Wrongplanet Musicians' Showcase

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The kit hasn't been maintained really at all in several years. It's owned by a church, so asking for money to fix it up isn't something I'm comfortable with at the moment!

I made several samples with it, all with condenser mics. One set of samples was made with the mic placed in the center of the room, while the other set was made more on-axis very close to the drum heads. I did toms with snares on and off. The room samples were really nice, but not very "big" sounding. I expected more putting the mics on the heads, but all I got was this kind of dull "thunk" kind of sound.

The same day I made those samples, I sampled a 3-octave set of handbells to do demos with. It was mostly ok, but the highest note (C7) just made this ugly "clink" sound and not much tone. I'm concluding that the condensers were too close to the source, since the room drums are ok-sounding suck close to the head. I might try again with the condenser placed overhead and bells maybe a foot or two away.

Last week I sampled the bells with the SM57 (dynamic mic) and actually liked the sound better than the more sensitive condenser. 57's are known to be good drum mics, so I feel encouraged. I even mic'd my keyboard amp with it at a gig last Saturday. One problem I know about with the drums is the toms have damping rings inside them, so there's no tone at all. And they're probably all tuned too low, with the floor tom not tuned low enough. The heads haven't been changed in over 6 years. I don't recall which line these are, but they seem really nice. They probably just need a little basic work.

It is kinda chip tuneish. The lo fi sound was mainly achieved by slapping a tape sim on the output bus. I like the sound of cassette tape. 'Ferox' from this range, and I think I used the reverb from this set of plugs too. I really like them. http://www.toneboosters.com/products/

Last edited by Moog on 03 Feb 2012, 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The SM57 can be used for every drum but the kick (and maybe the floor toms) and will get a good sound assuming the kit is well tuned. Condenser mics are better suited as overheads I believe, a little bit of tom and snare sound but mostly cymbals. For the kick, you would be best off with a Shure Beta 52, it's one of the industry standards for kick mics for a reason!

Dampening rings inside the head would lead me to believe you're dealing with Remo Pinstripe heads. After six years, you will struggle to get a good sound out of those. They're great heads if you close mic the drums, but the heads are long dead at this point. Not unusable, but be prepared to do a fair of processing on the samples you get.

Tuning is a fickle thing, if you have a drum key, just go at it. One drum at a time. Be prepared to spend a few hours tuning the drums (batter and resonant heads! The resonant head is key to a good drum sound!), especially the snare.

http://soundcloud.com/domsay

Experimentation is fun

@ Dogenegra: Your sound quality is great, which kind of hardware and software do you use?


Here's a song I wrote one year ago. I think it's not that bad, even if that doesn't mean that it sounds good when I play it xD
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58AL6thnO1E[/youtube]

Really?? It's just Audacity and a Samson condenser mic http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samson-Mic-Clip ... 374&sr=8-1

And my Toshiba satellite C660, with no extra add ons or anything. Just the basics

Obviously it's the reverb that makes the quality appear so brilliant^^
Probably I'm just too stupid to make good recordings apart from my piano pieces which are of course pretty easy to record... just one instrument, no effects... xD

Yeah, I was worried I added too much reverb, but I think it sounds alright. I think it suits the song. I really like that song by the way that you posted. Some really nice chords in there too!

@ Dogenegra: I like your music too, though it seems to be weird it all makes sense and expresses a very individual feeling, thank you!
Here is a piece that I originally had written one and a half years ago but only the chords of the theme and the melody have staid the same (it was really raw). Now I have arranged it new, added some parts and... I think I can call this one a composition finally, though there are still many weak points, but that's rather concerning the recording and arrangement than concerning the composition itself.
I play the piano since 5 months now but generally I've been making music since about 2 and a half years when I started to secretely play around with my sisters guitar when I was at home alone. I've been learning music through experiments with my own "compositions" and not through otherones songs. So all the music that's in me is pure me and nobody else. My music has developed on it's own from a few melodic lines to what it is now and will develop to something great once, I'm sure.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiEHho51iRY[/youtube]

This is good stuff. I hear a lot more evidence that you've really worked at crafting this into a polished work. Good job!

A couple of things about basic orchestration: Your low strings do the quasi-Alberti-bass kind of figure for an extended length of time. That's more effective on a keyboard instrument or guitar than it is in strings. It also works really well for woodwinds. You just want to avoid running on with it for a long time is all, or if you do, you might do better slowing it down--like, if your Alberti pattern is in 16ths, switch to 8ths. For low strings, a better alternative is to have a strong downbeat on your lowest note and "block" the upper notes, taking advantage of the bow since string players are very good at fast repeating notes. This stands in direct contrast to what keyboard players do--rapid repeating notes wear out the hands, so playing arpeggios works better.

Pizzicato is a cool effect. It's not a substitute for good staccato playing, though. Be careful that you don't overuse it. A good way open up your use of staccato and pizzicato is to make those passages less rhythmically static and vary your rhythm patterns somewhat. Extended passages all pizzicato aren't very realistic and can be taxing on your performers. Lighten up a bit and you'll have exactly the sound you're looking for. Use of accented patterns when you do have extended staccato playing are also important to making those passages a lot more musical sounding.

