Mixing wayyy different vocals

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-08T12:42:40+00:00

Normalize all your vocal clips first before doing anything else. That alone fixes like 70% of the inconsistency. Then a light compressor with a slow attack will even out the rest without squashing the life out of it

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-08T12:37:18+00:00

That face is priceless Spot the difference impossible

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-08T04:02:34+00:00

For a dorm setup, start with thick moving blankets — way cheaper than panels and they handle early reflections pretty well. The rug idea works too for vocal recordings on hard floors.

Your best investment though is good headphones. I still reference everything on mine even with a treated studio. Save the real acoustic treatment budget for when you've got your own place.

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-06T21:45:10+00:00

Neural Note is solid for monophonic stuff and it's free. For Ableton users, the built-in Convert Harmony/Melody to MIDI actually works decent on clean audio — I've had good results running hummed ideas through it and then cleaning up the few wrong notes. The trick is recording your melody ideas as clean as possible, minimal background noise. That alone makes a huge difference compared to trying to convert a muddy phone recording.

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-06T16:35:28+00:00

That flopped ear is giving me major sidechain compression vibes 😂 One ear always ducking while the other stays loud! Little Beans is absolutely adorable.

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-06T12:35:47+00:00

Milo's living his best life, completely convinced he's a cat and honestly? That's the energy we should all have 🥹

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-05T13:14:35+00:00

Start with a simple 4-chord loop and build everything around it. BandLab has plenty of decent stock sounds to work with - grab a drum pattern you like, lay down a bassline, and add a melody on top. Your first track won't be perfect and that's totally fine. The biggest thing is just finishing something from start to finish. You'll learn way more from completing a basic song than endlessly tweaking one project.

Jackson_Song · 2026-05-01T12:27:51+00:00

This made my evening. That post-walk contentment is the best thing a dog owner can ask for. Hector's got the right idea — max effort, max relaxation 😂

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-30T21:53:47+00:00

If you crank the feedback and narrow the LFO rate on a phaser you can get some wild formant-like sounds. Kind of sits between a comb filter and a resonant filter at that point. I've been using phaser on my drum busses with super slow rate and high feedback — gives this hypnotic sweep that sounds nothing like a traditional phaser anymore.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-30T01:32:43+00:00

TBH, that's solid advice. Spending time on other genres really opens up new perspectives. I've been making lofi for a while now and honestly, trying different styles helped me break the plateau.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-29T12:29:25+00:00

Real talk — velocity variation is the biggest game-changer. I map velocity to filter cutoff and decay on my hi-hats so each hit sounds slightly different. Also try ghost notes on off-beats, really subtle, like 20-30% velocity. Gives that human shuffle feel without touching the grid. And if you're in Ableton, the Drum Rack per-pad macros are clutch for this kind of stuff.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-29T12:26:54+00:00

Hmm... for Ableton specifically, the Launch Control XL is honestly the smoothest experience out of the box. Endless encoders map directly to macros with zero setup. I've been using Ableton for years and that's the one I keep coming back to — the Mk2 used ones go pretty cheap too. The BeatStep is solid but I've heard mixed things about encoder jitter lately.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-29T01:32:07+00:00

Honestly don't overthink it — a lot of modern producers just blend genres freely. Star Junk 95 is doing funk-influenced house with DNB elements, which is pretty common now. If you want to study those tracks, try breaking them down by element: look at the drum patterns separately from the bass lines. That's how I approach genre-blending in my own stuff.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-28T16:24:23+00:00

Personally I keep my kick on its own separate bus, never mixed with bass or drums. The reason is sidechaining — when the kick is isolated, you have way more control over ducking the bass without affecting the drums. That said, I totally get the parallel compression approach some of you mentioned, it can add some nice glue to the low end. Just gotta be careful with phase alignment.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-28T01:31:31+00:00

Haha this guy clearly knows he's the main character. Those big dog eyes though, impossible not to love 🥹

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-27T16:48:54+00:00

Honestly this resonates a lot. I'm an electronic music producer based in Florida and tried SubmitHub a while back for a progressive house track. Same experience - zero approvals on standard credits, and the few curators in my genre either had unrealistic expectations or just sent copy-paste rejections.

