In this post, I want to talk about an interesting way to find drums for your songs: sampling them from other songs.

I traditionally used sample libraries and virtual instruments like Battery 3 to make my grooves. Of course, I always added some effects to give them my own style, but you can only add so many effects before the sound begins to get away from what you originally wanted.

I was listening to a few tracks the other day and I was thinking of how good the drums sounded. I tried to recreate them, but I couldn’t get the exact sound. So, instead of trying to imitate them, why not use them directly?

Battery 3 screenshot

Some people will say that this is immoral and that it violates copyright. However, remember that we live in the digital age and all these notions are pretty vague. The entire drum and bass scene was based on the amen break. The nu-jazz and acid jazz genres, use samples from old jazz recordings all the time. It has become pretty much a standard in many genres to sample someone other’s song. Of course, this doesn’t mean you will rip-off the entire track. We are talking about sampling a tiny part of the whole song here. So small, that no-one would really notice.

So, all this is pretty simple. First, you must be really accustomed to using the scissors tool of your DAW of choice. You must also be good in reading waveforms. A good help in reading waveforms are transients. These are non-harmonic elements of sound that are characterized by an instant increase in amplitude (this is not a scientific definition, but it’s pretty much the overall picture). Transients help you seperate the different elements of a groove. In fact, many algorithms, like Cubase’s, are based on transients in order to split a drum loop.

The sudden peak here is what we call a "transient"

Once you take the piece of sound you want, don’t forget that it is likely to need some more processing. Everything in a song needs processing during the mixing phase, however, your sample, taken that it is from an album recording, is already mixed and mastered. This will give it a different sound from than if it wasn’t processed at all and maybe you’ll have to keep that in mind when you reprocess it. However, all the reprocessing is actually good, because it will change again the sound of the original sample opening up new possibilites.

You might have heard of Burial, a very popular dubstep artist. I was reading a discussion some time ago, where they talked about Burial’s drums, saying that it was all the resampling and processing that gives his drums their distinct sound. And anyone who is a fan of Burial will recognize that the drums he uses are really unique. His samples, however, are not that many. I believe that he must use only a few sounds for his loops. Their timbre however, is so special, that they help consolidate his unique style. This is the power of a great sound design!

Burial’s Untrue is a really great album. Listen to it when you get the chance!

When you are mixing you are going to need to use some EQ to make the instruments sit together. When you are boosting a frequency, try to use a wide curve. In that way, the boosting seems more natural and musical. On the other hand, when you are cutting frequencies, try to use a very steep curve.

When you are first using an EQ on an instrument use a band filter with a very high volume setting and a somewhat low Q setting, so that you can hear the various frequencies more clearly. Then boost or cut the frequencies you want.

High boost setting, low Q

A very nice way to make the instruments sit better in the mix, is to make a cut to a cerain frequency to all the instruments, when you make a boost in one of them. So for example, if you boost the 2000hz range in the guitar, then make a cut in this range to all the other instruments. Of course, this applies mainly to instruments who are on the same side of the stereo field. If you have panned two instruments hard left and right, you’ll probably not need this, as they’ll sit together anyway.

A wide boost

A steep cut

Lately, I’ve been mixing my new album (http://raskolnikovsdream.com). If you listen to my pieces you’ll see that I layer a lot of sound on top of one another. When you are mixing, the main focus is how to stack all these different sounds together. Sometimes, the sounds are all on the same frequency range, something that makes it quite difficult to mix them.

Enter panning. Panning is the location of the different elements on the stereo field. Back, in the days of yore, everything was mono. That means that there was only one channel for both left and right speakers. Stereo, seperates the signal into left and right. This creates a fuller sound, but the reason that stereo was created was not only to create a fuller sound, but to emulate a realistic live performance.

The next step after stereo is surround audio, but surround audio is something that is mostly reserved for audiophiles, since it is difficult to set up.

Surround panning in Cubase

Now, panning, as we said, concerns the placement of the audio elements in the stereo field from left to right. One of the biggest mistakes one can make is to place everything in the center. Let’s say for example that you are trying to mix a guitar with a vocal track and you place both in the center. The sound won’t be so clear. Now, try to move the guitar to the left. Suddenly, the vocals become clearer. This is what panning is for.

