MYYA DYNAMIC

Music producer, composer, audio engineer, multi-instrumentalist. I make audio for games and videos.

[swarnpert]

NO MORE SONGS UNDER 3 MINUTES. GO BACK INTO THE STUDIO

[myya-dynamic]

I'm not putting this on a record, everything's digital now!

[girldraki]

[girltentacles]

audio engineers love telling you their favorite numbers. i’ts usually 1 or 2

[myya-dynamic]

Big fan of 5 personally

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P

As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.

[myya-dynamic]

AI kills the unheard artistry in audio engineering.

Humans have been making music for a very long time. Longer than recorded history, in fact It's in our blood. It's something we have the innate desire to share with one another and experience. Music is a phenomenon... an art form. It's intricate and nuanced. It's a way of communicating things when language falls short. It's even a reason to better oneself. 

Eventually, recorded music came along and changed the landscape. It became possible to detach the experience from the activity of making it and take it with you. We generally recognize this as a good thing. It birthed the industry we have today, and new forms of artistry became possible through recording, and then eventually through mastering, mixing, production, sound design, and more. A good piece of "recorded" music nowadays will have had artistry and intention injected into it by way of all of these things. Everyone can recognize the artistic contribution of a singer, their band, and a composer to a record, and most will be able to appreciate the nuance a producer or sound designer could add. Fewer will detect the intricate ways a mixing or mastering engineer could contribute musically to a work. 

I've learned how to do basically every step of this process--from conception to mastering--to a professional standard. I've learned the techniques, the traditions and customs, and the tools at my disposal all well enough to create music from scratch. The part of all of this that I found most beautiful upon learning it--the part that really sold it to me--was the unique ways that you get to be an artist in "post". 

Let me be clear. Mixing and mastering engineers are the agents that a listener will be most likely to overlook in favor of a performer or composer. I'd spent years believing (well into my life as a musician and producer) that mixing and mastering were mere tasks and that they were for nerds who like to be technical, not creative. Dare I say, mixing and especially mastering could be a higher art form for some, above composition and performance. In the same way a sculptor works behind the scenes to carve away at a piece of stone, breathing life and meaning into it, so too must a mixing or mastering engineer chip away at the sound they are given to bring forth those same qualities. There is nothing less artistic about bringing out an element that's getting buried in the mix than adding a drum fill in a transition. Both of these examples are deliberate choices meant to elevate a musical moment. 

When the CEO of a generative AI music company like Suno or Udio says that most people would "cut out the boring parts of music creation" if they could, they're demonstrating an awareness of the fact that most newbie/intermediate DAW users and musicians don't know how to use audio hardware and software to its fullest potential, or that they don't have a trained ear or a vision--not really. If such newbie creators were more aware of the process and they knew what could be, they would be bubbling at the opportunity to contribute (or have someone else contribute) even more to their artwork through the very intentional practices of producing, mixing, mastering, and other such engineering. Unfortunately, because AI company CEOs are capitalists focused on money, they aren't trying to help you make your artwork genuinely better, more thought out, or more rewarding. They're trying to sell you their solution. 

No, don't waste your time trying to learn about compressors and mid-side bullshit. Don't even worry about sniffing through samples and presets and synthesizer dials. That stuff is all too complicated for you, and if it's not... it's too boring. You're above that. Your ideas deserve to be instantly realized, however developed they may be. What you are trying to do--exclusively--is the only art to be found in the audio. Everything else in the process of creation is busywork.

When you generate music with AI as opposed to creating it yourself, you are missing out on the artistry of every single step you chose to offload onto the machine. Everything that could have been conveyed through a unique sound, a rancid lyric, or some fancy automation... gone. 

For a lot of artists though, there's not a lot of intention in their sound selection, mixing choices, mastering chains, etc to begin with. Many are unfamiliar with the tools they have and because of that, they struggle to use them as an extension of their artistic voice. If a person can't play the piano, they're going to have a hard time making a piano express something. Similarly, you're not going to be expressing anything by way of mixing or mastering if you don't know how to do it. The music shouldn't end when you put down the mic or unplug your guitar. 

