Mix Challenge

A friendly reminder:
Including today, 7 days left to submit your production


If you want to access the extended game mechanics of the Songwriting Competition (asking for feedback during production), please try to release your first edits within the next 3 days to have enough time to get possible feedback (if needed/wanted) and continue to work on your song.

Please also keep possible Daylight Saving Time offsets in mind if you decide to submit something "last minute".

TrojakEW wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 13, 2021 15:04 CET

Yup I know there is more then 2 instruments but I used them more as background ambient melodic pad.

"I'd love to hear you combine one or two (two absolute max) acoustic instruments with an ambient soundscape ..." was what Mr Fox said. I wonder though, wheather my synth bass is to be considered an electric bass guitar? In that case, maybe I have broken the rules? Edit: No, because it's certainly not acoustic.

I also wrote that "Clean E-Guitars" would also be fine, so Bass Guitar/E-Bass would work just as well.

Just... make music - see where your journey takes you. That is the point of the Songwriting Competition. You still got over 5 days left, folks!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ntgeba1lx7ice ... n.wav?dl=0

The song idea began with a simple drone guitar riff. I created a pulsing pad with a poly-synth, distortion, phaser and verb. The guitar has an overdrive, EQ, Octaver and a LayD pedal, creating a very low-end heavy movement. From there I tickled around some melodies on the piano. I actually just bought an Arturia MINILAB and used the octaves live during the recording to bounce around the sonic spectrum. There are some Ah’s in there supporting the melody, some steam spurts and a helicopter . In the middle of the song is the flower in the darkness. A little guitar lead that breaks things up for a colorful moment. The new synth inspired a lot of the sonics in this track and so it felt like I was communicating with something that was previously alien to me. Thus I give you, Alien Communication.

Enigma
RVerb
Tape Echo
Tapehead
MondoMod
Studio Reverb
BF-76
GTRStomp2
PSA-1
Waves Q 1-10
RBass
KramerTape
H-Delay
ModDelay 3
UltraPitchShift
C4

bx_solo
SSL Comp
Abbey Road TG Mastering
Maxim

Instrumentation:
Cheap Japanese guitar, direct (Cimar)
Vocals
Piano (Grand Rhapsody)
Xpand!2

It seems you have some special kind of Dropbox account, @SoundBeing. It seems you have to be logged in in order to access the file. I can't see or hear anything.

A Future in Noise wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:47 CET

It seems you have some special kind of Dropbox account, @SoundBeing. It seems you have to be logged in in order to access the file. I can't see or hear anything.

Shoot, see if it's fixed. Ack! Technology~!!

SoundBeing wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 19, 2021 15:42 CET

Shoot, see if it's fixed. Ack! Technology~!!

It looks as if it's fixed. I'm in a café, however. The connection is very slow, so I can't hear anything, anyway.

FLAC: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OHt71u ... sp=sharing
MP3: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ha-3Xy ... sp=sharing

Greetings!

I wanted to create a feeling of nature awakenig after a long and cold winter. It is kinda reminiscent of what we all experienced in the last year. The spring looks promising and aims to bring a resolution to our troubles, but we still feel the taste of stress we went through.

Instruments and techniques used:

- Overall, I tried to create a lo-fi feel of early 80's home studio.
- Cherry Audio "Polymode" used for a bass drone that developes with stacked octaves and fiths.
- SampleScience "Cinematic Piano", the name stands for itself. It plays the main role in the first part of the track. It is drowned in Eventides's "Blackhole" reverb that transforms everything into etherial pad.
- "CA2600" plays the piano chords as arpeggio, fed into Audio Thing "Outer Space" tape echo that creates a rhythmic texture.
- u-He "Repro-1" used for the portamento synth lead. It is also fed into reverb.
- Field recordings of a spring forest, fed into Wavesfactory "Cassette" to simulate a budget recorder.

Technical information:

Hi all,

My advice is to listen to the track first and then read the description. Here is the link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bGvjRH ... sp=sharing

The bulk of this composition is a 7 minute jam on my steel string guitar tuned in E G# C# G# B E. Tuned this way to create an E major pentatonic vibe with open string and harmonics. The pickup went through my pedalboard, details later, and a mic with some compression into my DAW. I wanted to make a pad out of the acoustic guitar so I ran three passes of this recording out of my interface through my pedal board while ‘playing’ the knobs on the pedals. Each take had different settings, pedal order and/or playback speed (varispeed / re-pitch). It fun was being hands on and performing it like this.

Here is an overview of my board; mostly in order, but this was not constant and not all pedals were always on:

Behringer Bass Synth BSY600 (only used on piano)
Digitech RP80 for octave up/down effect
Vox Wah
Carl Martin Red Repeat (sometimes oscillating)
T-Rex Comp Nova (Compressor)
TC Electronic MojoMojo Overdrive (used as an EQ to reduce high and lows on piano track)
Hardwire CR7 Chorus (used a bunch of different modes and played with speed and dry/wet blend during performance)
EHX Memory Man with Hazarai. Used as (reverse) delay and flanger.
Boss RV6 - Used the Shimmer, Dynamic and Modulate modes

With these guitar pads in place, I jammed in some delicate piano (NumaCompact2) and, like the guitar, ran this through my board afterwards. This time I also reversed the piano going into the board and than re-reversed the pedalboard take, so you get reverse reverb, knowwhatImsaying?
I also recorded the midi of this take and used in for a Lunaris pad; very soft in the mix.

The most difficult part was weeding out the lesser bits while still maintaining the flow. I didn’t want too sudden changes. After that, I did tons of volume and filter automation to keep it from getting too dense and static. I hardly did any plugin processing; Mainly some fast attack time compression and Flux Bittersweet to reduce transients. And later some dynamic EQ to tame the otherwise overwhelming midrange (1.5-2k) with TDR Nova (it’s free btw!).

Gear:

Acoustic guitar Cort Earth 100
Numa Compact2 (piano)
Joe Meek SixQ (opto compression on acoustic)
Guitar pedals
DAW: Live 9
Luftrum Lunaris
UAD1176E
TDR Nova for dynamic EQ
Kompreskimo (on Master, subtle)

Generally, I like the result better when I start with something 'organic' (acoustic) and then make it sound more artificial, than to try to breathe life into something that's synthetic (like a synth). That's a big part of the reason I went with this approach.

Dexed
Piano
Prophet
Airwindows Verbity, Galactix, srsly2, Starship, tape delay
Valhalla Freqdelay, Supermassive
Liberty distortion, I love Walter reverb
Audacity

Clue is in the name
Just made a track based around the feelings of what is happening
Both in nature & life