my rant/plead for help

[anonnona]

well here's my rant...if you have a minute, or any knowledge that might help a fellow human, well, it would stop me from clawing the walls off.

my burning questions (and I mean they cause me actual pain):


- I come across mixes at soundcloud many times and the waveform looks like a solid BLOCK OF AUDIO PEAKING PERFECTLY AT -0.1db, *even during the quiet parts of the song <-??. Even when there's only an arpeggio happening all by itself.
Yes, I know: "well mastering is an art best left to a professional, bla bla bla", but these are mixes that were "mastered" in somebody's bedroom.
I would prefer not taking this question to the fking grave with me. and I've been asking it for fking years.
I can't get even close to that volume of sound without it starting to sound absolutely painfully bad.
An acquaintance said: "there's a rack, not t-tacks, you can just run your mix into it and it comes out like that".
I wish I knew so badly that it is actually keeping me awake at night and ruining my relationships, lol, heh, cry.
I can't hire a professional mastering engineer, and I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure the mixes I'm talking about didn't cost thousands either, they're just using something.

question/desperate rant#2:

I have too much fking software. And yes, I know: "just use what works for you". somebody like skrillex(who i'm beginning to hate anyway)
claims to use "only ableton live.." with his winey pretentious voice "i just use ableton in my laptop and headphones, i made my whole album with a blown speaker".
could ya be more full of sht?

I have Reason, Cubase, Logic, and Ableton Live, NI komplete, and...it's a problem.
I know the ins and outs of all of them. With Reason stuff comes together easily and it's fun.
I love how Logic works, Cubase has
the most amazing audio editor I've ever seen (with built-in melodyne thing).
Ableton Live just pisses me off but only because so many people are getting great results with it while to me its a horror show.
To automate, I have to use the Arrange window, and if I'm gonna use an arrange window, damned if i'm gonna deal with an app that always erases your automation with
every pass of an overdub.

So I'm sitting here and not making anything at all because of all this total bullshit. <-might as well put that guy there, even though I'm pretty much ready to give up.

[skimpi]

Fuck off all that software and just use logic, the synths and plug-ins in there are well enough to make good tracks. Don't just use ableton cos Skrillex uses it, 'Oh Skrillex uses ableton, so if I use it, I'll make phat trax too' if you dont get on with it, you dont get on. I have mates that use ableton and swear by it, I just cant be arsed to learn it so I dont.

With the mastering, I dont know how you would get everything to peak at -0.1, but why the fuck would you? Oh, just cos everyone else does? Fuck everyone else, dont make trax cos you wanna be everyone else, make your own shit, in your own way, with your own style of DIY mastering. If you send a sick track to a DJ, they arent gonna just dismiss it cos its not mastered, they will turn it up, but first its gotta be a good track, so just concentrate on making good, interesting beats.

[didi]

did anyone else read the original post in a whiny desperate voice?

no offence...


anyway, just sort out your monitoring, and get your mix right. Who cares what it looks like on sc? A big, punchy, spacious mix, handed to a good m.e. = phat tune.

[hudson]

LOL a solid brick wave-form is the exact opposite of what you want. Pick a DAW and just make music, don't worry about what your song looks like right now.

[Samuel_L_Damnson]

The brick looking wave form tunes you are talking about probably lack any dynamics, which IMHO is a very bad thing. Yes they will sound loud but the mix tends to suffer.

[Artie_Fufkin]

I have Reason, Cubase, Logic, and Ableton Live, NI komplete, and...it's a problem.
I know the ins and outs of all of them.

I'm pretty much ready to give up.

You bought and learned how to use all that and you're ready to give up? (I'll take it off your hands....)

Stop looking at waveforms! Just listen to the music and make it sound good first. Your friends/girls/whoever you are making this music for that you want to impress aren't going to care what it looks like.

Here's a legitimate reason to look at your waveform:

[Jas0n]

I have Reason, Cubase, Logic, and Ableton Live, NI komplete, and...it's a problem.
I know the ins and outs of all of them.

I'm pretty much ready to give up.

You bought and learned how to use all that and you're ready to give up? (I'll take it off your hands....)

Stop looking at waveforms! Just listen to the music and make it sound good first. Your friends/girls/whoever you are making this music for that you want to impress aren't going to care what it looks like.

Here's a legitimate reason to look at your waveform:

I LOL'd pretty hard at the waveform.

[Jas0n]

First thought when you talk about the waveforms though ... compression comes to mind. You can pretty easily use a compressor to blast everything up to peak. Second thought, lots and lots of that sound could be inaudible. It is NOT ideal to have a solid brick of sound... especially when you're talking about soft spots and arpeggiation. It sounds to me like someone has stuff - a lot of stuff - going on below sub bass range, or something along those lines.

With regard to your software problem, it sounds like you're suffering a combination of an oversaturation of available resources, and an undersaturation of inspiration. There's an easy cure for the first (drastically reduce your arsenal, force yourself to really get creative with one DAW or even one synth), but as for the second, you're on your own.

I'm not a huge fan of Skrillex but I do appreciate him as an artist. I think people set themselves up for failure when they frame their experiments against his work. Love him, hate him, or be completely indifferent to him, doesn't really matter ... he's taken something extraordinarily difficult (shall we say elusive, as in a goal?) and made it look easy as pie.

[VirtualMark]

So I'm sitting here and not making anything at all because of all this total bullshit.

What bullshit? Make some good tunes, on one DAW, then worry about mastering. You don't need to torrent five DAW's to make good tunes, most pro's just use one and do fine. You'll never get fast on all of them, it takes a while to learn one inside out. And read about mixdowns, stereo panning, eqing etc, that's how you'll get your tune sounding better. Of course having good sounds and a good arrangement comes first tho.

And stop hating on Skrillex, you've not even come close to achieving anything in music yet, so you can't really criticize his methods. Its getting old now, tired of reading whiny posts about him.

[Kochari]

^ The fuuuuuuuuck is going on with that waveform?

[syrup]

^ The fuuuuuuuuck is going on with that waveform?

OP, no offence but you sound like a whiny...

[Artie_Fufkin]

^ The fuuuuuuuuck is going on with that waveform?

It's what happens when you pirate an NI product

[dj nation]

did anyone else read the original post in a whiny desperate voice?

no offence...

+1 again no offence, i also couldnt agree more with the person who said strip down your arsenal, 1 DAW n 1 synth. all you need mate, i was kinda like this aswell. but then i just started learning ableton and massive through n through and also dropped the whole 'i need to make sick tunes that other ppl will like' attitude and things just flow better.

just my 2 kronors