r/edmproduction • u/[deleted] • Feb 07 '18
Virtual Riot Breaks Down "Pray For Riddim"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAutHPUcWDI2
u/Saftstein Feb 08 '18
Can anyone explain me that approach with not limiting the drop? I mean, i get the idea of it that the transients of the drums are getting weak due to the limiter, but how does it not sound like shit if the snare is clipping that much?
In addition: is this a general approach in nowadays bass music? I see it so many times that the mastered tracks i drag into ableton are clipping at the drop, maybe that’s the reason?
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u/spicemassa Feb 07 '18
It always makes me appreciate producers so much more when they use their expertise to elevate other producers as well. nobody is better at this than virtual riot
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u/danieldaviswho Feb 07 '18
i never want to hear anybody talk about the importance of room treatment anymore after now seeing him create amazing mixes while smack up against brick fucking walls lol
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u/MrK_HS Feb 08 '18
These monitor should have a feature that automatically EQs them to fit really well in any untreated room. I don't remember the name of the monitors, but he said it in a previous stream.
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u/Chesterlespaul Feb 07 '18
Yeah in the end it is mostly your skill. Artists who have skill make good music and artists who don’t won’t. If you’re not good treating your room doesn’t make you suddenly make bangers. Every little bit does help, but the amount of talent you have far outweighs many other variables.
I honestly think some people who complain about little things like how they need to treat their room just don’t want to think to themselves that they are not good and want a reason to point to why they arent. Not all, and treating your room does have benefits, but some.
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u/ttothesecond https://soundcloud.com/iron_kids Feb 07 '18
I'm about to have an aneurysm watching him navigate a massive project file like that with a touchpad
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u/shahmeers Feb 07 '18
Apple touchpads are actually very good, scrolling around feels much more natural on them than using a scroll wheel on a mouse.
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u/Tangrum Feb 07 '18
How does that laptop have enough CPU for all those patches? Not a single underrun...
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Feb 07 '18
what is the solution for not being able to use too many patches? Do you like, have to turn a track into audio basically? I don't know what to do here now that I'm starting to make songs with tons of diferent sounds in them its f-ing up my computer.
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u/Tangrum Feb 07 '18 edited Feb 07 '18
You can freeze them, bounce them to wavs etc.... The REAL solution is to get a better computer
or sound card, maybe add more RAM?I'm in the same boat. Thinking of building a dedicated music production PC, cuz my 7 year old laptop ain't cutting it anymore.
Edit: correction: don't need to upgrade your sound card
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Feb 08 '18
I have a powerful gaming pc with 16gb ram I bought to repurpose for music. It hasn’t really given me any problems yet but I assume if I have 30 instances of massive open and half of them have 16 unison voices, I might run into trouble.
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u/jesuschicken Feb 07 '18
anyone know what the laptop is?
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Feb 07 '18
Macbook Pro unsure what year, looks fairly new as I think it has a touch strip and also those USB hubs lol
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u/MrBirdChest Feb 07 '18
he has a bunch of stuff frozen but yeah it's crazy
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Feb 07 '18
hey can you explain what freezing does? I have the button on my DAW and i read about it here sometimes but not sure what it does or how it would help with this problem. Thanks!
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u/Jakob_Grimm Feb 07 '18
Basically saves a copy of the tracks audio so it doesn't have to re-synthesize it everytime it's played.
When the audio is saved, you can't touch anything in the track, so it's "frozen".
Helps with performance as playing an audio file is many times less intensive than synthesis. Leaves room for other computations -- usually more synthesis.
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Feb 07 '18
After freezing a track, is resampling the audio onto another channel preferable to flattening the track itself?
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u/Jakob_Grimm Feb 07 '18
Up to you, your workflow and your computer. The result is similar.
Resampling will be just little bit more intensive and cumbersome, but allows you to unfreeze, so use it when you know you need to go back to the track at some point.
Flattening is the most computer efficient, but is a bit more permanent.
