Where can I learn how to make my music sound professional?

[TweakHead]

MTBC is right. I've used Logic for many years now. And I bought all the magazines dedicated to it, doesn't hurt to look and see if there's something I've missed to fill the holes. After a couple experiments, you're able to integrate some handy stuff into your work flow. Later you find yourself doing stuff really fast and intuitively. It comes with time and no one should stress it to much, I think.

People usually take a long time to get a rock solid Kick and Bass combo, for example. Usually comparing the material with mastered tracks is a big factor in producing frustration. Takes some time to train the ear. I highly recommend you get the sounds as close to what you want on the synthesizers (or other sources) before applying any sort of post processing to them. That's also where the gold is.

Then it's just a matter of making things play right together: for kick and bass, there's a couple of solutions available. Side-chain compressor on the Bass channel triggered by the Kick (used as input for the compressor) is probably one of the most used tricks for Electronic Music.

Still on the bass chapter, it's easy to go wrong on many stages, some related to synthesis, some to mix and processing. For example: if you want it to be steady and rock solid, you need to take away what's called the "drift" on some synthesizers, in others it's named such things as: "free" [running oscillators], on others you need to select "retrig", on the Virus you'd need to select a Phase value for the oscillators to recycle the wave for each note played. This gives you phase consistency (very much needed on many electronic music genres and easier to handle for mixing the bottom end). Something to look at on the synthesizer before going anywhere else. Also good idea to have an oscilloscope (there's some free ones) and see if the notes have their own space or colliding with each other - while adjusting the amp envelope.

If your patch is using an envelope assigned to the filter's frequency (which many times it does in a lot of music) and you feel your sub energy is lost with that, you can always add another oscillator tuned 12 semitones bellow the first with a triangle or square wave and mix it with the original. Some synthesizers have their own sub oscillator tuned one octave or two bellow. You can layer two bass instruments, one covering the sub part, the other one with a high pass filter leaving room for the first, and covering the mid range area. I'm ranting about this, just as an example of how you can go one route or the other for the same problem - one is solved inside the synthesizer and the other makes use of two instruments and careful mixing technique. In the case of the layer option, you can send both signals to a bus/aux channel and process them together - which will make them sound as one sound. Probably a good idea to shave off some frequencies from the kick in the mids for the bass's snappy tone to come through. You EQ a sound while listening to how if affects the others, in context.

For other sounds, depending on how much the Bass comes into the Mids, it's probably a good idea to use a low cut/high pass filter on those. But it they're programmed right, and played on the right octaves, not much cut is needed. But EQ here is used to reserve space, so as to preserve clarity. On breaks you probably don't need to cut the low end from the Leads, you can even benefit from it... This is an example of how mixing interacts with composition.

[namnibor]

Thanks a lot for the advice! For me, reaper seems more the intuitive route and yeah, the way you train people with software development is very much the analytical method the military engraved in me. Makes so much sense to learn by running into 'road blocks', tackle them, move on, at al.

[TweakHead]

About Reaper. Never got to try it, but saw some very good reviews on specialized magazines and have an idea of how it looks like. Looks very organized to me and actually know of some pro producers who have moved from cubase to reaper and swear they're never going back.

There's a couple of things I feel software does better these days: one of them is Bass. I know that hardware synthesizers can put out huge bass sound, specially if we're talking analogue. But having free running oscillators playing the bass isn't ideal imo. In order to use those great sounding basses from non-digital hardware, most people tend to go through the tedious process of re-sample, so as to build a sampler instrument from the "good" notes. You then need to zoom in on those waves and choose the notes with the best transients - which is related to the initial phase of the notes - for each note.

There's plenty of good sampled bass instruments from famous instruments in such things as Spectrasonics Trillian, and even some Moog notes (at least) in EXS24 (logic's own sampler) and certainly a loot of good sounding sample instruments for Kontakt (that's Native Instrument's super sampler).

But if you're like me, you really don't mind using software synthesizers for Bass. Digital synthesizers are more precise and software saves you the trouble of having to adjust timing issues by hand - so it's a no brainer for me: either software or sampled instruments.

The other thing I think software handles much better nowadays is drums. Sure there's the good old drum machines still around, and even new ones. But I honestly feel one is better off using samples inside some dedicated software or even arrange the samples on audio tracks (which I do often). Or make use of a lot of options to synthesize your own from different sources, layer them... Again, no timing issues and the ability to process the sound very fast to your liking.