However, the stereo field has to be balanced. You should move audio tracks that share the same frequency spectrum equally to the left and to the right. So, for example, you should balance the guitar on the left, with a high hat on the right. Furthermore, you should know that everything placed in the center sounds more pronounced. So, you should leave the center for things like vocals, bass and kick drums. Vocals, because they are very important and bass and kick drum because low frequency sounds are not perceived very clearly by our ears and if you move them left or right they will mess the perception of the whole mix.

Anyway, sorry for not having written. You can subscribe to my feed, so that, when I post the new articles you will be informed immediately

Thank you for the support, thus far. I am planning to come back

Alright, there will be one time or another, where you might want to take a synth sound and make it sound fatter and more analog. This kind of sound is difficult to reproduce in soft synths. Most quality digital soft synths, try to have their own distinct digital sound, leaving analog-like sounds to dedicated analog emulation synths.

One of the best emulations I have heard is Arturia’s Analog Factory. Another one is Admiral Polyanna. Native Instrument’s Pro – 53 is also very good. Finally, Spectrasonics latest achievement, Omnisphere, contains many analog sampled waveforms.

Arturia Analog Factory

However, there will be times when you want to create your own analog emulation, or try to make a sound even better. First of all, you should know that you have to choose the right synths for the job. Not all synths are really for this kind of of task. If you have been trying for over 2 hours to make something sound good, but you can’t, chances are that you are using the wrong tools

Now, let’s get to the point. To make a sound fatter, you need to have some kind of dissonance in it. First of all, don’t use sine waves, because they contain only one harmonic: the fundamental. We want harsher waveforms. We have to use square or saw waves.

A powerful tool to cause dissonance is pulse width modulation (PWM). This constantly changes the width of the square wave, which translates into a more dissonant sound.

The second way to create dissonance, is through the tuning of our oscillators. You can lower and raise them by a few cents, in order not to be in tune. Additionaly, if you want a bass sound, you should lower all of them, or some of them, an octave.

So, this was really the basic idea! Now, to make the sound fatter, you can use effects. Chorus is a good idea, because, slight amounts of it are not very noticable, but make the sound more dissonant. Distortion is always an option, but you might want to use a good VST effect, because most distortions built in soft synths might not be the best option. Finally, if your sound is not as good as you wanted it to be, you can always layer another sound on top of it! You can also add reverb, which helps to make every sound more organic, even though reverb is the most abused effect, because it can improve any sound.

First of all, a compressor is a device that reduces the signal volume by a ration, once the signal exceeds a certain threshold. A typical compressor will have the following settings: Ratio, threshold, input gain, output gain, soft knee or hard knee, attack and release.

The threshold determines the Db above which the compressor takes action. The ratio is depicted in fractions such as 2:1 or 4:1. This means that for every 1 Db the signal surpasses the threshold, the compressor reduces it by 2 or 4 db respectively.

This diagram shows what happens. There is a certain threshold level. The signal enters and once it reaches the threshold, the compressor starts working. Α 1:1 ratio means that the signal enters and exits unaltered. An infinity:1 ratio means that the compressor works as a limiter. It doesn’t allow the signal to pass the threshold, no matter how loud it is. We’ll get to this in a while.

A compressor also has a knee setting. This determines whether the compressor starts working in an abrupt or soft way. When the knee is hard, the compression is more apparent in the sound.

The attack of a compressor determines how fast a compressor starts working. When this timing is very fast, for example 10 msec, then the compressor starts working immediately and the whole signal is compressed. However, when we choose a greater attack setting, such as 50 msec, we let the transient pass. That is the first part of the signal that hold no harmonic elements, but makes the sound more "punchy". Release, determines how quickly the compressor goes off.

A few lines above we mentioned the term "limiter". As we said, a limiter is a compressor with a ratio equal to infinity:1, which means that it doesn’t allow anything to pass the threshold. A compressor is useful at the mastering stage. It is actually the very last thing in the mastering chain. After all the process has taken place, we pass the signal through a good brickwall limiter, in order to make the signal louder, while ensuring that nothing exceed the threshold and causes distortion.

