Questions about producing

I’m having trouble choosing drums, vocals, making sounds, and making a bass drop sound good. Any advice would help

Don’t use vengeance samples. Record your own vocals. Use a synthesizer. Add a sinewave under your lead bass riff.

Learn to use EQ and Compression for your drums.
Assuming you just got started here, so just try and make the easiest tracks possible for a start so that you can learn your way around your DAW a little.

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read, practice, dont expect your skill level to match your taste in music until after a few years of serious trial, error, frustartion, serious practice etc.

1 BigUp

Having trouble choosing? Are you having a hard time assessing your own taste or do you just not know where to start for your own particular sound you want to create?

If you dont find good drum samples just learn to make your own samples. Thats the best way but it takes time.

sorry man almost flagged your post for shit advice

vengeance packs are so dam versatile. they include bait shit but also some good stuff I personally use them a lot and I’d like to think it’s not noticeable in my tracks. and I’m talking bout drum samples not loops or anything of that sorts.

also recording your own vocals is a shit advice, at least for someone who is just starting out. I’d first learn how to treat vocals by using acapellas (that’s acapellas4u.co.uk for OP)

other than that I agree with you on the eqing and bass layering part and making as simple tracks as possible. I’d also add do a lot of remakes of tracks to learn composition and song structures I cannot stress this enough

1 BigUp

Way I see it, it’s really about what you want to focus on. If you use Vengeance drums/other drum samples that are already layered and heavily processed, you have more time for everything else, since you don’t have to spend hours on drums alone. You don’t learn much about making your own drums tho. I personally don’t use Vengeance samples because I like the sound of acoustic drums and Vengeance drums are pretty much the exact opposite.

I don’t know where to start.

Oh that’s totally understandable, that’s often where producers get stuck in the beginning.

One of the things I like to do is put together an idea of what it is I want to emulate. Like choose particular tracks that have sounds that I want to approach and recreate for my own music. In fact, if you could give us some examples from tracks of sounds you’d like to recreate, we could probably help you more specifically.

Also re: Vengeance samples, I’ll just throw my two cents.

If you want to use them, they’re not bad. Some are extremely heavily compressed, so you don’t need much post-processing on them, but that sort of takes the fun out of producing and discovering your own sound. But I don’t know, it’s all about your interest and the sound you want, so I think whatever tool you want to use is a good enough tool, but it’s all about your approach with the tool.

I’d like to get drums like First of the Year, Bangarang, Centipede

A lot of these tunes have multiple layers of snares to get the sound required since almost every single snare sample I have encountered sounds horrible.

I highly recommend the gold baby dirt and layers pack…gives you all the pieces parts to make layered hits.

1 BigUp

I would also like to create growl basses that i think are automated like First of the Year and Scary Monsters in terms of synths

I’m gonna tell you a secret. I’ve mentioned in this forum that I’ve known Dillon Francis since high school. Well when we began doing a little producing together, he gave me a track by an unknown artist at the time, Skrillex. The track was called “fm8test2” but it turned out to be Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites when it was released (though it was a very early version). So if you really want to get some of those sounds, it looks like you’ll have to get Native Instruments FM8 or some FM synthesizer and just fuck around as much as possible to eventually find the sound. Or you can watch tutorials on FM synthesis and work with those synths until you have the sound you’re looking for.

This is just IMO, you can take whatever synthesizer you want to try to make those sounds but that’s just what I’m guessing he uses most frequently.

I have fm8! And do you still have fm8test2 still?

See if you can get hold of a few project files so you can see how others make tracks in the style you like.

I dont know if they have an FM8 tutorial but Groove3 have amazing tutorials on tons of relevant info. They used to have subscriptions for 15USD a month. I subscribed for three months and spent all my studio time whatching tutorials. Well worth the 45 dollars…

While your situation as you describe it is very vague and could just be summed up to “how do I produce electronic music?”, I will try to give you an answer.

When composing a song, you kinda want to have an objective or an image in mind of what you want your track to sound like, what feelings you want a listener to have while hearing your work, and really just what vibe you want to capture. Finding an inspiration or image to use and associate in your music helps A TON. An amazing artist, who goes by Oolacile is a perfect example of this. Oolacile makes music that is themed from From Software games. Many of his tracks have samples from Bloodborne and Dark Souls games maybe (both are amazing).

So yeah, something like that. Hope my answer helps. :smile_cat:

Do you have fm8test2 still? If so could you please send it to kronosmusicoff@gmail.com
Thanks!