Viraj's Weblog

Here is a new song. I spent almost the whole weekend on it and got some blisters in the process.

The drums are created using Addictive Drums with my electronic drum set, which has some excellent drum samples. MIDI drums are nice because you can easily correct errors. However, I found when doing rolls and such, it's hard to get the analog feel.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the bass right, and I think I created about 8 different versions I had to dump to my ipod and then listen to in my car. My car has a crappy stereo, but it's where I listen to most of my music. If it doesn't sound good there, I need to improve it. The first versions had really bad bass that killed my speakers. The plain drums lacked kick, so I added an 808 kick, but the mix of that and the real drum kick was too much. So I put a compressor on the 808 kick, which sidechains from the real drum kick. This makes the drum kick lower the volume of the 808 kick for a few microseconds. Then I added a compressor to the bassline, using input from the 808 kick. That lets the 808 quickly bring down the volume of the bassline. So the real drum kick compresses the 808 kick which compresses bassline .

I've found the real time spent in all of this is getting it sounding right. Mastering is definitely an art.

The video for this song will be a collection of time lapse videos. Be sure to keep an eye on my YouTube channel!