PSP Xenon is a very good software limiter

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can go as loud as we want without distortion. A good brickwall limiter can add character to the sound and go louder than another one, but, after a point, everything distorts. Limiters are an entire different topic altogether, but know that they shouldn’t be used in mixing. If you are mixing and then you are passing your signal through limiters, then expect the quality of your sound to quickly deteriorate.

If you choose to use a piano and a violin, you will never be able to play rock. If you choose to play a distorted guitar, you’re probably off in a different direction.

However, most of us, think only about music by using instruments, and not sounds in general. I myself have written music using mainly electric or electronic instruments. What happens, however, when you start using sounds from nature?

This is where it gets interesting. Every sound around us can be used in a musical setting. There are three main ways to do that:

1) Use a sound as an oscillator in a synthesizer

2) Sample it a use it rythmically

3) Use it as it is

Out of the 3 choices, I am currently used the 3rd one. It is a very artistic choice. I am taking urban samples, from highways and airports to train stations, and I am using them as the background noise of my tracks. It is strange, how the ambient noise can "fill" the sound of a musical piece. It’s also very strange, how non-musical sounds can be used in a musical setting.

The two best sources of ambient samples I have found are these: The free sound project and a plugin called Speakerphone Cabinet by AudioEase. You can download some urban noise from the free sound project and add it into the background of your track. You can also use noise as an introduction or as an outro to your track.

Of course, this is my way of doing music. Aphex Twin, has created an experimental masterpiece, called Bucephalus Bouncing Ball, where he uses a sampled bouncing ball as a special rythmic effect

Link: www.youtube.com

On the other hand, Native Instruments’ Absynth has many programs that use experimental sampled oscillators. I have used one of these on my track "Gabriel". It’s a sound that uses a tibetan voice. I leave it to you to find which of the sounds it is

Anyway, once you allow ambient noises into your tracks, you’ll enter a new world of inspiration. Matthew Herbert creates pieces that are mainly focused around sounds he has recorded himself. Check out "Yesness" for example, where it has used countless recorded "Yes" from people. The possibilities are endless.

When I’m saying capitalize, I mean promote your music through myspace and make money out of it. So, let’s take a look to what happened with my project: Raskolnikov’s Dream.

My MySpace is http://www.myspace.com/raskolnikovsdream I joined it at January 11 2009. The day of this article is March 4 2009. This makes 52 days. In 52 days I had 8339 views and 2750 as of the time of writing.

This isn’t a bad number is it?

However, the other statistics are discouraging. I sold only 7 albums, I got only one friend on last.fm and 18 fans on facebook.

So, what is going on here?

My opinion is that these stats reflect the psychological profile of the average MySpace user. And let me tell you why. On CD Baby where I sell my CD, I checked the incoming links. Not one of them was from MySpace. Actually, not even one person in MySpace even tried to enter my CD Baby page. I had some people telling me that they would buy my album, but they didn’t.

On the other hand,on CD Baby i got about 200 visits and sold 5 albums there (the other 2 from a total of 7 were from my site). This comes to a whooping 2.5%, which doesn’t actually sound like a big number, but think for a moment that if, for example, I had the means to promote my music to 10.000 people (which actually isn’t such a big deal), I would sell 250 albums. If I had the the means to promote it to 100.000 people, then I would sell 2500 albums.

These numbers might not  look like a big deal, but if you are an independent artist, they are. It is very difficult to promote your music to such a big audience, yet, if you sell albums, you get most of the profit yourself. Actually, if I sold 2500 or more albums a year, I could make a living, even though these numbers would be considered a failure if the album was released by a record label.

But, what causes the difference between CD Baby and MySpace? It’s simple. As I mentioned above, it all depends on the psychological profile of the average MySpace or CD Baby user. In MySpace, people are looking not to buy music, but to find and listen to music. On CD Baby, people go to buy music.

So, while I have only 200 CD Baby hits, I sold 5 albums, while on MySpace I have 8400 hits and I haven’t sold an album.

