GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?

Thanks man. Yup, that's pretty much what I do.

Recording a loop. Add a beat. Layer it up, copy and paste, soundcloud. I'm not a professional musician. Never have been, probably won't be. Yet its my most learned exercise as I've probably put in 1000+ hours. It's just something I do for me and if I make a nice product, great. Most of it is madness.

Literally 200 or so gigs of stuff I've never released though, because mixing/mastering is real work. I guess you could say I'm more of a performer. I produce almost nothing.

Shame live music is impossible at the moment, but should stream some stuff. It's literally illegal to play in a band so, well, strawberry float.

For me music is more an art practice than something with a defined goal to it. It's a mode of being. I really enjoy interacting with others mostly in my group TBS but they're all over the place at the moment. Hopefully we can get together before too long because we really have a dynamic. Haven't seen my drummer in years though, he disappeared off some place selling LEDs for cruise ships. True story.

I rediscover my music on a regular basis, play for a few days, release some old jam tracks, still got 10+ year backlog to get through. It's harder when you record everything in a group and try to make that the project. Some really good mashed up tunes in the moment that never see the light of day.

You can see this in professional musician's output though. A jam/riff/thing gets released 10, 20 years after it was written and becomes a hit. And the musicians are like, lol, we wrote that 20 years ago. I think this is probably what will happen to me when I give up with design/art and just teach guitar, play at weddings, and live in somebody else's house/shed/cave. I jest, but I think it's going to take a long time for me to finish and commit anything properly to tape, especially the way things are at the minute.

Really enjoy playing with my Arturia Minibrute 2 though, I've got some ideas going on there just stored in the sequencer. That was a good buy, and its there for when I need a sonic escape from my design job.

Green Gecko wrote:Literally 200 or so gigs of stuff I've never released though, because mixing/mastering is real work. I guess you could say I'm more of a performer. I produce almost nothing.

You should just give them a quick mix and chuck them out bud. The amount of bands I like that I'd listen to them live through a horses arse is in the hundreds. Modern day if you got a half decent recording and a half tidy mix you could at least chuck them out for people!

Load wave > normalise > Waves L3 Multimaximiser on master channel set to -0.2dB lol

You're right. I might just say strawberry float it and render out entire 2-4hour long jam sessions. The Internet has caught up, so you really can upload, and stream an endlessly long track/session, completely uncut. It's better than nobody being able to listen to / hear it, even me because often the levels are way off and I have to do a +4-8DB boost in VLC just to listen to it . Better than it clipping though. A high noise floor is workable, whereas hard clipping is not. I was good enough a sound engineer to avoid that most of the time.

Maybe that's what my group needed, to just have the technology available for people to scan through waveforms at their own leisure until they find something they like? I've had ideas of building a website/app like that, where it's basically just a sound dump. Go to this website, explore a waveform, find some 1 minute sequence you like. Maybe even give visitors the ability to select out and edit the bits they like at their own leisure, and then they determine what "track" is?

Now that would really change things...

You should definitely get the jam sessions out there. If you look at musicians like James Ferraro, he released a metric gooseberry fool ton of his early music online. I downloaded a huge torrent and amongst the 30+ minute tracks of pure noise there are moments of genius - finding it is half the fun, and it shows his progression to his recent music that follow the typical 'album' format i.e. 40-60 mins, 3-6 min per track, thematically cohesive.

Probably 90%+ of my music is just stored on my PC too. I jump from genre to genre depending what I feel like making so I've started grouping off tracks based on that, just to try and eventually assemble a selection of tracks that work in a sequence.

I do wish there was a Soundcloud alternative that leaned more towards music discovery rather than the culture of self-promotion in the hope of getting likes and followers. I find it quite hard to discover new music through Soundcloud unless its tied to a very specific genre. Plus its full of bots.

Holpil wrote:You should definitely get the jam sessions out there. If you look at musicians like James Ferraro, he released a metric gooseberry fool ton of his early music online. I downloaded a huge torrent and amongst the 30+ minute tracks of pure noise there are moments of genius - finding it is half the fun, and it shows his progression to his recent music that follow the typical 'album' format i.e. 40-60 mins, 3-6 min per track, thematically cohesive.

Probably 90%+ of my music is just stored on my PC too. I jump from genre to genre depending what I feel like making so I've started grouping off tracks based on that, just to try and eventually assemble a selection of tracks that work in a sequence.

I do wish there was a Soundcloud alternative that leaned more towards music discovery rather than the culture of self-promotion in the hope of getting likes and followers. I find it quite hard to discover new music through Soundcloud unless its tied to a very specific genre. Plus its full of bots.

Yeah, I had kind of hoped that's what Soundcloud would be for me but it's basically twitter for so-called "drops" now.

