i dont see it being about " what is expected" , i see it being about what will make a creator of music successful and give them the ability to be remembered in musical history.
if a person treats music as learning and do the bare minimum of what is expected
it will be impossible to accomplish anything other than a few jobs here and there no impact on the world or history going into the future.(also they wont have multi millions of fans)

 

I agree with what Taskforce said about musicology. It might sound dumb and it actually is dumb when some body points it to you, but trust me when I say that it's easy to fall for it.

20 years ago I started making some house stuff. All I knew was that house music has a foundation on a 4/4 kick base, a snare or clap every 2 and 4 and a hi-hat every 3rd 16ths.
I knew that, as opposed to Rock, for instance, I wouldn't be using a guitar for the "hook" sound or a traditional drum set for the percussion. So I was using a TR-808 for the drums. Now... The problem is that I wanted to sound like Masters At Work and I was sounding more like Deep Dish and Danny Tenaglia. Nothing wrong with that, it's still house music after all. Just not the type of sound I was aiming at.
I've seen many people making this very same mistake and the number 1 cause for this is called Vengeance Sample CDs.

It took me a while to notice what I was doing wrong. While I knew that an electric guitar and a drum set wouldn't be the right tools for what I wanted to do, it never occurred me that instead of using a Roland drum machine, maybe sampling some real percussion was the way to go. If you want to make some rock, you won't run into this kind of problem because you know that all you need is a drum set, a bass and a guitar. Of course that you have countless pedals and distortion boxes, but the core sound is still a guitar. With electronic music there's this ocean of gear and it might be confusing, to say the least, if you don't know where to turn.

Taskforce listed some old school tracks there. Knowing that, for instance, Jaydee's Plastic Dreams Lead sound is a preset from the KORG M1 model or that Josh Wink's Higher State Of Consciousness and Daft Punk's Da Funk was made with a Roland TB-303 is the type of knowledge that can save you hours from scrolling through countless presets from countless synths.

But even after that, you still have to layer down your melodic/harmonic stuff and this is where I would say 70% of the magic your music is going to have lies in. You have to have some degree of knowledge to make the most out of it. For instance, you can't replicate a Stephan Bodzin trademark lead if you don't know what glide/portamento is.

Study the artists you like. Pick the nuances of the style itself and try to replicate them the best way you can. The rest will come with time.

 

Your title reminds me of an old joke...

How does a boy elephant find a girl elephant in the tall, tall grass?
Answer: Delightful!!!

I generally know what a part needs in my head, so I then begin sculpting it by choosing waveforms, attack time, the filter and its attack, then depending on what I expect out of the patch, LFO settings for movement of the filter, panning or anything else I want not to remain anchored. I try to leave effects for mix time because it can limit other choices for the whole of the mix. I also like to scroll through premade presets because it can pique my creativity. And because I can play many instruments and enjoy the sound and creativity of microphone tecnique always like to record live percussion and drums to give the track a humanness that only really can for myself be realized by not throwing in machine loops. I prefere to play all my keyboard parts and not sequence much at all. If I do, it is loops that I have created by actually playing all the parts.

 

Woah that circle of fifths chart is awesome.
Do you have any links or videos where I can learn more about chord progressions and chords in depth ?
I'm mostly a sound designer but I've been meaning to learn some music theory and piano.
I've been playing guitar for 7 years now but I mostly play by ear.

 

@semilla
Hi, i know i am not MMJ, he should be the best to answer you, but since i saw your post, you should check out MMJ's two major threads in the Education dept, highly recommended:
https://audiosex.pro/threads/the-language-of-tonal-music.32310/
https://audiosex.pro/threads/the-language-of-modal-music.32818/
And i wish you a happy new year welcome to the forum

 

@taskforce ahhh just what I needed!
Thanks a lot man, hope to learn a lot from everyone here !
Happy New year to you as well

 

This.

 

I mainly craete my own patches and create favourites of 3rd party patches

 

It's usually a mixture of hard work and sheer dumb luck.

 

They're usually down the back of the couch. I was sitting on an Oberheim OB-X and thought it was haemorroids.

 

How do I find my instruments? I scour the second hand markets on the regular and oftentimes trade in what I want to give up.

On a more serious note (although I was being serious), happy New Year's people.

 

Damn, you got some knowledge, and even better, you share it!!!
Would like to get some outstanding techno tracks recommandation. I started listen to techno since early nineties, but lack knowledge of more recent stuff.

