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New tune


KimyReizeger

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Just put up a tune I made today. Mainly just cuz I think it's a nice listen; I didn't obsess over it, and have been frustrated for a few days now with difficult mixes / my inability to finalise things. I spent the day listening to three or four really good trance tracks so was experimenting with swells, epic build-ups 'n that.

'Not for critical evaluation':

MySpace.com - KimyReizeger - Aberdeen, UK - Electronica / Experimental / Jazz - www.myspace.com/kimyreizeger

Hopefully someone'll enjoy it.

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I didn't like this.

I found it boring. And it hasn't got any decent hooks, or a good chord progression, or any real new ideas injected in at any point in the piece. Its ridiculously repetitive and found it hard to listen to after 20 seconds.

Sounds like something you'd hear on a videogame loading screen for LMA manager or the like.

Sorry

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the lead synth sound that runs through the whole piece is kind of too dry and uninteresting to sustain interest, tbh I thought "oh no" as soon as I heard the first few bars. The rest of the synth sounds were pretty dry too, there's not really anything there that excites or holds interest and the same goes for the drums really. Mixwise, there's not really any bassline coming through and you're really overdoing it with the compression! There is like a fine line between a bit of subtle pumping and full on sea-sickness inducing compression hell.

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Mixwise, there's not really any bassline coming through and you're really overdoing it with the compression! .

That's quite interesting - I always feel I'm not doing enough, though this is usually based around what I read about huge amounts of compression being a fairly routine part of modern music making, as opposed to compression making the music sound better. My mastering process (if that's what it is) basically consisted of sprinkling a few compressors around the mix and hoping for the best, though these are issues I am acutely aware of and generally seeking to rectify.

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That's quite interesting - I always feel I'm not doing enough, though this is usually based around what I read about huge amounts of compression being a fairly routine part of modern music making, as opposed to compression making the music sound better. My mastering process (if that's what it is) basically consisted of sprinkling a few compressors around the mix and hoping for the best, though these are issues I am acutely aware of and generally seeking to rectify.

IMO compression is pretty widely misunderstood and overused. It's only necessary if there is a problem with the mix which needs to be corrected, i.e maybe you've put your drums through a tape emulator to get some character into them, but that's flattened the dynamics so you would use a compressor to bring the attack/decay, the snap and punch, back into them. Then again you could achieve the same result by mixing back in some of the dry drums...

If you put heaps of compression on the elements of the tune all you're doing is actually increasing the peaks in the waveform and pushing down the volume of the track. People do this and it sounds punchy and it pumps, but once it's rendered it sounds quiet compared to other tunes, so they will then go and stick a brickwall limiter over the whole mix and chop off those peaks they've just created in order to bring the volume up, making the mix a bland wall of noise that's incredibly fatiguing to listen to.

It's much nicer and more natural to hear the dynamics of the sounds themselves, rather than dynamics imposed on the whole mix by sidechaining compression.

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Yeah, I certainly don't claim to understand it - most of the stuff I make remains unfinished because I'm so reluctant to enter this master compression process which is, for me, such a drain on creativity. The stuff I've been working on really recently I've just been trying to mix well; record things at decent, stanardised levels and think hard about depth perspective of each component, and also consider what I want in the song and where exactly it fits. As a result I've found myself using less compression, but historically, yeah I have been mindlessly squeezing all hell out most of my stuff.

I must say, I do hate the idea of standardised over-compression and any guilt of this on my part is more due to a desire to learn compression thoroughly before discarding it, as opposed to thinking it necessarily improves my music. I think a balanced mix with discretion exercised over sound placement will always win over pumped up Kylie remixes:

MySpace.com - MSTRKRFT - Moss Park / East York / TORONTO, CA - Electro / Punk / Rap - www.myspace.com/mstrkrft

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Yeah, I certainly don't claim to understand it - most of the stuff I make remains unfinished because I'm so reluctant to enter this master compression process which is, for me, such a drain on creativity. The stuff I've been working on really recently I've just been trying to mix well; record things at decent, stanardised levels and think hard about depth perspective of each component, and also consider what I want in the song and where exactly it fits. As a result I've found myself using less compression, but historically, yeah I have been mindlessly squeezing all hell out most of my stuff.