That reference is interesting, and yes, that's exactly what most of my group's music is/was like. 45 minute long epics of total horribleness and in 5 minutes or 3 minutes or even 30 seconds there's moments where I genuinely feel like, wow, that right there is special.

When I get around to my own personal giant sound dump, I'll of course share it here. I think the idea of crowdsourcing the determination and selection of "good stuff" is itself a pretty novel concept...

Edit: wait, wait. How about this. You have a platform where the fans get paid a fee to find the good stuff, and then release it as a track. Every time that track sells, that fan gets a kickback for selecting that track as a track.

Then the fanbase literally gets rewarded for doing the hard work for the artist, filtering through all the stuff and deciding what's "good", because afterall, it's up the audience what's "good", no? That's kind of anarcho-capitalism.

I'll check this post back in 10 years and I bet some other band has done it.

I think I've registered my absolute distaste for mixing before. It annoys me most of the time.

I've had severe hearing issues over the last 5 weeks and it's been pretty frustrating in numerous ways.

Left ear is a complete shitshow now. I'm fairly sure that the damage is permanent at this point. I may have cholestematoma, but I'm not sure yet.

I'm trying to figure out a solution for recording music, because I still want to continue doing it. Does anyone have any recommendations for relatively cheap but good headphones for tracking and mixing?

I know it isn't really ideal for the latter, but I can't hear things properly through speakers anymore. I used to just pump the click or drum track out over these.

Edit - Here's some videogame cover I did a year or more ago. There's other kinda embarrassing stuff in the profile, I privated the most cringeworthy tracks

https://soundcloud.com/user-212781159/prewillcleaner

Squinty wrote:I've had severe hearing issues over the last 5 weeks and it's been pretty frustrating in numerous ways.

Left ear is a complete shitshow now. I'm fairly sure that the damage is permanent at this point. I may have cholestematoma, but I'm not sure yet.

I'm trying to figure out a solution for recording music, because I still want to continue doing it. Does anyone have any recommendations for relatively cheap but good headphones for tracking and mixing?

I know it isn't really ideal for the latter, but I can't hear things properly through speakers anymore. I used to just pump the click or drum track out over these.

Edit - Here's some videogame cover I did a year or more ago. There's other kinda embarrassing stuff in the profile, I privated the most cringeworthy tracks

https://soundcloud.com/user-212781159/prewillcleaner

Sorry to hear you're going through hearing troubles. I've been playing drums for years and also have tinnitus (incidentally, not caused by the drumming), and I'm currently relying on mixing electronic drum sounds for my income so I can somewhat relate to the whole speaker/hearing issue.

What's "cheap" to you for headphones? For over-ear headphones, I've been using Audio Technica ATH-M50X headphones for some mixing and think they're pretty accurate in terms of response for the price. They're around £110, which I see as reasonable for "reference monitor" style headphones. It's all relative though so this might be expensive for your budget.

Heskimo wrote:

Squinty wrote:I've had severe hearing issues over the last 5 weeks and it's been pretty frustrating in numerous ways.

Left ear is a complete shitshow now. I'm fairly sure that the damage is permanent at this point. I may have cholestematoma, but I'm not sure yet.

I'm trying to figure out a solution for recording music, because I still want to continue doing it. Does anyone have any recommendations for relatively cheap but good headphones for tracking and mixing?

I know it isn't really ideal for the latter, but I can't hear things properly through speakers anymore. I used to just pump the click or drum track out over these.

Edit - Here's some videogame cover I did a year or more ago. There's other kinda embarrassing stuff in the profile, I privated the most cringeworthy tracks

https://soundcloud.com/user-212781159/prewillcleaner

Sorry to hear you're going through hearing troubles. I've been playing drums for years and also have tinnitus (incidentally, not caused by the drumming), and I'm currently relying on mixing electronic drum sounds for my income so I can somewhat relate to the whole speaker/hearing issue.

What's "cheap" to you for headphones? For over-ear headphones, I've been using Audio Technica ATH-M50X headphones for some mixing and think they're pretty accurate in terms of response for the price. They're around £110, which I see as reasonable for "reference monitor" style headphones. It's all relative though so this might be expensive for your budget.

Ah, someone else with tinnitus. I've had it since I was a child, but it could easily be drowned out by background noise. Recently, it has been so loud because of the hearing issue, I hear it all the time. Took me a few (sleep disturbed) weeks to get used to it. It's rubbish, but hey, no point in complaining about it any further.

About the headphones, upper end of the budget would probably be around that. I just want something balanced and accurate. I'd looked at AKG before, I'll start looking at the Audio Technica stuff. Thanks for the help as well

Upper end sennies, AKG or Audio Technica are probably a good place to start looking. Look at frequency response charts on a site like Headroom. You're always going to get a bias with headphones which means they're not ideal for mixing but if you then go on to listen to your mix on a range of systems to master it then that is what you are supposed to do anyway (even if you have monitors, because nobody listens to music on monitors except engineers). Or you could consider sending your mix out to be EQ'd by someone you trust with a different pair of ears!

