For those who think that the mute function is just a mute function.
In my previous thread I talked about how to enhance your work flow to get more productive and creative musical experience.
Now let's talk about musical experience itself.
Sound habits
As a producer you have your own set of habits that are usually show how good producer you are, but sound it self has it's own habits that will probably ruin your idea where you want to go in your mix.
Mud
Mud is usually stopping sound to give good tonal dynamics
Mud is always present. Once you start your project and until you finish it.
The proper solution for this is the Mute function on the mixer.
Mute input by input until you find the sound that is ruined your mix. That is usually the sound that you would delete instantly because it's peace of junk but most of the time there is more then one sound involved in mud.
Once you find this take a look first on Wich octave this sound starts. And you can figure out where your mud is.
Now use the main eq to clean this frequency. You are searching for bright points where everything feels like one frequency.
This is only works with mastering within the app. But if you use this Technic from start to finish, you can hope that you will have nice and clean mix.
You can mute everything in Caustic so this option can be a key to unlock your vision of sound. You can mute beatbox chanals one by one. This process can give you really nice beats.
This method really helped me to simplify the complexity of the mud problem.
Volume
This tip should come before than anything else. But since we are making music using unreal Perception we have a feeling that everything here can go wrong anytime.
Volume on caustic can be pain in the ass if you don't consider using your phone speaker. Using the speaker is much easier way to perceive the loudness of your song, because, believe me or not, these little speakers today are not suffering from audio latency at all.
They represent the real loudness that your processor can give. That's why it's much better to set loudness after you cleaned the mud from your mix.
This can create a new set of mud but that mud is usually under C3.
To clean the mud from this part and from lower parts learn how to use a compressor or, set 2 compressors in the master. both compressors you must set to max. That means set them until you see that the volume on compressor is reaching the top. Now start from ratio on both.
Set the ratio on the first, set the ratio on the second and do this until you can actually hear that dynamic range is equally perceived.
This process is called Dynamic filtering
Another thing to mention is -3 rule in music.
If you see that the volume on your mixer is higher then 3 then you will probably face with a lot of problems.
Something wrong must heppen here because you actually push the limits of naturally perceived sound. You will first feel that your reverb is not wide as before and this is the first sign that your space to input new sounds is running out.
Volume of your synth however must always be 5 . This way you can apply a 3db. And create good conditions for audible sounds.
Harmony
Use scales almost always.
Caustic has Keyed BPM. And this keyed BPM is connected with Melody helper.
I wanna say that every BPM has it's own key. Every change in BPM changes the pich by 3%
So if you go from 120 to 121 BPM, you will boost the pich of your daw by 3% and if you lower it you will lower the pich by 3% and make your song louder.
All these problems are solved if you use a Melody helper.
It's very important and don't forget to use it every time.
That's it for now. I hope these advices and fact will work for you as they are working for a lot of time.
Next time I will write about the stereo processing. I will translate it properly first and post it again on same place.
Goodbye, for now.
Audio Process 2 (update on mixing)
How to start your mix?
There are so many ways to start your song, or a new project, and, how you start your song depends on what you want in your mix.
I decided to write here about two essentially important ways to build your track.
The only rule you must follow is to stay in the song mode rather then in a pattern mode.
I have watched many tutorials that actually show that the producer, a pro- producer is starting a song from low end , slowly fixing the mistakes as he goes to the high end.
But there is one thing here I noticed that is wrong. If someone is supposed to show you how to start building your mix, why is showing only the low to high mixing where you start from zero and you are fixing the mistakes as you go up?
The main reason is sound education.
How to tune? How to clean the mud? How to build inspired chords? How to relay on basic elements to get your mix right?
And there's nothing about high to low mixing.
Why?
Because that's the only right way to get things done before they are even done.
And it's not an interesting one. It's a weird way to approach and doesn't always show the coolest sounds.
The high end is starting on C6 and it's fully sampled on C7. C7 is known in my country as the lucky Octave, because it can always give the most accurate results. I use it mostly to tune my bass. To tune my bass i add my bass notes on the C7 sinewave and then I Tune the mid and high according to it.
After that i simply play with mixer Volume knob, and the bass EQ knob to find a most attractive frequency.
So the best way to start your Top to down mix is C7 octave range.
You can start with some very high percussion sounds or a crash sound.
Or the high arp. Depends on your desires.
This sounds need to be tuned first. After that you add a layer to that sounds it can be a delay a reverb , or a similar effects. After that you EQ the sound, add a limiter if it's necessary, and go lower.
Remember, just keep it low.
