› Forums › Music › Sound Engineering › Thinking about doing something like this …
- This topic has 31 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated December 13, 2010 at 12:18 am by 1984.
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December 12, 2010 at 11:57 am #1232667
@cheeseweasel 411243 wrote:
Producing dance music, studio sound engineering and sound system design are all very different areas and if you do a course in how to make tunes, it’s not gonna come in handy when you want to build a rig. If you’re wanting to work across a broad range of sound engineering disciplines and really want to do a course, your best bet is probably one that teaches audio engineering fundamentals that are relevant to most sound jobs, the type of stuff that’s in “Sound & Recording”, by Francis Rumsey – a really good book for learning basics, I recommend you get hold of a 2nd hand copy off amazon (and this on its own won’t get you a job – it will just give you knowledge).
And whether you learn it off your own back or do a course isn’t gonna matter to an employer when you’re looking for work (and what sort of work would you be looking for btw? You mention that you don’t want to work for a company) – they just want to know that you’re capable of doing the job, which means they want evidence (past experience and references from employers). The main advantage of doing a course is you might meet some useful people along the way, a buddy to produce tunes with, someone with money saved up who’s up for building a rig, someone who can get you a job at a record label etc.
yeah that’s the benifit a few people got from the last corse I did – contacts.
Idealy I’d be working on my own projects and helping a friend out who needs an all round sound guy (safe safe raaa) for films/games and a shed load of other stuff.
gonna have a look at that book you sugested .. see what sought of stuff it teaches … if it’s basic prinsables i’ll most likely allready know alot of it but would be good to re-afferm some of the stuff i’ve allready learnt and make sure i’ve got it correct and compleat in my head.
[EDIT] – Just flicked through that book (google books) and there’s a quite a bit i don’t know actualy … like the more technical stuff about actual aperatus .. i know most of the stuff about soundwaves ect.
My main goal atm tho as i’ve said is nailing music production.
For me this is the first step.December 12, 2010 at 12:23 pm #1232668Is the book
“Sound and Recording: An Introduction (Music Technology) by Francis Rumsey and Tim McCormick”
or just
“Sound and Recording by Francis Rumsey”
cos I can get the first one for 31p lol .. the second will be about £26 scond hand >.<
[EDIT] – just found out the “an itroduction” was only on the older vertions of the book … it’s the 6th eddition i want which is the bottom one.
December 12, 2010 at 12:51 pm #1232669OK book’s been ordered .. nice one for that suggestion. (I think I actualy had one of the older vertions from my old music tech corse years ago lol … fuck know’s where it’s gone now tho.)
Still need to find some way of upping the lvl of my production.
December 12, 2010 at 12:56 pm #1232657I think I have the 5th edition, which is called ‘Sound and Recording, an Introduction’. It’s written by one of the lecturers from my course. Chances are nothing much has changed in the new edition, so if its 31p I’d just get that one.
This one’s really good too for sound engineering basics.
As far as dance music production goes, it’s a bit of a dark art and there aren’t many hard and fast rules, and people are always coming up with new ways to fuck around with the latest plugins and make new sounds (sorry if I’m teaching you to suck eggs). E.g any sound engineering textbook will tell you that making a compressor ‘pump’ is a bad thing, but loads of dance music relies on that effect (especially since that fucking Eric Pridz tune came out a few years back).
I have a bash at making tunes sometimes (not very successfully), and I tend to find I get bogged down with getting the mix sounding right before I’ve developed the tune, which is the wrong way of doing things as it always sounds crap in the end. I’ve got mates who aren’t as technically skilled as me who can make better tunes because they’ll just get an idea down that’s really creative and mix it afterwards. Btw loads of producers are crap at mixing their tunes and get someone else to do this behind the scenes.
December 12, 2010 at 2:16 pm #1232670a side chain compresser linked to a kick drum or something right?
I do exactly the same thing as you .. i spend 90% of my time mixing it as i’m going along and never get my fucking tune done at all!
The problem I have tho that makes me do this Is actauly synthing the sounds I want in the first place. I can make some mad noises .. but they never sound crisp and are allways either too muffled or something’s wrong with how it sounds …
you recon this book would be any good? …
Sound synthesis and sampling By Martin Russ
December 12, 2010 at 3:04 pm #1232658Yeah, you’d basically route everything you want to pump to a bus, stick a compressor on it and send your kick to the compressor’s side-chain (personally, I wouldn’t use the kick tho, I’d send some short percussive sound like a metronome click to the side-chain instead to give better control over the attack/release characteristics).
I find it really helps to produce with someone else – one of my old mates lives in Bristol and he’s good at coming up with ideas, so I’ll go round his, listen to some rough beat or idea and develop it a bit, and we keep bouncing the ideas back and forward between us until a tune grows out of it.
Definitely get hold of some decent synths and a good sample library – getting good sounds out of a weak-sounding synth can be a mission – when you’re having to stack loads of plugins on the channel just to beef up the sound it’s probably time to get some better instruments. A good synth should sound fat straight out of the box (if you get chance to use any analogue synths e.g a Moog you’ll probably find that you need to tame the sound rather than make it bigger).
I think I read that synthesis book when I was at uni actually, the name rings a bell. Tbh I think what I was getting at in my last post was that trying to rationalise synthesis and production techniques in a formal course or a book is a bit of a red herring, as it’s not an exact science, and the creative use of synthesisers comes more from breaking the rules rather than following them – bottom-up tinkering with parameters by someone who understands what kind of sound they’re after.
Those kinds of synthesis books are generally written by academics rather than successful dance music producers, and explain the subject in a fairly dry and academic way – I did a module in sound synthesis when I was at uni, and knowing the difference between an additive and a subtractive synth for example isn’t all that useful when it comes to making tunes.
December 13, 2010 at 12:18 am #1232671See that’s what I need to learn … how to build sounds .. I know what I want alot of the time .. but have no idea how to make the sound how I want it … I can get close at times .. but offten after so many processes to get the kinda sound it’s lost alot of it’s umpf.
The synth I’m using atm is a software synth called massive .. it’s suposed to be (and imo is) a very powerfull soft synth. The premade sounds can sound sick … but when making a synth noise from scratch there’s only so many I can make that are any good.
Is it litteraly practice that I need in order to get better at this .. there no other way then meeting up with other producers? as I don’t really know any irl that I can meet.
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› Forums › Music › Sound Engineering › Thinking about doing something like this …