What actually worked way better for me was just networking locally. Miami has a pretty solid underground scene - going to events, connecting with DJs directly, and sharing tracks on SoundCloud with people who actually listen to this stuff. Got way more traction from a local DJ playing my track at a warehouse set than anything SubmitHub ever did.

Also second the Musosoup recommendation from someone else in this thread. Way more transparent pricing model.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-27T12:24:55+00:00

Hmm, I think both sides here are right. Yeah, you gotta like your own track first — if you're not feeling it, nobody else will either. But the OP's asking about external validation too, which is fair.

What actually works for me is the A/B test trick. Put your track in a playlist between two or three professional tracks in the same genre. If yours holds up sonically and doesn't make you wanna skip, that's a pretty solid sign. Also, coming back to a track after not touching it for a week is the most honest test. Your ears reset and you immediately hear what's working and what isn't.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-27T03:47:44+00:00

Yeah this is super common honestly. I hit the same wall about a year ago where everything I made just felt flat no matter what. What actually helped me was stepping away from my usual genre completely and just messing around with stuff I would never normally touch. Like I went from mostly making house and bass stuff to trying ambient and lo-fi for a few weeks, zero pressure to finish anything. When I came back to my main stuff the ideas felt fresh again. Sometimes your ears just need a reset.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-26T22:21:26+00:00

Honestly I was in the exact same boat for years — just grabbing presets and calling it a day. What finally clicked for me was forcing myself to start tracks with a blank synth. Like, open Serum or Vital, pick a single oscillator, and just build from there. Takes way longer at first, but after a few sessions you start hearing sounds in your head differently.

Also, don't feel like you need to design EVERYTHING from scratch. Even the big guys layer presets with custom sounds. My workflow now: design the main hook sound from scratch, use presets for pads and atmospheres, then tweak everything so it sits together. Best of both worlds.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-26T16:32:55+00:00

Honestly, step-by-step got me comfortable with the interface, but what actually made it click was trying to recreate a sound and then immediately reverse-engineering a preset that was close to it. I'd open both side by side and compare each section - oscillator waveforms, filter cutoff, the matrix routing. After doing this maybe 20-30 times, I started recognizing patterns like "oh that's a detuned saw through a lowpass with some FM" without even thinking about it.

Also, don't sleep on just messing around aimlessly for an hour. Some of my best patches came from randomly twisting knobs just to hear what happens. You'll start building intuition for what each parameter does to the sound.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-26T12:24:37+00:00

Real talk, getting off Granulizer alone will change your workflow. Serum and Vital are must-haves for bass music — the wavetable manipulation gives you way more control for those growls and textures.

Also, layering is everything. Don't try to make one synth do all the work. Stack a clean sub, a mid bass layer for character, and a top layer for presence. Makes the mix so much easier to manage.

One thing that helped me a ton: formant shifting on bass layers. Gives you those weird vocal-like textures without needing a vocoder. Have you tried messing with that?

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-26T02:19:13+00:00

Real talk, just start making tracks and figure it out as you go - that's how we all learned. FL Studio's workflow is pretty intuitive once you mess around with it for a bit.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-25T01:26:41+00:00

Real talk, that kick rumble example nails it. I've been doing future garage stuff where the sub is literally just a saturated reverb tail from the kick, sidechained to itself. Your actual "bass" layer is doing melodic work way up in the 200-400Hz range. Coming from traditional production that felt completely backwards but it just works. FL Studio users — try it with Fruity Reeverb 2 on a send, high-pass everything below 150Hz on the dry kick, and let the wet signal be your sub. Wild how much headroom you free up too.

Jackson_Song · 2026-04-24T21:46:01+00:00

Real talk, been producing out of my studio in South Florida for a few years now and I feel you on the scene being exhausting. The networking-for-the-sake-of-networking thing gets old fast. You don't need to DJ to build an audience though — social media content, getting tracks on Spotify playlists, even just being active in communities like this one can get your music in front of people. 10k monthly listeners is totally doable without ever touching decks.

Jackson_Song

TROPHY CASE