I like that you are doing more to create contrasting musical passages. I don't hear any kind of transitioning from one to the next, though. Master that and you'll have all the composition basics out of the way.

I like pretty much everything I'm hearing here. Nice use of color, a little more textural exploration... When you're writing for orchestra, avoid brass ensemble sounds. Use solo trumpet instead and you'll have something more realistic in your mockup. Brass ensemble sounds work well if you want a unison treble choir and a unison low-brass choir. A typical orchestration rarely has unison brass. Save that for a concert band or jazz band sound rather than orchestra. Depending on the software or hardware you use, a good mockup can be really difficult to get without a lot of programming. Even on the expensive hardware I use, my solo brass sounds all suck. What I do sometimes is record using a unison brass ensemble just for inspiration and then rework it into individual parts. You won't get the same immediate results switching to solo trumpet or solo trombone. You really do have to do a little extra effort to find what really will work. As annoying as that is, it pays off when you finally do get the right brass combination in your orchestration. Your use of brass in orchestration can really make or break a composition.

I'd love to hear more stuff like this--it sounds like you're really going somewhere. And I think the better you get with orchestra instruments, the better you'll develop your ear when just writing for piano. You'll certainly notice a difference when you come back to it after writing for other instruments for a while.

Thank you very much for your awesome feedback!
You are right, the seques are not fluent enough. Especially the one before the pizzicato part.
My problem with the variety of instruments and their expression is, that the RAM of my computer will be overloaded if I use to many, since I would have to load the samples for each expression of each instrument separately but at the same time to use them all together. With this piece I even had to shut down windows explorer such as all of the other softwares after they have crashed from overload. But I would hopefully get a new computer with big RAM this year.
You are right, I should really think of the way those instruments are played, my father said I would get a violin for my graduation in spring. Ideally I would play the violins myself then, but even if not I could better empathize with those musicians and compose in an adequate way!

My Synclavier only has 64MB RAM, and my Akai S2000 is maxed out at 32MB. You don't need much memory. You just have to be smart about how you use it. I max out the voice cards on my Synclav long before I use up RAM. Modern software samplers are horribly inefficient the way they handle samples.

Lets say you have a nice arco string ensemble sound that you can almost feel the rosin on the bow. You load an instance of your sampler for staccato sounds using that same sample set, and you change your AEG so there is no sustain and a quick decay. Ok, for another passage, you want a very slow attack. So you load another instance of the same samples and adjust the AEG to get a slow attack and even change the sample start to cut out that aggressive arco sound. And you want the same arco but with sustain. And for another you want pizzicato. Let's suppose your arco string samples are 16MB and your pizz sounds are 8MB. Your staccato samples will take up 16MB of RAM, your slow attack another 16MB, your arco with sustain is another 16MB, and your pizz are 8MB. That's a total of 56MB being used.

What the Synclavier would do is keep the original samples in RAM and just change the EG for each track you use. You'd never use more than 20MB. If your sampler tops out at 32 like most do, you still have room for some drums and bass, whereas DAW architecture will just keep filling up your RAM without thinking about HOW the samples are actually being used. It seems cool that you can fill up RAM with a lot of samples and not think about an upper limit. But ultimately it's tough on your system. And that's not even if you're using 24-bit samples with sample rates of 48k or higher.

Getting a violin to get a good understanding of how it works and how to write for it is all very fine. There are a couple of things you can do that might actually be better for you, though. If you want to write for violin, find a violinist willing to try your ideas out. They can help you learn what works and what doesn't. The other thing is study orchestration. I really liked the Samuel Adler orchestration textbook, and I still dig it out every now and then if I get stuck on something. Supposedly there are better books out there, but the Adler was what I learned from and I still find it useful. I think Strauss had a famous text on orchestration that you might research. Berkleemusic.com has online courses in orchestration, but you might want to make sure your written theory skills are really solid first or you might find the online orchestration to be a waste of money. I had to take methods courses on all instruments, so knowing how the instruments work and what they can do is fairly natural to me at this point. This isn't necessary, of course, but helps.

Dogenegra the first soundcloud reminds me of the Radiohead track, Go Slowly but more epic :)

Here is a makeshift video i did in windows movie maker to a demo i did in cubase

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8S2ye5UEUo&feature=g-upl&context=G2f5b0faAUAAAAAAAAAA[/youtube]

Here's my latest work-in-progress. Not an "original," but I'm excited about it none-the-less. It's just a demo. When my handbell partner and I finish working it up, I'll post a video of this thing in action. In the past when I'd make demos of my handbell music, I had a set of homemade handbell samples (homemade samples, not homemade handbells) I'd use, but I was never really quite satisfied with them. I bought me a Shure SM57 and decided to try it out on the bells. What you're hearing is the handbell parts being played back on the Synclavier with what I think are better recordings of the actual bells we play on.

You can also hear me showing off my mad guitar skillz (haha); if you listen close enough, you can hear me playing my Tele WAAAAAY in the background. I was also having a little too much fun on the bass!

http://soundcloud.com/angelrho/leaning-demo

I don't have any links to them, but I am part of a Steel Orchestra and have recorded a CD with the Band to commiserate 25 years of it first forming (the band).

The website however is; www.pantonic-all-stars.org.

http://soundcloud.com/half-brother