deadmau5 tip of the day (maybe week) - Dec2

[jasonj]

deadmau5 tip of the day (maybe week) - Dec2

deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) has decided he would do a tip of the day or week if he gets lazy.

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@deadmau5

Dec 2. - Unison

Unison is generally achieved by most VSTi’s by adding more voices of the same timbre to create a louder or more spread out sound. For example… by hitting one note, the Synth will actually produce 2 or more voices. Many VSTi’s usually have this feature in their UI… and sometimes the control is great and all that, but sometimes you might want a little more control over that to make a sound thats more to your liking.

The problem i’ve always found with unison (especially in the low end) is that you more often than not get weird phase problems… this is just caused by a given number of voices accidently colliding into each other at some point which will phase a certain part of a sound out, resulting in some notes sounding thinner or way more present than others, even though youre mashing the same note repeatedly. I hate to say it, but youre always going to run into this problem. However one technique ive managed to live by is recording the same sequence over and over and over and over until one gets randomly spat out that i can live with after ive recorded it. Of course that worked out for me for a while.. but then i got thinking, theres gotta be a better way.

Well first we need to see where the problem even stems from… in this case, its stereo. You can totally hear the effects of a shitty unison if you monitor it in mono. Not to say we need to monitor everything in mono, but its good practice just to keep a mono insert on your master chain (just for reference from time to time). Of course, depending on the plugin or synth, Unison is usually gradually or radically spread out over the L/R channels as the number of unison voices increase. For example… a 4 voice unison bass might be panned accordingly; 1 voice panned 100% on the left and 1 voice 100% on the right… plus, 2 more voices panned 25% L and 25% R … and so on. Of course, theres also a pitch factor involved… this value is normally called “unison detune” and all that does is slightly detune each of the unisons voices by x amount. The reason this sounds so “lush” is because you have detuned stuff on the left and right now… giving the sound a stereo image. In fact, this is alsmot exactly what a “chorus” effect does, only a bit different.

I’ve always been a bit of an analogue nut… ergo, alot of the synths i noodle around on are Monophonic (only capable of playing one voice at a time with no unison) So… to get a thicker sound out of them… i follow the basic principles of how a polysynth would create a unison… and hell, dont be scared to try this on a VSTi either.

Record your riff / loop… one voice / one polyphony. Now by one voice, i could be talking about any given number of Oscillators used to make up that voice, but for simplicities sake, we’ll use a pulse or whatever, doesn’t matter. Now, re-record the same thing again on a new channel and try changing the pitch by 9 cents or something (or just record a few loops of the same thing and get your scissor on). Lets go for a 4 voice unison to keep it easy… so rinse and repeat that 2 more times

now youll have 4 channels, all mono, panned center and hopefully playing the same recording / wav / whatever… so lets get in there with the imaging. take the first 2 channels and spread em out L and R say one channel hard left, the other hard right. i dont really care. whaytever sounds good to you. then do the same to the other channels… just try to keep it balanced, otherwise your sound will be panned in a weird spot. (you can pan it wierd if thats your thing, but the key is to spread it. hopefully my leet ascii diagram might help… where 1 2 3 4 are your recorded tracks on the Left Center Right scale thing im gunna invent just now.

L --1—2—C—3—4–R

so there you go, by now you should have a bit thicker sound. And now youre probably asking, well.. why dont i just turn the unison on and use 1 track instead? well… now you have alot more control over the sound really, and since its now Wav data… and not random waveform starttimes your VSTi decided to spit out to make it “more analog sounding” you can get in there and tweak the weird notes… and by tweak, i mean nudge bits of each of the 4 tracks forward and backward in time by a teeny tiny bit (which is usually all it takes to fix a dodgy note) … and since youre on seperate channels… now is a good time as any to get all experimental with it and maybe run some effects on some of the channels… i.e. a slight reverb on voices 2 and 3… or strip some low end out of 1 and 4… your plugin probably didnt support that.

anyways. hope you found that bit useful, saved my ass many a time, and definatley gave me the satisfaction that i’ve actually worked on something to make it better then using some fuckin preset.

