Project Button Masher: So Cool JC

By Shamus Posted Thursday Feb 19, 2015

Filed under: Music 24 comments

I’m taking it easy this week. We’re not trying to copy any particular style. Not trying to emulate certain instruments. Not trying to figure out what gives a soundtrack its particular sound. I’m just making music and posting the result. This is my attempt to take everything I’ve learned and see if the quality of my work improved.

If there’s anything that inspired this track it’s this em… skit(?) from Machinima: Deus Ex: The Recut.


Link (YouTube)

There is something really delightful about re-cutting and subverting the Deus Ex dialog. The conversationFor the impatient: It’s at the three minute mark. in this week’s song was really fun to put together.

This one is a lot more complex than my usual project. I also took the time to make everything myself, including mapping out the drums. (I usually use pre-fab drum loops.) Most of the instruments were built by hand. Note that I’m not saying it’s better or anything, but it is a pretty big step up in complexity and effort. Here’s the track map:

track_map_so_cool.jpg

A funny story about the audio clips in this song:

In Deus Ex, you get to visit the Lucky Money dance club in Hong Kong. When you go in, there are a couple of women waiting by the front door. One of them flirts with you, and it’s transparently obvious that she’s not interested in you at all, she just wants someone to pay her cover charge, buy her some drinks, and then go away. Her fawning praise of JC is so thick it borders on mockery. “You’re so cool JC, I’m so glad I met you.” And the game lets you do it. It doesn’t comment on it. It doesn’t turn out later that she’s a villain that you have to fight, kill, or interrogate. It’s just a perfectly normal situation where they allow the player to behave like a complete rube.

It also plays against standard videogame tropes and expectations. The whole “questing” mentality of games has taught us that when you meet people who are asking for things, it’s an unambiguous good to give them whatever bullshit they want. I remember forking over my money to these girls and clicking on them again and again thinking, “Is there something else I need to do for them? At some point here one of them should give up a key, or a bit of intel, or a hint, or… something. Right?” But no. They’re exactly what they seem: A couple of girls looking to bat their eyelashes at a guy and get free stuff. It’s a dumb little moment and it always makes me smile when I have my badass nanotech secret agent go into the club and act like a putz.

What I learned:

Important lesson this week. I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong with regards to mixing. It turns out I’ve been carefully balancing out the audio levels and then at the last minute ruining them. So that’s hilarious.

The program I use has a volume slider at the bottom of the interface, like so:

magix_volume.jpg

I’ve been using that volume as just a regular volume slider, like you’d use the volume on an MP3 player. If I was using my headphones I’d turn it down, and then when my ears got sore I’d switch back to speakers and turn the volume up again. The problem is that this volume slider doesn’t just control playback. It controls the volume of the final mix. I’m not saying that’s wrong or anything. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.

So after working for hours I’d take the headphones off and reflexively turn the volume up before I hit export. This would blow out all the volume levels and mash everything together. Here is a song in progress:

audio_mix1.jpg

That’s more or less the way it ought to look. You’ve got quiet instruments and loud instruments and lots of variation in the overall piece. (Note that I only see this waveform if I open the project in Audacity. Which I’ve never had any reason to do until now.) But when I crank up the volume, it looks like this:

audio_mix2.jpg

So I’d crank up the volume, export it, then upload it to Soundcloud. When it sounded kind of off, I figured it was because I was using speakers instead of headphones. My speakers are old and not in good shapeThe right one is partly blown, thanks to one too many games of “Windows Volume Control Roulette”.. I was accidentally participating in the loudness war:


Link (YouTube)

This probably explains why my stuff sometimes sounds less interesting after uploading it to Soundcloud. I always attributed that to artist’s self-critique, where you stand back to get a good look at your work and suddenly decide it sucks. But no, it was actually me sabotaging the mix at the last moment.

This is not to suggest that my mixing skills are brilliant or anything. I am not an audiophile. I’m actually an audioslob. I don’t often care about sound quality and things like white noise don’t usually bother me. I can enjoy listening to an old cassette tape on tinny speakers without going crazy. But I try to take care with audio mixing and editing because I know some people really, really careYou should hear the Diecast before I edit it. Popping, clicking, and white noise galore. I know the end product isn’t anything special with regards to quality, but the raw audio is a lot worse..