So, it all depends on the user profile. Surely MySpace is a great way to promote your band. Possibly, the greatest. It’s a good way to gain internet fame, and fans for your live shows. But, maybe, if you want to gain money from MySpace, maybe you should look elsewhere.

First of all, everything depends on the kind of music you want to write. Pop and rock music for example have pretty standard structures, while IDM electronica, for example, does not.

Secondly, it all depends on your method of working. Some people like to improvise on loops, other want to write music while they alreay have in their mind how the piece should go.

Additionaly, you have to know that the structure interacts with the length of the song. The standard pop form will work nice for small length songs, no matter the genre. However, it might not work too well for epic 12-minute progressive metal songs .

Not your average pop band

So, let’s take a look at some musical forms.

The pop form that we mentioned above is the following: Intro – Verse – Chorus – Verse – Chorus x 2 – Bridge- Chorus. Almost all pop songs ever written are built upon this form or variations of it. Also, it is very important the the chorus comes before the first minute and the song doesn’t last more than 4 minutes. You will notice that most pop songs go like that.

This form, however, is not only for pop songs. You can listen for example my piece ‘Gabriel’ at http://raskolnikovsdream.com/discography.html. It follows the same form, but in no way you can call it ‘pop’.

Another form, that is never used in pop music is the form A-B-C-D-etc. It’s actually a series of parts that are not directly connected to each other. This form is popular among metal bands, be it classic heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, or black metal like Cradle of Filth. Listen for example to Afraid to Shoot Strangers. While there is some repetition inside the parts, thus making the parts something like (a-b-a-b)-(c-c)-etc., the large form is actually A-B-C-etc. The parts between them are completely different, even having abrupt changes in the tempo.

Link: www.youtube.com

Another very useful form that is used very much in ambient music is A – A+B – A + B + C – etc. This means that you start on a loop, and you add subsequent loops thereafter. Because this form doesn’t have any great fluctuations in intensity, it is very soothing. You can hear this in my track ‘Horse’ at http://raskolnikovsdream.com/discography.html. You can also hear it in Boards of Canada (my favorite ambient group) Amo Bishop Rodden.

Link: www.youtube.com

So, that was it for today! Of course, these are not the only musical forms in existence. These are just 3, that can be very useful in your musical compositions. We will cover more forms in future articles.

When most people start learning about music, they usually start learning about music theory. However, what people don’t understand, is that in these days, music genre is not just about music theory, but about music production as well.

I have received many times the question: "How can I sound like band X ?" . These can be bands like Nirvana, Rolling Stones or The Prodigy.

It is important to note that music defined not only by what you play, but also, by how it sounds. This might seem self-evident, but then again, why don’t people understand that the guitars and amplifiers that Rolling Stones use, are completely different from the effects that they are using in their effort to imitate them?

The Prodigy

So for example, let’s take Nine Inch Nails. Their sound is driven by digital distortion. There is no way ever you can imitate their sound, if you don’t use this kind of distortion. 80s bands used a lot the chorus and flanger effects. And classic rock bands, used a lot analog distortion.

Sound design is an essential ingredient of modern music. So, you should always take in into account when you are writing and recording music.

It isn’t rare to write a tune using a dry guitar signal, that outright sucks, and then add distortion, to find it sounds like a hit. Additionaly, effects, not only alter the sound, but they can alter the notes as well. For example, if you use delay, you are adding a rythmic element that didn’t excist previously. The same happens with flanger and phaser.

If you think about it, it’s pretty much like when you are listening to a beethoven sonata on the piano, and then some guy plays in on his guitar. It’s not the same thing. Actually, it’s not even close, no matter how good the guitarist is.

This could be due to wrong choice of effects

This is why learning how to use effects for sound design is important.

First, define your genre and your goals.

Secondly, listen to artists of the style you are trying to imitate.

Third, experiment with effects, to try to recreate the desired sound.

Once you master this, the next step would be to try and make your "own" sound. Like all instruments have a sound of their own, the same is true for the effects.

I am planning to include tutorials on specific effects and VSTs so that you can get started somewhat easier