Share any music production tips and tricks you discovered

#1

Share any music production tip/tricks that you discovered when experimenting

@for beginners, I figured out how to get xanopticon texture idm drums…

Take a drum break, comb over the the break with a volume envelope to make it punchier, then use the processed drums as a signal, to control the volume of a weird sound made with a synthesizer…the idea is instead of spending a load of time synthesizing drums, you can take a a granulized neuro bass sample and use any drum break as a volume envelope by using the peak controller to control the volume of the desired sample in FL Studio or something similar if you are using different daw

IDM Production - Help needed
#2

Wavehammer everything.

#3

creating false-arpeggiated melodies using delay FX when layered with harmonies often leads to some really good unexpected tones that normal arps won’t provide. I use delay on quarter notes in 3rd/4th counts all the time to counter rhythm things in my music. A bit of a signature experiment I’ve kept over the years.

#4

As boring as it sounds… High pass everything with a medium slope to take out unwanted bass and tune to taste. That and think of percussion panning like you are sitting at a drum set from the drummers perspective.

#5

I read this a lot on forums, but newbies should take it with a grain of salt. It’s a quick way to end up with a thin and brittle mix if you go overboard. Good advice, just err on the conservative side with the filtering. A lot of a sounds character can come from the 100-250 region, shelving filters can do the same job but in a less brutal fashion.

#6

Do you have a cheap outboard compressor? Have a cheap Behringer mixer laying around for live use? Try this trick I discovered for insane pumpy screeching distorted compression.

Put the input of the compressor on an aux send, and connect its output to a track. You can use that track’s send to create a feedback loop, which results in screeching oscillating feedback with no input, but add in some drums or other rhythmic synth stuff and the results are a beautiful and chaotic fight between the signal and the feedback.

#7

sidechaining, not only accomplished with compressors, but can also be done through an eq by sending the signal have an effect on the desired frequency

thank you @parricide

#8

Paulstretch and then wavehammer, sometimes wavehammering before paulstretching

#9

i took a sample of some drum thing i made and ran it through a granular synth, i played around with the timestretch algorithm and automated the parameters of the granular synth, and used the same sample loaded it into sytrus to fm mod it and had the fm mod sample modulate the granulized timestretch sample using vocodex, + distortion + highpass fliter automation + some eq

i took screenshots to better explain what i did:

and here is the resulting sound:
grain bass sound

#10

Really nice result, very metallic, very digital!

#11

Inspired by that I did something different on the MPC Live, took a “kick” sound, by the power of a bad timestretching algorithm I stretched it and pitchshifted it twice, resampled, fine some nice looping points.
Then I put a single drone note and side chained to the original kick (just to let you guys hear the start and end point) and filtered it, bit of resonance to get some low end, towards the end of the file you can hear the filter sweep across the sample so you can hear all the frequencies.
And a sample and hold lfo on the filter cutoff.

#12

Tremoloing (is there such a word in English?) pads or any longer sound - but with a rhythm to the tremolo. You can achieve it with plugins or by sidechaining to a muted track, which can be a kick or some percussive sound which, if playing, would be playing a rhythm different than a typical 4/4.

Then - if tremoloing / tremolating / tremoling (!! love to play with these :smiley:) does not sound that good, trying the same with gate or filter with sidechain to that rhythmic track.

#13

Sometimes the drums you start with aren’t the ones that finish your project.

Patterns, samples, speed or otherwise.

#14

Creating “false” arpeggiation through delay FX at 1/4, 1/3 time can create the best unexpected melodic results in your composition when layered with a harmony :slight_smile:

#15

The big thing for me is really limiting myself to write the hook/meat of a song. Recently I’ve been using the TR8S and limit myself to one pattern, that is 11 drum voices/samples, and 8 16 step variations (and two programmable 16 step rolls) . If I can’t write something within those parameters that I could potentially mix into a DJ set, it isn’t worth recording to my DAW.

#16

that’s one thing I have to repeat to myself constantly; don’t feel stuck with what you have at a specific moment, you’re always free to move things around and trash a whole section if the track goes a different direction. Let your creative mind drive the process.

#17

Nothing very specific, just some general thoughts.

Sooner or later you have to realise that less is actually more. I used to fill up my tracks with many layers, every gap had to have plenty of content. But when you reach your mixing stage you start to realise how flawed this idea is in general. if you mute some track and you can’t here any difference in the mix it should stay muted or at least somehow used in other context. You can achieve a complex general sound but that doesn’t mean you need to layer over 20 different audio tracks and take extreme surgical measures to merge them all together. It’s not worth it. Some room needs to exist that could nicely wrap up and highlight your sound design decisions.

While trying to fix that one sound for hours sometimes it’s even better to re-do or replace it completely. Don’t be afraid so scrap that one idea that you’re trying to get “right”. It’s very tiresome. Save a backup project and instead try something different for that part.

When you reach the end of the line with some work in progress where you have no idea how to continue with it, start a new project. Select same BPM and key (let’s say that previous project had sub bass layer in F0) so you can use that as a reference and start building stuff from scratch while not even trying to match that previous project too much. Then you can quite easily merge projects and copy/paste layers from each other, merge ideas, borrow stuff from one WIP to another because you will have more stuff to choose from (“these layers might fit in that other WIP i worked on!”). I name projects like 170_s_01… 170 is bpm, S means I focus on some sort of synthesis, etc… This works surprisingly well for me.

#18

had an ephination that this ^
is just looping different samples taken from different beats (could be different tempos or different time signatures whichever)
with a little bit of swing, maybe made, by manually tweaking some hardware

#19

As a rule of thumb I try to maintain at least 30hz of separation between my kick and bass, unless I’m sidechaining heavily.

#20

if you don’t name/color your tracks/samples/instruments you’ll regret it later.

slams random keys on keyboard

"yeah i’ll remember “asdrekiksnarefuckk” is my main 2nd stereo kick later