Newborn Guide to Music Production - Here's to all the losers who want to make music

[cleanerfromvenus]

Vintage Keys Studio is a really good channel if you like old school recording and deep dives into analog keyboards. I used to love Automaticgainsay but his last few reviews have a damn church bell going off every 5 minutes that make his reviews really annoying.

I have my own goof off channel that I'm not posting where I go over drum and guitar gear. I mostly collect cymbals now.

 

[coof coof]

Some VSTs that are good to grab for free are kilohearts essentials and the melda bundle. Prisma is a multiband distortion plugin that is pretty neat and there is plenty of other random cool shit on the same site with varied usefulness. This is one of my favorite filters right now. You can hold shift and click and drag any of the parameters on the UI to modulate them and it has an audio follower or more standard LFO mode. I've been having a lot of fun playing around with this buffer effect that is also free. These are also pretty cool, but I use them pretty rarely. Spectral compressor and Crisp are the two main ones people use out of that bundle. Crisp can sound pretty good on a drum/bass premaster bus with settings kinda like this if you're going for a crispy sound as the name implies.

Spoiler: settings

As far as paid stuff I really can't shill the complete kilohearts bundle enough. Its probably 80% or more of what I use now between phaseplant + multipass + snapheap and all the ancillary effects. You can do stuff like adding a subtle Haas effect without having to do another send by putting a snapheap inside of a multipass and messing with the mix knob and stuff so its only effecting the top end however much you want it to. Just one example but you can get really unhinged putting multipasses inside of multipasses to target different frequencies with different filters/effects. Here are some cool and or useful presets for snapheap, phaseplant, and multipass. The snapheap ones for wash outs, spinback, and the fattening knob are particularly useful.

 

[deeman]

Sorry for crossposting, i'm a inpatient little child with a almost fully functioning studio.... I hope this is the right place to ask...

So... it happened... about a decade after doing any music i got the brilliant idea to teach my lady how to do music in Fruity Loops (I think i used like 9) before it was renamed. And looking at the new market of VST(i) s and shit i got hooked myself.

So i'm trying to make my studio as physical as possible, both for me and my girlfriend, so i gotten the FL Keys mini and AKAI Midimix for using as a mixer, but then i remembered my old dusty Behringer BFC 2000 and thought; "I could skip using the MIDIMIX as a mixer and use it as a VST knob controller instead (taste that sentence).

I have downloaded a script for the midimix, had to assign the low row of knobs so i got the hang of that, but as i plugged in the BFC and put it on the correct controller (namely the BFC 2000) but the faders refuse to work, all the buttons play different keys on the piano and dragging a fader just makes it slide down again, for those who don't know the BFC uses mechanical sliders so when shifting banks it automatically slides the faders)

Is it because i got the MIDIMIX already allocated to it? if so, how do i delete it's presets? I mean it has the BFC2000 to choose from drivers from the get go...

If that fails i still have trouble making the BANK LEFT + RIGHT to function on the MIDIMIX, so i only got 8 channels :/

*FL Studio 2024 is the version i stole... erm... are totally testing out before i buy*

 

[coof coof]

As such, I'll necro this with some of the videos I've found most useful to save for the re-watch later.

Here are a few very valuable Mat Zo videos I forgot to add to this post:

Spoiler: Bass sound design in phaseplant

Spoiler: Mixing advice mostly centered around creating depth

The biggest take away from it is that he uses glue compression, narrowed stereo field, and reverb/convolution to make stuff sound like its coming from further away and he uses multipass to add slight saturation on the low end and compression on the high end of stuff he wants to bring forward to give it more contrast. He also uses Pro-MB on expander mode on some stuff he wants to bring forward to give it more dynamic range if he doesn't want to saturate it at all.

As an added bonus here are the Pro-L2 settings I started using on all my premastering chains and stuff with the only real difference being the amount of pregain for each group. Basically copied 1 to 1 from the old Pro-L preset that Skrillex uses on everything. It is what you would expect for the most part with 2ms attack and 23ms release, but worth noting that its on transparent mode and the channel linking settings are important to tweak for each song.

Spoiler: Settings

 

[coof coof]

Here are some plugins that really shouldn't be free: Basically a free pultec emu, spectral morph thats better than the $300 vst, crazy good clipper, nice saturation/compression.
The new paid version of the clipper is also really worth it for mastering.

 

[Postmodernist Disaster]

I'll chip in with some of the free plugins that I've come across that are way too good to be free.

First off there's Nil's K1v, a 1:1 recreation of the Kawai K1 synth that needs no additional ROM setup and is pretty much plug and play. Doesn't consume too much CPU either.

Everything U-He are always some of the best audio plugins currently available and Zebralette is basically a stripped down version of their flagship synth Zebra 2. But even with a single sound source it can still sound massive and is pretty much a testing bed for Zebra2. Their whole suite of free plugins are extremely solid and the full versions are decently priced too.

VirtualJV is a wip low level emulation of the Roland JV-880 (the weaker cousin of the JV-1080, which was widely used in the 90s by both film and game composers alike), the thing is pretty rough around the edges currently as right now the only tweakable parameters are the FX section since the Edit tab hasn't been finished yet. But it not only has the factory patches from the 880, it also includes the RD500 digital piano sound set and the gimped but full suite of all the 19 SRJV80 expansions cards, which vary from typical 90s cheesy digital synth sounds to very niche genres like techno, 3 different types of world music and even country. It does require some setup but the ROMs for both the synth and the expansion cards can be found in archive.org afaik.

Osirus/OsTIrus have already been mentioned before ITT but recently the team behind those released a 1:1 emu of the Nord Lead 2 virtual analog synth. You still need to find the BIOS file separately but it's pretty much the synth in a digital enviroment and can even load patches from the physical unit. The only tibdit about it is that as of now preset names have not been implemented so patch loaded into it will just be named 1,2,3,etc. But I've attached a file that contains all the factory patches Nord released back in the day plus some more for the NL1 in .mid format plus the necessary json files needed so it can actually display the name of the patches.

For some simpler VSTs that don't do much regarding editing capabilities but can still fit in some mixes are Redtron, Ticky Clav 2 and CollaB3. The first is a Mellotron collection of samples dressed in a custom sample player and comes in two flavors: SE, based on the original models people like the Beatles and the Moody Blues used and 400, which is based in the latter models that King Crimson and Genesis used to mention some. Ticky Clav 2 is a lightweight emulation of a Hohner Clavinet, an instrument that is mostly associated with classic 70s funk and Motown, made famous by Stevie Wonder on Superstition and finally CollaB3 is an recreation of a Hammond drawbar Organ, which is pretty much iconic for everything from classic 60's-70's pop to jazz, prog, fusion, etc. Getting the hold of it might be trick at first but searching for a tutorial on how to use a Hammon in general works as well.

A honorable mentions goes to SWAY, an upcoming emulation of Yamaha's FM/Sample hybrids, the SY77/TG77. As of now the project is still missing some key finctions like evelopes, some samples and the FX section but it's ecpected to go on a provate beta soon in case someone wants to keep an eye for it.

Also, I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but since trackers have been mentioned, some people here might like Renoise. It's basically a modern DAW full with MIDI and VST support out of the box but it's entirely build arround a tracker interface and can even load and export both samples and projects in legacy tracker formats. The demo is basically the full program but with some occasional nag screens and the inability to render your works, but unlike FL, you can actually save and reload your files at a later date.