I am not a musician. I have no musical background whatsoever other than "oh that sounds cool". I dont play any instruments (im learning the piano now) I just make music to have something to listen to while I draw and I dont really like mixing because it pulls me out of my groove. Apologies to the audiophiles who start bleeding from the ears should you decide to listen ...

this may not sound like music

I use to sample...ALOT.. Then it got to a point where I would start taking the samples out of tracks to see what I had left. Disapppointing stuff there...just a kick, some hats and a loud snare. This link is to my early tracks I made somewhere around 2014:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q0zh08kkimwn4zz/AAA6jRmKmrdtx1hWufYYaInla?dl=0

That realization got me back to making original tracks, I still sample, but a lot less. This is a link to my most recent attempts at something with a little more movement.. if thats what its called.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/qttgvp73teko4q1kjegy9/h?dl=0&rlkey=c0e68xhg8q6tabcbkl7dd0xm9
It feels like hyperactivity.


so yeah I thought I would share my growth with you guys. Ive been making music for a while but Its only for fun and enjoyment.

To the uploaders, dude, I cant thank yall enough for the efforts, the instruments and sound effects I am able to experiment with! This site has been mad helpful along my musical journey.

Questions:
1. How do I achieve realistic horn (trumpet and sax - Christian Scott?) movement? Is it speed? Velocity? Layering?
2. What effects do I add to guitars to make them sound just....mmm damn crunchy (Tides From Nebula - The New Delta) or really lush (Carolyn Malachi - Beautiful Dreamer)
3. How do I crank up the volume of pianos but keep them really soft????
4. What drum vst is closest to Anime intros?
5. Whats the most effective technique for chopping/blending samples into an original mix so that they sound almost like an instrument in the background?

If you have any mixing suggestions.. Id like to hear them because all im familiar with (can use properly to some degree) is Parametric Eq and Reverb everything else is time consuming.

 

Last edited: Mar 3, 2023

These questions can be self answered by closely observing "HOW" real players of these instruments perform live. Not just one or two, but 100s - on each instrument, if you truly care about attempting to make samples be semi- realistic or sound as real as possible.
Much of this comes from understanding "HOW" they phrase, their musical dynamics (not DAW mixing technique), how certain notes and phrases run together, what the ranges of all instruments you wish to use are, how and when special techniques are used effectively and when for example "No trumpet player would ever play it like that", understanding that in music there are two kinds of dynamics - volume/amplitude dynamics and intensity dynamics. The latter answers question 3 and it is only simulated in MIDI with velocity and expression mapping.

You will never do it perfectly but if you cannot understand or imitate the above and there is much more than what I have listed, then the greatest samples and MIDI programming in the world won't make any difference. It will not sound real or remotely authentic.

 

Gonna use dropbox and update. Sorry about that.

 

Very true. Should have been super obvious. The simplest things I overlook sometimes.

 

My bass guitar attempt is on the last track in the droboxlink. "Calyscos Revenge".

 

We are ALL human. The number of times people have gone looking for their car keys or house key through the entire house and they walked past it several times is astronomical. Sometimes the things we need most, we already have at our disposal, right in front of us the whole time.

 

It is lol. I do too often.

So back to my Piano issue. I make music in FL Studio. Whenever I turn down the velocity and get the keys to a soft gentle press. it sort of sounds TOO quiet but when I turn up the instrument in the mixer rack it loses that softness. I been tinkering with that for a while and I just cant quite nail it. I hear it all the time in well mixed piano tracks. I guess a good question is how can I get it to sound up close without the key press gaining intensity?

 

It's hard trying to get VST bass or whatever else to sound "realistic" but man they are getting really damned close.

A certain amount of realism can be fished out with key switches and velocity layers but it's never going to be the same.

Here is an example for my personal experience with messing around with wood vs chips. Two classical guitars, same player, one is an attainable guitar made by for regular humans that hangs around at my house and the other one is sampled from a great guitar by the folks at ample sound. Now of course they are going to sound different, but I don't prefer the sampled one regardless of the hours I spent on the midi recording, proding, tweaking and adjusting over the 15 minutes it took to do a few assays, a few takes and then choosing one.

Now I spent some time on this, but one of the issues is that when playing on a keyboard I will make different choices. The idea was the same but it wasn't written down and with each instrument only a few days apart I made different choices. Some things I can no longer do in real life and maybe could never have done on a wood guitar as far as timing and procession go and some things I just can't make a sampled guitar do regardless of how long I spend on it.

Key switches, velocity layers and whatever else will only get you so close. However, regardless of my preferences I don't think either of them is bad. They are just different. Sometimes close enough, is close enough.

The rest is just taste.

 

Try using an compressor with a negative ratio or dynamics with an expander function. adjust to taste. You can bring up the bottom and crush the top but there is only so much you can do. No matter how much you try you just can't satisfy a horny female whale if you are horny male chihuahua. round holes and square pegs kind of deal.