So hopefully I’ll stop making that mistake in the future and I’ll have fewer over-boosted tracks.

 

Footnotes:

[1] For the impatient: It’s at the three minute mark.

[2] The right one is partly blown, thanks to one too many games of “Windows Volume Control Roulette”.

[3] You should hear the Diecast before I edit it. Popping, clicking, and white noise galore. I know the end product isn’t anything special with regards to quality, but the raw audio is a lot worse.



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24 thoughts on “Project Button Masher: So Cool JC

  1. CJ Kerr says:

    Dynamic Range! Hooray!

    With regards to being unaware of your mistake until you saw the result in Audacity: it looks like there might be a VU meter over to the right of the playback controls. That gives you the same kind of information in real time.

    1. Alexander The 1st says:

      Except the problem only occurs once he hits export, because he turns up the volume at the last minute of playback, considers it good, and hits export.

      It’s a change he literally does so he can hear the mix louder.

      I mean, I guess he could run the visualizer at the same time, but to someone who’s not expecting it to break his audio, the visualizer’s kind of out of the way.

      If anything, it should show it during the export process, or even before as a preview, so that someone would actually notice it before they finished the recording.

      1. CJ Kerr says:

        Except the problem only occurs once he hits export, because he turns up the volume at the last minute of playback, considers it good, and hits export.

        Yeah, I was kinda assuming that he gives it at least one last listen before hitting export, but you’re probably right – Shamus does say “reflexively” which implies that he does it automatically even though he’s not listening, just wandering off to get a cup of tea.

        1. Being a programmer he should know better than to implicitly trust programs and other programmers :P

          Now Shamus is no ditz, so I’d call this a layout/design flaw of the software in question.

          Maybe there is a option someplace that will prevent this from happening, then again I’m sure Shamus won’t do the same mistake twice now that he’s aware of it.

          For the record I’ve never been a fan of volume sliders/knobs that “increase” the volume, I prefer to reduce the volume (i.e. it starts at 0dB and then the numbers go negative).
          You will never clip that way (unintentionally at least).

  2. Ah, excessive compression, yeah I’m one of those that really dislike that :)

    Very “flat” songs tend to give me listening fatigue and if in my playlist I tend to skip them after less than a minute many times.

    Too dynamic songs on the other hand is also an issue, I forgot the source of this but IIRC about 30 dB is the max range that a human feel comfortable with, from loudest to quietest in a song (measured as RMS I assume).

    The EBU R-128 broadcast standard has max true peak at -1 dBFS and a loudness at around -23 dBFS. (they call it LKFS instead if I recall)
    So if a song has peaks less than 0dB and are from around -15 dBFS RMS to -30 dBFS RMS then quality and listenability should be a good as it gets as far as loudness is concerned.

    I tend to normalize my stuff to -23dBFS RMS (Sine) even if that means the peaks will be way below 0dBFS. I have also found I like to edit/listen to music at that level too, it allows me to crank up the volume knob and get some juice (power) into the circuits to drive that bass (very important for headphones).

    While some of your previous songs where better as far as melody/musicality goes,
    this song is better technically. And the fact that you did your own drums, kudos man, my hat is off to you, so many just slap in a pre-made drum loop thingy into their songs.
    I highly value originality like this. *tips hat*

  3. Jordan says:

    Audacity does have an amplify option that by default doesn’t go so loud that it clips parts of the wave form. Probably worth sticking to that if you want to crank up the volume.

  4. BenD says:

    Eep. So any chance of new, less smashed SoundCloud uploads?

    1. That could easily eat up an evening, I do believe there is a donate link to the right someplace that in theory might help incentivise something like that to happen. :P

      EDIT:
      Or maybe Shamus could provide a high dynamic/high-fidelity lossless album release (in FLAC format maybe?) that folks could buy?
      Maybe starting at a buck or similar and otherwise just let folks set their own price (sort of like a pay-what-you-want thing).

  5. Otters34 says:

    “There is something really delightful about re-cutting and subverting the Dues Ex dialog…”

    Please keep this up for the rest of us audioslobs, sir.

  6. Hal says:

    The funny thing about that scene you reference is that the girl’s friend has one line, and only one, after that moment. Which is hilarious, because a few minutes after you go into the club, the club is attacked by cyborgs.

    So of course, said friend wanders around after the cyborgs are all dead, saying, “Thanks for getting me in,” completely oblivious to everything that just went down.

