I have been producing for a year, and I have mostly focused on finding creative and unconventional things to do: interesting ways to use a granulizer, making atonal music for fun, weird EQ techniques, sampling screams for a drop, vocoding everything, etc. It is a lot of fun but I want to work on making my music more accessible and better sounding overall and just have 1-2 elements that are more experimental in terms of how it sounds, rather than trying to reinvent everything.
My process for coming up with interesting vocal samples and processing these (granulizing, looping them, reversing them, etc) takes about half my production time, I spend most of the other half coming up with melodies and variations. At the end I pick out some sounds for my pre written melodies, usually by going through the presets in Sytrus. After that I'm done, I usually breeze through the sound selection process compared to the rest of my process. Sometimes I compress to increase the track's overall loudness, sometimes not.
Thing is, all of my songs sound terrible, they all sound very distant and almost low-passed yet harsh, even though I am not low-passing or distorting the high end on purpose. And my supersaws, for example, sound very underwhelming.
I understand the basics of mixing, EQ, compression, limiting, panning, etc. but I am trying to figure out a way to apply this. I have played piano for 12 years and spent a lot of that time messing around making random stuff for fun and programming synth patches on this weird rompler (it was a digital piano that had about 200 pretty good piano presets and thousands of stock sounds from sound effects to choirs- I kind of miss it tbh), so I can come up with a lot of track ideas fast (usually 2-3 a day), but I am really bad at making anything sound good, and when everything sounds terrible, I naturally tend to come up with overly complex/random arpeggiations and throwing in unnecessary sounds to try to make up for how shitty everything sounds. I think if I could make each individual element in the song sound much better when the song is put together, I wouldn't feel the need to put 16 different random chords in a song.
For example, say I have a supersaw preset, how do I make it sound better? Should I just pick another preset, should I try to layer the current preset, etc?
On top of that I am trying to find a balance between compressing things to make the song louder overall vs not compressing. I don't usually use atmospheric pads or anything, so I have a lot of dynamic variation, and the way I take elements in and out of songs, it's hard to level everything.
was going to post a song here as an example but it's not the feedback thread so I think i'll play it safe. if anybody says it's OK i'll post a clyp.it link
Submitted November 11, 2017 at 01:13AM by macbookprofan https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/7c6c50/how_do_you_guys_go_about_making_your_song_sound/?utm_source=ifttt