Horizon - Sadowick Artist Album

Available Direct to buy in high quality Flac, wav or 320 MP3 here:
http://sadowick.bandcamp.com/album/horizon

Horizon

The limit or range of perception, knowledge, or the like. the scope of a person's interest, education and understanding. Horizon is the second studio album by Sadowick containing 18 tracks varying in style but still sticking to the mid-bpm club style. The tracklist acts as a story of materialism to idealism. Horizon was written and recorded in 3 months.

https://twitter.com/sadowick
http://www.facebook.com/sadowick.official
http://sadowick.net/

Composed By, Producer, Written-By – Brent Sadowick

All tracks © 2012 SDK Rekords

Horizon - Sadowick Artist Album

New area for those interested in mastering services and sample packs.

Hey! Im now offering mixing and mastering services as well as making and selling sample packs.


check out : http://www.sdk-media.com/

And keep up to date with us at : http://www.facebook.com/SdkMedia

Sadowick - Kick Drums Volume 1

‎21 kick drum loops from my personal collection. Plenty of kicks I use in a lot of tracks. At a good price as well.



sadowick.net

Skrillex Studio Setup Then & Now - The Rundown

First off Skrillex has been exploding and right when you think he peaks in popularity he gets nominated for multiple Grammys (for serious?) Seeing how his music wants to be emulated and I myself have been curious looked into what he used in his past releases and his newer album. I was shocked to find his physical workstation equipment is very minimal and contradicts what you would think for his material.

"I’ve got the most minimal “rig,” if you’d even call it that. Macbook Pro, Ableton Live, some KRK’s (I actually did the whole Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP with the right speaker blown!) and some plugins. I don’t even use a MIDI controller. I’ve gotten very quick at drawing everything in with the trackpad. I prefer it that way actually. No hardware as of yet, though I do plan on expanding my studio and collecting more toys in the future. But what I have does the trick for now!"

So there it is for his past, literally making tracks without a stereo field with a blown speaker. He later was on his first round of toura and made tracks in his hotel room and even in vehicles on the way to gigs.

This is Skrillex pictured in his current (as of January 2012) studio based out of LA, he lives in a 100 year old building that was a bank. Some sort of creative persons loft community. He has since gotten some upgrades since his humble Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites beginnings. Hes invested in what looks like Dynaudio monitors, a Virus Ti and panels. Very Neat.   

He has an Akai MPK49 as his main interface connected to Ableton Live, 2 pieces of outboard grear that I assume could be a compressor on the left and some sort of soundcard interface (if anyone knows what they are let me know). You will then notice the Mac keyboard suggesting he is using Macosx and theres foam cups everywhere which could mean theres a coffee machine somewhere in this high traffic area. Or he doesn't like to do dishes.

Skillex is constantly on tour. As I said before he constantly makes music on the road anywhere he can. He travels with multiple MacbookPros (1 live, 1 toy/production mac and a backup). He uses Beats By Dre headphones, does everything on the trackpad and smokes a lot of cigarettes. Everything is in the box. He has stated in a recent interview that he makes tracks during the day and plays them out that night doing this, intense.

No doubt Skrillex uses Native Instruments Massive. On the software tip he uses that, FM8 and Abletons Operator. He has stated that he uses mostly effects within Ableton, he compresses, bounces audio and edits it again, he also uses techniques like Parallel Compression and Serial Compression but that will be a later Tutorial. Its been established that he most likely uses the L2 Maximizer (all dubstep people uses that) and a mixture of limiters, distortion plugins and some sort of bitcrusher.

I like this because it just goes to prove you can produce Grammy nominated (or a least pretty good) music without a quarter million studio, engineers, session musicians and artist development. It should inspire you like it does me.

Peace out Skrill drop it hard. =]=]=]

Dear Me From 2003

Dear me from 2003,

Hey you! I found your bio writeup thing you seemed to put a lot of effort into, I shall post it 10 years later on your new blog thing. Ill just post this here. I'll be gentle, I kind of cringe when I read this but its still all good.

A leduc local, just outside of Edmonton. I deliver The most uplifting sounds your ever hear. I range from different styles of electronica. I range from trance to happy hardcore to Goa to Technic Rave. Been listening and loving rave sounds for years. I've been producing for about 2 years. My biggest influentional artist has got to be push. Others include Public Domain, Yves Deruyter, Dj Tiesto, Plastic boy, Dj blackmaster and Steven Parker. My most influentional song has got to be "Till we Meet Again" By Push. Some include "We Will Survive" by the warped brothers and "sandstorm" by darude. I use tones of software to make my music. If you want to start, I recomend you download "Fruityloops" at www.Fruityloops.com Theres a free trial version of FLStudio 4. Please dont download it off Kazza or any other file sharing program, If u like it, BUY IT. You owe it to them. Peace

Capitalization and stuff. But yes you do indeed lived in edmonton with your grandparents, and you are a bit angsty and a bit egotistical. Thats probably because you have a bit of low self-esteem and you are defiantly committed to "delivering the most uplifting sounds you will ever hear" even though you have no means to do so.