 

I see what you mean. They both sound really good though! The first guitar has a lot of subtle nuances that the second doesnt. I know that might be a real challenge as far as that level of realism goes. Timing, though, thats the thing I know i need to work at. So would changing the swing help or hurt?

my bad if these questions are mad basic.

Maybe I asked the question wrong. is it possible, in the mixer, to make a soft note louder without that plunk (no idea what its called lol) that sound you get when pressing a key quickly with some force? or is it just what a key does as the volume goes up regardless of what i do to the velocity in the piano roll?

 

A is the fake, well sampled one...

There are four way to approach this getting the soft press to be louder.

So you record your 'soft sound' at whatever level it sounds right and then use the processors to give you the volume you need or want.

One is a dynamics processor (compressor/expanded) that will take any sound bellow a certain threshold and make it louder. So it will have a slope that starts at say -45dB and will apply whatever ratio you choose from there to increase the volume on that sound as it plays through until it reaches the threshold at which point it will do nothing.

Like a compressor but backwards.

The more granular way is just to add gain/volume to the parts you want made louder with automation, a gate would help here as in some places you will get the noise floor involved. That is how you would do it in the mixing process.

The other way is to go into your sampler.

You can load the patch settings and remap the soft hits to cover the whole range from 0-127 and remove the velocity triggered harder hits that have the sound of the hammer on string flam. Or you could just choose a patch that is a soft or felt piano, those don't tend have as much of the hammer sound.


That covers it all, not much else outside of that.

 

Something that might help. Turn your speakers up till the majority of regular music you have from commercial sources is actually painful to listen to. Do your mixing and recording at that setting at level that is comfortable to quieter than what you would generally consider acceptable.

Be-careful at those settings - loud instrument patches can before a real PITA.

At that level stop looking at meters, if you are even getting close to clipping anything on any meter the first thing you need is more powerful speakers. You now have the headroom required to mix your tracks to sound how you want without having to ever worry about cliping and bussing. You can always turn them up and squash them later, but you can't ungrind meat and make a steak once you've turned it into sausage.

 

There are lots of ways you can do this. I do not use FL Studio. It is a fine DAW I have been told. Does it have MIDI expression mapping? Even if not, the best way to get your dynamics right is in the input playing itself. That is, you manually playing it in, dynamics and all, live.

If you have issues getting it right in real time, the advantage with MIIDI is huge. I treat it all like a live performance but that is not for everyone.
Therefore, to get the dynamics, the beauty with MIDI is that you can slow it right down and play it in at a speed where you can capture all of the nuances and speed it up after you have the take. Additionally, wherever possible, if realism is your true aim, do not quantize. Manually shift the MIDI notes that bug you if there are any, paying attention to keep the feeling you have portrayed in a non-quantized and dynamic performance.. As great as quantizing is for perfection, realism means human. Human means it is not perfect. If machines could do it perfectly and not just approximate, they would not have "Humanize" buttons which never are truly close enough if you over-quantize.

When you hear a piece of music that not only sounds great it feels great, remember that and why and the how. If your tune feels great as a raw bed, keep that as your foundation and do not let anything interrupt it. You can take this onboard or not, but I have found it never fails. Cheers

 

Wai- What?! so those little bits in-between notes are an indication of a sample? It sounds natural.
Yeah I'm gonna listen again a little closer.. is that instrument on the sister site?

Okay compression I'll try. My thing is I'm never sure what I'm doing to any mix using one. Like I know it makes things louder and I like it but it always seems to have a ripple effect across the entire track thats makes me end up not using it.

This is something I sort of do naturally from the start. After putting together one loop I turn everything way up and the sort of adjust it to sound decent and keep going. I primarily use a pair of audio technica ath for this..my desktop speakers are straight up horrible lol. That could be a reason I'm don't hear certain frequencies.

I feel like theres a lesson in there somewhere but i cant stop laughing at the imagery.. I'm gonna go try to ungrind some meat now lol

The raw bed I do enjoy ALOT but I know there is a pinch that can be added that will sound even better to me. I WANT to enhance certain things that I hear as I listen but I don't want that to cause a chain reaction that will lead me to adding effects across the entire track if it makes sense.

Dude I honestly...never even thought about that! I was just trying to keep up with the tempo. Not that I was playing fast, Im still a beginner lol. That just never crossed my mind. Super helpful

 

I hear what you are saying. Simpler, if you lose the feel of it in the process then for me and perhaps just me, it becomes a 'back to square one'.

 

Yep, I've had a few tracks end up like that. I usually end up taking all of the sounds that I like from projects that dont quite work and turn them into something else. It almost always fans the flame.

Ill keep you guys' tips in mind while working on my next project