My newest creation. Check it y'all
http://soundcloud.com/elronncee/no-te-vayas

Really cool song, I like it a lot.

How'd you make it? Samples / synths (for guitar esp.) / where'd you get the vocals?

Sounds pretty clean too.

Thanks man, much appreciated.

I use Reason 5 to make all my songs thus far. Thinking on trying Ableton live cause I have heard many good things about it, but for now sticking with what I know.

The vocals and guitar are only from 1 sample. It was a song I found on Youtube from a fado singer. I recorded the song from Youtube w/ Audio Hijack Pro and then load it into Audacity. From Audacity, I took the opening part of the song (the guitar), and cut it up and arranged it differently to form the main lead you hear through most of the song using Recycle.

I found small vocal parts in the song that I liked and just played around with them over the beat using my MPC until I found something that flowed well. I have the same vocal sample four times through the song using different effects and automation that basically just increase volume, reverb and other subtle changes.

The synth was a Thor patch I found and tweaked the lfo a little bit and added a arpeggiator and set it to 1/16 playing over 3 octaves, added reverb, slight delay etc.

The cleanliness of the sound is something I have been struggling with. I've only been making music electronically for about 5 months, and found that boosting just about everything with a compressor and a maximizer and adjusting through EQ helps to make a clear sound and boost it at the same time.

Anymore questions I'd be happy to answer.

Hey guys, technical Q. I have some instrumentals but I don't know how to fix them. Basically have reverb on violins, sounds good but there's too much "excess" echo, if I turn reverb down it reduces echo but flattens the sound back down which I don't want. I dunno if you'll get what I mean :S If you do tho, any ideas on what sort of plugin could help with this?

Are you turning down the decay time? A gate maybe would work. You could try volume automation too.

Try tweaking the room size first (sounds like the room is too big for what you want), and then the decay as Prana says.

Basically the prob was that I had the decay and room set how I wanted, when I made them that way they were echoing out some nice bass notes that weren't coming out before, so I couldn't turn them down, but there was excess echo coming from the high end that I had to get rid of without changing the rest of the sound. EQ didn't work so I randomly clicked buttons on a compressor for half n hour and stuck some strings plugin on it which worked.

Most reverbs have hi frequency cuts and lo frequency cuts available. You could also try playing with that to shape the sound of the reverb.

Yeah I played with that high end reverb thing and it helped. The finished songs here http://soundcloud.com/purrrty/spartacus I dunno if the violins ended up too shrill after messing with them, or if I could have mixed/mastered it better or something. I'm a noob with electronic music so any constructive criticism welcome.

Cocteau,

I thought it sounded great. Could easily extend that another 2 minutes and make a song. Was wondering who the random was that followed me on soundcloud

For some reason most things I do end up a minute n a half long lol, I don't know why.


I'm interested in hearing about mixing/mastering techniques if people wanna share.

As far as I've learnt there's no special way to do it and how you would approach it depends on the song. Having said that there could be some basics or something that could be good to know. I use ableton and have a list of plugins that could be used on things but tbh I'm not really sure where to use them, I've just be sticking them on and seeing if they make things sound better. I've probably made some things sound better but some worse in the process, esp with the multiband dynamics :S

I try to follow the method of having all my instruments to 12db and the master to 6db before converting the song and "mastering" it, but my songs always end up around 12db on the master and then 6db when it's finished >:d
I find it hard to get volume levels right for things because in ableton it sounds one way but once it's been converted to wav the volume levels sound totally different.

I think you have a setting wrong in Ableton for your exports. There is something called normalize. If you have that highlighted, it will make everything the same volume. Make sure that is off. I have done a decent amount of file exporting from Ableton, and, without fail, it has been what I expected to hear.

I'm also completely unsure what you mean by 6dB and 12dB, as neither of those, in the context you are using them, are any kind of numbers that make sense to anyone who does sound for a living. I'm guessing you mean where you have your "faders" set? Generally, the top of the audio level scale is digital 0 (I doubt any modern workstations default to analog metering), and everything else goes down in -numbers. There are lots of ways to measure sound, so that number can sound a lot different on different mixes, depending on the "density" of the sound. Just because something is mixed at the same level as another song doesn't mean it will sound the same. What you're doing inside those obvious numbers everyone knows about is usually what makes the difference.

Most people who aren't professional have a really hard time with multi-band dynamics. I'm sure many professionals also have a really hard time with multi-band dynamics. Look at what it's doing, while listening to what's going through it. If you can hear it pumping, you're not using it right, unless that's what your intent is.

Anybody have any tips for extracting vocals from songs?

I've been using Audacity and have messed around with it for hours with no real positive results.

Only real tutorials I've seen using Audacity require mixing together the actual song with an instrumental version resulting in the "leftovers" which is primarily vocals with not as much of the instruments coming through.

I just don't have instrumental versions of the songs I'm looking to extract from. Any help is appreciated.

Look everywhere you can for instrumentals, because that's really the only thing that will help you out.

nunnehi, I have normalize off and dither off as well and then import the wav file back in and then try to master it, then put dither back on when I export out. I was thinking it might be what I'm listening to the song on, which is winamp, so it sounds different, like it would probably sound different on a hi fi compared to winamp and ableton? What do you listen to your songs on when you export? Maybe winamp has some settings that make it sound diff.

With the db I meant to say -12 and -6. The individual instruments at or around -12 but the master not going over -6db, and then when it's mastered the master doesn't go over 0db. Although by the time I get there everything always ends up too quiet anyways. Also my settings are 44100 and 24bit.