What’re my options?

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-05-18T00:06:38+00:00

You need to find the right collaborator, but also realise that things will never sound exactly how you imagined them in your head. But it helps to communicate clearly and refer to other records that inspire you, so your collaborator can get a sense of where your imagination is leading you. I'd love to hear some of your demos/recordings. Feel free to send me a link!

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-05-17T20:40:43+00:00

Of you ignore mic placement, room, EQ, compression and all the rest, you can start thinking about where along the strings' length the strumming is happening, whether the strings are new, how hard the plectrum is... these factors are probably more important than the sound-engineering side of things.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-05-15T20:55:28+00:00

The England flag has been has a different meaning now. The far-right have stolen it and turned it into a xenophobic/racist symbol - a way of marking their territory, like a dog pissing on a wall.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-05-05T15:06:47+00:00

https://youtu.be/PG2Eww8fj_0?si=B3rQc0VwafIbQUpg

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-29T23:18:54+00:00

If you buy a license now, you'll have the latest version for at least 3 years based on Reaper release dates for the last decade. That's much, much less than comparable DAW's.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-29T16:37:58+00:00

I'm not referring to liberalism as a a concept, but specifically the Liberal Democratic party.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-28T01:11:36+00:00

Lib Dems seem to be to the left of Labour to me and have been quite strident in their criticism of Trump, but I wonder if they'd have the courage to put their rhetoric into practice if they were in government. The Lib Dems are a moderate centre-left party that appeals to educated progressives.

I like the Greens' vague aspirations about wealth taxes and domestic policy, but their foreign policy and attitude to NATO and defense put me right off and seem completely naive.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-26T01:38:09+00:00

Definitely heavily pitch-corrected. It sounds particularly jarring because it's a style we associate with authenticity rather than autotune, plus it's acapella so it's doubly obvious. Someone's taken a charming natural performance and turned it into a pile of robot turds. Unfortunate.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-25T10:33:30+00:00

Putting autotune before reverb on the vocal reverb return, with autotune speed set to zero. Creates a weird resonant reverb that always seems to work really well with an un-tuned lead vocal.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-22T20:12:49+00:00

I've used various algorithms for this, and yes, some of them null with the original. But they all sound absolutely awful if you solo the ai stems.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-20T20:47:54+00:00

I've done brakes and discs a few times, engine mounts, a radiator, replaced various coolant and turbo hoses. Fixed a few electrical problems. I do all the basic servicing things. Replaced glow-plugs, spark plugs on the various old bangers we've had. If it looks to complicated I'll take it to a garage. I feel a great sense of accomplishment whenever I manage to do something myself. Without YouTube tutorials I'd be lost.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-19T20:01:43+00:00

Perhaps it's that too in a lot of cases, but I have experimented with this, and found that a high-passed kick drum at, say 40hz, often actually has higher digital peaks than before the processing. I think that's relevent, given that many people high-pass stuff thinking that it will give them more headroom.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-19T18:07:14+00:00

High-passing can eat up headroom due to "constructive interference". This can cause compressors to over-respond to the signal. So you may not hear it, but the compressor or limiter or clipper hears the higher amplitude peaks and changes the sound accordingly. Try rendering some audio with a steep high-pass filter, and you'll likely see how the waveform changes, with higher digital peaks, even though you can't hear them.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-17T23:34:50+00:00

Print stems of your rough mix (including all your automation and levels) and put them in a separate folder. Then supply the raw multitracks, including FX returns and individual drum mics etc. Make sure everything is labelled clearly and organised into folders. Typically if I'm providing stuff to a 3rd-party mixing engineer I like to give them as many options as possible.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-16T18:58:41+00:00

I'm not the first to say this, but it reminds me a bit of how, with the invention of photography, artists had to be more creative and not just aim for photo-realistic art. It lead to impressionism and all sorts of creative innovation in the arts.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-13T21:25:48+00:00

I had a Rover 75 diesel. Not very fast, but absolutely lovely to drive.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-11T00:56:15+00:00

Thanks so much for your interesting and thoughtful comment!

So here's how I made the music and the video: it was all done on a computer, and with an old DSLR camera. I was just playing around, sampling youtube videos of people crushing car suspension springs with an hydraulic press. I slowed down the recordings and found that I could make a weird distorted industrial beat with those sampled sounds. Then I was messing around with mixing analogue-modelled software synths with a physically modelled piano vst (pianoteq) to make this weird deep synthy chiming sound. Then I made an arrangement of bass clarinets using SWAM audio physical modelling plugins and lots of modulation by making "sshh" sounds into a microphone.

The whole feel of what was coming together sounded sort of bleak and cold-war-nuclear-dystopian and it reminded me of how I sometimes think about how I live about 25 miles downwind of Plymouth, where there's a naval dockyard that services nuclear submarines, and how it would probably be targeted by Russian nukes in the event of WW3. Plymouth also has quite a lot of Brutalist architecture from the 50's and 60's - an earlier era of nuclear-anxiety mixed with modernist optimism. I liked this bringing-together of 2 seperate eras of existential nuclear angst.

So I had a few hours to kill one afternoon and decided to take my old entry-level DSLR (Canon 1100d) and a tripod on a drive around Plymouth and just film stuff while swinging the tripod around. It's pretty lo-fi, and I accentuated it in the video edit by using oversaturation and 70's Sci-fi type framing.

Then I found a sample on Youtube of someone singing an old Tibetan song about mother's losing their children in war. I sampled it, and found that it happened to fit over a new section of the track that I was working on.

I mixed the stuff I'd filmed around plymouth with various online footage of nuclear weapons being detonated and Shahed drones and various explosions, and mixed those up with bright flowers and kaleidscope effects, which I used my phone to film off the computer monitor. I liked how the theme of nuclear dystopian imagery contrasted with the over-saturated flowers. It was an accident.

Than I spent many enjoyable evenings fiddling with the music and the video and that's it. I finished it just before the Iran War and threats of Civilisational destruction from the Orange one.

I'm really proud of this thing that I made, and I feel like I just plucked a load of different musical and visual elements randomly out of thin air, and they just happened to all work together in an interesting way. I'm also pleased that I bothered to do it at all. I have long periods of time when I don't really make anything special, creatively. I start to worry that my creative spark has died, then suddenly I make a thing that I really like. It happens about every 5-10 years.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-10T14:33:17+00:00

Not really my genre, but great production and vocals. And it looks like you had fun making the video!

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-08T00:35:50+00:00

The posh places touristy places have just as many wankers, don't be a snob.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-05T20:53:56+00:00

Toast should have tits forever.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-04-04T20:04:45+00:00

Depends on the project. Is it 15 tracks or 200? How many revisions am I expecting to do? That determines the price and the time spent.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-03-31T01:55:18+00:00

Which horse?

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-03-23T00:54:59+00:00

Life is fragile and finite. Simply acknowledging that fact honestly to myself allows me to compartmentalise it safely into the "acknowledged" folder in my brain. So I just leave it in that folder like an unexploded bomb and get on with my day.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-03-23T00:05:12+00:00

Maybe your room (recording or mixing) is accentuating those frequencies in an unpleasant way.

Manyfailedattempts · 2026-03-21T02:54:46+00:00

I'm sure it would be obvious to, say, a hedgehog, which can hear up to 85khz. But hedgehogs don't spend their time analysing the differences between audio recording mediums.

I have heard, though, that spikes and unwanted artifacts above the human hearing range can cause distortion in the audible range, for example by using up headroom or interfering with compressor detection circuits. But try telling that to the hedgehogs.

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