Interesting list on Hypebot of online sites & services which follow the great web 2.0 approach.
Forthcoming on Trace’s DSCI4 – Pacific’s “Modern Age” EP. It reminds me of some older matrix style. A very rolling sound and a high quality music standard. congrats!
For us, the use of vocal lines is one of the most important issues when it comes to (mass) appeal. So am I only referring to commercial success? No, not neccessarily. Of course selling tunes is of high interest (of which I’ll speak in another post), but here I’m interested as a music lover.
Just be honest: How many of your favourite tracks contain vocals? Quite a lot I guess. Now you may say, well I do remember some, but most of them are kinda mellow or Liquid, like Seba and Paradox’ “Move On” and all that High Contrast catalogue, and yeah, to some extent tunes like Fresh’s “Submarines” (and all the other…hmm..experiments he did). But what about the harder, techy stuff? Yes, there were huge tunes in that, too. Maybe it was just us totally freaking out when experiencing Rawthang’s “Beautiful Morning” and “Epilogue” at BSE’s Blackout Party back then in Utrecht/NL. Or think about the two great tunes Concord Dawn did (“Take Me Away From Here” / “Morning Light”). Newer ones are “Spiral” and all that great, weird John B stuff.
Speaking of it, you may have noticed that production-wise there are huge differences (just think of the ones noted above) in vocal tunes as there are in instrumentals. But, nevertheless, the production standard doesn’t seem to matter that much, as long as vocals are in there. Why? It seems the ability to recognize human voice is deeply and genetically wired into our brains. You therefore naturally focus on the vocals, and use the drumwork and bassline as a framework, an utility for your feet to autonomically move. Robotozation. (Haha, don’t even think of “Bot Funk”!) The vocals are in there to provide a hook for your brain to catch to. One could even say the catchier (read: cheesier) the vocals are, the less effort humans must put into processing them, so you can enjoy the uplifted state of dancing more easily.
It therefore makes perfect sense to think about using vocals in your tunes. We did that on a couple of tunes in the past, and guess what, people always go crazy when we play them out. So when thinking about what to put onto the album, vocals were an easy pick. After having lightheartedly decided that you want them, it’s quite more a pain in the ass to actually get them.
In the past, we mainly took someone else’s tunes which contained vocals we liked or which at least catched our attention and then managed to extract them out of the original tune. This sometimes is an easy task, as many commercial trance tunes contain a breakdown part, where the vocals are standing free, just accompanied by some pads or fx. All you have to do is
As most commercially exploitable vocal tracks are already perfectly arranged, you won’t probably have to dramatically re-arrange the vocal block you’ve just extracted. Just put it in the right place, extract parts of it as you like, and you’re done. Well, except for the legal bit.
We’ve had numerous discussions on the legal aspect of stealing vocals. Not from the moral point, but out of the uncertainty whether labels may want to release it or whether the originator’s lawyers will intercept. Well, there’s no money in DnB, and there have been quite a lot of cases in which producers have put out stuff that was highly critical in legal terms. Just think of all the (quickly sueing) metal band samples, and we all know what happened to “Fucking Hostile”. Basswerk felt quite uneasy with uncleared samples, too, so we decided to record vocals by ourselves.
What does it take to record vocals? If we all had a huge budget for every tune we make, we’d just hire a professional vocalist, rent some big studio and we’re all set. In reality you don’t have any of that. Instead, the most important thing is to find someone who can properly sing. Of course, “properly” is a relative term, and there are technical ways to overcome most singing problems, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
Catch that person, get an ok microphone (like the Shure-SM58 everybody seems to own, hidden in some dusty drawer) and start recording. Hmm, wait a minute. What lyrics and which notes? You can, of course, start with the lyrics of a well-known song. Still you’ll have to credit the original writer, as you’re touching his intellectual property rights. You are allowed to do so, but apart from crediting, you’ll have to pay some fee/percentage of incomes. So, a better way might be to write the lyrics yourself, or at least to change the lyrics you chose in the first place, so they’re no cover version anymore. Same goes for the notes. Ok, obviously this is where your creativity comes in. Don’t forget, it’s all about catchiness, and this is achieved through simplicity. Call it pop.
Well, now you know what the singer will sing. Now what? Take that mic, connect it to the audio input of your computer. If there’s some EQ-capable device in between, cut the low-end and boost some of the higher frequencies between 1.5 and 6 kHz. Maybe some top-end, too. Depends on the recording room, the singer and the amount of noise in the signal. Be sure to adjust the input level, so the recording doesn’t clip/distort. Also, check this again once in a while throughout the recording process, as vocalists tend to start being kind of shy and get louder later. Now record as many versions as possible, and try to achieve some variaty in the notes, and especially in the rhythm elements. Keep them all.