    Also, okay, show of hands: Who here robs the mini-mart outside the club?

    1. Otters34 says:

      Well duh, of course I do. That’s why they put all that loot in there, so people could steal it and pull one over the cops a few yards away!

      Love to see something like that in some grim cuberpunk movie, where the badass protagonist just breaks into a shop and steals things. Doesn’t even say anything or offer any explanation, just a smash-and-grab.

  7. Tsi says:

    Wow, this one is pretty darn good !

    1. Cuthalion says:

      +1 I like it quite a lot. It’s repetitive, but in a fun, dancey way. The bass is nice, and the instruments are neat.

  8. Decius says:

    I’d like to see you take the techno instruments and use score that wasn’t originally techno. I think that some of the NES musical scores would work well, although they are arguably precursors to techno.

    I think that Brinstar would be a good place to start.

    1. There are some rights issues tied to just taking someone elses composition (i.e. doing a cover song).
      Doing something in the same style would work but not outright using the same sequences of notes (there is no set limit but sounds-like to plagiarism to cover-song can get messy if unlucky).

    2. bit says:

      That’s a really weird sentiment, because NES chiptunes are A; historically developing in parallel with techno (and using a very different type of technology with a very different sound) and B; though chiptune is kinda it’s own genre now, compositionally NES games were just other genres fit into the NES music chip- almost exactly like you’re talking about. Metroid is John Williams-style sweeping soundtrack, Mario is very jazzy orchestral, a lot of Capcom stuff (Castlevania, Megaman) is based on 80s metal and rock.

  9. djshire says:

    Shamus, always look at your meters when working on anything. Looking for the db rating. One of the things that you can do in most DAWs (I use Logic) is to put either an EQ on the main output bus, or get a good volume meter. You have several choices, like the Sonalkis FreeG, or using the meter in IK Multimedia T-rackS (which also has the option to give a level suggestion based upon your genre/sub-genre).

    1. Decius says:

      I recognize that some of those are words.

  10. Trix2000 says:

    There was a time when sound quality didn’t seem all that important to me, but then I started doing side-by-side comparisons (on my own and later through work) and now I vastly prefer high-quality sound.

    A lot of it comes down to the little background details that are in a lot of music, which otherwise might be missed or blend into everything else. They don’t seem to be integral to how the song is, but they can do a lot to augment things and make them sound more interesting. Not to mention it’s wondrous how much a good solid bass line can make a song ‘feel’ better (provided it’s not blasting my ears out, of course).

    But then, I’ve grown a lot more attached to music of late (mostly from games) so I may have more of an interest in this sort of thing than the average person (I wouldn’t call myself an audiophile, though… I’m not that picky overall). That and my current job may influence my perspective a bit.

  11. Shamus doesn’t your Windows/Soundcard setup provide separate volume settings for headphones and speakers?

    If it’s Realtek you have then you can go to the Realtek website and fetch the latest drivers and control panel for your audio chipset there.
    Vista and later should support separate volume settings.

    So if you unplug the headphones from the headphone jack then it switches to speakers (and the volume changes to whatever it was set there).

    Soundcards like the Soundblaster series from Creative and the Xonar from Asus should also have the same (at least the cards I’ve had over the years).

    FIY these days I sit almost exclusively with huge circumaural cans on my head (Q-PAD QH-90 they are large enough to fit my ears…)
    I can wear these comfortably for hours upon hours, they also block some of the PC case fan noise.
    Way back I used to have small on-ear headphones and those gave me actual sores on the ears, nasty.

  12. Dude says:

    Shamus, you mentioned you’re learning to play the piano in the last diecast post. Are you practicing on a real piano, or a MIDI keyboard? If the latter, which one are you using?

  13. I really like this one, Shamus. Unfortunately, that is all the comment I have, because even after supreme effort on the part of some poor folks assigned to teach me over the years, I still have approximately as much grasp of how music works as a moldy cheese.

  14. lucky7 says:

    this is probably my favorite so far. However, that’s all I can contribute.

  15. poiumty says:

    Deus Ex: The Recut, eh?

    Well, time to break out the ol’ quoting spree.

    “WITHIN THE WEEK. WE WILL HAVE. -=OLD MEN=-. RUNNING THE WORLD.”

    “No. Within six months.”

    “Yes.”

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