Real world synthesizers always come with presets, and those presets
are usually the most awful sounds you'll ever hear coming out of a
keyboard. They're overdone and geared toward a mainstream audience
of bells and whistles. Good artists don't use these presets but
harness their gear back down to something real and pure-- and most
importantly, their own. A lot of these are those deep sounds
everyone here knows and loves.
In a computer it is the same thing, there are a lot of elements that
are geared to that same mainstream audience, as well as all of those
garbage loop and prefab rhythm programs/plug-ins, and you have to get
past that just like with real world synths and make your own sounds.
You have to make them your own. A good artist will synth and tweak
every sound in their production themselves and have total control....
from the synth pads, to the bass, to the percussion. Classic 808 and
909 sounds are nice, but if everyone still only used those sounds in
their songs the music would be dead in its tracks.... (Are guitar
bands still making Hair Metal?) The music had to mature and evolve...
A good artist can make their computer sound deep, rich, and 'loose'
if they want to, but they have to know their tool well enough to make
it a reality.
Forget your 808 and 909... make your *own* sounds, the way *you* envision them.
I use a mastering filter on almost every individual sound or part
that I have running in the mix. The beauty of the computer is that
the synth itself isn't the only part of sound production... like in
Live, you can drag whatever filter you want and apply it to a part--
in essence you are building your own extension of the synthesizer to
your own specification in each separate part. Some parts I could
have 8-10 filters going at once, and others none at all. They are
simply extensions of the filters we have always had *inside* of the
synthesizer but tailored to the synthesizer *we* want to build-- and
the beauty is the ability to make it unique to every sound---*for*
that sound. Almost every sound or part I have in the music I create
is absolutely nothing like the original sound coming out of the base
synth itself--sometimes completely unrecognizable... it is the
filters I apply after it that truly lets me mold and shape
them. This was not 'gear-head' nonsense that I planned and
researched ahead to figure out. It was all in moments of inspiration
while learning a new tool and it felt completely natural. It was
fresh and exciting for me-- "oh, I can do *this* now!"... and
everything came together. There were no presets. No loops. Nothing
created by anyone else but me. I just had even more control.
Someone will chime in and say, "See, you overproduce in the
computer", but every real world analog synthesizer (subtractive
synthesis) has its own filters inside that you have to utilize to
control and build the sound from the base operator square, triangle,
sine waves. To not use those filters in the real world synths you
would be forced to make music with nothing but pure blips and
tones. To say using post-synth filters in the computer is
over-production is to say you would have to strip all of the internal
filters out of your real world synths as well and make music with
nothing but those pure basic tones to 'keep it real'.
The artist has full control over a warm or crispy mix if they
choose. Personally, I like the clarity you can mold in the computer
but still like a thick low-end... on the same token I want to be
able to put my cd in my car stereo without having to turn down the
bass. Some of that BC/CR stuff I have to jack the bass way down just
to be able to jack the rest of the volume up.
All of this, of course, is my personal preference.
At 11:12 AM 9/3/2006, you wrote:
certain plugins go a long way toward warming and fattening up music
- but if whatever it's affecting just isn't there in the first
place, it's not going to be the same. in recorded sound, the most
important element is the source, followed by the initial capturing
of that source, and then by whatever you do to it afterward, and
finally in the playback. there are some people who turn this on its
ear, warping the most incredible things out of something very
mundane. but they still started with the original characteristics,
which in turn affected the building blocks of their sound.
again, having said this, i enjoy some music made on laptops very
much, some of it even doing a decent replicating job i sort of spoke
against. whatever works.
d.
(seeing if one section of my long reply at a time gets through)