Also think that one's better of mixing inside-the-box these days. There's plenty of high-end tools out there, and you're able to use many instances at once. Honestly feel that with good enough ears, one doesn't really need to waste a awful lot of money on expensive hardware equalizers and effects.

So, why do we need the expensive hardware gear - and I mean mostly synthesizers here. The sound and the interaction with the instruments, of course.

Composing today is different I think from what it used to be. Many musicians make some arrangement decisions thinking like producers - the frontier between the two is more ambiguous now then ever before - but if you know your synthesis and your music theory, all it takes to sound good is to develop some mixing skills.

Of course there's some daw specific stuff people do often nowadays: such as fading in and out on the audio recordings, applying time-stretch, reversing pieces of audio, tunning and transposing pieces of audio, inserting silence by cutting pieces...

This is the stuff there's to know about a daw software. Where and how to do such stuff. Once you're good with that, ideas flow more quicly.

[namnibor]

Originally Posted by TweakHead

About Reaper. Never got to try it, but saw some very good reviews on specialized magazines and have an idea of how it looks like. Looks very organized to me and actually know of some pro producers who have moved from cubase to reaper and swear they're never going back.

There's a couple of things I feel software does better these days: one of them is Bass. I know that hardware synthesizers can put out huge bass sound, specially if we're talking analogue. But having free running oscillators playing the bass isn't ideal imo. In order to use those great sounding basses from non-digital hardware, most people tend to go through the tedious process of re-sample, so as to build a sampler instrument from the "good" notes. You then need to zoom in on those waves and choose the notes with the best transients - which is related to the initial phase of the notes - for each note.

There's plenty of good sampled bass instruments from famous instruments in such things as Spectrasonics Trillian, and even some Moog notes (at least) in EXS24 (logic's own sampler) and certainly a loot of good sounding sample instruments for Kontakt (that's Native Instrument's super sampler).

But if you're like me, you really don't mind using software synthesizers for Bass. Digital synthesizers are more precise and software saves you the trouble of having to adjust timing issues by hand - so it's a no brainer for me: either software or sampled instruments.

The other thing I think software handles much better nowadays is drums. Sure there's the good old drum machines still around, and even new ones. But I honestly feel one is better off using samples inside some dedicated software or even arrange the samples on audio tracks (which I do often). Or make use of a lot of options to synthesize your own from different sources, layer them... Again, no timing issues and the ability to process the sound very fast to your liking.

Also think that one's better of mixing inside-the-box these days. There's plenty of high-end tools out there, and you're able to use many instances at once. Honestly feel that with good enough ears, one doesn't really need to waste a awful lot of money on expensive hardware equalizers and effects.

So, why do we need the expensive hardware gear - and I mean mostly synthesizers here. The sound and the interaction with the instruments, of course.

Composing today is different I think from what it used to be. Many musicians make some arrangement decisions thinking like producers - the frontier between the two is more ambiguous now then ever before - but if you know your synthesis and your music theory, all it takes to sound good is to develop some mixing skills.

Of course there's some daw specific stuff people do often nowadays: such as fading in and out on the audio recordings, applying time-stretch, reversing pieces of audio, tunning and transposing pieces of audio, inserting silence by cutting pieces...

This is the stuff there's to know about a daw software. Where and how to do such stuff. Once you're good with that, ideas flow more quicly.

All great stuff. Interestingly, I have this copy of Novation Bass Station vst that came with the Remote SL61mk2 and wondered what you thought about that? (I have not installed it yet, and have another health issue "speed-bump" going on right now, but this will be a life-long ongoing affair and indeed disabled military veteran...I tend to be in denial of this a lot)

Definitely agree with drums as well.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by namnibor

All great stuff. Interestingly, I have this copy of Novation Bass Station vst that came with the Remote SL61mk2 and wondered what you thought about that?

I know the question was for Tweakhead but I'll chime in anyway... the Bass Station plugin was a pack-in with my Remote SL as well, and I'd say as a freebie pack-in it's okay I guess but I didn't see anything special about it, or it never made it's way into my music I should say. Your mileage may vary of course -- I don't recall there being anything objectionable about the sound, but I guess I didn't like the UI, or maybe it's that bass sounds are easy enough to make with other plug-ins that just offered more. I figured maybe the UI was designed to look like older hardware and thus had some appeal there?