2 questions about the sound when making music on a PC

[ew]

And where is that going to come into play? After all, you're monitoring what you record in your DAW through your interface, no? And furthermore, why would you assume that any developers aren't going to code with the bottom limit of what's going to be reproduced in mind?

ew

[Tricky-Loops]

Today, with good, cheap sound cards being available, together with transparent headphones and monitors, we can get a very dry, clinical sound which doesn't have any colouration.

Whenever I listen with cheap soundcards and transparent headphones & monitors to old songs from the 70ies, they still sound pretty analog. Maybe with less tape saturation (as there aren't any cassettes anymore) but still analog.

It's rather a problem of songwriting. For example, you can use Sylenth to make crappy harsh digital sounds or you can use it to make "analog" warm sounds by using the right chords & the right OSC (de)tuning & filter settings...

Skilled songwriting (& sound design) is more important than the quality of your soundcard.

[thecontrolcentre]

You do realise that cheap soundcards only affect the percieved audio? They have no effect on the actual sound quality.

[PHassan]

And where is that going to come into play? After all, you're monitoring what you record in your DAW through your interface, no? And furthermore, why would you assume that any developers aren't going to code with the bottom limit of what's going to be reproduced in mind?

ew

Well if they do, then fine. But if some of them don't then it maybe a problem as the unwanted frequencies will build up and affect the whole mix, and could be problematic, even during the music making.

Its not really an issue for me, it was just an additional question I asked as I was curious why some soft synths are sitting so well in the mix - like so many people say that about Sylenth1.

Anyway, I will do my own research to see how different softsynths behave.

[cornutt]

In my experience, what people called the "natural" sound can largely be achieved by doing two simple things: (1) roll off highs above 4 KHz, and (2) put on a little bit of a short-persistence reverb. This is 90% of what the fancy mastering plugs do, and you can do them with pretty much any EQ and reverb software/hardware you have laying around. I personally dislike running mixes through plugs that highly color the sound -- everything you put in comes out sounding the same, and it's more fatiguing to listen to than the dry sound was.

And yeah, the worst offender in my setup for low-frequency transients is my Juno-106. Pretty much any patch that uses the chorus will drive the DAW crazy unless I put a compressor on it.

[DJ Warmonger]

Are there any plugins, methods you would recommend to make the sound more natural ?

Learn physics and psychoacoustics (:

My advice is to focus on (appriopriately) wide stereo image, since it adds most to sound quality regardless of how deaf the listener is and what are his actual preferences.

[SODDI]

Hi guys

Today, with good, cheap sound cards being available, together with transparent headphones and monitors, we can get a very dry, clinical sound which doesn't have any colouration. While it may be good when mixing, I think its quite unpleasant on the longer run when you are making music or doing sound design.

Are there any plugins, methods you would recommend to make the sound more natural ?
Like some EQ, limiter, filter on the master ? Are you using anything like it when you are making music or design sounds ?

My other thought is about virtual instruments. So many of them are made by big and small companies and just hobbyist developers who very often don't have much experience. While physical synths have some specific output frequency range, its possible to create virtual instruments with a very broad output frequency range. Is that one of the reasons that some synths sit well in the mix and others don't ?

What would be a way of dealing it ? (other than not using them at all

Thanks

If you can get a "dry clinical" sound out of your rig, then that is the best of all possible worlds.

You don't want coloration on your monitored sound - that's the base-line. You want to be able to hear the sounds and effects that color the sounds. Otherwise, you'll miss-mix.

[aciddose]

You don't want coloration on your monitored sound - that's the base-line. You want to be able to hear the sounds and effects that color the sounds. Otherwise, you'll miss-mix.

That is a nice theory, but I regularly find my mixes are terrible if done with a dry monitor configuration. That is because I like to listen with a system adjusted to my tonal preference relative to the "dry" source material. So by mixing with such a system the result is that I produce "dry" mixes.

If I mix without the system configured to my preferences the mix itself ends up colored by those preferences and nothing even close to what you'd expect.