In the future you will range from different styles of electronica, you will also hate that people call it "EDM" for some reason. You will dabble in making slower Housey-Trance but you wont be making Freeform-Hardcore or Goa (hold off the weed for a bit). And what you think Technic Rave is, is Hard-Techno/HardHouse. You have not been listening to rave sounds for years ("rave" is not a genre of music). The years part is more like 2 but when you are 24 it will be 11 years. Crazy eh?

In the future you will only use something called Ableton Live and less plugins than you can count on two hands. You dont need to use tonnes of software, its kind of a waste of time. Also stop going through presets, any monkey can figure out what the knobs and faders do.

What you call producing isn't producing, please dont be discouraged you will nail it one day. Technology and mental capacity is a bit behind at this point in time for you. when you are around 22 you will commit months of bootcamp like dedication to making sounds. You will get it even if you think you cant.

Peace out little guy,
24 year old you

Getting That Old school House And Techno Sound

This is a part two to getting that old school sound in your house and techno tracks, that sound thats fuzzy, a bit muddy but sounds good and gives you that warm feeling.

The House and Techno guys used this! Its an E-mu SP-1200 and many great tracks were made with it, It was a drum machine and sampler all in one. It was around $15,000 and offered 10 whole seconds of recording time. It was the standard for many years until Akai came out with their samplers.

Now here is the technique to get the retro sound, The E-mu only had 10 seconds of sampling time so the hip hop guys would sample 33rpm records at 45rpm into the machine and then pitch them down in the machine (to have more recording time). If you take that and its 12bit resolution you have THAT SOUND.

Now how do we make it a bit more authentic? Turns out when sampling from a record there would be hissing, mechanics noise and pops and you can add this to your recordings before you flatten and pitch it in two ways. You can use software turntable/tape noisefloor emulation or you can find some real recordings of the electronics online (there are many music nerds who collect these)

Two essential plugins for this are iZotope Vinyl and TB TimeMachine. Both are made by reputable companies and are FREE!

So lets have a quick tutorial:

1. Find a piece of audio you wish to use this technique on, percussion and vocals would be a good place to start. Loops are ok

2. Take your material and times your bpm by 1.35. If you are using material at 128bpm you will have sample at 172bpm. You can always set it to anything you like but the general rule is to have it pitched up a fair amount.

3. Apply a noisefloor, hissing and hum to taste with iZotope Vinyl and apply the 12bit resolution with TB Time Machine.

4. Flatten, bounce and/or render it out

5. You will now pitch the material back down to the original bpm but now you will have some wicked sounding transients and a retro sounding, fresh off the dub plate sound.

6. EQ and process as usual (bonus points for a console style EQ with saturation)

Have fun and here is a track that was made using an E-mu.

SDK MONOPHONIX : A Free Windows Vst Incl. Standalone

Monophonix is a monophonic analog-ish synthesizer, with special attention brought to the filter and distortion sections. It was made to offer extreme control over distortion for deep basses and screaming leads. I wanted to make something that can squelch the shit out of saw waves with a combination of 2 sets of filters and a distortion and overdrive set up in a linear way.

3 sets of envelopes control ADSR, pitch and both filters and the initial patch shows what it can do.

DOWNLOAD

Lets Remix: Faithless - Insomnia, a step by step how to remix in Ableton

Greetings earthlings, Im a little late posting this. But here it is, a lets remix video tutorial of Faithless - Insomnia  Using Ableton Live you can easily remix and chop up a track, add samples, arrange and mix a new track. With commentary I kind of walk you through it. Please forgive my poor mic audio (and monotone voice), I blame Youtube (not really)

This is a quick remix you can do in under an hour, this is a the basic practical way to go about it, enjoy =]

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:

A little trick I used to make a few of my Hard Techno tracks sound oldschool...

I use this to get that oldschool percussive feel on most of my tracks. Now most new sample packs contain hits and samples a little too crisp and pristine, overly processed and they dont really do it for hard tech or hardgroove beats. but there is a trick to make your tracks sound oldschool.

1. Make loop of toms, percussive hits, quantize on 16ths and 8ths.
2. Tune down a few of them, this will give you the lowend you want. Tuning toms is what that retro feel is all about
3. Take that loop (no kickdrum yet) and render it to wav (also render it as loop if that option is available)
4. Open that loop in your favorite MP3 encoder
5. Render at either64kbps or 96kbps. This will kinda smoosh the sounds together and create a nice sounding downsampled sound (make sure its renderd in stereo)
6. Bring it back into the DAW and EQ boost the bottom and high end.
7. Compress it a bit and use an imager8. Finish and master the track as you usually would

This is a technique i figured out on my own, adds something extra to the processing. I know it goes against every rule but whatever.

Check out examples here:

http://www.beatport.com/label/sdk-hard/19241
http://www.beatport.com/label/retro-future-techno-sdk-rekords/22124 

Dance Music Mixing & Mastering Theory

Music production in the early 90s and throughout became more and more accessible to the average person, starting with the sampler, sequencer and DAT recorders. Consoles were still as expensive as cars, synthesizers were 1000s of dollars but studios could be built for the production of house, techno and hip-hop production. Computers and Cubase could offered around 6 channels of recording and rudimentary automation and the parametric Eqs ran externally at around 2-6 bands. This was an exciting time for dance music, it had a grassroots evolution that when we listen to classic releases we can hear.

