Perpetual frustration and lack of skills

[gaggle of hermits]

I'm honestly not sure if I'm explaining my issues properly, it's somewhat difficult to articulate exactly what I'm struggling with, but getting that 'groove' is part of the problem

having played a few tracks on your soundcloud, i respectfully disagree. they are serviceable but on the second one down, the hi-hats at the start are more confusing than grooving and the quantisation is way overdone on the rest.

is this not a clue?

; with basses for example, I'm unable to create anything that sounds good and meshes with a kick drum, regardless of if I add EQ/FX or not.

this is rarely purely an eq problem. it's a "this bass is too long/short/in the wrong place" problem.

[TW1306]

having played a few tracks on your soundcloud, i respectfully disagree. they are serviceable but on the second one down, the hi-hats at the start are more confusing than grooving and the quantisation is way overdone on the rest.

is this not a clue?

I'm honestly not sure what you mean about the quantisation, sorry, but as for everything else I don't think 'the groove' is the problem I was thinking of; I can work with beats/drums somewhat okay but when it comes to synths, basses, effects etc I very much struggle with making anything serviceable.

this is rarely purely an eq problem. it's a "this bass is too long/short/in the wrong place" problem.

As with above I think it's an 'I can't create good sounds to begin with' problem if anything.

[gaggle of hermits]

ok. i'm not overly fussed if you take my advice (i could be way off target in any case) but this is the pattern you've established over years. people try to help. and you come back with "yeah, that's not the problem i've got" without thinking for a moment whether there might be a point to it. time and again.

seriously, a lot of these tracks used pretty much regular presets, especially the stuff done on romplers (and i remember being in the shop where sasha came in with some older guy to buy a jv-1080 back in the day). the key was using those sounds well (with maybe a touch of light eq to push a sound back or forward, but really not much more than that, or an adjustment to the delay and the filter through the course of the track).

i look forward to your near identical thread in a year's time.

[TW1306]

ok. i'm not overly fussed if you take my advice (i could be way off target in any case) but this is the pattern you've established over years. people try to help. and you come back with "yeah, that's not the problem i've got" without thinking for a moment whether there might be a point to it. time and again.

Because I have no idea how I'm supposed to implement that advice if I can't even make some of the most basic elements in the first place. You talk about 'creating a groove' but how am I supposed to go about that? What am I not doing in that regard that I should be?

You claimed the hi-hats are 'too quantised' - what does that even mean??? They are sequenced just like everything else in that track (and all other tracks I've done), and that's the first time anyone has ever made that comment to me.

I am willing to listen to advice but 99% of the time I have no idea how to actually put it into practice - what parts I'm doing wrong or not doing at all.

[gaggle of hermits]

You claimed the hi-hats are 'too quantised' - what does that even mean??? They are sequenced just like everything else in that track (and all other tracks I've done), and that's the first time anyone has ever made that comment to me.

no i didn't. I wrote that the hi-hats are more confusing than grooving. i didn't elaborate but one issue with that is that there are two hi-hat patterns as far as i can tell and they are clashing with each other too much. one needs to support the other. you might do that by changing the sounds, losing half the hits, adjusting the off-beat velocity, rolling off the top of one line to push it back a bit. or just rethinking those loops. however, it's probably not a big change that's required: the key with any of this is understanding that quite small moves can make a dramatic difference in feel and groove.

the over-quantisation was just a comment about the stuff being too much on the grid: i don't know whether you've played stuff in and quantised it or just piano-rolled it. if it's the latter, you really want to put more emphasis on playing-in and working from there.

[vurt]

you can't create a groove if you can't feel it.
even if you can't play the right notes, you can tap out the rhythm on keys (even qwerty) then move the notes up an down. one groovin baseline.
then do the same for the drums...
quantise to 32s/16ths and see if you mess the groove up, if so undo and try individual elements, maybe leave the kick and quantise the hats.

start by tapping on the desk even to get the groove. feel it first, then make it in the computer.

do small things, don't aim to make a track, aim to make a few drum loops and a few bass loops, mix them up, see if it sparks an idea...
if not, tomorrow, write a drum loop that does work with one of yesterday's bass loops.
let that play, try and add pads, or a melody. don't force it, as the loops play, sing along "dum de dum" you don't need lyrics, it's about finding something that works melodically.
the more you do these things, rather than trying to write a track, the little bits, at some point, you will move on.

you sound busy in your personal life from what you say above, try to be more relaxed about music, just do odd bits, and remember to congratulate yourself on occasion for nailing that take!

[Aiynzahev]

I'm happy to offer a 1 on 1, you stream and I sit in. I did this before and it was interesting, A lot of what I pointed out he already knew, but just wasn't doing it for whatever reason, either rushing or missing the trees for the forest kind of thing.

[TW1306]

the over-quantisation was just a comment about the stuff being too much on the grid: i don't know whether you've played stuff in and quantised it or just piano-rolled it. if it's the latter, you really want to put more emphasis on playing-in and working from there.

Okay, the sentence just read to me like you were talking about the hats being quantised, apologies. I don't have a physical keyboard (and getting one would be impossible for the time being unfortunately) so I do pretty much everything in the piano roll.

I understand I can come across as dismissive but I genuinely don't mean to sound rude. A lot of the time I honestly just don't know how to implement the advice, especially because it feels like my lack of ability to actually create suitable synth sounds and such is what's preventing it. I'll try to explain with vurt's suggestion above: just creating some basic bass and drum loops and developing them. I'm certainly happy to try that (I've been doing it with drum loops for a while anyway) but I would need decent bass sounds to work with - which is one of the difficulties I have.

