Hi peeps 
 
Sorry to rush this, but I'll be back in the morning in order to catch up on the latest toons here and also post some more info on my current works.
 
Briefly, it is a piece that was created on Sonar X2 using fifteen instances of u-he's latest VA VSTi Hive.
 
I decided in the end to use 3rd party EQ rather than Hive's own EQ (I'll explain more tomorrow).
 
I have also used (for now) a limiter on the master bus in order to maximise the levels, although there is still some dynamics left (I need to refer to Danny's post in my techniques topic on the subject).
 
Here's the link:-
 
https://soundcloud.com/synkrotron/nessus
 
see you all tomorrow 
 
cheers
 
andy

Hey andy, 
Nice work. The playing and theme is good. The mix needs some help. 
On my end, the bass is overall muddy. Maybe there is too much 200-300 Hz hanging around.  Did you mix on speakers or phones? 
Did you view a stereo spectrum of the master out to see where your frequencies are building up? 
I would try -6db @ 250Hz and then +2 at 8K for starters. 
Cool idea. 

Bass sounded fine over here, Rim... Andy, great groove and wankout with Hive.  I bought it way back when the survey bucks were sitting there...Haven't had the time to play with it much as so much else has been going on but you've inspired me to dig it out and give it another whirl.
 

Vangelis lives. Deodato too. Who gave you the hives? ha ha  sorry. It seems like a workhorse of a synth, nice effort! Very much a fun noodle with a new toy, I see this as a cool foundation or background to something. What are your plans?
 
cheers,
-Tom
 

I've just got up... Very first thing I did was come visit my song and see how things were cooking 
 

Rimshot
Did you mix on speakers or phones?

Hi Jimmy, thanks for listening 
 
Yeah, I always mix on phones I'm afraid... Limitations of a "home studio."
 
I will definitely check out what you are saying. I wanted to use just the effects within Hive and it does have a basic EQ. But I noticed there was a lot of bass hanging around, even on some of the pad presets. I ended up adding an instance of Pro-Q on each track, just so that I could "see" the spectrum. Seeing the spectrum is important for me as I mix on headphones.
 
I also put Pro-Q on the master bus too, but in all the instances of Pro-Q, tracks and bus, I only dialled out the low end with a -24dB/octave low cut at around 50 Hz. And I also used some high cut, although I don't think that was as important.
 
So I thought I caught most of what would perhaps make it muddy. As I said, I'll definitely look at that again and see what I can do. I didn't use any other boosts or cuts so I need to spend more time on that for sure.
 
Thanks for pointing that out 
 

Vastman
Andy, great groove and wankout with Hive

LOL! Thanks Dana  I'm so glad you listened to my happy toon...
 
I don't know where that groove came from to be honest... Must be built into my internal system... 
 
Yeah, Certainly get Hive out. I've only just scratched the surface of what is potentially a beast, given all the routing and modulation options. And I've not even bothered looking at the 45 page manual for it yet.
 
 
Right doods... I've got a busy time ahead of me now... I've got to listen and comment to as many of the latest tracks this morning. Got some catching up to do.
 
And then I am going to attempt a thorough write-up of Nessus, as much for my own benefit and to explain the processes used and decisions taken. It'll be a lengthy read and I'll be sticking in lots of screenshots.
 
Off for some breakfast now
 
cheers
 
andy

emeraldsoul
Who gave you the hives?

hahaha... Hiya Tom, and thanks for listening 
 
I was just nipping off for my breakfast, but very quickly, it was mainly an exercise using just a single synth. It's something I generally do with all new synths I get, just to help me see what it can do. This time I've worked it into something that almost resembling a tune haha!
 
Not sure what the final end game is... As always, I'm learning about my craft, with the help of peeps here, so I'll be polishing it some more I guess... Turd polishing is my next favourite pastime 
 
If I change anything now, it may possibly to thin out the lead lines a bit. I wasn't sure if they sounded a bit corny and over the top. I find that because I don't do lyrics, I tend to overdo other aspects.
 
Okay... got to go get breakfast... I'm starving here  

Creating Nessus pt 1
 
Okay, I'm going to try and give a detailed breakdown of my latest track, as much for my own benefit, as well as giving peeps an insight into my music.
 
