Even if i prefer BIG sounds with heavy guitar ;) , very nice song !!
But you work with Caustic like a "multi track" with your sounds (drum is a sample ?) or some tracks are only made with Caustic ?
Loops yes. However i chopped them up into elments and make my own patterns. I used mostly pcmsynth, very rarely beatbox except for some fillin hits or hats or crashes. Some of my pad sounds i made in....... caustic . Export my sound as a wav song then take that back into a pcmsynth ....
Everything you hear is made in caustic. I have loaded and created some large sample libraries used in some of these tracks but no memory issues or lagging. Automation used creatively can greatly enhance your songs. Individual synth filters and parameters can be automated too. Insert effect blocks can be automated as well.
A compressor is a common tool used by producers or workstation users such as us. The art of compression takes a dynamic range of sound (loudness) and narrows that dynamic. The art is to use it to get as much loudness impact as possible without creating the "pumping" effect.
Now in alot of styles of music we generate here on this forum, compressor effects can be heavily used and abused to add some cool punching or squashing effects.
Play around with it on your master strip and here how the settings affect your overall sound, then you can understand how to use it in futre projects...
I use a compressor on almost every strip as well as master.
I will soon be putting videos about this and other cool Caustic up on my youtube channel soon........
Ok thx, i have tried but i don't understand how i can have a better sound with it. Maybe i should plug an headphone or my hp with better bass to hear the diiference.
Just been mucking about with compressors, it is a very mild effect. So mild I wondered if I was imagining the difference!
So I layed up four in-line, two on the beatbox and two on the master, which was way too much but allowed me to confirm that I was hearing a subtle change in sound and not imagining it.
The compressor adjusts the volume of the sound coming through based on how loud it is.
It has many uses but here's a real world example from my live engineering days. Let's say you've got a singer who's not used to singing into a mic. You place a compressor on the mic input to stop his random screams from blowing up your speakers. If the sound coming in is too loud, the compressor will kick in and lower the sound. The threshold is the level at which this kicks in (else sound just passes through normally), the ratio is how much the sound gets squashed when going above threshold. Now you don't want this effect to happen too quickly in terms of milliseconds because it would distort the sound audibly (you ARE affecting volume, which you never want to do too fast) so there's attack and release parameters to ease the effect in and out.
In Caustic, an easy way to hear what it's doing and experiment a bit is to start from a blank rack (new song), set up a subsynth playing a continuous tone. Say C4 spanning the whole pattern, with a simple triangle wave. Make sure you're in pattern mode and hit play.
Then load a 909 kit into a beatbox and create a simple kick drum pattern on every 4th grid square to get a Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom going.
Now, place a compressor on the subsynth and press the side chain display (S.CHAIN) until it displays the channel with your beatbox (#6 if you're using the default rack). This will tell the compressor to use the beatbox signal as the compression trigger, rather than the default, which is to use the sound coming in. Now go down to the mixer and mute the beatbox (the compressor gets its signal before the mute so it will still do its thing). You should now hear the previously continuous tone dipping in volume when the kick drum fires on the muted drum track. Try raising the output volume on the beatbox to hear its effect on the compression. Play around with the compressor knobs now, you've got a clean place to experiment. For extremes, set threshold to minimum, ratio to maximum, attack to minimum and release to maximum. That's the "pumping" effect jblann1 mentioned above.
Hope this clears things up, the compressor is a great tool to clean stuff up and make your tracks punchy. Have fun.
Rej nailed it. It is an essential tool to make your music sound more alive and kickin'.... Im about to render a quickie tune using stock Caustic synth sounds and 909 beatbox only.... Ill do an A/B comparison. You will guess which sounds more in-your-face-awesome...
Dont worry, i wont ask for a multi-band compressor/limiter fx block. ;)
my mistake the compressor is labeled now.but it would still be nice to know how many ms each increment is on attack and release times,threshold and ratio etc.Thx
And if they can get their act together with their Android app, I'd love to offer direct upload from Caustic one day. Right now it fails 50% of the time without giving me an error code, so that's not something I want to support.
rej, it's be a pretty awesome partnership to export to soundcloud, click a checkbox to "share" and have it populated here on the site as well...too bad their weird upload thing is b0rk3d.
Yup, that's be the plan. I just need to give them time to iron out the bugs in their stuff as well as getting myself and Mike to figure out how to tie it to the website.
Old thread i know, but i was having a lot of trouble with the GMkit on one of the packs, it wasnt loud enough and then when i turned it up it was distorting. So i googled the s chain to find out what that was? Anyway in that search i found this thread with some very good explanations to compression. I found rhe attack to be the one that makes the most diff to the actual sound,? It s actually a very useful tool , i have manged to get the drum sound good by just using the attack and threshold. I ve been told that with threshold - more, is actually less. So no more red stripe on my mixer s drum channel!! Yay!
It's pretty good,nice loops too. Good job.
Even if i prefer BIG sounds with heavy guitar ;) , very nice song !!
But you work with Caustic like a "multi track" with your sounds (drum is a sample ?) or some tracks are only made with Caustic ?
My songs >> https://soundcloud.com/zicman/ << sgnos yM
Very nice !
Loops yes. However i chopped them up into elments and make my own patterns. I used mostly pcmsynth, very rarely beatbox except for some fillin hits or hats or crashes. Some of my pad sounds i made in....... caustic . Export my sound as a wav song then take that back into a pcmsynth ....
More to come soon!
