Recently i started to examine beautiful track GIMME MORE produced by Danja. This track is top tier production. I downloaded multitracks and have few questions. I noticed they always have two tracks on every instrument and every element is stereo.

Two kick track - slightly stereo https://imgur.com/a/BTB3GHb,

bass 1 - slightly stereo https://imgur.com/a/yr2Q2xf,
bass 2 - slightly stereo https://imgur.com/a/ZC5MSab,
bass 3 - alost full stereo.

I zoom in on kick and really see no difference between tracks https://imgur.com/a/ba3AtIK, but it is still slightly stereo. I mean, if i just duplicate one of this track and pan hard left and right of course it will be mono (straight line on center), but when i pan these hatd left and right i get slightly stereo. Thats mean channels slightly different, but how?

Another question is that i noticed many many producers slightly speed up tracks - here they speed it up (varispeed, no warping) in 35 cents (2% percent). Why they do that? Charlie Puth said in masterclass they do it to stand out among other tracks. Really? If you need multitracks i think i can share it. But i found it somewhere on the web. Thank you.

 

it's easier to say what someone did rather than why they did it. but here is a few wild guesses. I could be totally wrong.

The "duplicated" channels are just to increase the loudness of that part, without overdriving a single channel instead.

The reason you are seeing "slight stereo" on your correlation meter, is because each side is different, but only slightly. The reason for this can be to create a little bit of a Haas Effect. It can increase the perception of stereo width, without using an imaging tool or altering the actual waveform information. A common way to do this is to just apply a tiny # of samples delay on one side Right or Left.

I haven't ever heard of using a trick like the speed increase "to stand out among other tracks". But again, to hazard a guess; it is to shorten the tail of each hit. Since the sample start is locked to the BPM grid, the increase in speed will preserve the transient, but shorten the tail. That can result in a "cleaner" sound between the hits, because there will be more space between each event's transient. I will usually use a transient shaper/designer plugin to shorten tails without any "speed change". Maybe it's the same kind of intent.

So my guess is that the producer wanted to make the changes he wanted to hear, but without actually altering any of the waveforms. Like you said, someone knows what they are doing.

 

Hey, thanks for answering.

About Haas effect - as you can see here https://imgur.com/a/ba3AtIK, there is no delay at all. These waveform are identical but yet it slightly stereo.

About speedup - interesting, but when you speed up a track without warping the relative distance stays the same.

I checked other sounds and i found the only one true mono track - https://imgur.com/a/IZTgn6g.
Thats mean - other intstruments as kick and bass are in stereo intentionally. According to that, why they have always 2 mono tracks instead of 1 stereo? Even with perc that true mono you can see they have perc L and perc R. Maybe its just the way its multitrack organized but idk.

 

tempo is often increased to give a sense of urgency or intensity, tempo is decreased to add tranquilty and pacing. Part of being a good versus average or poor musician is understanding how to emphasize parts as well as to add interest by changing phrasing in passages and understanding nuance and timing.

though I will say a bog standard britney spears song is a damn poor choice for understanding nuance or phrasing, but everyone must start somewhere.....

additionally Clone's post is spot on, instruments are frequently doubled to add body and volume to a part, and tracks can be moved slightly out of sync to give more space or air to that track.

watch how to make your beats break harder

 

Thanks for answering. I understand your point, but i think 0.5 billion stream song deserves some attention. Never heard about pure doubling track just to add body. I thought its made through direct mixing. Anyway, thanks for video

 

You can choose this import option in Logic. Align Bars+Beats will shift the initial transients back to the grid position. That's the easy way. But you can also use Flex Time, which does not warp it at all. It uses hitpoint detection like Recycle, and lets you move the transients only so they snap to grid. But I do get what you mean. Why do you think no warping has been used at all, anyway? You would not see that with bounced/printed stems or tracks when they are reloaded.

Is this not one of the premises of New York/Parallel compression?

 

Last edited: May 13, 2024

at some point your will realize there is music, and there is the music business they converge at a few points but are mostly entirely different things. what you are interested in is entertainment based on music. not music per se. Good music can be popular but often isn't. Popular music can be good, but often isn't....