[vurt]

I'm happy to offer a 1 on 1, you stream and I sit in. I did this before and it was interesting, A lot of what I pointed out he already knew, but just wasn't doing it for whatever reason, either rushing or missing the trees for the forest kind of thing.

this! can often be something many bedroom producers (myself included these days) don't "jam" with other knowledgeable people.
by jam here, i don't mean a conventional everyone plays an instrument, as we are dealing with midi input, but having other ears in the room (or online nowadays obviously) inputting ideas, encouraging, and just chatting about music, it's all part of what i was getting at earlier when i was talking about my friend, he went out and found people to teach him tiny bits, just one lick, then he'd work on that for a few days then get another.

and kudos for doing that
hats off to you sir!

[CinningBao]

You're young, and most of us here are old farts (I speak for myself and whoever else accepts this truth) and nobody here knows anything about how much experience you have with this stuff, or the methods you use to explore and implement your ideas.

So most of us will be regurgitating processes we've used in the past to get to "the next little level" of whatever we're trying to understand.. whether it's kick sound choices, understanding groove, how to exploit quantisation.. (or wtf is compression, how the hell do I make reverb choices, how deep do I side-chain the kick to the bass) most of us end up creating little games or test environments to explore the next thing.

A lot of making music is... not making music. A lot of it, as you know from playing trumpet, is just practise. Practise, f'kin practise. And we do that with exercises designed to help us understand blowing, and lip stuff, and posture, and chromatic scales, and arpeggios.. make and play some of these games with your DAW and those tools. Ask questions like "how much swing can I apply before it sounds bad?", "what is a bad kick choice?".. make beats without any intention of developing them. Just make deliberate rubbish. Then look at what you though it was rubbish. Maybe bits of it weren't?

Music is supposed to be fun, even when you're learning or practising! And we learn more when we're having fun

Apologies for lightening the tone a bit too much!

[TW1306]

I'm happy to offer a 1 on 1, you stream and I sit in. I did this before and it was interesting, A lot of what I pointed out he already knew, but just wasn't doing it for whatever reason, either rushing or missing the trees for the forest kind of thing.

I would definitely appreciate that, I think it would definitely be helpful to show what I'm doing rather than struggle to get it across in words - though I'm not sure how I'd go about it.

[i need Help]

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The key is to make sure you’re listening to people on the right side of the curve, not the left side lol, which, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty dang hard nowadays with social media.

I too got stuck in “The Vally” for many many years. I’ve got a very technical/analytical personality so I was eventually able to dig my way out on my own, but looking back I can see that had I been able to accept some of the advice I was given, I could have gotten out a lot sooner. The key is to trust the advice regardless of how you feel about it or yourself, which is why it’s so important to make sure the people giving advice aren’t actually in the Valley with you. “Blind leading the blind” as the saying goes.

As was pointed out above, you probably know more than you think, but at this point you’re lost in the valley and need (or would benefit greatly from) someone to help get you out.

That said…

I'm happy to offer a 1 on 1, you stream and I sit in. I did this before and it was interesting, A lot of what I pointed out he already knew, but just wasn't doing it for whatever reason, either rushing or missing the trees for the forest kind of thing.

**Rips shirt and gets on hands and knees **

Oh wise and powerful @Aiynzahev! Designer of the patches! Knower of the crazy production tips! I FREAKING beg you, let me sit in tooooooooo!!!!! I’m being dramatic but also serious lol.

If not then ima be hitting OP up after y’all are done cause he’s prob gonna like leapfrog me lol.

Here’s another chart I made in case OP doesn’t know, it’s not as tall as I wanted because there’s a pixel limit on the app I use lol:

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[BertKoor]

I repeat: try to remake a track.

Focus on solving one problem at a time. Identifying what the problem is, is half the work done.

So pick a simple song to remake, one you expect is easy.

Cut corners if you have to (pick your battles, address one problem at a time) but don't cheat. An exact copy is not needed, "your" version is good also, as long as you can say you created it all by yourself.

Do this a couple of times, and your skills will improve.

[TW1306]

I repeat: try to remake a track.

Focus on solving one problem at a time. Identifying what the problem is, is half the work done.

So pick a simple song to remake, one you expect is easy.

Cut corners if you have to (pick your battles, address one problem at a time) but don't cheat. An exact copy is not needed, "your" version is good also, as long as you can say you created it all by yourself.

Do this a couple of times, and your skills will improve.

I've done a lot of trying to recreate tracks/specific sounds and struggled to identify the problems/discrepancies, but as promised above I will take all advice on board, so I'll give it a try. There's a track I can think of that's relatively 'simple' in terms of composition, so I'll do my best with that one.

[vurt]

maybe if him with the unpronounceable name can arrange a live stream, he can help you a little in identifying mistakes and help you to understand how to yourself.
failing this, if you want to try and post bits on soundcloud as you do the recreation, we can all maybe have a listen and help you.
eg as i said earlier, don't aim to recreate the track, aim for one element.
let's take the drums as an example.
we can give our opinions only of course, only you know how you want it to sound.
we can suggest trying different kits or adding this or that. depending on what the track is and what you bring to listen of course.
or even just do the drums from the verse for now...
what im saying is break it down in to bite size chunks. then build piece by piece.
we climb mountains one step at a time