So I'll quickly get to the main details and avoid doing the whole personal information.
I have been attempting to practice music production for over 6 years now, with several, significantly long intervals in the 6 years.
To be honest I never really considered myself a musician and all of the knowledge that I have is because of my elder brother, who is a legit musician (drummer). I was always interested in SFX, psychedelic sound spaces, good ambience and well arranged bass music, which is what I have been attempting to make ever since (with a little influence of hip-hop).
I use Ableton Live 10 and all my plugins are purchased (not that I have any really expensive ones, just make most of the plugin boutique sales). I have a windows PC and everything works perfectly.
Now I'll start spelling out all of my doubts:
- None of the mixes I make ever sound complete or full. They're always flat, panning is very random, and there's never enough punch/presence in my sounds/instruments.
- Although I ensure to keep a check on my levels, and EQ my sounds, making sure to leave enough headroom in the master channel, I end up having frequencies fighting for stereo space.
- I feel like selecting the right timbers to make a nice family of sounds is a very tough skill to acquire. Because although I try to extract sounds from existing sounds, I never end up making it sound 'one'.
- I don't have a particular process that I follow, and end up putting ideas down at random and just build from there.
- I feel really demotivated because over the years, even though my knowledge pertaining to music production is growing, the application of that knowledge is really hard to implement.
- One final thing that I can remember as of now, I usually layer a few kick drums to make one big kick, but yesterday my brother fixed my kick drum (in 5 minutes). He replaced 2 of the kicks that I had selected, one with an 808 which he used as the boom/sub kick and another studio recorded kick (from the Ableton library) for the body and left the click that I had added on their earlier. This made the kick so much clearer and better. I was wondering if this is a standard practice or is he just some wizard.
Also, after hearing my mix he mentioned I should use better sounds/timbers and have a musical melody. Now that is something I felt that was debatable because of the type of music I want to make. He isn't a big fan of electronic music and doesn't even consider it music. He's more on the 'play it' grind. I'll definitely upload a sample of the track that I'm mentioning here in this thread, based on the response I'm getting, to broaden my perspective.
Basically I'm here to just get tips, guidance, advice and anything else that'll help me become a better music producer.
Thanks and regards,
Rohan
I have been attempting to practice music production for over 6 years now, with several, significantly long intervals in the 6 years.
To be honest I never really considered myself a musician and all of the knowledge that I have is because of my elder brother, who is a legit musician (drummer). I was always interested in SFX, psychedelic sound spaces, good ambience and well arranged bass music, which is what I have been attempting to make ever since (with a little influence of hip-hop).
I use Ableton Live 10 and all my plugins are purchased (not that I have any really expensive ones, just make most of the plugin boutique sales). I have a windows PC and everything works perfectly.
Now I'll start spelling out all of my doubts:
- None of the mixes I make ever sound complete or full. They're always flat, panning is very random, and there's never enough punch/presence in my sounds/instruments.
- Although I ensure to keep a check on my levels, and EQ my sounds, making sure to leave enough headroom in the master channel, I end up having frequencies fighting for stereo space.
- I feel like selecting the right timbers to make a nice family of sounds is a very tough skill to acquire. Because although I try to extract sounds from existing sounds, I never end up making it sound 'one'.
- I don't have a particular process that I follow, and end up putting ideas down at random and just build from there.
- I feel really demotivated because over the years, even though my knowledge pertaining to music production is growing, the application of that knowledge is really hard to implement.
- One final thing that I can remember as of now, I usually layer a few kick drums to make one big kick, but yesterday my brother fixed my kick drum (in 5 minutes). He replaced 2 of the kicks that I had selected, one with an 808 which he used as the boom/sub kick and another studio recorded kick (from the Ableton library) for the body and left the click that I had added on their earlier. This made the kick so much clearer and better. I was wondering if this is a standard practice or is he just some wizard.
Also, after hearing my mix he mentioned I should use better sounds/timbers and have a musical melody. Now that is something I felt that was debatable because of the type of music I want to make. He isn't a big fan of electronic music and doesn't even consider it music. He's more on the 'play it' grind. I'll definitely upload a sample of the track that I'm mentioning here in this thread, based on the response I'm getting, to broaden my perspective.
Basically I'm here to just get tips, guidance, advice and anything else that'll help me become a better music producer.
Thanks and regards,
Rohan