slim wrote:The other majken vsts are nice too, Chimera is such a good idea.

Worth repeating for emphasis. Chimera is my favourite pad synth at the moment, and the concept behind it (subtractive white noise synthesis?) is a brilliant one. It's such a haunting sound with so much natural movement.

Not sure if this is a tip or a technique, but I'm having fun playing effects plug ins. For instance, a reverbs room size and various cutting and damping controls can be used to pick tonal areas from a sample, to the point where it can be made to sound like a (weird) monophonic synth. Also, flanger ...

I get that for professionals, it must be pretty useless unless you know and trust the person giving their opinion. You know that people will listen to your tracks for pleasure, so one of those people complaining about a noise or some phrasing doesn't matter. In fact, if you did take every bit of ...

Depends on how the waveform is represented. A stereo signal is obviously composed of two waveforms, and outbound seems to suggest that the viewer used represents differences between the waveforms with this offset. For a mono signal, it should just be amplitude. Pretty much any real audio ...

As far as I know, the only way it would impact audio is by wasting some available amplitude - if you were to normalise it, you can imagine only the lower half would touch the minimum value, restricting the amplitude of the signal. If you were to remove the DC offset and normalise, you would notice ...

Ha, just the first ridiculous genre that I know the evolution of off the top of my head.

Sample choice is obviously a big part of it. In terms of the production itself, the main thing for me about break tracks is always the drums: they generally sound like live samples, sometimes they sound live. There's velocity variation, and he leaves a lot of room (for DnB) in his drum lines. The ...

(Re)production in art is like reproduction and evolution in the animal kingdom. A constant attempt at making a copy of something that's been proven as beneficial, but with each copy there's some some tiny mutation, amounting to a small change from the original. And a couple of years later, all ...

I'll just wiegh in adding my voice to the chorus of a good arrangement.

That said, a lot of the tracks I DJ I find deathly boring to listen to unmixed. There is something to be said for a simple track as a blank canvas for live performance - although I don't think I'd release such a thing unless ...

For headphones, I'm a big fan of AIAIAI. I'm using TMA-1s at the moment (my home listening/djing phones) but I'd like to get some of the producer versions. I went around BPM with £200 to spend and my favourite test tracks. I was looking for punchy bass, relatively flat response, easy to drive, low ...

I'm just starting out, and I've found that imitation has really helped up until now. In order to imitate a sound, you need to develop your analysis skills to the point you can pick out why you even like the thing you're imitating, what really makes it work etc. Once you've successfully imitated ...

@Smalltock: I'm not a big fan of the intro synth - although it does work much better with the beat. I think it's because it's not a sound porn synth, it doesn't sound like it's played live and it doesn't have much (obvious) modulation. Any or all of that would help I think. When the drums first come ...