Something hollow, fake, lame about the DAW sound. Not enough of a human feel, and the 'humanize' functions don't seem to do the trick. Womenpop and Gpop are especially vulnerable to being produced with that soulless DAW sound. Tweens seem to like it, but they can be trained to like any drivel.How do you avoid that soulless DAW sound? Keep the sidechaining to a minimum, keep compression turned off except on lead vocals (if you're a vocal music cuckold), stop quantizing, better DACs and ADCs help a bit but it's almost guaranteed that a modern DAW will produce music with that soulless DAW sound.
>>130722329Sounds soulless cause the every sound is calculated. No performance, no fun. Tiny little interferences like maybe a string buzz, a breath in, a voice crack, everything stylized to be 'theoretically immaculate' while eschewing the actual soundmakers
>>130722329>How do you avoid that soulless DAW sound?EZ, play all your individual tracks through an amp/speakers and re-record with a mic
>>130722329Most modern music is mixed on a daw.Most of it doesnt sound soulless.You mean electronic music.And even then you have no clue what you're taoking about since you onky mention pop. Of course thats soulless.Learn more about genres of music, how people make them, what characterics the sound has and so on, then come back
>>130722975Onto tape. But it won't fix the robotic nature of the compositions, just add a little color.
>>130722992Well yeah also avoid quantizing and play all parts live if possible
>>130722977>Most of it doesnt sound soulless.It does, most of it. It's because of DAWs.
>>130722999Ah you're just a retard baiter, cool, have fun
>>130723008Many people have been saying this for a long time. Try making a tempo map of your latest womenpop or gpop tunes.
DAW music is the best music. Don't care about "soul" if your soul sounds shit. Give me cool shit.https://youtu.be/24bPOapYe7w
>>130722329Sidechains and compression have always been used on recordings. Stop doing DAW things like autotune, quantizing and removing all of the breaths in a vocal but compression is not what makes a “DAW sound”. Most engineers track bass and kick drum compression to tape (daw) as it sounds different in pre than post.
>>130722329For me, it's the pure DAW music, fully quantized perfection>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDnGgjlWaM8
>>130723099>Sidechains and compression have always been used on recordings.No, no. Not always. And for a long time they were used only judiciously, not on practically every track.You've got loudness wars brain damage, very common these days.
Tape16 is pretty funhttps://emrmusicgroup.com/tape16/
>>130723028Modern pop is electronic music. Having autotuned vocals on it doesnt beat the case. You're doing a strawman not even out of bad intent, just cause of ignorance
>>130722329>How do you avoid that soulless DAW sound?learn how push and pull works with snares.learn how envelopes work.practice, play the shit yourself, don't edit it to hell and back.learn how eq really works so you can allow overlapping to do it's job.quit removing too much silence by chopping samples to exact amounts.learn to use stereo wideners correctly.LEARN HOW COMPRESSION REALLY WORKSstop mixing for ALL systems and mix for your ear instead, it's ok if it sounds like shit on a phone speaker, everything does.learn that snare drums don't need high end on their track, that comes from the overheads.allow imperfections.there's lot of little things.https://vocaroo.com/1fMzEYcGarkm
>>130723276Never said it wasn't, you said that. I never mentioned autotune. Now, you were talking about all the dicks you suck all the time, right? It sucks you got AIDS.See if you want to put words into my mouth, and then claim that shows my bad intent, I will feel free to do the same with you.
>>130723071liked that album but wish it was more hyperpop like the closing track
>>130723371https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Woman#Credits_and_personnelno they use instruments, it's just that the mastering is done in such a way as to make it sound very plastic
>>130724058>the masteringanon...
>>130722329>keep compression turned off except on lead vocalsevery song since 1960 has used a glue compressor, holy larp
>>130722329Just turn of quantization and stop playing to a gridIt's that shrimple
>>130726266Windham Hill would like to disagree with you.