It was seven days ago when I saw a post about Hive, the latest release from u-he. It's a VA soft synth and I gave it a quick go and thought, "I'm having that."
 
There are plenty of "one synth" demo's out there, but felt I wanted to give it a go.
 
I normally get bogged down in an eight/sixteen bar idea that goes nowhere. Somehow I managed to break that with this composition. This time I started mapping out a bit of a "structure," by playing with a few different chords. It only took me about three days to map out the whole tune, pretty much. Might sound like a long time but I can take ages with his process.
 
For the chords I used two different pad sounds from Hive's presets, one panned 60% right and the other 60% left.
I wanted an evolving sequence running through the whole track, so I used X2's Step Sequencer for that, producing, in total, 23 different sequences based around the different chords, each just one bar long. I "stored" each sequence in its own Take Lane which was then muted. I do this so that I can make notes on each sequence and copy them around as needed.
 

 
So now I've got my chords and main sequence running through the track.
 
I wanted a percussion section next. Hive isn't multi-timbral, so I had to use an instance of Hive for each item. I went with just four; kick, snare, open and closed hi-hat. I then stuck those tracks in a folder. I mapped out a very simple quarter note pattern on the kick and a simple complement on the snare. The hi-hat is simple too, just a 1/16 pattern. I used velocity at this time to give the percussion some sort of feel.
 
Then I added a bass line, following the tonic of chords, with no complexity whatsoever, varying the length of notes played, nothing else.
 
I then created two more pad tracks, this time panning 80% L/R. The notes played are mainly an arpeggio of the main chords sequence, each track slightly different.
 
Now, although I didn't really need them, I created two more sequence type tracks. These are panned hard L/R this time and are fast attack short release presets played in the upper register. These vary and interweave throughout the main body of the piece.
 
Then came the lead parts. I knew I wanted two, but to start with I placed one instance of Hive, selected a typical synth lead preset and played a load of takes over the top of my backing. I knew these would need some heavy post processing. I've been playing keys for a long time, but I'm still rubbish. And limited in my style too, hence the pentatonic scale used.
 
It was this process that probably took the longest as I had to painstakingly go over each bar and tweak notes back into time. I don't use quantize on lead tracks as I feel that this is the only part of my music that should not sound mechanical and computerised. I drag each note to within a 1/128th off the beat, give or take, which is hopefully enough to make the lead track sound like it has been played by a human. That can play keyboards...
 
Once I finally got the lead part sussed, I loaded another instance of Hive and selected a different lead preset. The MIDI from the first lead track was copied to this. I then had to decide how these two lead part would interact, kind of talking to each other. I split at points I thought felt good and muted one track. This was done throughout the lead tracks and I ended up tweaking/adding notes as I went along. In a couple of places the two lead tracks play in tandem.
 
Next up was to revisit the main sequence. I said that I wanted it to "evolve" and to that end I used automation envelopes. Twelve in all. One on each of three oscillator and sub osc volume controls, four in total. One on the cutoff and resonance of the two filter ADSR mods, another four. And the final four where for the delay and sustain levels of the ADSR mods. I could have used automation on the track volume but I wanted to see how using the Hive oscillator volume controls sounded. Here is a screenshot of the envelope lanes:-
 

 
This was another lengthy process. I think Sonar could use some improvement when it comes to creating and editing envelopes (assuming there is no change between X2 and Platinum).
 
Finally, I decided that I wanted to add a sort of "effect" type track. So I added a final instance of Hive and tried a number of presets before I arrived at something I thought was suitable. It is used in the intro and outro sections only.
 
So, here's my final track view layout:-
 

 
Notice how I hide the "instrument" tracks, leaving just the MIDI tracks. I never look at levels in track view and leave that for console view, which is better suited in my opinion. Also, as well as placing markers to show each section I also use a dummy MIDI track that I place clips on with different colours so that it's easier to see, as well as easier to select sections of the song to loop or edit.
 
Okay... I will cover the mixing and mastering stages in another post.

Creating Nessus pt 2
 
Now for the mixing and mastering stage...
 