If you have truly made a work of art that is dripping with deliberate choices, intentions and themes, you will have had no reason to ever touch an AI. It will be complete, and it will be gratifying! It need not sound professional.

If you're reading this far down, I commend you. There is so much to learn about audio engineering beyond making things "sound better". There is clarity to be had in one instance, brightness in another, and so many rich details to be milked for all the artistry within them. And fear not! As daunting a task as it might seem, learning how to do digital audio is actually rather accessible. For instance, there's a very informative video series on YouTube by Izotope (the creators of the Ozone plugins) called Are You Listening? that I've been learning a lot from recently; it's about audio mastering. 

A mechanically generated piece of media Frankenstein-ed together out of intellectual property stolen from artists slopped on top of your own messy contribution is not music, and it demonstrates nothing but an absence of care. Generative AI will not give you a voice, its output will mean nothing, and you will learn nothing by using it. Take pride in your work and let it change you. You can do better than a machine because you have ears.

Music is a human activity, let's keep it that way.

[macmanx]

Bandcamp takes a stand against AI music, banning it from the platform | TechCrunch

"We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans," the co

Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” is not permitted and that it will not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles.

[myya-dynamic]

What the heck is dithering?

Most DAWs work at a pretty high bit depth for maximum quality audio. High quality audio files take up a lot of storage space, and sometimes you need to make them smaller to upload them somewhere or put them on a CD. Unfortunately, making the files smaller (by reducing the bit depth) introduces some faint quantization distortion which causes aliasing and makes the audio sound a little worse. This is when you use dithering.

Dithering is literally just noise. It's noise added at such a low level that it's inaudible and serves only to blur the very lowest dynamics in the bit depth you're working with, so that there's less dissonant aliasing. That's it. If your audio is rendered at an appropriate level, you will certainly not hear the dithering when listening at a normal volume.

You only need to add dithering to audio if you're taking it from a higher bit depth to a lower one.

Sometimes DAWs will give you different options for dithering. These are almost always just ways to change the frequency balance of the noise. Often, changing the balance of the noise to avoid midrange frequencies can make it even less audible while it prevents noticeable ailiasing just as much.

[thememedaddy]

[myya-dynamic]

Make sure you have your movies set to play a stereo version of the movie audio. Sometimes film audio will be set to 5.1 by default. If you play media with five channels over a stereo system, three of the channels are going to be lost OR your system is going to try to reinterpret it strangely.

[myya-dynamic]

Making It Louder

As an EDM producer, I can safely say the loudness war is over. Loud won. Human beings simply enjoy when music is louder, and so when we're mixing tracks, often times we strive to make them as loud as possible without ruining them. I learned a lot about loudness while doing research before making my album LOUD AF. Here are some tools and methods you can use to make your tracks literally or perceptibly louder beyond just turning up the volume.

The first thing I imagine most producers would think to use to increase the perceived loudness further is dynamic range compression. By reducing the highest peaks of a sound, you can increase the gain of the entire sound, making it louder on average. Compression can leave you a lot of headroom to increase the volume of a track without being too noticeable.

You could also push your track into a limiter. A limiter is technically a compressor with a really high ratio but most use the two differently. Flattening the sound beyond a certain threshold is useful if you want it to be as loud as it can be without adding distortion. You can bring up the pre-gain of the signal until the limiting sounds too noticeable and then back off somewhat.

Maybe you're fine with adding some audible distortion. In that case, you might use clipping of some kind. Where a limiter will duck the audio so it doesn't cross a threshold, a clipper will literally cut off the peaks of your waveform. This is a much more aggressive way to enforce a threshold, and is often best used with some kind of compression so that a balance between ducking and distortion can be found. Use caution with clipping, it's really easy to overdo.

Sometimes to make a sound bigger you don't necessarily need to make it louder but rather more full. Multi-band compression can be used to make a sound fill out the frequency spectrum and thus seem larger and perhaps louder. A sound that takes up that much of the spectrum being compared to one that fills only a narrow band is equivalent to the sound of a whole orchestra versus a flute.

