Bingo. This right here is relevant for any music style and it takes years of experience. This is part of what I was getting at up thread. Great track, by the way.
Eh, make shitty tracks for a few years and nail the composition part. No one cares if your music is generic, by the numbers shit no matter how well itās mixed.
If you are you using a DAW as your master clock thatās your problem. I would try another clock from one of your instruments as the master and disconnect any midi to the DAW, match the bpm on the DAW then hit record then start your sequencer. After you are done recording you can adjust the start of the waveform to the one. On Ableton it allows you to select all of the recorded tracks at the same time so youāll only need to adjust one track and the rest will follow.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I still get jitter from Machinedrum using itās own clock. I always have. The jitter seems better on newer Elektron boxes, but is still definitely there when I record them. For Octatrack, I guess Iāve always had it clocked when recording it, so havenāt ever tested how stable its internal clock is. Recording Syntakt over overbridge isnāt too bad, but still moves around a bit from my experience with it, but it seems better than recording it over midi. Iāve never been able to get a perfect clock from Elektron boxes, but I still use them in my production, but I always use workarounds, like I mentioned earlier to deal with the problems from jitter. Itās a bit of an inconvenience, but to me it is worth it, because I love the Elektron workflow, and the sound of Elektron boxes.
afaik by learning from lots of interviews / post of artists I like (lots of Zenon artists, lots of forest, etc.), the ones that use hadware in their production to generate sound always emphasize that they bounce / record everything to samples, from one shots of the kicks / bass to loops of synth / percs etc.
I donāt think any existing (commercial) psy artist plays live from their gear, they usually have everything in their Live clips or similar, leaving nothing to chance.
so overbridge will help you utilize your synth from DAW but if you want tight kick-bass, youāll need to bounce individual notes and align them manually sample-tight. thereās no sync magic afaik.
or, like mentioned earlier, you could go for less accurate styles like goa / oldschool psy where the sound is not that airtight.
if you need to be inspired jamming psy without being super accurate, have a look for example at one of my personal favs, Electrypnose:
he had lots of older jams that now are gone from his channel, but heās top producer in my books, and Iāve heard his tracks on various systems that blew my mind. BUT, for released music, he will always bounce his stuff and work on every element individually. I think he had a ācourseā where he explained how he works in Cubase, how he records long synth parts and then cuts them up and aligns everything.
One of the outstanding artists in this sound space! Quite varied output too, not just focussed on banging stuff, but also chill out / ambient etc. Excellent stuff.
This is the āworkā part that many of us canāt find the time or motivation for. A lot of time and patience required. There is no automatic solution.
for sure, itās hard work and you have to be up for it to get that accurate sound if thatās what you are aiming for.
Yeah I do the same thing but I donāt align everything after. Of course I make House, so a little looseness is ok with me. That said I get everything synced as tightly as possible before recording in. I will either use a sync box or an Octatrack for short stuff. I just got a blackbox for long takes.
What I have found that is pretty cool for drum machines is just matching up the BPMs and not sending sync, just a start/stop message. That is usually tighter and more organic than one machine trying to sync to another IME. I just ordered a blackbox for this very task.
For synths I usually send sync as well but I may mess with that. Instead of time aligning all my recordings dead to a grid I tend to throw them in sampler and just mess with the sound until I get something unique. Different style though than Psytrance.
With Psy at around 138bpm and more or less everything on 16th notes, you can hear sloppy sync quite well
For me, I ended in building my own Hardware-Sequencer and sequencing everything from there. All other hardware just do tones. That way the only issues that can occur are artifacts of jitter in Effects. I got rid of that by replacing the Blofeld that does really bad in syncing FX for a Virus.
Which one did you build?
The hardware UI is highly inspired by the Cirklon but with an additional row of mechanical Keys and a completely self written Software running on a Teensy 4.1. Currently have 16 Tracks with 16 Patterns each. Every Pattern has 16 Bars a 1-16 Steps, thatās up 256 Steps, but as you can tell every bar to repeat a defined number of times, patterns can be a lot longer. Every Pattern have 3 Random based Modlanes triggered by enabled steps, and 4 Independent (Resolution, Steplength etc.) Mod-Lanes that can be LFO or a āGraphā that you can draw with the Encoders. (Comes close to drawing Modulation in a DAW).
Tracks can be either Drum-Type (With 16 Rows, each with their own MidiPort/Channel and Note configuration to work with more or less every type of drum-machine), Mono-x0x Type, a Chord track or a 16 Voice Poly-Track having totally independent (Velocity, Length, Probability etc) Notes.
Currently working on a few generative Features.
Its my second Hardware approach (did a Deluge-Style Grid first), but found out, that I like the 16-Encoder approach better). Its kind of my Dream-Sequencer, having all the features I want and nothing, that I donāt need. Also being able to implement new stuff, when I come up with them is awesome.
Only issue: I spend way more time on the Sequencer than on making music with it
That means home brew, based on some arduino? Sounds very cyberpunk to me. Like stepic sequencer in hw.
The Teensy SDK is based onto the Arduino Framework, with Paul, the originator having written all the hardware related stuff himself. Its uncountable faster than Arduino-Board and has a lot more Ram.
Everything is hand-soldered (totally not fun, soldering nearly 70 RGB LEDs onto a board!). PCBs of your own design are very cheap, when you order them in china. As I am nowhere near an electronics-person, that was the hardest part.
if your analogue oscillator has inconsistent attack consider a one shot LFO on eg pitch or filter freq. This should mask it. I leaned this from analysing LEMs patches for MNM.
Would love to see a pic of this homemade sequencer if you have one
I grew up listening to Psytrance in the early 90s
Blew my mind
Years later found out they (Hallucinogen, TIP, Eat Static etcā¦) did it all on very minimal setups where computers only played a secondary role
Mostly hardware - synths, drum machines, samplers, fx units and mixing console
Iād say that was half IDM