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I started this as a comment in bla's blog about doing shit the hard, stupid way, but decided to expand the idea to its own rant/blog/whine.
Every time I've listened to cbit,ml,delta,implexgrace,lowlifi,nq,adjective,albatrocity or, really just alot of you who create these sounds and tracks I just cannot figure out, I think I MUST be doing shit the hard, stupid way, and even if I weren't, it would still take more time and devotion to finish one track than I have to spare. I usually spend the four to six hours I can alot per week just getting a melody or wrestling with the technology, and lose the spark and give up. I have about 3 hours of recorded melody and bassline ideas saved as impromptu clips from just the last year, since I posted that gearpron blog. I also have a few saved sequences going back 8 years that are all between 20 seconds and a minute, and they each took days to get to that point.
Some of you peeps here should hold classes for money on how to do this stuff right, with a curriculum, demos, assignments and so forth. By the end, I would be able to use the tools in the class to make compositions without once getting lost or stuck. There could probably be one style per course. I'd pay for that, seriously. If you were worried about giving up trade secrets, consider it a motivator to come up with new sounds and teach the old, standard stuff.
It reminds me of learning Linux or Unix: There's often only one way to get the shell to do what you want in a certain situation, and you could spend years learning the OS and never get enough of it down to make it work for you completely, whereas you can find your way around windows or OSX in one sitting. Just to get one command to work, sometimes you have to read and read and read and read and read and read and read and you finally find that what you needed ends up being a difference of three characters from what you origianlly typed.
If someone had been standing over your shoulder and you'd asked one simple question, hours or even days would not be lost.
This whole music thing is just like that for me, mostly in terms of technique for generating timbres I hear in music posted here, but also to a great degree on sequencing and producing non-repetitive drums that sound good. If someone stood behind me and said "You start with this drum loop, easily found online, and run it through this chain of free plugins to get this specific sound, then use this magic thingy to chop it up" then I could apply it and better focus on how to creatively arrange it into a track. Maybe it would change later, but it's part of the process, and impedes progress until the task is done.
I spend copious amounts of time either trying to get something simple that doesn't sound like ass or trying and often failing just to get the software to cooperate. It isn't fair that you spend all this money and the software crashes or doesn't work like expected, yet it's overwhelming with all the possibilities and directions to go when it works.
Timing is a big, big problem for me, even with some jittery plugins, and especially when trying to sync two apps together when both vendors were too arrogant or incompetent to allow their product to be a Rewire slave. Most importantly, Midi jitter and latency from the external devices can make life miserable, and you start to imagine timing problems that aren't even there.
I can see how those of you who only possess a PC and a controller, and use one main sequencing application, with an arsenal of plugins, can get so much done. But even then, I constantly hear things posted here that sound like if I tried to do them, they would take two lifetimes to finish. So many notes, so many events, and how much of it was done by hand versus not? And "I know that that sound there resembles a snare, but how did it get that way?", and on and on. I just get angry that I don't understand how it was done, and possibly because I know I would never have the time to do it right. I start trying to reverse-engineer little tidbits from all the different posts into my own ideas, and just get frustrated. This has been going on since I first noticed em411 in June 2003.
It's clear there is a new breed of virtuoso, as evidenced by RDJ,Tom Jenkinson,etc. whose proficiency lies in manipulating software to compose and produce, and in comparison, maybe I'm the chimpanzee with my typewriter. But I can't help thinking there are just some key techniques and ideas that no one mentions because they take them for granted, yet I've never even thought to try them, despite reading posts here regularly for five years. I've asked people on this forum how they did this or that before, and usually people either don't remember, or it's too complex to explain. But I have to wonder how many of those people ever read books, took classes or the like. More than likely, this modern method of composition and production is mostly self-taught for nearly everyone who tries it and succeeds.
I know, I know. Just get in there and do it with no expectations right? If it sounds like ass, then at least you had fun, right? I've made piles of infantile,amateur tripe for 11 years now, and nearly all of it is incomplete. I want to do something I can actually publish and be proud of. Not for once: For good. | |
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06/20/08
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bla
i think with techno stuff like this its more important to make loads of tracks than to try to put loads of ideas into 1 track
06/20/08
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RogerRoger
I did think of one more question regarding this approach:
Say I establish the track length of what I have here is satisfactory, and do a mix of just those few tracks, render it and start a new Live project with that render as the foundation, will this be too limiting and difficult than staying with leaving everything in one Live project? Naturally it saves system resources, but I mean building off a render from another project as a composing method.