>>130722329without a DAW your music will be soulless plus tape hiss
>>130722329im not into that rabbithole but to my ears 90's electronic music sound sounds better than 10's or current electronic music. its like you can hear the layers
>>130722329Lean into it https://youtu.be/W3BeJHlYuVY?si=k418BKvr662Ux_v4
>>130729718this is beyond DAW music it's probably made with a phone app
>>130729682People were happier with what they had, you didn't have unlimited effects, unlimited tracks, and unlimited gear. Soft synths and DAW-centric production enabled a lot of slop. Sure good musicians will use the newest thing and use it well, but they probably know what they're doing better because they started with hardware and not much of it.
One cool thing Aphex Twin was doing in the 90s was going out in the city and recording all sorts of physical collisions, hitting a metal piece, a bouncing ball.Then taking that back and turning it into a sample that was screwed in multiple ways, so that it became an instrument.That's why he has that signature sound because he didn't depend on the specificity of tools from that time, he customised everything. So once the beat fads faded away his stuff continued to not sound like it was too stuck in its time.
>>130734168Yeah he's not alone in that, and it sounds great. Autechre used to do that a lot, lots of camera sounds, clacking balls desk toy sounds, drops of water, etc. Richard also has a lot of classic sounds that keep coming back, you often hear his CR78 and the 303.
>>130723119They used compression on the Beatles at abbey road. Pink Floyd got in a big fight with Alan Parsons over the mixbus compression on DSOTM. Vintage pultec, Teletronix, and universal audio compressors date back to the 50’s or so. They have been used on everything that’s ever been called pop music. You wouldn’t have the drum sound on when the levee breaks without the 1176.
>>130734811Never said they didn't use them though. They used to use them with taste and prejudice, knowing you could easily overdo it.And here we are, everything is compressed to hell and sounds like garbage so you can listen in the car or whatever.
There's some electronic/beats fatigue imo, breakcore and all this y2k revival shit have pushed things so far that they're doing superhigh bpm tracks that sound like they're made for Guantanamo cellsI can't see this going much further, you can't escalate this by making even more elaborate or faster or bass-heavier beats. It becomes unlistenable.So yeah the wind seems to blow elsewhere
>>130734822Ok I can agree with that. So perhaps the answer to the “DAW sound” question is judicious use of signal processing.
>>130734975More beats = better, I guess. They are free these days after all.>>130734999Sure, I already admit that somebody who has a good skill set can use a DAW and not have it sound DAW-ish. But this seems rare just going by my own ear, as a long time amateur electronic and piano and jazz trumpet musician. It seems like older people know not to overdo it and the younger set likes to just hit you with massive everything all the time, and always with compression on everything plus again on the master.That dr-loudness-war site has more info at at least tries to nail down the problem, even if the site itself isn't perfect.
>>130722975tried that yesterday, it sure doesn't sound like a DAW anymore but it sounds like shit, and cuts everything below 100hz and above 100khz.there is certainly a use for this but i haven't found it yet
>>130734168>>130734719Depeche mode did this too
>>130722329With daws there were like that grid and with ableton there were loops or something like that and there were always that grid as something to break except that grid were also not there like some electron and what were compression anyway
>>130722329music recorded on tape has saturation and glue that normal DAWs can't replicate. My band specifically records onto tape because it sounds better.
>>130735060Add the low end and the high end from the DAW signal back into the mix
it's 100% the composition. the other stuff is irrelevantit's not just "don't quantize" (though that's a necessity). it's everything. you generally need to ignore or barely pay attention to the grid during the arranging and composition if you want to actually make a decent song. this applies for any type of musiclike, all of this is completely irrelevant nonsense except maybe the "quit removing too much silence" part:>>130723371>learn how push and pull works with snares.>learn how envelopes work.>practice, play the shit yourself, don't edit it to hell and back.>learn how eq really works so you can allow overlapping to do it's job.>quit removing too much silence by chopping samples to exact amounts.>learn to use stereo wideners correctly.>LEARN HOW COMPRESSION REALLY WORKS>stop mixing for ALL systems and mix for your ear instead, it's ok if it sounds like shit on a phone speaker, everything does.>learn that snare drums don't need high end on their track, that comes from the overheads.it's solely the composition and arrangement adhering too closely to a generic 4/4 grid, especially with quantization