I'm far from being a "pro" mixing engineer, obviously, and I'm totally self taught, with help from a lot of offline and online media, including this great forum.
 
As a result, my workflow isn't the best, but it's all I know.
 
I tend to mix as I'm going along, tweaking levels as I add new elements. At some point I sometimes drop all the faders down to zero and start from scratch, and this is what I did here. I first brought up the percussion as high as it would go and then everything else was brought in around that. I believe that sometimes percussion can get lost in the mix so I try to give it some priority. Doesn't always work though...
 
Regarding effects... I wanted to use all of the effects within Hive, and for things like reverb, delay, chorus and distortion I did. But I found the EQ and compression effects to be not that great... More to do with my limitations I guess, as I have now become to love my FalbFilter effects. Ease of use and great user interface are the main reasons. And I like the spectrum analyser, which is essential for me because I mix on headphones and I need to know what is happening at below 50Hz.
 
I did try to stick with just one instance of Pro-Q on the master bus only, but after a while I started adding Pro-Q into the effects bins of individual tracks too.
 
It was then that I noticed that there was some low end stuff hanging around in some of the presets. This is Pro-Q showing the spectrum for the main sequence:-
 

 
Notice the slight increase in low end fequencies below 50Hz. I know they are only at around -45dB but I always worry that this will all add up to problems later. So, as you can see, I added a "low cut" at 50Hz in this case. Same again for one of my pad presets:-
 

 
And here's the snare, although this time I decided to cut at just over 100Hz:-
 

 
I therefore went through all of my tracks to check this out. Not all the tracks suffered... But those that did received some serious bass cut.
 
On the master bus the Pro-Q instance has some more low cut. But here is my problem, I think, which is mentioned above. Notice how much low frequency stuff is still there:-
 

 
A clear illustration that I still have a lot to learn yet... But the lack of any real EQ adjustment on the master bus was more of a "keeping processing to a minimum" sort of thing. But now that it has been mentioned I need to ad some more curve that that EQ, perhaps something like this:-
 

 
I must admit, that even in my headphones, it sounds less "boomier" already, so this must be a step in the right direction. Comments invited as usual 
 
Okay, now for the limiter...
 
I created a topic about this subject in the Techniques forum and there is plenty of help in that. But I am still opting to go down the limiter route rather than killing the peaks before they get to the master bus.
 
The main reason for this is, I do not freeze my synths, because my laptop has the power for most of my work, and I therefore have no waveforms to go by. And, as I find with the synths I use, once you start tweaking filter resonance and cutoff you can get unexpected peaks here and there. I deal with most of them by altering the fader level, and once upon a time I even added some fader automation to dip a level momentarily. So I'm finding the limiter method a tad easier to deal with those rogue peaks, that are more a product of adding all the tracks together than clipping levels on individual tracks.
 
Here's a Pro-L screenshot:-
 

 
As you can see, there's not much going into the red there...
 
Notice I had Inter Sample Processing turned on. However, I still had problems with the final export. At first I made the output level -0.2dB and the resulting wave file was fine. But upon converting the file to MP3, it clipped. Not by much, but a clip is a clip. I eventually had to drop the output to -0.4dB to remedy this.
 
Finally, here's my waveform for the entire tune:-
 

 
Even though the wave is quite busy, there is still some dynamics in there, and I am reasonably pleased with the final result, other than the low end problems mentioned. I am still using Sound Forge 10 for manipulating my final wave file and converting it to a 320kbps MP3 file. Lately, "manipulating" consists of trimming the track to length, if needed, and inserting a bit of silence at the beginning and end. I would normally have compressed the wave too, but in this instance I was happy with the levels that I exported from X2, as a result of using Pro-L on the master bus... Something I have not done until recently.
 
Okay, I think I've waffled on for long enough about this now.
 
If you made it this far, thanks for reading
 
cheers
 
andy 

Nice job on this fun tune.  It looks like you did a lot of work to put all those screenshots up.  In spite of using headphones to mix, it sounds well balanced on my first listen.  Keep em coming.

very cool synkotron and nice playing. I like your choice of sounds and the warmth of the mix.
I am listening on crappy speakers and will have a listen again later.