With Emergent Drums 2 on sale for $79 right now, this is the most acknowledgement I've put towards the program/company since its initial release not too long ago.

From what I've seen and heard, it just doesn't seem very impressive to me, especially for the price. I remember thinking this when it was initially $100; and ever since then, they've steadily been bumping up the price to where it's now $249.

For those of you that have it, I have a few questions:

• How often do you use Emergent Drums 2 in your workflow?

• Does it feel more like a tool or a toy?

• How satisfied are you with the samples that generate from the product?

• Do you often use Emergent Drums samples as placeholders, and later load in other samples when you find the right one?

• Would you earnestly recommend Emergent Drums to a friend for $249? $149? $79?

If you've listened to some 90s and early 00s ambient-oriented tracks and tried to recreate their sounds with just a synth, you'll notice that downsampling and bitcrushing won't get you the same kind of sound you hear in there. It will sound dull(er) and less... complete, lush, rich? That is because back in the day artists sampled their synths and the technical side of that process had some cool side effects.

You can sample in two different ways. You can sample whole chords, where your parallel harmonies and frequency stretching will combine into a weird but cool sound. Or, on the topic of this video, you can sample an individual note from a synth and have your frequency stretching happen with different magnitudes for every note of the chord. That will create an interesting and rich sound!

This Thought-Forms video will show you an exact how-to with some tips on how to develop that sampler sound once you get the basics. It's quick, concise and really informative.

I hope you find this

There are a lot of great stereo imaging tools and spectrum analyzers. Most of them aren't free though. Having a good way to visually analyze loudness, frequency distribution and stereo image is incredibly important. Unfortunately, it is often the case that most default or free solutions are barely functional. They don't provide you with enough information to shape your mix or don't present it in a simple, clear and understandable format. (I'm looking at you, FL studio visualizers!)

SPAN is a spectrum analysis tool that will let you monitor your peak volume, RMS and LUFS. It shows you the frequencies that are passing through the plugin and you can customize the spectrum view by changing time, frequency and level ranges. If you want even more precision and control, you can adjust the fast fourier transform sample size, it gets that technical! You can also compare channels, left and right of the same channel or two different ones. Two channel comparison is the limit of the free version,

Just found this website where you can select your heaphones from the database and automtically generate different outputs for various EQs to adjust for linearity to help you with mixing.

Just wanted to write out this post to the waveform community and say my thanks to everyone who's been participating and lurking in this community so far. It's amazing to see your posts and projects here every day and it genuinely makes my day a little brighter to know that something I posted helped someone on the other side of the screen!

Anyways, I'd like to ask you all to help me bring you better content. I can't really post Kush, In The Mix, or random youtubers everyday, I find a lot of channels don't go nearly in-depth enough on a lot of topics and just scratch the surface, and well established youtubers just post the same content and advice over and over again. We should all benefit from different perspectives here!

I got a new job (yay!) earlier this week, so I'm gonna be a bit short on free time, which means if I don't do something about the way I search for content it'll be hard to make it consistently.

Finding noteworthy youtube channels can be quite time consuming. Writing

Making a great sounding pad is actually more tricky than getting some cool synth and drowning it in tons of reverb. I know I tried that the first time. And failed miserably. You don't have to!

Will is gonna walk us through different tricks and ideas to flesh out an ambient pad. Using a root tone, texture tones for highs and lows, some effects and simple automations will allow you to create a cool and easily customizeable(!) pad from scratch with any and all wavetables that you want in there!

Hope you find it useful, guys! AMN out!

For a set of headphones that is so extremely visible online and offers quite a unique feature, I couldn’t find much information on it that wasn’t hyperbolic. So here I hope to provide a nuanced view.

Note that my current set of cans and therefore comparison are the Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro. I realise this isn’t a fair comparison as they are not only more expensive and not wireless. They are also open back.

Wireless

Wireless low-latency headphones are awesome. Yeah it’s noticeable to me but barely. The range is pretty much studio range. Don’t expect to wear them into a different room but walking around your studio without getting tangled in a long cable works very well. I can keep them on and hop from drums to piano without any interruptions.

User Experience

Getting set up was easy. No installations or software packages. Just plug in an analog signal, pair the transmitter and the headphones and go. There is volume control on the headphones which was set really high to begin w

Lo-fi balcony - Like it or not ^^

😅

Dubstep growls may sound like they're simple, but getting a good growl sound is way more than just distorting some waves to all hell (though it may be a part of it). Using your envelopes and LFOs to shape the sound through filters, distortion and other effects will get quite a bit more complicated.

Noah will show us how to get a high quality, clean and powerful dubstep growl in the style of Virtual Riot, so you can put those skills and ideas to use in your own synth patches.

P.S: My posts will slow down from here on out as I have a bit more going on IRL than I did when I started. This one today is a quickie in between my schedule, but bigger posts will still keep coming and I hope you find it interesting nevertheless!

EQ is a really simple tool, but the way it works is anything but that. Different equalizers use different algorithms to process your audio, and most of them will affect your sound in unexpected ways.

The video will give you an overview on some technical reasons why phase weirdness happens with most EQs and also how an asymmetric EQ setup can give you unexpected Haas effects.

And man, does Sage Audio's video feature some sick beats!

I was looking for some good videos on automation and it surprised me that there's not a lot of content relating to the decision making process, despite automation being a standard feature in any modern production software.

Automation is an important tool in any music producers kit and learning how to use it well is just as important as arranging your tracks, if not slightly more so for electronic tracks. One could say that in electronic music it is a part of arranging.

There are a lot of fun ways to automate your productions, like creating macro effects for your synths to use as buildups or additional texture. Today though, we'll take a look at how Fabio from Noize London approaches making transitions, building and releasing tension, and working with emotion through gain automation.

This is addressed to somewhat experienced users who worked with both softwares:

What made you choose one over the other on the long run?

I have been with Reaper for quite some time but considering mixing and mastering my next project in Ardour. Not sure if it's worth putting in the time to learn it from the ground up.

Please don't make this about free vs. paid software.

Thank you!

Do you ever feel like you can make a great loop but you can't make a great song? I don't know if that's your experience, but I've been there before, and let me tell you, it's a nightmare. It brings to question all of your skills that you have developed so far, because you've been able to cruise through without thinking about it. But now it just isn't enough! I needed more variety in my tracks.

So if you're like me then this video is just for you. Nathan goes into a key concept about arrangement that will help you think about it in a much more constructive way. Every instrument can be played with different articulation, loudness, rhythm, etc. and it doesn't have to play all the time. So Nathan poses three big questions of arrangement: what is playing, when is it playing and how is it being played?

This video will show you how these questions give you insight into what you were doing subconsciously (and how to answer them in a creative way). It will provide you with a simple thinking

I'm in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.

Whether I'm sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I'm generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I've created.

The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it's just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that's been slowly tacked on over time.

Alternately, I'll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars... these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don't tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I'm wo