Sven Weisemann / Patrick Gil / Angelo Clementi / and obvious actual von Oswald /Juan Atkins collabo Albums I dig.

 

You too know your stuff. Most of the names you've listed were, and still are, big influences of mine.

The Techno genre "label" seems to have changed somehow. A lot of tracks are being advertised as techno but they don't really match the template that guys like the ones you've mentioned a few more like Joey Beltram have established in the past. At least not in the Detroit/Chicago scene sound department.

Johannes Regnier - Hilbert Space (Original Mix) [The Healing Company/#THC010] -> Released in 2015, only 100 hard copies (12") were pressed. Became relevant in late 2016. Had a couple of re-presses after that.
Fur Coat - Pulse Width (Original Mix) [Oddity/#ODTV001]
Onno L - Satoshi (Original Mix) [Underground Audio/#UGA064]
German Brigante - Mango (Original Mix) [Diynamic/#DIYFTTF11]
Patrick Berg - Running Numbers (Original Mix) [Filth On Acid/#FOA006]
Roberto - Prolecanites (Original Mix) [Fossil Archive/#FAUK001]
Prince Of Denmark - (In The End) The Ghost Ran Out Of Memory (Mind Against Remix) [Unreleased]
Benjamin Damage - Montreal/Drum Computer (Original Mix) [R&S Records/#RS1714]
Ben Buitendijk - Transistor (Original Mix) [Planet Rhythm/#PRRUK109]
Kobosil - Konvergent (Original Mix) [Ostgut Ton/#OTON091]
Mind Against & Aether - Solaris/Event Horizon (Original Mix) [Afterlife/#AL003]

Honorable mentions:
Ben Klock - Subzero (Original Mix) [Ostgut Ton/#OTON019]
Maceo Plex & Gabriel Ananda - Solitary Daze (Original Mix) [Ellum/#ELL025]
Klock & Dettmann - Dawning/Dead Man Watches The Clock (Original Mix) [Ostugut Ton/#O-TON001] -> Piece of history here. First Ostgut Ton release. Since you're from Germany you obviously know this one. The Berghain/Panorama Bar Anthem.
Hans Berg - Machines (Original Mix) [Fullbarr/#FBD021]
Stephan Bodzin - Singularity/Zulu (Original Mix) [Herzblut/#HERZBLUT502] -> Might as well recommend the whole "Powers Of Ten" damn album since it's a damn masterpiece.
Mano Le Tough - Primative People (Tale Of Us Remix) [Permanent Vacation/#PERMVAC1052] -> When it first came out I didn't like it. One year later it was my favourite track...

Most of the stuff there, is "Techno" or at least it's what people call it. There are a couple of Melodic Techno tracks there. Hope you find something that makes you shake your head there ;)

 

Last edited: Jan 10, 2018

I wait until I'm sober, and then I retrace my steps

 

I find them crispy, and sometimes a little too stringy!

 

there are many tricks you can do here to get that certain pad ,if you are looking for fast tempo bright pads they usually sound better with
little EQ ,just cut the little muddy bass off it(more options with adding gate/sidechain/play with knobs on same plugin to your taste)
and same goes if you are looking for pads for slowtempo style, turn the cutoff and the oscillators ON untill u feel its the right sound
remember there are no rules in creating pads,combining two sounds,adding chrous,are all tricks and fun time

i know what you mean on spending time looking through presets for hours so to save time in studio
just concentrate on building the track itself in the begining arrange the paterns for first min (including verse part and chrous part
then build the intro and those part where it lifts the track up,get a good bass and pads and melodies,then add drums
im sure you know how to create tracks from get go,so usually pads are not first thing to produce if you are making fast tempo
unless you are armin vaan buuren lol,at least thats what he said in that tutorial video (in studio with AVB)

 

*

 

Hooohaaa, that is what im looking for, definitely will go thru that list to the fullest, and fill the gap of lack of knowledge about what’s up in that huge sound field!!! So appreciated, thanx for taking so much time to!!!!
And sorry to Original poster for being offtopic, but I bet it’s allright because of the rich info right here.

 

Since 1963 my instruments have found me. All very different stories, but each time the instrument popped up into my life. I didn't look. It came to me, ...if that makes any sense.

 

It makes perfect sense, in a Jedi Mind trick kind of way :P