Djent tips

Hi Peeps,

I think this is the first time I've posted in this area.

Anyway, I fancy trying my hand at producing a bit of Djent. Trouble is, although I've been playing guitar for over thirty years, I've never really put the effort in and as a consequence I am only good for a bit of lead and simple rhythm.

I therefore propose to turn to my A|A|S Strum Electric soft synth instead. And I will be routing this through either TH2 or GR5.

I have experimented with various presets in the soft synth and the effects and I am reasonably impressed with the sounds/tone I am getting. Not quite there but I'm sure I can get the sound I need.

My main problem, then, is the MIDI side of things. Strum Electric is not that bad when it comes to options for up/down stroke and palm mute, total mute etc. but I am struggling to get that "classic" Djent style.

I am wondering if anyone else has tried this, or something similar, in the general Metal genre, and can give me some pointers as to what I should be doing to improve my "soft guitar" playing techniques.


Many thanks :-)

andy

Thanks for that Jonesey.

I'm not sure about some of the questions you've raised to be honest. The A|A|S software does allow you to model gain, as well as pick position and strength, stuff like that. It's based on physical modelling and not samples, so I need to full get my head around that.

I reckon there are some nifty MIDI programming tips I need to learn in order to crack this.

And yes, djent is a genre of metal, and the word djent is supposed to be the sound you get from palm muting. You could argue all day about this, and certainly, metal bands I've been listening too since the dawn of the genre have used the palm mute technique in there music. But someone, in their infinite wisdom decided to create a new genre... beats me, but I do like some of the bands that put themselves into this genre :-)

Hi Dave,

No, I haven't got Kontakt I'm afraid. I have a handful of guitar sample stuff that comes with Dim Pro, but that's it, and when I came across Strum Electric and Acoustic I was quite impressed with the physical modelling method so I decided to give the sample based synths a miss. Was that a mistake do you think?

bitflipper


I collect them instead of snow globes.

It's a disease and I think it's catching...
 
Regards,
Dan

 

I don't know if this will be possible with what you have, synkrotron. That style is something that cries for a good sounding amp, a detuned guitar that is set up right and the proper technique. I've yet to hear any sample come remotely close to capturing such a sound. There is one that would be the only thing I can think of, but to be honest, you're better off trying to physically play this yourself.

But, if you want to do something based on samples....nothing else in creation in my opinion and experience, comes as close as this.

http://www.prominy.com/SC.htm

Watch the vids without looking at them...listen to the mp3's, preferably "Another World". This thing is so powerful, it could be the end of guitar players and it sounds good enough to where guitar players wouldn't be missed really. There are a few things that are questionable within the sounds...but for the most part, this thing is as close as you can get.

-Danny

Hi Danny,

Thanks for your input here, I really appreciate it.

I doubt if I'll be able to play my own guitar too well to be honest. It's more of an ornament I'm afraid, which is embarrassing, but there you go. That's why I thought I try to use my MIDI programming skills to try and emulate what I want to hear instead, but so far I am failing in that too.

I've watched some of the vids and listened to the mp3 files and SC Guitar is very good indeed. But I bet even that takes some patient programming to get the best out of it. I didn't really want to go down the sample route, only because I had invested in the physical modelling route, and if that fails I will probably give up and keep to doing what I know best. I just thought I could produce a kind of electro/djent fusion, no vocals, perhaps just a token vocoder vocal here and there.

But I won't give up just yet. The Strum VST is not in the same league as SC, by the looks of it, but you can still use a certain amount of articulations. I'll experiment some more and, if I manage to create something half decent I will post it on my soundcloud page :-)

What I was thinking was if you had some ideas for the guitar use a MIDI guitar softsynth deelymadoodle (or any old sound) and put your vision for the parts together and then I'd translate that to the real deal... but however you'd want to work it. I'll warn you though I'm not exactly in creative mode at the moment. Got my head in the manual and learning production stuff so it would take longer if I was putting in a creative effort. Let me know either way. Cheers.

Right on. How about we play a little musical ping pong? What I propose...

Pick a time sig and BPM value and I'll just jam out a bunch of rhythm riffs on the fly... like 15-20 minutes worth to a clcik track. Then you can slice 'em and dice 'em however you like, add some beats and foundation synth parts (or if you prefer I can program the beats in BFD when you send it back) then I'll rerecord the parts how you've arranged them and toss on some guitar melodies/leads where appropriate. Then send it back to you to add more synth textures/leads/whatever. I haven't been singing or writing lyrics much lately but maybe I could do some of that as well if you want.

Could be interesting. I'm still only a quarter of the way through the manual but it's starting to be a lot of repetition so it's going a lot faster now. Once I've absorbed as much as I can I want to take a little break to play around with my new found knowledge before digging into the Groove3 stuff so it'd be a welcome change from studying.

Did you upgrade to the full version of TH2? If not I'll clone the track and bounce the effects to one and leave the other dry so you can mess around with it.

Lemme know. I might be ready in the next couple weeks barring any unforeseen life wackiness.

Cheers!

I'll just freeform a bunch of wackiness and you can pick and choose what you like. When I sit down for a practice session it usually culminates into me just letting riffs and stuff flow for a while. There'll be lots of riffs and variations in 1-x measures of repetitions to choose from. I'll slice out any real garbage and send you the rest. I'm envisioning you getting the structure together then I'll polish, practice and record it how you've laid it out if you're okay with that. It'd be a true writing collaboration. Should be fun. I'll PM you when I'm getting closer to doing some tracking. Cheers, man.

I was only joking about the styles Beep... Back in my day you had Rock, Heavy Rock and Metal and that was it. Well, at least that's all I listened to anyways ;-)

If you want to do different time sigs and tempos just put the info in the file name. We could then do a Progelectropopmetaljazzfusion song........................

Lol... You got me, Andy. My last metal band (and my only stint as a drummer) used to try to edumacate me in all the sub genres. They'd be like "well this part should have an "X" metal beat and this should have "Y" metal beat and blah blah blah..." to which I usually replied with "Your getting a Maiden beat here, a Slayer beat here and in this section I'm just gonna spazz out for a while". It all worked. ;-)

@kev... I listed the metal tunes on my Soundcloud under "Dork Metal". Which got someone once confused for saying "Dark Metal" but nope... it's Dork Metal. lulz