trekkiejj
Registered User
Joined: 17 Mar 2007
Location: Lubbock, Texas, US
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 Posted: Sat Mar 17 2007 23:10
techniques for rock/metal/etc? |
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Hi all,
This is my first forum post. I've been reading the forum and playing around with MT2 for the past few days, and I was wondering how many of you compose rock/metal tracks using MT2. Perhaps we could swap some tips, tricks, and techniques?
A little background on myself might be useful...I'm an old skool tracker, having started tracking back when 4-track MODS were state of the art, in the early 90s. I tracked on and off for years, swapping MODs on local BBSes. FastTracker 2 was the last tracker that I really used--back in the late 90s--when TraxInSpace was still around. When TiS went down, life got in the way, and I got away from tracking. Well, just for fun, I downloaded MT2 the other day, dusted off some of my old samples, downloaded some new samples, and started tracking again.
Although tracking is really better suited for electronic genres, I've always had a fascination with mimicking acoustic genres (rock, jazz, etc.). It's always been extremely difficult to make these genres sound halfway realistic. Rock in particular has always been hard because of the sheer dearth of decent guitar samples. Plus, it's hard to mimic an instrument as expressive as the guitar when you have a limited set of samples to work with. That's really true for any type of acoustic instrument (I think that's why tracked acoustic drums always sound fake).
I've seen the techniques improve from 4-track MODs to FT2 .XMs (Betrayer, ZackmanO, and others typifying the late 90s metal tracking scene). Mainly this meant better quality samples--and more of them in order to copy every squeak and squak of a guitar. Still, ripping samples from these tunes caused the guitar to have a very stitched-together sound, as the samples were recorded by different people, each of whom had different gear. Plus, if you wanted to use a guitar with a particular sound but didn't have the samples, you were SOL unless you happened to play guitar.
I don't play guitar, but I love rock. It's always been a dream of mine that somehow a technology would come along that would realistically emulate a guitar along with amps, distortion, wah, etc. During the past few days, I've discovered the joys of VSTs, and I've discovered a host of free VST effects that do emulate various types of guitar-related gear. When I pump a simple clean electric guitar instrument and a few sampled fret noises through these VSTs, I come out with a very realistic guitar. Distortion, etc. behaves as you would expect from a real guitar.
I searched the MT2 forum for "metal" and "rock" and listened to a few tracks that sounded like they used the old school metal tracking techniques (though of course sample quality and such is very, very good now). For those of you that track the occasional metal or rock tune, do you have any tips or tricks you'd like to share? For your guitars, does anybody make use of VSTs (instruments or effects), or do you always just rely on samples or loops?
To get the ball rolling, my favorite free guitar-related VST so far is FreeAmp 2.0 (go to http://frettedsynth.asseca.com/ and click on "amplifier simulators").
I can post .OGG samples of some of my experimentation if any of this is new to anybody besides me. Otherwise, I won't bother.
I really am an MT2 and VST newb, so apologies if I'm stating the obvious. Feel free to ignore me in that case.  |
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G3ronimo
Hot & Sexeh
Joined: 27 Dec 2005
Location: The Netherlands, Wezep
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Posted: Sun Mar 18 2007 02:30
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Slayer mimics metal guitar perfect, try to find it somewhere, and if you like it buy it  |
www.soundsector.net |
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trekkiejj
Registered User
Joined: 17 Mar 2007
Location: Lubbock, Texas, US
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Posted: Sun Mar 18 2007 06:02
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| G3ronimo wrote: | | Slayer mimics metal guitar perfect, try to find it somewhere, and if you like it buy it |
Ahhh...that's awesome! Yeah--I saw Slayer 2 in the plug-in database after I posted my message.  I guess what I found new and exciting is old hat to everyone else. Well, it's new to me...I was just reveling in my n00bness!
Oh, there is one more thing I could mention. As I recall, metal tracks of yore never quite got the drums right. The other day I stumbled across this site:
http://www.kara-moon.com/
There are quite a few free sample packs there: http://www.kara-moon.com/index.php?modid=mod02&l_submenu_id=m001_02_02
Drum samples by Yppse are amazing--high quality, with just about every piece of a trap set recorded in an incredibly wide variety of ways. I spent hours one day just sorting through the basic pieces and building XI instruments from them. I think they turned out well.
I hope somebody besides me finds them useful. |
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Scandinavian Noize Syndic
User
Joined: 17 Mar 2007
Location: denmark
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Posted: Sun Mar 18 2007 14:27
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| trekkiejj wrote: | | G3ronimo wrote: | | Slayer mimics metal guitar perfect, try to find it somewhere, and if you like it buy it |
Ahhh...that's awesome! Yeah--I saw Slayer 2 in the plug-in database after I posted my message. I guess what I found new and exciting is old hat to everyone else. Well, it's new to me...I was just reveling in my n00bness!
Oh, there is one more thing I could mention. As I recall, metal tracks of yore never quite got the drums right. The other day I stumbled across this site:
http://www.kara-moon.com/
There are quite a few free sample packs there: http://www.kara-moon.com/index.php?modid=mod02&l_submenu_id=m001_02_02
Drum samples by Yppse are amazing--high quality, with just about every piece of a trap set recorded in an incredibly wide variety of ways. I spent hours one day just sorting through the basic pieces and building XI instruments from them. I think they turned out well.
I hope somebody besides me finds them useful. |
thanx will surely check them out,even though i dont produce rock or metal,but breakcore,experimental,noise |
Scandinavian Noize Syndicate
www.myspace.com/scandinaviannoizesyndicate |
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XnmE
Registered User
Joined: 04 May 2003
Location: Warsaw, Poland
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Posted: Mon Mar 19 2007 14:16
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I think any vst is realy good for relistic distorted guitars, even Slayer. I still use multisampled guitars for my metal tracks (except of these made with real guitar )
Did you try to find some about metalscene? Betrayer used to record whole parts, riffs chopped to fragments, but in 90's many trackers used multisamples. Good mulstimapled guits give you control, you can use many oldskool tracker efx, like 9xx, 1xx, 2xx, 3xx etc... Many of my tracks is made using FrozenEyes set, try to listen to my "Zima" from previous mt2 compo (im afraid that theres no full guitars set inside, some unused samples are removed) it is the best set of guitars in tracker format i've ever find, even if its in 8 bit. But it will never sound profesional and really realistic. But its just tracking, some kind of homemade imitation of real rock/metal music. If you can add much afford to the song, use some efects in right way, you can get some pretty cool results.
Now, im trying to record some tracks with real guitar and V-amp 2. Ofcourse main part of the songs still will be composed in MT. Well... i think i will not give up tracking metal guitars. |
Music Is ThE GatE
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