Often, if an element of a track cannot be heard, the problem isn't that it itself is too quiet but that the other sounds are overbalancing or masking it. Examine the balance between elements in pairs and level them in smaller groups. Assess what frequency bands of the sound in question are important, and boost those with EQ. Then, cut those same bands in other elements to create space for the important one. Interestingly, if two elements are taking up completely different areas of the frequency spectrum, they won't fight for headroom at all and you can push them to be surprisingly loud. If they're taking up similar frequency areas, turning one up could mask the other and cause it to sound quieter.

Sidechain compression can be a fantastic way to make an element come above everything else. This is often used for kick drums and vocals. Making every other sound in the mix duck a little bit when an important element enters will make the important one seem louder in comparison. Make sure to use a decently fast release time on your compressor so the ducking doesn't become obvious.

Ring modulator sidechaining is a more aggressive way to "duck" elements under a more important one. There are several good tutorials for it out there, and in the Kilohearts Essentials bundle, there's a plugin called Compactor that makes this process really easy. Ring mod sidechaining adds audible distortion when the affected elements interact with the sidechained one. I have only ever found this useful in heavy, aggressive genres that have plenty of distortion already, and only to make drums punch through more.

Reverb can be used to make elements sound louder, surprisingly. If there's a particularly dry element that is really loud but doesn't sound big, reverb can make your brain perceive the loudness of it more effectively. As the room or reverb reacts to a sound, that cues your brain into hearing it as louder, because louder sounds make more reverb when they happen in spaces. Sometimes delay or echo effects can achieve this result too.

The preparation for a loud sound like an impact or a massive bass could be argued to be equally as important as the sound itself. A loud sound that is preceded by another loud sound won't jump out too much, but one that is preceded by a quiet sound or silence will sound much bigger in comparison. Make the preparatory gesture before a loud sound smaller than it to bring it out more.

Add multiple layers to a sound if you want it to sound huge. A full orchestra doesn't sound so grand because it has one of each voice, there's multiple voices playing in unison on each part. Similarly if you want a bass sound or a supersaw to be massive, think about the unison layers you could add to it that would compliment or fill out the timbre.

Hopefully these options are enough to get you started. I'm sure there's more techniques out there that can be used to squeeze your audio further, but these are the ones I know.

[nixiecat]

if ableton crashes one more fucking time tonight I'm gonna destroy a building

[nixiecat]

AAAAAAAA EXPORT FASTER GRRAAHHHHHHHH

[myya-dynamic]

Freeze/render any tracks that use really heavy plugins before exporting, and make sure your buffer size is appropriate for the task.

[nyaoix]

[deepspaceboytoy]

Man I mean. Like what’s even the point man.

[myya-dynamic]

Should I just kill myself or

[segamascott]

[myya-dynamic]

I literally just listened to an unreleased experimental piece called "spring" that was just digitally created spring sounds like birds and rain

Everything has a place you just have to find it

[notswush]

The Everything Bundle

The Everything Bundle is a remedy for your well-founded FOMO. Let’s be clear, this is every last plugin we’ve ever made. Not only did we sav

Yo

[girlballs-archive]

wow it's so fucking cool that i have to constantly micromanage Reaper's audio I/O settings because it can't fucking remember my settings ever

[myya-dynamic]

I have literally never had this problem

The only thing I can find online about it is a forum post from 2014 about per-device ASIO channel configuration that confirms that Reaper will indeed remember config settings as of version 6.75

:/

[maidthings]

heartbreaking: someone has used bitcrushing when it is painfully obvious that the effect they were looking for is downsampling

[maidthings]

Visit Original Link

[storywonker]

They recorded tinnitus? It's a physical thing?????

[storywonker]

Lola De La Mata speaks to Patrick Clarke about how her experience with severe tinnitus and vertigo fed into her new album Oceans On Azimuth

Source

[bisexualbaker]

Transcript:

The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.

[uhhhhmanda]

HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHAT I HEAR ALL DAY