Hey guys, as some of you already know, I'm woking on a track at the moment. When I upload it to soundcloud, the kicks in the intro have little waves on top of them. When I look at most of the pro's waves, they are straight and don't have any. Is it the panning?

Music is about sound, not about how the wave form looks on soundcloud's impossibly vague approximation of what the wave form actually looks like. Ignore it. Does the track sound good and right? Then it's good and right.

I suspect the OP knows that.

But soundcloud dumps down the quality of your upload. Something to be aware of.

Additionally, it approximates the waveform. And the visual approximation changes drastically depending on what visual resolution it's rendered as. In other words, it's meaningless, even though we can glean information from the visual representation. If it's accurate, that is. Which it's not. Since it can't be controlled, can't be accurately understood, and doesn't affect the audio, it's worth ignoring.

My theory, however, on the little waves is that it's how the video interpolates the semi-consistent pattern of a sine wave whose graphed frequency cannot fit in the rendered resolution... er.. its hard to explain what I'm thinking.

But like if you have a graphing calculator, and you tell it to display the Sine function, and then zoom out along the X axis such that the periods get shorter and shorter, it'll reach a point where the grainy visuals cannot accurately render the ptatern anymore, but it does make a consistent 'rounding' of what the y value is per visible x coordinate.

This video phenomenon is also visible in digital oscilloscopes.

...Okay I think that's enough words on this. It's really nothing.

Thanks a lot MOK, I guess it's because it zoomed out to that point, so I guess that's why it's showing the waves, but yea, I'm more concerned about my sound not my waves