Something Funky

April 26, 2012 7:22 AM

Mostly finished electro/house track that I'm working on, wouldn't mind some feedback...

posted by empath (7 comments total)

(Made with Ableton, Sylenth, Massive and a few other random plugins.)
posted by empath at 8:11 AM on April 26, 2012


I love how the percussion builds at the beginning. The snare that has a swoosh-type delay in the other ear is awesome. Great stuff!
posted by tunewell at 11:24 AM on April 26, 2012


That's from Ableton's built-in ping-pong delay if you're talking about the same thing i'm thinking of.
posted by empath at 12:52 PM on April 26, 2012


I'm not sure exactly what kind of sound you are going for. So I'm not sure what kind of comments to leave.

With the white noise sweeps, I'd recommend EQing some of the low end out of them, because they fill up the whole sonic spectrum, and can drown out the other elements at the peak of the swell.

I'd also suggest adding some minor drum variations in the last bar of the end of every 8 or 16 bars. I don't hear a bunch of turnarounds, which can help the track continue to evolve and not sound repetitive.

You might consider adding just a tiny bit of reverb to the snare drum, to help give the drums some space.

I'm not much of a fan of the small percussive elements bouncing left and right. I've had more success paring persussive elements together, and panning on slightly left and one slightly right; Plus you will loose that effect on a large sound system, which is usually in mono anyway.

Additionally, it sounds like the drums aren't sub-mixed. I could be wrong, but they don't sound too glued together, you might try grouping all the drums and then putting a multiband compressor on them to tighten all them up.

Adding the occasional automation to the Bass sound will help keep it from becoming too droney in the track. high passing it, or doing a delay through or two might help add some variation.
posted by djdrue at 2:15 PM on April 26, 2012 [2 favorites]


Thanks, that's all good stuff :)

It's not mastered at all, I'm still just arranging and figuring out what parts to put in and in which order....

As far as what I'm going for, i don't actually know :) These tracks are mostly learning experiences for me. I want to head in the direction of UK Funky or Garage eventually, but right now I'm trying to make what I can with what I actually know how to do, which basically means kind of lo-fi production and a retro sound...

The next step I was going to to was to load all the drums in geist and group them together, I'm more just trying to figure out a groove right now than anything else.

I guess 'mostly-finished' isn't a great description for where the track is right now :) More than half done is still 'mostly' right?
posted by empath at 2:20 PM on April 26, 2012


Geist is a pretty solid drum tool, and it should be able to give you all kinds of little quirks and shifts that you can apply to the drums to add variety. See if there's a global swing parameter, I'd play with that to take some of the drum hits off the grid to loosen the timing on the drums.

It doesn't matter if you run all the drums out of one audio track in Ableton, or if you configure Geist to run out of multiple out tracks. I'd still suggest running that whole group of drums through a multiband compressor (try the "Standard MultiBand Compressor" preset in the Multi Band Dyanmics Audio Effect unit in Ableton.)

I'd also suggest maybe kicking up the global tempo one or two bpm.
posted by djdrue at 11:35 AM on April 27, 2012


nice tune dude. not a music producer so can't get technical. agree a bit with the white noise sweeps/drum turnaround comment though.
posted by marienbad at 9:47 AM on May 1, 2012


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