When you’re done with that, clean the recording. Get rid of the noise (noise gate, strict EQing), emphasize the vocals. Carefully compress them where you feel there’s too much dynamics, but remember that this also emphasizes the background noise, so don’t overdo it. In most cases, the intonation is not perfect at all, so you may want to check the different versions you’ve recorded. Just arrange them to different tracks in your sequencer, so you can easily switch between them. Now find the parts in the different versions that fit best and copy them to a new (master) track. If some versions sound a little different, try to balance that by EQing and compressing before you continue. If there still is some minor mis-intonation, you should consider plugins like Antares Auto-Tune to smooth the recording, but be careful (or intentionally agressive) as this quickly sounds unnatural. Also, you’ll probably encounter rhythm glitches, which you’ll have to fix by repeatedly cutting the recorded block into pieces and shift a little in time to have them fit into the musical raster. Ultimately trust your ears, but use your eyes as additional guides by detecting peaks in the recording and arranging them to fixed parts of the rhythmic raster, like on 16ths. Render the whole vocal block to one, and you’re done!
Us being djs who only spin digitally, it’s only logical to once in a while examine the web’s MP3 shops which legally sell your daily fix. The most important criteria for us are the up-to-dateness and range of the shop’s DnB catalogue, followed by track quality and price per download. Please note we don’t list iTunes as it only offers 128kBit downloads via a proprietary client software.
So here are our current two recommandations:
www.djdownload.com
Backed by US based DJ magazine, this shop offers the newest stuff. The seem to not having a big back catalogue or a wide range of supported labels, but the stuff they do have in stock is hot (RH, Barcode, …), so if you’re after one of the labels they offer, this may be your best pick. Prices are 2.16 EUR (320″) and 1.43 EUR (192″), payment via creditcard.
www.beatport.com
This surely is the best overall shop. Powered by DogsonAcid, they offer a huge variaty of styles and lots of up-to-date stuff in form of a colorful flash-based site. Prices are around 1.23 EUR, and they also offer WAV downloads for an additional bandwith fee of .82 EUR (1 USD). Payment via creditcard.
There are other shops, but they don’t cover the newest choons and therefore are not really recommandable except for their back catalogues.
www.trackitdown.net
Diverse labels, 320″ at 2.15 EUR.
www.vibrationrecords.com
Mainly atmospheric stuff at 1.45 EUR.
www.chemical-records.co.uk
Apart from their huge vinyl selection, they have a digital download shop, which offers kinda outdated stuff at 2.17 EUR.
Diverse stuff at a reasonable price of 1.29 EUR.
www.nu-urbanmusic.co.uk / dubplates.org
Seemingly sharing the same shop system, they offer mainly Liquid labels at 1.47 EUR.
There are some DnB labels which are either fully digital or at least selling their tracks as MP3s:
DnBszene.de also features a (mainly German) article on MP3 shops, which also covers netlabels and therefore doesn’t focus on the most up-to-date stuff as we did here.
Take a closer look at the text of the graphic elements:
Awesome! (I know who did this, though, hehe…nice1!)
The tracklist for our upcoming album “Beautiful Bytes” on Basswerk will probably look like this:
01 …… nphect & dizplay – white russian
02 …… nphect & dizplay – my velvet morning
03 …… nphect & dizplay – motor
04 …… nphect feat. complex – mofo
05 …… nphect & dizplay – tsunami 2006 vip
06 …… dizplay – shining through
07 …… nphect – beyond the invisible
08 …… the green man – damn wire (n&d’s goddamn wire remix)
09 …… phace, nphect & dizplay – deep throat
10 …… dizplay – don’t you see
11 …… nphect – enjoy the madness
12 …… nphect & dizplay – inside the hive vip
13 …… starke & gorter – you can go on (nphect & dizplay remix)
A good friend of mine did a series of plugin performance measurements to determine the relative performance for various plugins. For the techy people among you, this might prove as valuable as it is to us.
Listed are plugin name, type, estimated maximum loadable instance count and relative performance index, computed by dividing 100 by the instance count. Therefore, the lower the index, the better the plugin performs. Please note, that this done using Cubase SX3 on a Pentium 4 with 2.6 GHz and 1 GB of RAM. Moreover, the plugins were measured in their initial state, meaning their performance can greatly vary after tweaking the properties. Also, the numbers are rough estimates only! The target was to compare similar plugins, not to get bullet-proof numbers. As a result, one is able to choose the right plugin among the set of installed plugins for a specific task. For example, I use different compressor modules for single drum tracks, for track groups and for the master channel.
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