Techniques that everyone loves but meh you out?

Anybody else mentioned yet “joining the loudness war” … there is so much dynamic and feeling distroyed by just pumping out those maximized levels.

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agree. and i have similar feelings about ‘DAWless’

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I hate noisey eaters. Like, seriously loathe them. And there is a style of music that I can’t help but think sounds like noisey eaters and I have to switch off very quickly. This will be Heresy to some but its that Autechre/Aphex Twin type of thing they do regularly. Really quick wet sound noises or very snippety percussive sounds. Honestly hate it.

Not sure what style or technique you’d class that as but I’ll just call it The Noisey Eater style of electronic music. Gross.

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+1 on the side chain compression
autotune
trap beats , must be the least creative beats ever … horrible copy paste mentality
the token acoustic sample in EDM to give it some credibility
the drop
the dystopian sauce pored on every techno track of the last 5 years or so , this postapocalyptic witch demon crap is just not doing it for me…

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modular blips dressed in reverb

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Ok, I’m gonna say it… unpopular opinion incoming…

Putting kick drum consecutively on trig 1,5,9 and 13…

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Dude, Construction Kits, so much yuck. You know there was a bunch of that crap packaged with the Loopmasters samples that came with my Octatrack. It got me wondering how many people actually “produce” that way. Please god tell me it’s not common.

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typing anything boomer like into this thread, telling everyone that i hate every genre which I’ve never imagined to come up with because I’ve neither played the required instruments or still waiting for „the“ firmware update to make even better music with my drum machine and 3 guitar pedals.

close it :alien:

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Seems I would have lots of fans here myself too! :smiley:

As someone who’s still keeping his ears open for that first actually decent country song, I don’t really hate any specific technique as such.

But, to get off the high horse, I usually can’t stand autotune (especially male vocals) or this sort of fake lisp singing style (a lot of this going on in Finnish pop/rap/rnb music, probably just a fad from abroad :grinning: )

Also usually don’t like chiptune style stuff.

Trap beat hi hats are also fn lame.

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Connecting your gear with suggested DC voltage, been there done that. Be creative, swap power bricks for happy accidents :grin:

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A lot of meh on this thread for sidechain compression. Totally get it for the overplayed four on the floor pumping sound. But I gotta say, I have heard a handful of tracks over the years using sc compression in a super abstract, suggestive, syncopated way that have truly blown my head right open. If done right, it can be sublime.

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When vocalists do that ‘croak’ before reaching pitch. :fury:

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Dude Country rules… the Outro of Keith Urbán’s - “Nobody drinks alone” gives me goose bumps every time.

Also Alison Krause and Union station while technically blue grass has some beautiful songs, “let me touch you for a while” being one of my favorites.

Maybe one of those songs will tickle your fancy

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This could be said for any production technique, if done in a creative and fitting way for a song, anything goes.

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was thinkng this since reading through the thread- Lone (in particular his excellent ‘Ecstasy and Friends’ album), Flying Lotus, all of Andy Stott’s output from 2010 onwards, to name but a few, have used sidechain compression as a compositional tool. of course, lots of peeps jumped on that bandwagon afterwards but at the time it was fresh and those releases still sound great now

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That whole sound designy side of electronic music that judges the interest of a track on how complex the bass sound is.

Growls and other brostep bass sounds clichés

It’s funny because I have my own set of rules and limitations that I use when I produce, but I also love a lot of music that go against them. My conclusion is that no production techniques are meh, I just don’t know how to use them well.

(Also, snare rolls are cheesy as hell)

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THIS!

compression is very useful on analog synths, where tweaking certain parameters can drastically affect volume.

works much better for parameters than for notes.
on the other hand, the most useful kind of randomization — velocity randomization — is rather uncommon feature in hardware (i mean modulating velocity of sequenced notes with something random). most of modulation matrices i’m aware of omit velocity as modulation target.

arpeggios can work well on background parts. classic (90s) goa trance recordings have a lot of good examples for using them that way.

but yes, tediousness of conventional arpeggios and messy/useless implementations of randomization led me to making my own advanced arpeggiator.

THIS.
and overuse of highpass filters on each & every part.

live drum parts are my answer to this.

and my personal №1 is lo-fi for lo-fi’s sake.

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A few more:

Unison bass: - unless done well sounds like smeary flab.

Teh drop: - the overblown designed to be impactful cliche that ends up sounding oh so predictable.

Sirens/klaxons: - the first time I heard them I hated it, now it has gone far beyond that. Not talking about dub sirens used with restraint, but those annoying blasts designed to demand attention.

Music that sounds like a DAW: - you know the kind, where it has every current technique to sound competitive/polished and it just sounds over done and terrible, hard to listen to but easily heard, yuk.

Overfeel: - aka feels, chills or trying too hard to convey emotion, just ends up sounding insincere if overdone, which seems to happen a lot.

Too much LFOs: - we get it, you just discovered LFOs, yeah they can be cool and useful, but not on everything, all the time, tempo synced, all the time. Nothing says lack of flair and imagination like over use of LFOs on all the usual targets, just because you read it in some lame book/watched some lame video, does not make it true.

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Agree with that

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Fake record crackle ew
None of my records even sound like that no matter how fucked they are

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