch to up/down, random. go nuts! track to audio & pick and choose the "good" parts (as previously suggested).
+ modify the sync of the arp. give a weird gated triplet feel, double time, etc.

mix & match all of these techniques & more. modulate them for some nice fills.

expanding on the 'random' arp post... try putting 2 arps in the chain, w/ at least 1 set to random. make the computer 'solo' over your track! who said computers can't improvise???

Thread revival?

If you're trying to get some random glitchy noises out of a drum break, put on some effects and then put a compressor after them. Set the threshold really low, then play with the attack, release, and ratio. The louder sounds like the kick and snare will start to overpower the quiet ones, but in the spaces where there's just a hihat that'll be louder. So then when you go to chop out little bits and pieces you'll have more variation in the sounds throughout the loop. If you have LFOs on your effects unsynced you'll also get the different hits with different effects settings on them.

EDIT: just realized I tried to bring this back many months ago about five posts up, ha.

Nice thread ! i learn some cool tips here - thanks allofyou

Tipslink - if u look for some cool free samples go here -> www.freesound.org

-Mixing starts the minute you start a new track. If you start piling up different parts on top of each other in a main loop that conflict frequency-wise, and tell yourself you'll make it fit in mixing, trust me, you won't. You might be able to pull it off if you're Bob Katz, but in reality the easiest way to mix is to make sure as early as possible that the sounds don't step on each other's toes. (This has the added bonus of giving you more space to really work the samples - if you keep most of your percussion and riders in the high end you can squeeze a lot of high-mid and midrange energy out of, say, one snare sample to make it really crack.)

-Something I find helpful that I didn't even realize until about 3 months ago: USE STEREO SAMPLES! If all your drum samples (or even melodic samples for piano, EP, guitar, pad etc.) are in mono when you put together your loops you'll have a HELL of a hard time trying to get them sounding good in the stereo spectrum during mixing. It gives the whole mix a more natural, open feel and you won't have to deal with using shitty stereo expanders, or panning everything everywhere unnaturally.

-Never mix a tune without caffeine in your system

Yup... same........ Good advice though

awesome thread guys =D im trying a few things

for the nastiest sub bass in vangaurd use the oscilator r2d2 it is soo heavy. its has a little overtone in it and more bass than your local fishing hole. I use it like mad as the sub part for my bass, also like to add even more overtone by adding another oscillator set to pulse dbl pwm and layer with my lead. so nice

Spend time to construct or polish up a template that sets up a track ready to begin writing.

For mine, in Logic, I have all externql gear, commonly used plugs, busses, auxes, audio/midi routing, screen sets, names, color schemes etc already setup when I start a track, so I can dive right into a track without any fussing around, both efficiently and creatively.

Tip 2: utilize busses and auxes. Good for groups, sends, triggers, sidechaining, organization, and interesting controls and routing. One example, I put a longish hall verb on one bus and a short drum room verb on another for sends. Various amounts of signal to one or both of these verbs is can keep all the tracks in a similar space but with differing depths. Also separate different percussion elements to process, then bus them together. My drums are bussed externally for processing. Some busses have no output, and only exist as triggers for sidechainning. Signals can be split into different frequency bands, bussed, processed, and bussed back together, etc...

Tip 3: learn shortcut key commands for your DAW. It is amazing how much time gets saved and how much productivity increases when You can quickly zip around your project.

Tip 4: keep your workspace clean, organized, and inspiring. Don't allow distracting elements into your workspace, turn off your phone, Internet, etc. Get a good chair and good lighting. Our environment is more responsible for our creativity and mood than we may realize.

just toyed with this last night:

set up a sampler with a bunch of different percussion sounds. weird hits, clinks, chimes, hats....whatever. put in you percussion pattern. go to sample selector instead of key selector, split all your samples evenly in there (so no sample will play at the same time as another). then turn the samplers lfo 2 on, and map it to the sample selector. adjust lfo speed to taste.