Not sure why I'm posting this in this thread but it just sort of feels right .

Anyone had trouble with a device (in my case a radio) that has an AUX input where it automatically switches to AUX when it detects something has been plugged in, however something has clearly gone wrong in the circuitry as nothing is being plugged in but the bastard keeps switching to AUX anyway, over and over again?

Really doing my nut in. I'm there trying to listen to Radio 2 and every few seconds it flicks over to AUX, so I have to manually put it back onto DAB, only for it to go back to AUX a few seconds later the bastard thing is barely one and a half years old and wasn't exactly cheap!

I've tried cleaning the port, doing a factory reset etc but no luck. I'm wondering now if my only chance is to try and break it open and somehow fix the circuit board, but I'm no electrician, I don't own a solder gun and I would have almost no idea what I was doing...

Ooh it felt good to rant about that .

This sounds counter-intuitive but perhaps its possible to trick the circuity by actually connecting something random to the aux input, then using the input selector to deliberately select what you want to listen to? That might alleviate the device being erroneously triggered by current fluctuations, electrostatic, EMI etc and help it "lock" into specifically one and one other thing, instead of constantly "presuming" you have just plugged something in (which probably uses some kind of physical jack and or signal/ground connection detection).

If it's a dodgy physical sort of connection detection then you could then perhaps try just fitting an adapter to it so it "thinks" something is plugged in, but then switch it to something else. You then might to do this once after turning it on, rather than constantly.

Not a bad shout, and definitely worth a go. Thanks GG!

Can anyone help me choose the right replacement strings for my guitar? I haven't had to replace a string on it until now, so I want to make sure I'm buying the right one.

My guitar is a Yamaha Pacifica 112V.

I was thinking of either:

https://ernieball.co.uk/guitar-strings/ ... tring#2223
or
https://www.stringsdirect.co.uk/strings ... -light-p14

Would either/both of those work?
And how easy is it to replace a string?

Lotus wrote:Can anyone help me choose the right replacement strings for my guitar? I haven't had to replace a string on it until now, so I want to make sure I'm buying the right one.

My guitar is a Yamaha Pacifica 112V.

I was thinking of either:

https://ernieball.co.uk/guitar-strings/ ... tring#2223
or
https://www.stringsdirect.co.uk/strings ... -light-p14

Would either/both of those work?
And how easy is it to replace a string?

The 112 is a great guitar, a friend of mine had one that I borrowed back when I first started playing.

Either of those are fine. I tend to buy Ernie ball skinny top heavy bottom strings for my electrics.

You want to replace all the strings at the same time if they've been on for ages. If you play regularly, you really should replace them every few months as they go very dull sounding and are harder to keep in tune.

Changing is very easy, just takes a while. Buy a string winder for unwinding the current machine heads to save you a lot of time, replace each one with about 2 inches of slack and wind up to some tension. Do that for all strings and leave it overnight for the strings to stretch, then wind up slowly to near tune, leave again, as they'll keep stretching and go flat very quickly. Eventually they set at their in tune state. If you try to go to full tension right away, it's highly likely you'll snap them.

I've used Roto yellows, regular guage 10 (the 10 or whatever the smallest number is describes the size of the smallest string), on my Pacifica 112 for over 15 years.

I've never really snapped a string from full tension initially, you just need to do it slowly. Not those anyway. A nice thing is they include two top E strings which tends to break easiest.

I wouldn't go straight to light guage strings unless you really struggle to fret big chords because they bend all over the place potentially leading to an out of tune sound. They also break more easily.

I've only snapped one and it was a top E, I can't remember if it was right away though. Worth mentioning anyway if someone doesn't know how to re-string as it'd be easy to just go mad and wind right up quickly and break something.

Yeah I guess if you did it with 10 seconds it would stress the steel quite a bit. This also happens if they're initially set string tight.

Thread them on with both your index and middle finger under the strings about the middle (like pulling a pistol gesture upside down). That gives you the right amount of slack to wind on.

And don't trim the string until its stabilised tuning, or at least after it's wound for a while.

Thanks guys, went with the D'Addario strings and managed to re-string without issues (although it looks a bit messy - couldn't get it to wind as neatly as I might've liked ).

Had a go with Rocksmith to try and help me improve and learn some songs, but I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. It's not quite as interactive as I thought it'd be. Hmm. Oh well.

Been working on more music, and while I'm still gooseberry fool at producing it, I think it's starting to sound a little less amatuer hour now.

On that subject, it annoys me how completely overproduced most modern music seems to be. You have bands that are famous for a stripped down sound (as there's not many band members), then you listen to an album and it's like they've got 400 people singing and playing instruments.