ohhhh wow that’s neat. there really is a plugin for everything these days. can’t argue with the price either.
I think part of the issue is I saw some videos recently about how if you aren’t running at a super high sample rate distortion plugins can’t really work because they need more digital headroom or something, at like 48k they start aliasing which isn’t perceptibly noticeable but nerfs the transient and harmonics and stuff. for a long time I was running through converters that were limited to 48k so I had no other choice, but of course now that I’m running through an analog board (which higher resolution converters) I can’t increase the sample rate of my session without halving my output channels. god I hate this hobby.
there is no reason now that I can’t run in the box sessions at a higher sample rate though so maybe I’ll try that soon and do an A/B comparison with some simple drum, bass, and vocal tracks, which is where I find the differences most palpable.
yeah this is a major issue with mixing analog and I’ve been adopting a workflow where I just do one song at a time and settle for being commited to it once it’s “done”, which honestly is hugely refreshing compared to the neurosis that the precision of the digital realm allows. it is slower though.
however I ~have~ found that worst case, even if I have to rebuild a mix, it takes much, much less time to do so on a console than on the board. it will never sound exactly the same but getting that exact sound is much less important than you might think. and in a pinch if you are trying to get it exact you can get pretty close by latching back and forth between the printed mix going direct out of your interface and the mix off the board.
for me the sonic benefits and the drastic improvement of the quality of my mixes alone is worth all the extra hassle. but I know people who make much better mixes in the box than I’m seemingly capable of so if it works for you don’t feel like you have to switch.
I also do a lot of mixing of live recordings. it’s fun to mix digital music analog but imo it’s not nearly as dramatic of an improvement, especially because samples can often have desirable punchiness/compression/EQ balance baked in from the get go. mixing a live kick drum takes a lot more tweaking to get it to sit than just using a sample, especially when you can just swap that sample out if it isn’t working.
some little nonsense I made in iKaossilator. great little app for loops, drop dead ez workflow, albeit I wish it had more sounds and a selective erase feature
not rly sure what I want to make but I find myself attracted to deep house type chill vibes. I’m waiting for an adapter for my mpc to come in, then I’ll probably start learning how to assemble drum kits on there
Trying to stay away from DAWs for now (for creativity and istraction/workflow reasons) but chopping samples on Audacity is so efficient. when free software holds up after 10+ years, you love to see it
In 07-08 I was using Ardour and Hydrogen, I wonder if those hold up too
nice track! i like the fades in and out, real sense of motion
octatrack
how is that? im mostly not looking for new gear, i just need to learn this MPC 500 first, but i am curious of what to ‘graduate’ to someday if the RAM can’t be upgraded in this machine. (my machine might have a busted RAM connector which means I’m stuck with 16 MB RAM which really cuts down on sample time.)
MPC 1000 looks good, so does MPC One… not very pressing, but nice to ponder.
I have to say that the MPC is like, a huge huge blind spot in my music gear understanding so take that as you will
for me the octatrack is pretty crucial in my setup - it will pretty much always be the brain of whatever I’m doing because it can swiss army knife itself into anything I need as long as I spend enough time figuring out how I want to route things and deal with the track levels and such. because it has inputs and can sample from those inputs and keep them quantized, it’s really easy to use it as a mixer for various synths as long as i’m ok with using up one of the 8 channels to do so. it takes a lot of setup and learning to really get the most out of it but once you’re there you can do some really awesome things with live sample manipulation, especially when you throw the sequencer into the mix
like you can do a thing where you record a 4 bar loop and then you can drop different trigs into the sequence so you’ll have some kind of syncopated pattern from the beginning of the synth, and then change the start point of each trig so now your sample is playing different parts of itself at different points in the sequence, and on and on - it can get really complicated and interesting, and all of this can happen live if you’re good enough (I’m not yet)
I do find that it’s very much suited for techno and once you move outside of that realm it gets a little tougher to use - the constraints around the 8 tracks are really great for techno because you get a lot of functionality per-track, but if you want a full, lush sound you’ll have to either pre-record stems or bring in a bunch of external FX onto your synths. I basically lucked out with how dense the m8 can get, because I’ve been messing around with different synth setups for the better part of a year and I haven’t found anything better than m8.