 

are there any real mono single files in the pack at all? its a while ago when i got stems bounced out of protools but i think in PT also mono files are converted into L+R tracks in the end. or at least, lot of mix engineers do it that why. don't know why though. also confused me back in the days.

 

No. Every mono track presented as multi mono L and multi mono R. That way mono instrument in this project has 4 channel ( 2 multi mono L and 2 multi mono R). Of course its similar if there is would be 1 channel.

 

You may want to raise the bar a little to productions like 24K by Bruno Mars, or Dynamite by BTS, or Levitating by Dua Lipa.

Technically the production of this song is under Baby one more Time: the bass lacks the lowend, a very weak kick, lots of distortion, loud midrange and no hihats (so a huge potential harshness generator less). I suspect those producers of not knowing shit rather than being some geniuses.

However...

The attention should be on the songwriting, and the huge hook - those are the drivers of this song.

 

wouldn't those be mixing problems?

Dua Lipa's Don't stop Now has half the quality of Levitating's production and double the streams.
that scarbee bass bugs the sht out of me! Ian could've so easily hired an actual bass player, the song would be much better

 

Last edited: May 14, 2024

Where did you get the stems?

There are lots of multitracks that are unexplainably stereo (or at least I haven't heard of the explanation). Even songs from the 70s. I don't think Mick Fleetwood's kick drum was double tracked to make it sound huge in Dreams lol.

 

If i remember from first link on Google. I mean, i think it was not double tracked initially. I just curious how drums and bass are slightly stereo if L and R identical. And why they did it slightly stereo at all

 

apart from loudness, I think the slight difference in time for the track is intentional, production technique or some sort, to make things a bit sloppier for vibe or something. you can hear from the final track, it's not solid hitting sound with sharp transient but a little sloppier (it obvious on the kick) and has some sort of dragging feelings to it.

 

You're not familiar with Danja and Miss Lago (mix engineer) ain't you? I mean of course everybody can say what they think about music, you can like stuff, dislike stuff and it's all good but reading that about Danja , come on ... This guy is a BEAST, top tier producer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danja_production_discography

 

Maaannnn, what a masterpieeeece!

>====>>> Not there anymore....

 

Playing with phase on low freq content is ALWAYS a bad choice.
If you want more transients, just add ONLY a kick transient track.
There is nothing "louder" by cloning a track : just push your track by +3dB

You want that agressive "drums attack" effect ? Just do some "positive" delay compensation on drumbus (ex ; 5ms BEFORE the other tracks).
Drums will hit before the rest, creating a "running front" effect.

There are a lot of tricks.
But doubling a kick in stereo Haas effect ... why not doing it on bass too ?
Or using Tone2 crappy "psycho acoustic" synths and effects for kick and bass, and ruin everything ?

Even a noob like me know it is a BAD idea by nature : any bass freq content in stereo will SUCK due to bass freq cancelling.
That's why ppl are using mono bass freq only (ex : under 120 Hz) for decades.
It is not to be "fancy" ...

There are countless ways to fake stereo on bass freq content (kick, bass ...).
Like splitting freqs, bass mono and upper stereo.
Or making a main mono "full" track, and adding a stereo layer with mid / high only.

Cherry on the top : a lot of public diffusion systems ARE MONO (like supermarket, halls ...)
To sum it up : for whatever reason they done it ... it was a BAD reason

 

Classic ignorant take...

The singer might have had a controversial track record (I think she was iconic af though being a straight man lol) but discrediting the producer is just dumb. To anyone analysing and learning, try to learn not just what makes a song great, but also what makes another song not so great for you.
I was once analysing a britney song too, what might seem like a dumb cookie cutter is a masterclass in songwriting. The song is called 'womanizer'.

womanizer is in phrygian mode, borrows the #II7 from lydian, to move to its own 2nd chord half step below

#II7-> IImaj7

it came from descending movement of all notes from previous i6 chord and this change moves those notes further down.

when this change happens, all notes shift down half step while one note, the key note of the song remains the same(7th in the chords)

think of it as tritone sub dominant to its original II chord.

Never heard anything like this in a pop song. Max Martin veils this complexity really well.

You can either learn, or just be bitter and ignorant.

 

if learning would take my bitterness away, that at least explains my resistance to it

 

After two songs of Britney Spear, i just had to clean my ears with that :

I'm out ...