Some Music (Trance, Techno, ...)

[haslo]

Jump right to the end for the current tracks, I'm leaving the thread as is for anybody who's interested where I'm coming from, but I'm much happier with my recent releases than these old ones here

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I hope this isn't too spammy or anything, so shortly after me joining the forums. I have two tracks for you to listen to, would love some feedback too, but mostly just hope that you might enjoy them:

https://soundcloud.com/glodjib/mountain-top-showdown

https://soundcloud.com/glodjib/nebulas-like-jellyfish

[haslo]

Please have a listen, here's two new bits of Trance I made:

https://soundcloud.com/glodjib/weightless

https://soundcloud.com/glodjib/crashing-stars

I just finished the second one today.

I built most synth sounds from scratch, using Phase Plant <3, Serum, Pigments, the Ableton core synths (Operator, Analog), and in the second track also Grain Scanner <3. There's an MS20 emulation from Korg Gadget's plugin versions very prominently featured in there, too. And some samples for piano, drums etc., mostly from Ableton's as well as the Leviathan packs.

I've switched to mastering with Neutron and Ozone and got proper (Genelec) monitors, and gee does it make a difference. And the Splice rent-to-own plan makes all that software almost affordable.

I'd love some feedback, too! Please let me know what you think!

[recursive one]

Weightless: very nice harmonies and melodies, good synths.

The mixing is a quite muddy imo, the synths clash with each other and the kick lacks punch. Overall the beat section needs more work, it sounds static and not driving enough. Maybe you could actually turn it into a breakbeat track. I liked the breakbeat groove at 0:35 -1:00 much more than the main beat.

Crashing Stars: Also great harmonic and melodic parts, interesting idea to combine triplet-based melodies with the 4 on the floor groove. This time i liked the kick/bass combo better but the mixing is still muddy. It seems that the track is heavily overlimited, the compression does some serious damage to the leads.

All in all, neither of these two sound like trance to me but they are ineresting in their own way. Could be great tracks if more effort is put into mixing and arranging.

[haslo]

Thanks a lot for listening and writing this honest and constructive feedback!

I'll definitely have to work on mixing and getting rid of the mud and getting better at giving instruments their own frequency space in the mix (and sometimes their own space to shine in the time track, too). I guess the not-so-punchy kick in Weightless is in part because of that, too. Arrangement of entire songs is also something I'm struggling with - I think Crashing Stars is better because I actually know what kind of overall structure I was going for. So I'll definitely focus on those, thanks!

It's interesting that you liked the part around 0:35 - 1:00 in Weightless better (and you're not the first to tell me that) - it was the first piece of the song I had built, and then I thought "I have to have a melody, can't have a song without a melody", so I added one despite not really wanting to. Looks like I should have listened to my gut and done something else instead.

The damage to the instruments in Crashing Stars isn't due to compression or limiting though.
It took two Pigment Overdrives, an automated Ableton Saturation as well as a Neutron Exciter to get the arpeggio that broken, the crash cymbal uses an automated Grain Delay, the broken MS20 before minute 4 is mostly HPF resonance but also another Grain Delay and another Neutron Exciter, and the piano's Grain Delay breaks apart intentionally, too. There's also automation on Grain Scanner around minute 2 that breaks apart the pad (into, unfortunately, mostly lots of mud in the mix).
But I guess I could have achieved a similar effect by just overlimiting instead and it's easy to confuse the two because barely anything is not distorted or broken to provide contrast and tell the listener that the distortion is intentional. And because of all the mud of course.

[recursive one]

It's interesting that you liked the part around 0:35 - 1:00 in Weightless better (and you're not the first to tell me that) - it was the first piece of the song I had built, and then I thought "I have to have a melody, can't have a song without a melody", so I added one despite not really wanting to. Looks like I should have listened to my gut and done something else instead.

I mean i liked the drum beat in that section. The melodies later on sounded good to me.

It took two Pigment Overdrives, an automated Ableton Saturation as well as a Neutron Exciter to get the arpeggio that broken, the crash cymbal uses an automated Grain Delay, the broken MS20 before minute 4 is mostly HPF resonance but also another Grain Delay and another Neutron Exciter, and the piano's Grain Delay breaks apart intentionally, too. There's also automation on Grain Scanner around minute 2 that breaks apart the pad (into, unfortunately, mostly lots of mud in the mix).
But I guess I could have achieved a similar effect by just overlimiting instead and it's easy to confuse the two because barely anything is not distorted or broken to provide contrast and tell the listener that the distortion is intentional. And because of all the mud of course.

Fair enough. When listening to a mixed and mastered track it's indeed hard to say what causes what. I had the impression that your main limiter was doing some extreme gain reduction in places, but I may be wrong and it may actually be your processing or something else.

My overall impression was that the mixes were not transparent enough and the dynamics sounded a bit unnatural. I'm not a greatest mixer myself though, always struggling to get accepatble mixdowns of my own stuff

[haslo]

Thanks a lot! You gave me lots to think about and try to make better in the future!

