techno sound

[nova]

bit of a techno production question.uk minamal would you use reverbs on the drum ellements like plate on snare and kick or would that be more kind of german sounding. and crome plated techno kit would that be more suitable for the uk minamal tech sound and how do you get a crome plated sound. is that reverb :?: . and with some sort of compression on drums perc fills bass. would anyboby be kind anoth to explain abit on compression for the the minamal uk techno sound.

thanks

[AcidMutant]

Don't use formulas, just mess around and see what sounds good.

Personally I don't use much reverb at all, especially not on drums.

Most of my kit I run via MIDI and don't have enough effects/channels for individual drum sounds but last night whilst messing around with a track I used the sampled snare off my TR606 (which sounds pretty weak) and stuck a reverb on it and it really made it sound fat and it had never occured to me to use reverb before.

If your going to use reverb on drums it can get really muddy sounding so try not to mix too much. Gated reverbs are also good for drums and try to use short decay times, but as I said before - just mess around, tweak those knobs and find something cool!

There's plenty of threads on this forum about compression.

[loopdon]

keep the cutoff on your reverb above the bass region, ruffly above say 400 Hz. that'll take care of a good amont of possibly occuring mudd using verb on drums.

[RDR]

keep the cutoff on your reverb above the bass region, ruffly above say 400 Hz. that'll take care of a good amont of possibly occuring mudd using verb on drums.

Wise words indeed.

The techno sound is what you make it, thats the beauty of techno.

i subscribe to the derrick may definition - "Techno is the sound you never heard before"

i know its cheesy, but it seems to work.

These are the things that matter to me.

A. make a sound interesting
B. Make a sound memorable
C. Make a sound clear as a bell (if this is what you require)
D. Make a sound muddy (if this is what you require)
E. Make it fat
F. Make it thin
G. Make it fun
H. NEVER make it boring
I. Give it swing
J. Tighten it up
K. Cross Genre's
L. Be obvious

As you can see, these concepts are seperate from any specific mixing skills in terms of hard and fast NO NO's from the world of mxing down etc etc.

above all this and holdings hands with these concepts is... BE CREATIVE! you dont have to do what people did before.

just ask richard d james.

[j_s]

i use loads of reverb all over the place. even on kicks/bass.
one of the things that has held me back the most has been asking 'should i be doing this?' and thinking it was too unorthodox. just do whatever you can to get the sound you want. i wouldn't worry too much about muddyness etc at first, you can alway clean stuff up later....

[Metadog]

i use reverb on just about everything - gotta watch the levels tho

[RDR]

Wierd... i use as little 'verb as possible. i want to be able to hear everything. not keen on too much verb. i love those ghost notes tho..

[Evil G]

Wierd... i use as little 'verb as possible. i want to be able to hear everything. not keen on too much verb. i love those ghost notes tho..

i've read that reverb can actually add intelligibility. with a dry sound, you only get one chance to hear it. but with a reverb or delay, your brain has a chance to piece things together that it might have missed.

[RDR]

Wierd... i use as little 'verb as possible. i want to be able to hear everything. not keen on too much verb. i love those ghost notes tho..

i've read that reverb can actually add intelligibility. with a dry sound, you only get one chance to hear it. but with a reverb or delay, your brain has a chance to piece things together that it might have missed.

Where did you see that? i'd be interested to read the full article.

Cheers.

[Evil G]

^^^ it was a side note in a book i just finished, "music, cognition and computerized sound: an introduction to psychoacoustics" from MIT press.

[RDR]

Great thanks for that, ill check out the prices and get back to peepz

o.k.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...455334-4028420

26GBP for those who are interested. I think that my college has a copy of this as i recognise the front cover...

coolio!

[Evil G]

i'll warn you, it is a bit nerdy. it's in a text book format. some really good bits, but also some really dry, boring bits. but all in all, i like what is going on at MIT - pure research in electronic music, with no thought whatsoever about clubbing or selling records.

[Ritzi Lee]

i'll warn you, it is a bit nerdy. it's in a text book format. some really good bits, but also some really dry, boring bits. but all in all, i like what is going on at MIT - pure research in electronic music, with no thought whatsoever about clubbing or selling records.

Wow sounds cool.
I'm a matematician,
so it wouldn't cost me so much energy to understand the stuff.

[Evil G]

MIT has another book called "microsound" that i just started reading. it's geared towards granular synthesis, but also has a big history on synthesis over the past 100 years. enjoying it a lot so far.

[Ritzi Lee]

The next chalange will be how the brain acts on sound.
How sound influences the brain to experience. (feel, taste, see)

Bio-pulse-currents through the nerves is still a very cloudy misterious subject.

[sash]

think about contrast. reverb will push a sound further back in the mix. u should have ur 2 most important elements at the front of the mix (usually kick n bass for techno). Just a rough guide though.

[Evil G]

think about contrast. reverb will push a sound further back in the mix. u should have ur 2 most important elements at the front of the mix (usually kick n bass for techno). Just a rough guide though.

that's a good point. anything that adds contrast will give the sounds more separation and definition, and some dry sounds are really important. there's more to bringing out a sound than just pushing up the fader.

[RDR]

Totally. this is why i use reverb as sparingly as possible. its all very well blathering it in 'verb for home hi-fi listening and wierdness, but most of my stuff is composed with the d/floor and PA in mind and they are pretty unforgiving when it comes to too much verb.

as with other things it's contrasts... v true.

[nova]

cheers guys,
i havnt been using much reverb. bit of reverse reverb on the kick and perc. i'll tri some gated aswell. it can be quite hard to get the sounds the way i want them. just kind of getting stuck on wot works and wot doesnt. kind of thinking if i can get my sounds down to the minamal techno grinding then i can gro my style in to it! thanks peeps

[Metadog]

"i've read that reverb can actually add intelligibility. with a dry sound, you only get one chance to hear it. but with a reverb or delay, your brain has a chance to piece things together that it might have missed." - Evil G

(ok, so i have not workeed out how to use the quote function)

that makes sense, evil - for me, reverb is often about setting a space for a sound, giving the sound some dimension, stopping it sounding flat ... i use rvb on most sounds, but i tend to back it right off half the time, leaving the decay fairly short, so that it is not obvious - this gives sounds more movement, shape, size, and stops the mix being washed out - too much rvb will hide a sound, move it back in relation to other sounds and make the mix muddy - too little will lead to a flat sound

;) [/quote]