Production Thoughts

AKA Thinking Out Loud 2.

I’ll start:

What I like about El-b’s masterclass is that he has his own names for the elements, like ‘flickers’ and ‘jah-jahs.’ It may be worth coming up with your own names so that those concepts can be filed away in your brain.

Also being able make a tune with only three tracks. This would mean bouncing down your drum beat (where you can edit it like a break), putting your jah-jahs on one track with a delay and the third track is bass. If a reverb send counts as a track then you would need inserts, but a single send is simpler.

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TBH and not trying to be contrarian - I think two tracks is something many producers might wanna meditate pon bit more (like me for one).

Make a tune that bumps with only drums and bass and everything on top is just gravy.

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Cream (Clapton)

made most on three tracks … I guess they used the fourth for extras or incidentals.

Could be an angle to try to bounce down to three tracks in the end and just try to mix those against each other.

One idea that I use all the time that is the best. Is to make all the extra fx out of elements already there in the tune.

That way it naturally morphs around. Can’t really explain it … but like you take the whole song and cut out a bit and then mess around with that bit and lay it back over the full track.
You try to change the physics of whats there but it will be more coherent than if you introduce an outside element to do the same thing.

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I do this constantly

Sometimes those chopped bits become the tune and just delete the original parts even hah

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Yes this is fun, even bounce to wav, fuck about in serato, record and use bits of it in the orig track. Or do similar things with tape

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yeah man i need to get into tape comp and fx

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I consider my self to be a seasoned Ableton Live user, but does anyone know if it’s possible to duplicate notes up an octave with a hotkey?

Ctrl c. Shift arrow key up ctrl v

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Well fuck me. Always thought that doing something like this would result in simply moving the notes, for some reason.

Write lyrics drunk and music sober.

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I had a breakthrough the other day working on a rmx for budspencertron. Why shouldn’t I just turn up the snare if it’s not loud enough.

Why do I spend so long messing with compression when half the time it’s just mixed too quiet

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Okay so this idea is ‘relatable’ or a good idea or something. But I’ve been doing it with an added ‘step’ that blows my mind right now :corndance:, - so say you have a full-ish tune going, then you put some crazy fx chain on the master channel (because it really brings crazy results/complex sounds) and every possible thing in the tune is effected and it sounds way more interesting than the tune itself - but you’re sort of holding back because you built up this whole tune (or idea ) and want that to work aswell -or maybe the fx is still too much eventhough its more ‘interesting’ - or you consider putting fx straight on the master as too drastic or ‘barbaric’, unworkable or whatever…

so what could you do to retain the structure and have it go full spazz out fx style too ?

Well, in the way I work, I do all the melody in midi and softsynths - so i have the melody ‘seperate’ and can just play it from another instrument anyway. . so the jizzed is retained still.
But in this case I just thought I’d re-map the melody back on top of the whole tune going completely fx crazy, and in that way, sort of have the original skeleton of the tune via the melody parts contained. It does help that the tune is focused on the melody. This means I can just turn it back into being musical again by ‘colouring’ in the melody in the most important parts and still have the bastard tune sort of ‘ruling’ the more boring pre fx idea of the tune.

hmmm :badteeth:?

going to post an example later tbf

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I love Ableton’s Impulse. I made drum tracks on it for years before Drum Racks and it still has a place in my heart.

I remember being the organizer for Tune A Week (TUNA) like 6 years ago. Man that shit was fun as fuck…

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Tuna is still going :slight_smile:

been sampling a ton of demoscene stuff lately, its a fookn goldmine, there are some youtube uploads that are vhs recordings of old demoscene releases hnnggggg, seriously 5 steps past where i would even go in processing and its already done for me, been living in sample heaven lately

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Is the 100bpm challenge still going?

It was changed to the 99bpm challenge.

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