I must say, I do hate the idea of standardised over-compression and any guilt of this on my part is more due to a desire to learn compression thoroughly before discarding it, as opposed to thinking it necessarily improves my music. I think a balanced mix with discretion exercised over sound placement will always win over pumped up Kylie remixes:

MySpace.com - MSTRKRFT - Moss Park / East York / TORONTO, CA - Electro / Punk / Rap - www.myspace.com/mstrkrft

...

yeah man, mstrkrft are fucking awesome.

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It makes my head hurt and I think it's a pretty good example of music made for specific purpose (grind your face into submission in big dance halls) as opposed to music made for listening.

It's exciting music. Music that makes you want to move. Music that makes you feel something. Probably why you aren't that into it.

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Yeah, I certainly don't claim to understand it - most of the stuff I make remains unfinished because I'm so reluctant to enter this master compression process which is, for me, such a drain on creativity. The stuff I've been working on really recently I've just been trying to mix well; record things at decent, standardised levels and think hard about depth perspective of each component, and also consider what I want in the song and where exactly it fits. As a result I've found myself using less compression, but historically, yeah I have been mindlessly squeezing all hell out most of my stuff.

I must say, I do hate the idea of standardised over-compression and any guilt of this on my part is more due to a desire to learn compression thoroughly before discarding it, as opposed to thinking it necessarily improves my music.

No offence, and I'm quite possibly just not understanding it, but I don't see anything creative in this process at all. This is not creating music, it's just figuring out different ways to make some notes sound different. I appreciate the value of mixing, compression etc etc, but surely that's just the polish, not the substance?

This is like saying you're writing a book, but only thinking about what font to use...

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Mixing isn't polish; it's everything - the practice of putting all these great musical ideas you have into a coherent format. Why that shouldn't apply to a musician (which is what you're suggesting?) who makes songs isn't really a question at all. If you mean I'm thinking too hard about it, then simply compare any random tracks off myspace with some professional stuff. I actually focus way more on the technical side of music production than the musical, purely because I find music pretty easy to come up with, have some self-assurance in that area, as opposed to mixing and compression in which I'm a fish out of water who bloody knows it and wants to crawl / bounce / manipulate myself in some hilarious awkward fashion into the ocean. That's not to say production and musicality don't cross over in a million ways; the different ways you process sound all affect the final mix, which is something to be listened to - ie, music.

MSTRKRFT is all about just pumping up a big riff and I don't think you can compare it to the subtlety and musical, err, krftmanship of something like this, which is sort of in the same line (though youtube does little justice):

YouTube - Orjan Nilsen - La Guitarra

And that's not to say a good song always requires pristine production; I like plenty of stuff which doesn't necessarily conform to established / modern values but for one reason or another just works. However, I think learning how to go for perfection is a pretty good place to start before chucking rules out the window.

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Mixing isn't polish; it's everything - the practice of putting all these great musical ideas you have into a coherent format. Why that shouldn't apply to a musician (which is what you're suggesting?)

Not at all. As I said, I fully appreciate the value of production. If I hear a good tune, obviously I want to hear it sounding as good as possible. But my point is, there has to be a good tune there to begin with...

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It makes my head hurt and I think it's a pretty good example of music made for specific purpose (grind your face into submission in big dance halls) as opposed to music made for listening.

That sort of over the top pumping effects is (in my purely subjective opinion of course) a pretty dated cliche that only really works with that kind of 4 on the floor kickdrum type music anyway. A classic example is this :

which is 6 years old or so. Notice that the pumping is really only going on with the tail of the kick and the low end frequencies, not the mids or highs so much, which kind of makes it a bit more bearable than having the whole mix pulse in time with the kick.

Erm yeah anyway the point is if you hear that effect in any other context it's usually considered a defect in the mix.

I see what you're saying about production in this way, that the mixdown is really important, and it is, but I would say sound design, atmosphere, the actual content of the tune, is far more important. There's no point in having a pristine perfect mixdown of a tune that sounds like it's made with the presets that come free with a synth and the drum sounds that come free with fruityloops, totally dry except maybe a delay or something, and just using over the top compression to give the illusion of dynamics.

There is a reason you generally hear music like that (benni benassi) being played in clubs like liquid. Even then though, if you listen to that benni benassi tune, and those mstrkrft tunes, you can hear that care has gone into making the dominant sounds a bit more distinctive and interesting sounding. They sound simplistic, but they really aren't.

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