Don't override everything at the start.
By building and covering the C7 you can go lower on C6 here you can continue your composition. Remember to check root keys of the samples you use. This will help to keep things under control.
I recommend that you use the sequencer, to really find out how this can work for you.
It's working fine for me now, and I always finish with something creative. I hope you will get same results. :)
Sorry, but you should really stop putting this kind of misinformation and garbage here.
What is the main issue with this post?
https://soundcloud.com/user-meleven/dimension-ten?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=1
@skarabee. If music were science then I'd agree. Yes, there are errors here (processors affecting loudness, misnamed technical terms).
But
There is gold here. Removing sounds for a clean mix. Key signatures and bmp is something I've never considered. These are not your "standard" technical tips but I'm interested in knowing what works for @Amel
My Soundcloud profile is _dredge_
I am not knocking standard knowledge. It is much better to know the rules before you break them. There is a danger here of misleading people, but there is no malice indended by Amel.
My Soundcloud profile is _dredge_
The dropping out tracks to find the clean mix is good advice...
Also, I would also add the advice is drop delay and reverb from machines as when you're starting off you feel like you need a BIG sound, once you've added a few more tracks you find that these effects that make the sound bigger may not be needed and will muddy the sound.
Pitch, tempo and volume are NOT linked, sure if you're using an audio sample and speeding will pitch it up, but in a daw if you change the tempo, the pitch is not affected. Likewise BPM does not affect volume.
Regarding using the phone speaker... Yeah, not sure about that... Sure use it to get an idea of what it might sound like if someone's only playing your track over a phone speaker, but all phone speakers are radiaclly different, with radically different frequency response and volume... But this applies to listening to your track on various sound systems, from car, to mono speaker, to headphones, and try and get your mix to work as best as possible on all of these devices... Phone speakers, in my opinion, is the bottom of the barrel of ifI cares it sounds good.
Skarabee, with all respect (genuinely) , I think you're being a little harsh, I think the intent of this post is good, and I know you're insanely skilled in this stuff so why not give your advice rather than just poo pooing the entire thing?
My latest track on show and tell
My Soundcloud page
I figured out that I am missing some better equipment to give a good advice. But there is a thing I want to mention. If you really wanna do a great mix in caustic, you must get away from using presets because there are just setting. Samples, loops, have more data , more data gives more space in your mix. All that, if you combined it with appropriate velocity, and EQ settings can give you an amazing mix. My best advice for everyone is to give your project' enough time. Day a week, a month or two, to fix all mistakes, because, music is expression of time. And it will never be less then that. I hope I will give much better advices in the future and hopefully help others here, because I love this forum, and I love the people here.
Enjoy guys, and thanks Rob for the support.
https://soundcloud.com/user-meleven/dimension-ten?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=1
"If you really wanna do a great mix in caustic, you must get away from using presets because there are just setting. Samples, loops, have more data , more data gives more space in your mix"
This simply isn't true in any way! Nothing wrong with using presets, sure some of the PCMs are not great, but if you like the way they sound use them. More data does not give space in your mix, that just doesn't make sense. Data is a meaningless term here, a simple square wave at whatever sample rate yields an identical amount of data as a complicated PCM sample at the same sample rate. A 5 minute WAV of silence is the same amount of data as 5 minutes of music and/or noise.
Now if you're saying use higher quality PCM / beatbox samples, sure, but you can use very lowfi samples to get interesting results.
All the the other machines use internal wave tables to produce their sounds, so one preset has intrinsically the same amount of 'data' as another for any given machine. How you tweak the dial will yeild better / worse results, but data is irrelevant.
Should also point out, generally to keep your mix good you don't want your machines clipping, however, one can use clips as an effect if desired.
My latest track on show and tell
My Soundcloud page
Now this is true what you wrote. I agree, but as a beginner I started using samples, I found easier to manipulate samples, presets are kind of distorted sometimes. There are also phasing problems between some synths. I agree, with you, but samples will always give me better results.
https://soundcloud.com/user-meleven/dimension-ten?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=1
You will get phasing issues if you use the width control and run the result over a mono output, as it's basically a static flanger, generally I wouldn't use that control ever, I used to use it loads because it sounded awesome on headphones!
Phasing between machines will only occur if you're using the same sample / wave form at more or less the same frequency slightly out of step with one another. It's not a caustic problem, that's simply how sound works.
My latest track on show and tell
My Soundcloud page
Psychologically, you can make a song sound more energetic by having a higher key.
e.g. Boyzone always went up a key for the final verse
My Soundcloud profile is _dredge_