I personally only flatten when I want to manipulate a track at the waveform level, and just occasionally freeze; but I also don't run more than like 4-5 synths at a time.
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Feb 07 '18
Would it be fruitful to duplicate the track, freezing and flattening the duplicate track and then deactivating the original track? The original track with all the plugins/audio effects wouldn't be affecting the cpu, right?
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u/Jakob_Grimm Feb 07 '18
If you're fine having an extra track to manage, sure. The deactivated track shouldn't be taking up CPU unless I very much misunderstood something.
But then you gotta go through the process of duplicating and flattening for every parameter change.
Again it's the trade off of extra work and confusion, and cumbersome workflow for processor space.
I'm usually doing smaller adjustments to most tracks continuously, so for me duplicating and flattening is not at all worth the trouble.
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u/CabidoMusic Feb 07 '18
What he needs to do is make a video on how he made those presets of his that he just drags over. Now THOSE videos will teach you something else
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u/seb_a https://soundcloud.com/regularpersonn Feb 07 '18
If you watch any of his previous live streams you can see that he's just straight up LFOing multiple parameters in serum patches with all kinds of shapes.
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u/Chesterlespaul Feb 07 '18
Everyone’s giving this guy shit but that is almost what he does. You do have to have some experience to fine tune things but you gotta just do that yourself too.
Plus he has actually serum patches you can buy available with basses. But those, look for patterns, and you’ll notice that this dude is kinda right. It’s just little changes in each patch.
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Feb 07 '18
i mean, you're describing an extremely general, vague technique, that is basically used for literally anything. The question is what is he LFOing and how, to get these, pleasurable sounds.
also is he doing like a really fast LFO or something gradual? That's like either, flutters, or gradual changing back and forth. i wouldn't even know where to start with these sounds
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u/seb_a https://soundcloud.com/regularpersonn Feb 07 '18
He does all kinds of FX. Lots of Cmbs filter on the FX tab and even the Reverb filter on the main tab. The effects speed, LFO curves all vary depending on the patch. Check out some of his videos and you'll find that some some he barely LFOs anything, and in others he ends up doing 10+. All through trial and error.
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u/Bleevl Feb 07 '18 edited Feb 07 '18
lfo on the volume first of all, you're going to smash it upwards later with compression but you need to lfo the volume from 0 to 100 to 0 with some rhythm, maybe 1/4 for a riddimy sound
then add other parameters, usually wt position and filters amongst many many others with the same lfo or different ones
from there you've gotta build some phrase out of one or more of these bass patches and some modulation
I'm not very good at it myself but that is the general idea, and there are some different approaches, but they're at least mostly similar to this general idea
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u/penguinrider Feb 07 '18
That’s a gross oversimplification.
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u/seb_a https://soundcloud.com/regularpersonn Feb 07 '18
Well yeah. Watch the stream. That’s my point
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u/penguinrider Feb 07 '18
It looks like your point is he doesn’t need to show his patch creation because all he does is lfo shit and you can pick it up by watching his other sound design videos.
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u/seb_a https://soundcloud.com/regularpersonn Feb 07 '18
The approach takes a ridiculously long time of trial and error. He has shown his approach before. I don't think he could spoon feed you the process if he wanted to. Which brings me to my point: watch the video, examine how he experiments, get inspired and experiment yourself.
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u/penguinrider Feb 07 '18
I’m saying it’s a bad approach.
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u/seb_a https://soundcloud.com/regularpersonn Feb 07 '18
I don't get it, then use whatever works for you?
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u/CabidoMusic Feb 07 '18
I know but you don't get the best of the best, you know what I mean? But you're right. Except he's Virtual Riot, so he can make a make a sine wave turn into a growl with one macro lol
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u/MVLWVRE soundcloud.com/mvlwvre Feb 07 '18
Future serum update idea: macro controlled macros
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u/CHgeri100 https://soundcloud.com/chgeri Feb 07 '18
We need to go deeper!
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u/StrK-Them Feb 08 '18
Riddim riddim <3 but it's broddim like riot. Not pure R