why was my message deleted???
#I'm new to music production, and I don't know how to make my beginner projects sound good.
rough narwhal
anyways...
I'm mainly a guitarist, and I want to try to make stuff. But my projects don't sound good. I've used cakewalk in the past, but I recently tried to use reaper. However, my project sounds bad. I don't know why it sounds bad, but I suspect that it is because my scarlett 2i2 is making a really loud staticy sound, my drum sim sucks, I'm bad at writing drum tracks, and I'm bad at managing volume and EQ. Can someone maybe walk me step by step through figuring it out or send me a really good tutorial video?
Also, my sound is coming out of my guitar into a boss reverb pedal, then a catalinbread katzenkonig distortion pedal, into a Boss Katana MKII, then out of the rec out into my Scarlett Focusrite 2i2, and then into my PC.
exotic belfry
@rough narwhal
Wait, reverb pedal before the distortion pedal?
That's an unusual signal chain.
In that scenario I would rather use Reverb vst in post (daw).
But hey, if distorted reverb sound good, it's good.
Using a mic to record the amp is more common than running the amp into an interface.
Could be in your scenario, just using vst plugins is a better option. (amp sim, cab sim, etc etc).
What the culprit of the staticy noise on your Scarlett can be many things, and by checking that, is by having as few things as possible connected electrically, and see where the problem occurs when things are added piece by piece.
Single coil guitars into heavy distortion is usually a nasty culprit, especially if there's a lot of em interference nearby.
Even a random table lamp in the room can be a culprit.
Also heard about people getting bad static noise on their interface when the charger to the laptop is plugged in, but gone when the laptop is run on battery instead.
Volume. generally, a decent starting point, is setting up the levels for the drums first, and then build up other instruments around that, but of course, there are exceptions.
EQ, depends on material, but generally, 300hz area is often culprit for mud. The fix, cut some.
Non-bass elements, usually, cut all lows out on those.
Mixing, it depends on what genres you work on.
Not really useful if I send a ''how to mix drums'' yt link from a metal engineer if you do soft indie or whatever.
Basically, try yt search ''how to mix (genre)/(instrument)''
something will probably pop up.
Anyway, general info. yt channels Fabfilter, and Dan Worrall are some of the best, general non-genre info.