the MIDI functionality is really, really great though - 8 tracks of MIDI + 8 audio channels is really cool and you get the elektron conditional trigs on both, which allows you to make really dynamic loops
I’d say that the main difference between the octatrack and MPC is that you have to prepare samples a little more on the MPC, as the sample manipulation capabilities aren’t as advanced. but once you have the samples prepared, the workflow is really fluid when laying a track down and it’s easy to get going when everything is loaded
the octatrack doesn’t require as much sample preparation beforehand, but it does require more work to get to the point where you can start laying a track down just because of the way the channels are structured; once that track is actually sequenced out however, your ability to manipulate how it plays out can be much more complicated and interesting than simply muting/unmuting parts
anyone know any youtube channels similar to Red Means Recording style of videos, but for MPCs? I really like his style of showing off the music production process with captions, it’s helping me think about how to make stuff, but i don’t own his hardware and not super into the style of music he makes. Ricky Tinez is a great channel as well, just looking for more ideally oriented to hardware i own, hip hop / club music oriented would be great
yeah it’s hard to find stuff for MPC workflows, I was going to come in here to suggest ricky tinez’s channel but other than that I don’t really know any
I also might have seen him in the san mateo guitar center? I was picking up a digitakt and used I guess he was there and the guy I was grabbing the digitakt from was like “this guy is youtube royalty” and I didn’t know who he was at the time so I was like “wow cool” and left because I just wanted to play with my digitakt ok
i keep trying to make jersey club type stuff but im really inexperienced with listening to that genre so it all ends up sounding like generic bad house music
my music making vocabulary is just really underdeveloped in general. do folks have advice? just ‘listen to a lot of stuff’?
the thing that struck me about jersey club is actually how stripped down it is and that’s kind of something I have trouble with in my own production, I do a lot of filling stuff in for its own sake and a lot of what I’ve had to learn with techno is that you don’t actually need that many elements to make a techno track, and with jersey club it’s even fewer. I don’t think you’re “allowed” to use hi hats unless you’re using some kind of amen break-y sequence in between the main phrases
like, I’d characterize jersey club primarily through the kick drum pattern and the vocal editing; the kick drum pattern will be the same throughout basically 99% of jersey club tracks, with it hitting straight on 1 and 2 but then doing a triplet pattern on the last two beats of a bar. you have more room for variation with the vocals, but the main aspect of them I hear is that they’re usually pretty straight on the grid, it’s usually taking a specific syllable or word and placing them on 1 and 3 as the main emphasis; you can add variations in between those two beats but 1 and 3 will be emphasized in most jersey club tracks
and I guess that’s my advice for listening to dance music - a lot of it is stripping the “genre” down to its fundamental elements to create a style guide for yourself, then working within those parameters and emphasizing or diminishing the importance of those elements depending on your taste. you’ll have to listen to tracks to do that, but if you listen to different tracks that are considered to be in the same “genre” then the focus should be on what the commonalities between the tracks are, because that’s the genre vocabulary that both tracks are using to situate themselves within the aesthetic space
this is super helpful. yeah I’ve noticed I have an impulse toward maximalism and space filling ambience, and i just have to learn to have confidence in the rhythm, the drums, and the creativity of vocal chopping. dead air is scary to me somehow.
the more i think about it a lot of the appeal for me with club music is just how the beat switches every couple of bars, it’s not really that any one bar has 20 different sounds happening, it’s more like kicks and vocal chops used creatively like you say.
like i woke up with this song stuck in my head this AM. what do you have going on? kicks, a vocal loop, a backing harmony, and vocal chops on the 4. the creativity comes from the sequence of beat switches. just gotta listen more and get a feel for it
this series is a tiny bit facetious but i really like it because it is spare to the point of obnoxiousness about the style breakdowns of different artists and genres
I did this a lot with chiptune because with LSDJ you only have 4 channels and you feel obliged to use all of them all the time, and one of the bigger problems I had when I started using DAWs and hardware was trying to do the same thing without realizing that the gameboy is its own compressor and distortion
one of the ways that I like to arrange my tracks is to get to what the most full, intense part of the song will eventually be and then work backwards from there, figuring out which element i want to play first and which elements sound good when added in at specific moments. maybe it works for you! everyone’s different tho so that’s just me