Early digital instruments like the TB-303, TR-909 and TR-808 were cheaper and used in techno in this time. Cheap rack mount processors were also available but would break on occasion.

Keep in mind cell phones were the size of bricks at this time and people felt awesome when they recorded things off the TV onto their VCR. Independent producers and labels were conducting voodoo magic seemingly creating tracks out of nothing on gear that carried the mystique of a jet cockpit. Mastering was done mostly at vinyl pressing companies as a preparation so needles wouldn't skip in the grooves and the record would sound as good as possible in clubs. This was the fundamental need for mastering, to prepare your audio for an analog medium.

Mp3s (as well as mp3 sharing) and the CDJ first came about together in 2001, for the first time you could pitch a CD in real time on a scratch-able platter just like you could on a record turntable, you no longer had to get an acetate pressing to play a song in a club and as a label owner you didn't have to gamble a run of 5000 records. You could promote yourself by putting your songs on Napster, giving music to the masses and in my opinion playing a key part in dance musics popularity world wide. Stores like Beatport, Trackitdown and Junodownload started up in the early to mid 2000's and now today mp3s (digital audio) is the standard.

Then POOF! There was no need for critical mastering!

Modern dance music is 95% if not all digital as a result of more powerful computers, the VST standard, high performance soundcards and firewire/usb interfaces. As a funny bit of irony music is made so much on screen that midi consoles in the spirit of hardware are used to aid in workflow. Now today you don't need an expensive workstation to make music, any computer you can buy at the store can run all the software you need out of the box, a lot of tracks these days are made by djs on the road on their laptops. These advancements have democratized the industry.

The advancement to emulation and digital processing as apposed to analog in a way has separated the artform from on vast polar opposites "Underground vs Commercial"

So what is mastering as it applies in these modern times? How it is done is by artist, its in our hands. We build things from the ground up and its all our own, for example Sander Van Doorn does all his processing and mastering with a UAD card and other plugins all digitally in Logic. He knows what works in a club and uses what he has perfected over the years. He also has his own sound and style because of the instinctual way he routes and processes sounds.

Alternatively, many pursue to get their tracks mastered by a third party or work with engineers to pretty much make the track themselves; robbing themselves of their own styles and the rewarding aspect of making dance music, learning the voodoo themselves. The use of engineers is a hot topic, I feel its a shortcut and all shortcuts lead to dead ends. The discouragement of the discipline of production leads people to resort to these things.

Modern mastering is not about making a track "fit" on a vinyl record but is now about giving a track a shine, grit and loudness comparable to other tracks. It is now possible to "get away" with a lot more these days and the rule now is ; If it sounds good use it. This is not something that needs (in most cases) to be played and sound good next to a Nickleback song on an FM station, TV or movie soundtrack.

As soon as you combine two sounds mastering has begun, mixing should be done as you go. you cant fix a kick and bassline in the master section if it sounds shit, garbage in garbage out. Mastering is not an exclusive end process.

Mastering these days is mostly about compression be it multi band compression, using a maximizer, brickwall limiting. Also added depending on the track you will see an highpass and lowpass EQ, mix saturator, Imager and a maximizer. There is no wrong way to do it in reason, theses mastering effects have been used in extreme values with good results. Examples of extreme compression values would be Justice and Skrillex, examples that would make veterans cringe but no doubt its still musical. See? Special effect.

With sample libraries geared for club music and processed accordingly they pretty much hold our hands, its very hard to make a track sound bad in a club. The key is to be overly critical of your sounds and get them tight in a mix and build a track outwards.

There is a large misconception that mastering will make a dull recording sound good and that it will fix anything. This is impossible and counterproductive, you will waste your time muddying up your track, plugins are not that magical yet. Software is only an algorithm and under the hood it does equations to the signal, it doesn't know what will make a track sound good. It is only a dumb window with knobs, and a tool for you to use in only as much values as needed. It takes a while to find you own way of things but it will pay off when you achieve your own unique style.

The way to do it is to get your naked mix sounding good then add your favorite mastering chain after, slowly boosting compression and loudness carefully and compare it to other tracks, do A/B comparisons on a good set of monitors. Instead of boosting the frequencies of the clap on the master buss you should try boosting them on the channel or reduce a bit from the kick. Too loud and distorted? Pull things down and find a harmony for what you are going for, DJs have a gain knob for a reason.

I was told many times that you should never master your own tracks, that it should be left a professional, you will fail and go to producer jail if you do. There are many peoples set ways and fetishes in dance music productions. There is no right way to put music out, no one really knows whats going on and its a good idea stay away from this elitism. As an example I was told that "trance music can only be made in logic and electro can only be made in windows"...

There are over 16,000 tracks released every week on dance music stores, music is and should be ours.