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[janzak]

I love joel

[sine143]

yep, saw this this morning as well. Great stuff, just started getting messing with NI’s massive synth.

[betatron]

wow, a decent read from such a complete ass? very interesting!

[Remote]

@betatron

wow, a decent read from such a complete ass? very interesting!

lol, second-ed. He comes off as a complete jack-ass but that was a nice post.

[sine143]

meh, even though he had the infamous “dj’s are cunts” interview, I still dont feel like he comes off as an ass.

Most of his posts are generally informative, and its pretty interesting to follow him on facebook.

[sarasin]

I have only recently gotten to know Deadmau5 and found that he IS a bit of an ASS isn;t he!!??

I mean…Tommy Lee from Motely Crue ain’t the coolest or most well known, but Joel disses him badly in that Deadmau5 Tattoo video.

Tommy has rocked for MUCH longer than you Joel!
Wait till people get sick of him…

Will like to see attitude then…

He just comes across as very arrogant.

I understand how this industry works ( I have producer mates who have reached similar success in their genres) and know that you have to have a good dose of confidence which sometimes gets seen as arrogance.

[sine143]

dude… deadmau5 and Tommy lee are actually good friends. They’ve talked about producing songs together.

[sarasin]

Yeah…I know that.

Just does not sit well…specially online. Not everyone knows their relationship.

You seen the clip where Tommy Lee is in the club doing his…“THING” and has to stop a fight?

Man…i can see why they cancelled his tour. Come on Tommy…a bit more effort Geeza!!!

[sahfsad]

Tommy has rocked for MUCH longer than you Joel!
Wait till people get sick of him…

[jasonj]

He may be an ass, arogant etc… I probably would be to in his place. I see Joel as more a person who puts this act on because he is having fun with it.

As for these tips, useful and I do hope he continues on dishing them out.

[wrong_chris]

i think most of the attitude is just to stir up controversy. kind of like how kanye west does it… this wouldn’t surprize me, deadmau5 is very marketing saavy and the whole “being an asshole in public” thing is actually a pretty good way to keep people saying your name.

there’s no such thing as bad publicity in show business.

me i couldn’t care less about deadmau5’s personality, i don’t know him - we don’t chill lol. i just judge him by the music he makes and i’m not really a fan, not my style. with that said, it’s pretty cool that he’s sharing tips of the trade… a lot of producers prefer to keep everything a secret, so hats off to deadmau5 for giving back a little.

[vinceriley]

I suspect that panning out recordings like that (L --1—2—C—3—4–R) will absolutely create the phase differences he is referring to.. try it on your bass, the “thickness” is phase diff, …its just not modulated like a chorus effect..

Check out the Roland SDD320 Dimension D, if you havent.. panning will never recreate that effect unit..

[Nephew]

@sine143

meh, even though he had the infamous “dj’s are cunts” interview, I still dont feel like he comes off as an ass.

He really is an ass. I spent time with him in his studio and he is as arrogant and pompous as they come.

But with that being said, he is a really good engineer and his stuff sounds solid on a big systems.

Do I hate him/dislike? Yes, with out a doubt. But do I have respect for his engineering skills? Again yes, he just needs to start writing better music now.

[Nephew]

@vinceriley

I suspect that panning out recordings like that (L --1—2—C—3—4–R) will absolutely create the phase differences he is referring to.. try it on your bass, the “thickness” is phase diff, …its just not modulated like a chorus effect..

Another thing it helps is levels. By panning them you’re using the whole stereo image while not overloading the master, were as if you had them at panned at 12 o’clock you would be clipping.

A nice I like to use with my basslines is to copy the bassline into three mono channels, and keep one at 12 o’clock and pan the other two hard left and right. Then I take the one that’s at 12 o’clock and filter out anything above 100hz, so you have the real low end in the center, and do the opposite on the two that are hard panned, filter out anything below 100hz.

Now you can add EFX to the two panned hard left and right while keeping the low end bumping still, plus it will make you bass sound huge with out overloading the master.

you can try the same with pads/strings to and get the same huge sound as well.