Veracohr

That's to be expected, but don't get fooled. I'd bet when you were in the mastering studio, the 'after' was a lot louder than the 'before', am I right? Our brains like to tell us something sounds 'better' when it's louder; it takes a trained ear not to be fooled by that. Another thing you might have been hearing is that when music is heavily compressed, little nuances of sounds that were previously buried start to come out, and it can sound impressive, like it "comes alive". But heavy compression kills dynamics, so one has to balance the negatives and positives. You said you want "more space", so I assumed you meant the mix is too dense, too many things going on at once, and I agree. The way to fix that is to have fewer things going on at once, which means removing sounds. Whether it's re-writing a part to make it more sparse, or removing a sound entirely from the mix, the only way to get more space in a mix is to take out the things filling that space. As far as breaking up patterns, as I said about the acid sound and the bass, they go pretty much non-stop, there are no rests. Alter the note patterns to give some rests, try making some notes longer than others. Again, to create more space you need to take things out; try taking out some notes. Dynamics aren't something that's added, they're something that's taken away. Like through heavy compression and limiting in mastering. Also try doing something interesting with a plain sound, like adding filter modulation if there's currently none, or some amp modulation if there's not much on a sound.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "more space", but my first reaction is that it should be simple: start taking out sounds. For instance, there's an acid sound that goes basically nonstop during some parts - try breaking up the pattern so there are some silences. Same with the bass. Also it doesn't have a lot of dynamics. What's an example of something you like that DOES have 'space'?

Both, they go hand in hand. Mostly I'm just not a fan of monotonous basslines that never change. That pattern is fine if it's part of an overall more complex bass part, but if it never changes it starts to grate on me.

I second this. An oscilloscope is used for looking at a single-frequency periodic waveform. Not much use in music production. A spectrum analyzer shows relative level of all frequencies across a given range.

1. No live performance yet, although I'd like to. That's why I bought Ableton Live in the first place, I just haven't gotten that far yet. 5. Typically one MIDI track per drum, sometimes if I have multiple toms or bongos or some kind of multi-drum group of similar sounds it will be on one track. 6. I only have one synth that isn't controllable via MIDI, and it doesn't have full envelope controls (x0xb0x). If I did have such a vintage synth, and was mid-writing, I might keep a chart. 7. There's no reason to convert a monophonic sound into a 2-channel audio file, it just takes up twice the space and is still mono. 8. I don't use groups usually. 9. No MPC here. 10. I record all manual modulation. 11. I have a 4-in 4-out MIDI interface, so I only need one MIDI channel per output, so I keep everything on channel 1. Exceptions are when I use the 'Combo' mode on the PEK to play two sounds at once (I don't really ever use it the way it was intended, to make combination sounds), and the Emu Orbit can play on 16 channels at once, I just don't use it much anymore. 12. All my MIDI, audio and instrument channels and tracks are typically just in the order I add them to the project. Sometimes if I have an aux channel specific to one sound, I'll move the mixer channels together, sometimes that's useful for certain things. 13. I don't have a set way I write a song. 15. I don't DJ, but yes I believe various DJ softwares have various ways of aiding tempo matching. 16. My instruments don't have arpeggiators, but if they did I wouldn't use them. 17. Generally just one MIDI track per instrument, although I have at times found a use for a separate track for modulations, especially when I kept changing the notes but wanted to keep the modulation. Not often though. The Andromeda wasn't really thanks to the general Alesis corporation, it was a small group of people in the company (at the time) who were passionate about analog synths and made it happen. One of those people is named Dave Bryce, and he frequents online keyboard forums, and he's posted parts of the Andy story. Pretty interesting.

I guess #3 has a TR-909, if we're only seeing the bottom row of knobs. The top row must be hidden in the shadow. Yes, I think #7 is also SH-09.

Yeah, I guess those are slide pots. Too bad the picture is so small. #6 is SH-09. I thought I saw mostly knobs, but I guess the angle just makes the sliders look funny.

To me it looks like a wooden endcap, something along the lines of a Prophet or Juno 6/60. Too hard to tell though. 6 is intriguing. It has the Roland-like joystick, but I couldn't find anything Roland that looks like it otherwise. I don't know how many other companies used a joystick, but most don't.

But he has since given up his title as Lord Spammer of All Psynews.

Today is Towel Day

I wouldn't even go that far. As far back as "Blue Planet" the albums started becoming just a couple decent tracks surrounded by mediocre or worse filler. Not even necessarily bad, just boring. "Cosmic Experience" was even a step up from the previous few; it jumped headfirst into the fullon style where the previous few flirted with it, but turned out better for it. Side note, I just took a look at Discogs and discovered there's an entire album among the early ones I was unaware of: "Waves".

I just did a search for "Controlled live version" and all I found is exactly the same track that's on the album, even when it was labeled "live version". Am I missing something?

I guess they took it down or something? "Page not found"

I don't know, a lot went down in 2011, seems hard to top. I think if 2012 ends up being talked about for decades, in won't be positively.

The basslines especially on the first few are not so great in my opinion.

Listening now. Aside from the KBBB kick/bass pattern, "The World Outside" is pretty interesting!

Lol, I just noticed that even THIS TOPIC is nearly 4 years old.

I was only quoting numbers from the US, since the "New Deal" was an American thing. Also, even though people look back on it now as a good thing that helped bring us out, at the time it was pretty controversial and highly unpopular.

The stock market crash of 1929 and Great Depression it triggered was much worse than the recession sparked in 2008. 25% unemployment rate, whereas it peaked at 10% in 2009.

Years ago I installed ReBirth on my Mac and used it without problem, but I long since uninstalled it.

I'm not familiar with those particular monitors, but it may be normal for them. All amplifiers have noise, poorly designed amplifiers will have more, and if you have them in a quiet environment and turned up loud you may just be hearing the normal circuit noise. Externally produced noise probably won't sound exactly like hiss, and is unlikely to be the culprit anyway. If the hissing is new and you've had the monitors for a while, maybe it can be fixed. I'd contact M-Audio tech support and see what they say.

I think by now Psynews on Facebook has about 10 times more "Likes" than Psynews has regular posters.

Do they hiss when turned on but not connected to the audio interface?

^ Yes, that's the basic business model of a digital distributor. There are lots of them.