[haslo]

I took a few more hours to analyze the mix of Crashing Stars, cut deep with some EQs to get rid of at least some of the mud and emphasize some things, and found what I think might be the cuprit that made the master uneven: A dynamic EQ from Ozone that butchered the sweeps by cutting some very specific frequency spikes and not others!

I think it's much better now, thanks again recursive one for lending your critical ear!

[layzer]

crashing stars: overall too compressed and blurry. sounds stomping over each other instead of taking their turn.

[haslo]

crashing stars: overall too compressed and blurry. sounds stomping over each other instead of taking their turn.

Harsh, but thanks! The stomping, do you mostly mean after the drop around minute 4, or before that already too?

[candybag]

Have you done a round of highpass/lowpass on all channels? I think the mixes sound too busy and muddy in general. And maybe too much going on in the mid/low mid.

This is what i would do;
Make a new copy of your track and be quite liberal with HPF/LPF on instruments and kick in general. Go through each channel and turn that knob until you can hear a difference, then stop and move on to the next channel. Don't spend more than 30 mins, export it and step away from this project for a week. Come back and do an A/B comparison.

Also, i think Sphongle has alot of tracks that would suit pretty well as reference mixes.

Mixing is a bitch.

[haslo]

Have you done a round of highpass/lowpass on all channels? I think the mixes sound too busy and muddy in general. And maybe too much going on in the mid/low mid.

I did, but certainly not enough (though the pads are high passed around 1k after recursive one's feedback, so it used to be worse...). Thanks for your suggestion! I'll definitely give mixing these tracks another go, and I'll be much more rigorous about giving instruments their own space.

Edit: I did make another mix. It wasn't easy giving the pads their own space without making them either clash or making them too thin, and the filter sweeps demanded space for the synths too. So after high and low passes and shelves everywhere, I added some filter sidechaining that clears the piano's frequencies from the pads when it hits. I also automated a HPF just below the leaky MS20 HPF from the duplicated bass line after minute 3.

I think it's better now yet again. Not perfect, but I think I'll leave it for now and try to do better with the next song. Thanks everybody for the feedback!

[haslo]

I made a new track:

https://soundcloud.com/glodjib/unheard-alarms

I started with sound design (in Phase Plant) this time around, because I knew the sound I wanted in the new track. It's the lead-bass-thingy that starts around minute 2:00. Two accompanying lead / mid-bass sounds quickly joined, and the next thing I built was the bass line, followed by the chords.

I tried to think about frequencies and avoiding mud from the start, and I think it helped. Mixing is much easier (though still hard) if I don't have to untangle everything first.

For the first of the two pads, I actually started with a Pigments preset, but quickly got frustrated because I don't know Pigments as well as I do for Phase Plant - so I rebuilt the patch in Phase Plant instead, and then was happy with the amount of modulation options I had. Not sure I'll keep Pigments in rent-to-own. It's a great-sounding instrument, and has lots of possibilities and great presets - but getting to where I want to go in its UI always takes so many clicks.

I also had another go at rebuilding the mix for Crashing Stars ... you're all right, it sounded muffled and confused, like listening to something through a curtain. I found more things that contributed to mud, too, and cut lots of frequencies from the delays, and actually removed the sub bass altogether while boosting the higher frequencies of the bass itself.

I guess if I keep improving at this rate, finding my mixes from a week ago ugly every other week, I'll get halfway decent within a couple of years. Yay!

[layzer]

on unheard alarms i still think you are using too much compression
and then pushing the volume to where it blurs everything.
here i recorded your track and my track(forbidden planet - posted here too) directly from soundcloud then put them side by side so you can SEE the
difference. my track is on the bottom and as you can see, it is not
as compressed as yours. it has dynamics, everything can breath
and is more comfortable to listen to, and if you go read
the comments on it, most people mention that the mix sounds good or great.
hope this helps.

[haslo]

I don't think my sausage should look like your sausage though. I'm looking for that more classic, epic, dense Trance sound I loved back in the 90s, which is still employed by those who were icons back then and remain so now. Looking at recent promo podcasts for the sounds of the labels of Paul van Dyk and Paul Oakenfold, their sausages look a lot like mine. Too fat for my taste for Paul van Dyk, too (where there's also clipping when listening to it).



It makes sense too - your sound usually doesn't have pads and choirs that run in the background, or as many layers of reverb.

I do have a huge lot to learn in terms of mixing, transparency, clashing frequencies and clarity of the sound design and arrangement, and I'm very grateful for feedback to that end. But making my music sound like yours would be the wrong way IMHO. Even though I do like your sound!

(Edit, and I think EQ and mixing itself is much more my problem rather than compression. Crashing Stars only has one limiter and no compressors in the entire project remaining at this point, though of course that could be completely different by the time you read this.)

[layzer]

ok no sausages should look the same, i get that.
but it should look natural. and over compressing music
does NOT sound natural, classic 90's or whatever.
i'll let you be though. but in leaving consider if
people paid no attention to red green blue
levels on television content. you could
compare an imbalance of the low, mids and
highs like the intensity of the RGB. too much
or too little of one or the other looks unnatural
and God forbid, all being too high is like over
compression... all white and you can barely
make anything out. eventually most music producers
learn this and so strive for a more balance and natural
sound.