CHRONOSPHERE

One thing which I spend a lot of time on is searching for vocals. As a beginning producer it's nearly impossible to create your own vocals, so what do you do in order to give your songs that catchy hook?

Text to Speech
On Report a Crash I first got into using text to speech using this website. You can create whatever lyrics you want, and edit those to your comfort. Later on with Who let the Yeti out I used this program. The quality of the vocals on these websites are usually quite bad, so you have to put quite a lot of effects of them so make them sound decent. Problem is, sometimes you don't want spoken vocals, but sung.

Create your own vocals
To create your own takes a lot of effort, and takes a whole different kind of skill then producing a track. You would need a professional microphone, recording studio and someone who can sing well. Those two can cost you quite a bit of money. No problem for a bigger producer, but what about the beginning one who wants to do everything as free as possible? There are websites where you can hire singers and you could get a semi-professional microphone, but we're lazy and we're cheap.

A cappella's
So you want to get some already made vocals. But where to get these vocals? Some websites offer free a capella's, you could use google, or get some home sung. Other websites offer paid acapella's, but be careful though, a lot of them are low quality and therefore not very usable. It's can be quite hard to find an a capella of a specific song, so you might have to browse through lists and lists to see if there's anything that fits you. Another possibility is to do it yourself and, like always, there are Youtube tutorials for it.


So finding or making vocals can take quite a bit of work, but once you've finished your track it's all worth it. Even if it's just a couple words it can really give your track that catchy hook that will make your listeners remember it.

In dubstep, there are two different kinds of people. First the ones who think 'new' dubstep is a sin and label it as brostep, aka as the purists, and the ones who think people should listen to whatever music they like, and not care so much about what genre they're listening to.

Some refer to Skrillex as brostep, others as dubstep. The brostep group claims he is the one who ruined dubstep by making it mainstream. How is one guy ruining it for everyone by taking dubstep, and doing his own thing with it? I think it's a fear of change. The 'old' dubstep is still there, and will never leave as long as people are willing to listen to it. But something new has evolved, which is commercially more attractive and even wins grammy's. Skream has stated: "I think it hurts a lot of people over here because it's a UK sound, but it's been someone with influences outside the original sound that has made it a lot bigger."

Music is contantly evolving, where would we be if The Beatles just made rock and roll? Some even say they destroyed it.  Some would say electronic music isn't even real music. "Music is always changing and the changes are unpredictable." so also says Billy Sheehan. Some genre's are dispised more than other, but out of those grow new genre's. What's underground will sometimes grow big enough to become mainstream, does anyone remembers grunge?

There's no stopping in the evolution of dubstep or other kinds of music. Wether you like a genre or you prefer it's predecessor is up to the listener, but where there are listeners, there is music.

A dubstep track which I hadn't released, but I've decided it should be. I quite like the feeling it gives because of the ambient sounds.

Phantasmagoria

Now that I've released my track Who let the Yeti out on Youtube. I'll get back to the track I've been working on while I let Who let the Yeti out rest. I do this resting on purpose, since it's hard to critically listen to your own songs after you've been working on it for hours and hours in a row. Instead of listening to music, you listen to technicalities and you know your own song that well that you know exactly what's coming.

Now active music listening I really would suggest, but when making your own music it's difficult to enjoy and decide if it's any good at all unless you slightly disconnect yourself from it. I do that by not listening to it for a couple days and then rendering it to a .wav file instead of listening it on Ableton Live, my music program. This way I can't 'see' what's happening.

So when do you release something? Usually when I want someone else to listen to it.  Like I said, my last song I let rest for a while, and after listening to it again I decided it needed lyrics. I used Text-to-speech Master to make computer generated text, added some effects and three hours later I got what I had in mind. Finally I mastered the track cause decided it was good enough. Deadmau5 says: "...you'll never complete anything. I'll never be 100% happy with any production. I can go back and make any production that I've done better. That's just the process of what makes you an artist."

Managed to finish the track I've been working on for the last couple weeks. Used this program to add some lyrics to it which I then put some effects over. Hope you enjoy :)

Who let the Yeti out.

Today I've been getting into Massive. Something I should've done a long time ago cause I knew what kind of awesome sounds you could get out of it. Found some decent tutorials on youtube and got myself started.

Haven't really made anything useful so far but spend a couple hours experimenting and learning it's potential, and it is massive indeed. Most of my time goes to experimenting anyway, messing around till you get something you like and then use it.

About a week ago I downloaded a pack called Vengeance Essentials by Manuel Schleis which contained around 25000 new sounds. Really useful as I started to get bored by the standard pack from Ableton.

Next thing up I want to learn to use is FM8 which is also known for being to create some monster beats.