it doesnt have to be done in a vst tho , fully agree with marsen tho
digital clipping is a fun area to explore around in, typically sounds awful but you can find some great results with some trial and error. The word ‘digital’ is a bit of a misnomer these days too, have a few digital (hardware) mixers that honestly smack when overdriven, they are both 12-bit sampler/mixers, so its bit reduction/hard clip sound
And to clarify i mean this only during the R&D of sounds, not in the mix phase (usually)
these tunes were mixed on those mixers, and yeah, the sibilance and distortion are fucking awful but idk, it worked for my ears at the time, the mixers saved the completed works to zipdisk and the inputs were from a tascam 424mk2
the perception of ‘levels’ has nothing to do with being able to listen to music loudly, in fact its an absolute beginners mistake to keep reaching for the volume knob for the monitors during a mixdown if you can’t hear an element properly. If you can’t hear it, its because the mix isn’t right, not because the speakers or headphones aren’t loud enough.
its really the opposite tho, its a nice way to make things super ‘cold’ imo, especially mixing that bit reduced sibilance with the original signal, super nice on glassy sounds in a parallel processing vibe
i need to give it a shot sometimes, can sound rly good when done well, this is prob my favourite example, alrhough thinking about it, he mentioned running it through a hw sample, so it might not be authentic digital mp3 sound degradation
ex ninja dub
coincidentally when '320plz’ing the guy i asked if he has a version without the artifacts
yeah, the tune bangs tbh, the drums all being super high passed and being bit reduced like that though, doesn’t quite work because they do end up being harsh and sort of flattened out on the top of the mix, i think there needs to some contrast on the drums where they bang out clean, or even just a pretty heavy parallel mix sort of coming in and out subtly
I used to imagine making a bomb track by clipping into the red and EQing it nicely. It’s really cool to find out that this red-clipping business really isn’t useful to beginners.
not at all, one of the biggest lessons i learned early on was that to make your track louder you have to turn everything down to make space for the parts that are supposed to be loud instead of everything just being maxed out, its all about relativity
and honestly, even though its sort of simple, its something i still struggle with in the early stages of building a tune
i know this tune isnt in your aesthetic maybe, but it starts off and it already sounds heavy af, there are moments where all of a sudden a much louder sound pops out, and it feels almost holographic. I keep this tune in my back pocket as a reminder
wouldn’t give it too much thought, putting ideas down as quick as possible is importsnt (imo) though it’s true it can influence your creative decisions
re dynamics
i always loved this big fuckoff baking tray hit about 7 bars after the drop (sry i dont know any other nusic apart from dubstep)
yeh, the point is when everything is loud, nothing is and it’s just a wall of sound, which can work in some context, but that’s usually very delibarate and carefully engineered.
this one is just such a golden example of how powerful a mixdown can be imo, you’d think it just drops and thats it, but no, the composition and mixing will continually hammer you throughout the entire tune
honestly have no fucking idea how this tune works^
the level of production is way beyond me, truly impeccable production
yeh I can relate in that definitely some of the tracks I feel most proud of as an artist and go back and listen to more than any (i do listen to my own tracks sometimes, ngl, i make the music I like to hear ) are ones where I feel like the musical and mix decisions are on the borderline of not really being right. stuff that was pushed a little beyond the right way of doing things
and I dont wanna sound conceited here cause I like a lot of “genre tracks” if you get me but I think thats why a large amount of basic genre tracks that are just doing an established sound can be sort of uninteresting… just people looking at how to make things that a million people are already making and copying to a t, not as much experimenting and figuring out when to break those rules once youve internalized them
, fully agree with marsen tho
