Congratulations to the winners,
Thanks for sharing about your tracks,
The first prize is deserved and (I might admit) maybe I didn’t vote for it because I knew it would win anyway 
you did great! Great drums, sample choice, mixing!
I don’t think I have much to say about drum and bass production I’m afraid,
I have a lot of years of music production as a hobbie, but I think I’m still pretty bad at genre specific stuff. Rarely finishing dnb tracks. There’s A lot of info that I haven’t studied. Also, going off topic and at the risk of being misinterpreted (or simply wrong) I will say as a hobbie producer I find claustrophobic certain specific genres in electronic music when taken too rigidly: I stop feeling like a musician but feel like a technician instead.
I’ve used hardware only but I would like to say that a computer and a daw is much more efficient at music production than expensive gear. I genuinely believe that’s the truth, not up for debate (how can you argue against the power of modern computers with a 90mb RAM octatrack?)
I did use ableton native compressor and glue compressor to make stuff louder. (Once again I dont consider myself knowledgeable to be giving tips on this, but that being said I find that using various instances of subtle compressors works nicely for me - if you read about ‘fmr RNC’ you might have read about really nice mode, which apparently is 3 layers of compression. I never tried fmr RNC myself but I like the concept).
The first track I did I used the m8 tracker. Just tried having fun with its native chiptune synths and FX - first time I tried that genre too. Ridiculously fast arps passing through volume envelope. I put a drum break sample playing very early on my jam to try to vibe with it, a nicely quantized break has less soul but is easier to work with. I pass the break through distortion (m8’s Amp and degrade, I think) to reduce bitrate and turn it into noise 8bit style. I layered drums on top of it (I think I used m8’s plaits clone of 808, and a noise synth for hats).
Add a simple bass and a simple chord progression to make it feel nice. By then I lost most of my motivation with the track, so I made it short and rushed it’s conclusion (I wish I had worked more on a few details and on an ending, but I really lost my mental battery by then)
At that moment I also had no notion if the m8 track was any good, it was sounding incredibly annoying to me by the end, so I went to do a quick jam with the OT and MNM - I’ve played with this duo extensively for more than 10 years so that’s my comfort zone.
Very very simple track, not much to say about it I’m afraid. Choosing lofi’ish synths and layering filters and subtle distortions gave it an old playstation nostalgia aesthetic I was looking for.
Drum break from DOA sample library. I would mention the following basic trick I liked using on the break: Pass it through OT phaser with 0 speed, random 0 speed LFO to phaser’s CNTR (position) activating on trigs (this means each trig gets a new random value, so each trig the breakbeats’s phaser is in a new position). Trig condition reversing the end of the sample every other time (or some rhythm like that)
Ot Delay’s beat repeat style trick, assigned to crossfader so I could jam it live along with filters cutoff.
MNM plays a wavetable Synth chord (with chorus on max at the start, ending at 0), a simple melody, simple bass, and some extra drums using noise (chose sid’s noise for extra 8bit sound - notice the ‘claps’ at every 4th bar, sometimes very subtle, depending on live mixing).
Jamming live was ot’s crossfader (to beats filter and beat repeat, I think master track filter too), MNM 's filters and FX, and overall mutes. Great fun to play, very simple results (that surely bore a lot of people). I recorded the jam and that’s it.
Which_instrument_do_ you_play?_Cutoff_filter-MEME.jpg
Looking back I wish I had used some samples from games, it would’ve added some value.
I was very surprised by the positive feedback and the votes. I rarely share my music nowadays so that felt lovely and made my week brighter. Thanks everyone!