Everything you hear is made in caustic. I have loaded and created some large sample libraries used in some of these tracks but no memory issues or lagging. Automation used creatively can greatly enhance your songs. Individual synth filters and parameters can be automated too. Insert effect blocks can be automated as well.
Adding a compressor at the end of the main bus, will add a nice punch to your tracks too.
"Export my sound as a wav song then take that back into a pcmsynth ...." Hehe, nice idea to have infinite track on Caustic ^^
You talk about "compressor" but i don't uderstand what this effect does. I feel no difference ... someone can explain ?
My songs >> https://soundcloud.com/zicman/ << sgnos yM
A compressor is a common tool used by producers or workstation users such as us. The art of compression takes a dynamic range of sound (loudness) and narrows that dynamic. The art is to use it to get as much loudness impact as possible without creating the "pumping" effect.
Now in alot of styles of music we generate here on this forum, compressor effects can be heavily used and abused to add some cool punching or squashing effects.
Play around with it on your master strip and here how the settings affect your overall sound, then you can understand how to use it in futre projects...
I use a compressor on almost every strip as well as master.
I will soon be putting videos about this and other cool Caustic up on my youtube channel soon........
Ok thx, i have tried but i don't understand how i can have a better sound with it. Maybe i should plug an headphone or my hp with better bass to hear the diiference.
My songs >> https://soundcloud.com/zicman/ << sgnos yM
Just been mucking about with compressors, it is a very mild effect. So mild I wondered if I was imagining the difference!
So I layed up four in-line, two on the beatbox and two on the master, which was way too much but allowed me to confirm that I was hearing a subtle change in sound and not imagining it.
Peace,
kowalski
The compressor adjusts the volume of the sound coming through based on how loud it is.
It has many uses but here's a real world example from my live engineering days. Let's say you've got a singer who's not used to singing into a mic. You place a compressor on the mic input to stop his random screams from blowing up your speakers. If the sound coming in is too loud, the compressor will kick in and lower the sound. The threshold is the level at which this kicks in (else sound just passes through normally), the ratio is how much the sound gets squashed when going above threshold. Now you don't want this effect to happen too quickly in terms of milliseconds because it would distort the sound audibly (you ARE affecting volume, which you never want to do too fast) so there's attack and release parameters to ease the effect in and out.
In Caustic, an easy way to hear what it's doing and experiment a bit is to start from a blank rack (new song), set up a subsynth playing a continuous tone. Say C4 spanning the whole pattern, with a simple triangle wave. Make sure you're in pattern mode and hit play.
Then load a 909 kit into a beatbox and create a simple kick drum pattern on every 4th grid square to get a Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom going.
Now, place a compressor on the subsynth and press the side chain display (S.CHAIN) until it displays the channel with your beatbox (#6 if you're using the default rack). This will tell the compressor to use the beatbox signal as the compression trigger, rather than the default, which is to use the sound coming in. Now go down to the mixer and mute the beatbox (the compressor gets its signal before the mute so it will still do its thing). You should now hear the previously continuous tone dipping in volume when the kick drum fires on the muted drum track. Try raising the output volume on the beatbox to hear its effect on the compression. Play around with the compressor knobs now, you've got a clean place to experiment. For extremes, set threshold to minimum, ratio to maximum, attack to minimum and release to maximum. That's the "pumping" effect jblann1 mentioned above.
Hope this clears things up, the compressor is a great tool to clean stuff up and make your tracks punchy. Have fun.
Any chance of labelling the controls on the compressor even if its in a tutorial vid?Got me baffled and Ive been using compressors for years
Rej nailed it. It is an essential tool to make your music sound more alive and kickin'.... Im about to render a quickie tune using stock Caustic synth sounds and 909 beatbox only.... Ill do an A/B comparison. You will guess which sounds more in-your-face-awesome...
Dont worry, i wont ask for a multi-band compressor/limiter fx block. ;)
my mistake the compressor is labeled now.but it would still be nice to know how many ms each increment is on attack and release times,threshold and ratio etc.Thx
Steve
I did an A/B compressor test. Here it is:
Www.soundcloud.com/eipstudios
This time i did a tune using stock caustic sounds and beatbox, just to make it fair :)
Oh yeah. Knocking diwn the reverb and delay levels and increasing artfully compression will enhance both reverb and delay in you mix
Good stuff, thanks for doing that. You can even SEE the difference in loudness in SoundCloud's waveform.
Thats why u chose S.C. to host my music. I love waveforms, I dig into editing down to waveforms all the time....
And if they can get their act together with their Android app, I'd love to offer direct upload from Caustic one day. Right now it fails 50% of the time without giving me an error code, so that's not something I want to support.
rej, it's be a pretty awesome partnership to export to soundcloud, click a checkbox to "share" and have it populated here on the site as well...too bad their weird upload thing is b0rk3d.
Yup, that's be the plan. I just need to give them time to iron out the bugs in their stuff as well as getting myself and Mike to figure out how to tie it to the website.
I will look into this. Soundcloud probably has a couple service APIs that I can tie in to. Then display them in categories or whatever on the site.
I'll talk to Rej about this when I investigate it a bit further.
Mike
Old thread i know, but i was having a lot of trouble with the GMkit on one of the packs, it wasnt loud enough and then when i turned it up it was distorting. So i googled the s chain to find out what that was? Anyway in that search i found this thread with some very good explanations to compression. I found rhe attack to be the one that makes the most diff to the actual sound,? It s actually a very useful tool , i have manged to get the drum sound good by just using the attack and threshold. I ve been told that with threshold - more, is actually less. So no more red stripe on my mixer s drum channel!! Yay!