07/10/08
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yghartsyrt
thanks for mentioning me. i feel really honoured.
for anybody interested, just check my answer on my release.
link
btw. this is an awesome and really inspirational thread.
makes me feel like em411 in 2004.
07/10/08
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RogerRoger
Much thanks, yghartsyrt. Just fyi, I'm all moved into my house with the "gear whore studio" all set up up now. link (I make no apologies for having all that shit and doing nothing with it all this time. I just suck, plain and simple.)
So maybe if I get up off my arse and show some interest, good things will come of it. Seeing as how software absolutely pisses me off 90% of the time, most likely I will have to continue to depend on the lot of you to be as awesome as you have always been. But who knows? Could be some fun to be had yet.
07/11/08
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yghartsyrt
that studio looks like some serious fun. i could see myself in there noodling for months. don't be so hard on yourself (i know easier said than done) but try to enjoy having fun with all tat stuff. and there's a lot to have fun with.
try to revoke your child (wow that sound cheap  )just naive playinf the sake of playing.
i'm looking forward to hear some nodlings
07/11/08
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bla
ive been making 1 beat loops on my mmt8 for my tx81z to play
ive done 11 so far (+however many i did for stfu marseille) but the other week my sequencer crashed and i lost the 8 patterns id done (a months work!) so ive got 3 patterns left but ive done plenty more so ive kind of evolved a system of writing the patterns that i follow every time. it not fully complete- i still have to make decisions as to where the sounds go and im still trial and erroring the notes together but the more i do the quicker and more instinctive it gets
i try to make it so no 2 notes (for any of the 8 parts) are on the same spot (except step 1- most stuff still wants to start at the start) and i cant help making sure i dont use the same notes in the same part
there are 8 parts (2 kicks 2 bass sounds 2 long sounds 2 percussive sounds) for each pattern
each part has 3 notes 3 pitch bend values and 3 control change numbers (breath control)
the pitch 'bends' and control changes go just before the notes- if the note was on 48 (1/2 way through the 96 step beat (384th notes)) then i put the pitch bend on 44 and the controller on 46- i seperate them a bit like this so the midi data is more spread out so it doesnt clog up
i tend to just choose pitchbend values for the sake of it rather than trying out what sounds good- like ill just decide that the 3 pitch numbers for this part are going to be +3072, -3072 and 0 and then try out different notes and see which works best with those pitch changes. the control (breath control) numbers are pretty much always 127, 096 and 064 unless the patch only really works with higher values then theyll be 127, 112 and 096
the placement of the notes at first is down to where they sound good but as the pattern fills up im just looking for where the gaps are regardless of how it sounds
oh yeah- importantly for live performance- all the data for all the sounds is spread across all the tracks on the mmt8- each track will contain 3 notes 3 pitch bends and 3 control numbers all on different channels so they relate to all the different instruments so that when im playing it live i can use the track mutes to vary the pattern (otherwise its just a 1 beat loop!) if i press track mute 1 then some notes,pitches,controllers for all the parts will go so each track mute affects all the sounds so the 256 combinations of 8 track mutes are all quite different
ummm got to go now
i hope to get a totally rigid system down so i dont have to make any decisions
arbitary value system
07/11/08
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KidQuaalude
lol...i love to read about your process, joel.
07/11/08
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RogerRoger
bla, I really like certain FM beats. Ones that come to prevalently to mind are the drums in the pinball game Pin*Bot. Alot of Sega Genesis music as well. Your composing style seems like organised chaos, but if it works for you, that's all that matters. I have yet to find a working method that doesn't kill my creativity.
yghartsyrt, thanks. Most of it has been a distraction for me from really making tunes, so I'm hoping the new location and this studio setup will make things a bit easier.
Here are some of my noodles from last year, organised by the gear it was played on, if you are interested: link
I make no claims as to its quality, but any criticism is welcome, both on this blog or with EM mail.
07/11/08
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bla
i wish i could invent a system of rigid order with no chaos at all
a set of rules that determines exactly how the pattern should be so i dont have to think about it and make decisions
and then itd need humanly tuning to taste at the end because however much i like the idea of machine music based on numbers im really still looking for the funk (which does not compute)
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