Ninten Kwon Do
Offline
Atlanta, GA

Hey everyone. I'm getting close to ready to release my first album as "nintenkwondo!" and am looking for some tips to improve my mix when recording or even improving my mix when writing songs in lsdj. So basically just any tips that would help improve the quality of my gameboy music.

Feel free to give me any other criticism on my instruments or song structure aswell, but mainly it's actually recording and mixing the music that I'm worried about at the moment.

My current setup for recording is just plugging the gameboy into a korg mixer for added bass then from the mixer into a mic jack on the actual computer and then post production in reaper. so i know there is room for improvement.

Here are the tracks in question...
https://soundcloud.com/ninten-kwon-do/not-dead-yet
https://soundcloud.com/ninten-kwon-do/ayuvir-blue2012
https://soundcloud.com/ninten-kwon-do/t … acy-part-1

unexpectedbowtie
Offline
Glasgow, Scotland.

If you aren't already, one of the best things you can do is record each channel individually into a new track on your DAW so that you have more control over them (EQ/plugins or whatever).

You can do that by muting all of the channels on the Gameboy whilst recording except the one you want to record at that point - off the top of my head I think you press Start + B whilst the cursor is on the relevant channel, then releasing B first. You'll see MUTE on the right hand side with the letter corresponding to the channel that isn't muted missing. That sounds confusing, but it'll make sense when you see it.

Afterwards, line the tracks up to be in synch. There's a few ways to do it. One is to get all channels to make a sort of short kick style sound at the very start of the song that you can easily pick out and use as a reference point to line them up (and later cut out). The way I've been doing it lately is to use an Arduinoboy, and LSDJ in MIDI sync mode so that you can trigger the Gameboy playing from the exact same point in the DAW for each channel.

p.s. Cool tracks! I'm a fan of the stereo panning.

Last edited by unexpectedbowtie (Feb 17, 2016 11:38 am)

SuperBustySamuraiMonkey
Offline
Madriz, Supain

Put all the channels on volume 47 and your wav volume and kick to FF.

Vegasdiamond
Offline
Antwerp, Belgium
SuperBustySamuraiMonkey wrote:

Put all the channels on volume 47 and your wav volume and kick to FF.

wav volume only goes up to 3, right?

token
Offline

honestly sounds great as it is

skutsit
Offline
Oulu, Finland

I like your sound very much man! To be honest, I don't have much critic (not even constructive) for you, since I'm fair new by myself in this kind of producing. I just had strong feeling that i must say something, since i think your tunes sound great already, or even perfect for my taste and ear. Keep it going, you definitely got a new follower for your future releases! smile

Popsicle Theory
Offline
the Netherlands

Sounds awesome already (but I've always loved your tracks anyway big_smile) but what I always do is record the channels separately and then throw on an EQ8 in Ableton and mess with that until it sounds right. sometimes removing the highs or lows of (bits of a) channel really helps making it sound less muddy.

ForaBrokenEarth
Offline
Nottingham, UK

Mixing is 90% arrangement, 5% levels and 5% everything else. I've been trying to follow the roboctobus school of thought recently. Make it sound as good as possible in LSDJ alone and then maybe doing some gentle stuff on the masterbus at the end, which is what you're doing by the sounds of it.

If you're recording the tracks separately and you do a lot of stuff with grooves, sometimes they don't match up properly in the end. And also, if you're using hardware, you can end up with a pretty nasty noise floor imo.

One thing I seriously recommend is comparing your levels with musicians you really like. Think about where X artist sits their kick/bass/etc in the mix.

Last edited by ForaBrokenEarth (Feb 26, 2016 4:14 pm)

Adzetko
Offline
Ardèche, France

Play with LR outputs seems to be a good thing for "legit" (on hardware) mixing. I'm not mastering this way to mix, but I've seen really good musics with stereo mixing (I've got in mind Rock Or Bust album by AC-DC, well, not chipmusic at all, but anyway, the stereo mixing in this album is a masterpiece. It think it's not their best album, but it's a good exemple on how is a good stereo mix). It definitely adds something.

The One Electronic
Offline
Detroit
unexpectedbowtie wrote:

If you aren't already, one of the best things you can do is record each channel individually into a new track on your DAW so that you have more control over them (EQ/plugins or whatever).

You can do that by muting all of the channels on the Gameboy whilst recording except the one you want to record at that point - off the top of my head I think you press Start + B whilst the cursor is on the relevant channel, then releasing B first. You'll see MUTE on the right hand side with the letter corresponding to the channel that isn't muted missing. That sounds confusing, but it'll make sense when you see it.

Afterwards, line the tracks up to be in synch. There's a few ways to do it. One is to get all channels to make a sort of short kick style sound at the very start of the song that you can easily pick out and use as a reference point to line them up (and later cut out). The way I've been doing it lately is to use an Arduinoboy, and LSDJ in MIDI sync mode so that you can trigger the Gameboy playing from the exact same point in the DAW for each channel.

p.s. Cool tracks! I'm a fan of the stereo panning.

This method imo is very debatable in terms of achieving decent recording quality... sure you'll get each channel on its own but you stack up 4x the line noise from the DMG and it's pretty rough trying to get rid of it without squashing the dynamics of the rest of the track.  Honestly the best bet is to get your track in LSDJ mixed as perfectly as you want it to be and then EQ afterwards for flavor along with maybe a notch at 9.25khz plus reverb and a little compression.

If you aren't hella worried about having a "legit" recording from your DMG, you can get a 100% clean line out recording of each individual channel via BGB and throw that into your DAW for fine tuning the mix.  A good example of this is Roboctopus's Disco.txt.  Pure BGB.

Ninten Kwon Do
Offline
Atlanta, GA

First of all thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply. I appreciate everyone's input.

The One Electronic wrote:

Honestly the best bet is to get your track in LSDJ mixed as perfectly as you want it to be and then EQ afterwards for flavor along with maybe a notch at 9.25khz plus reverb and a little compression.

If you aren't hella worried about having a "legit" recording from your DMG, you can get a 100% clean line out recording of each individual channel via BGB and throw that into your DAW for fine tuning the mix.  A good example of this is Roboctopus's Disco.txt.  Pure BGB.

This is what I currently do and from the looks of this thread will continue to do.
However...
When using BGB I get massive slowdown both while playing/editing songs and recording. Does anyone know of any ways to help with slowdown in BGB? Very cool that roboctopus used it on Disco.txt though I wasn't aware of that.

Until then I'll just continue to use real hardware and try not to be so hard on myself when it comes to my music tongue

The One Electronic
Offline
Detroit
Ninten Kwon Do wrote:

First of all thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply. I appreciate everyone's input.

The One Electronic wrote:

Honestly the best bet is to get your track in LSDJ mixed as perfectly as you want it to be and then EQ afterwards for flavor along with maybe a notch at 9.25khz plus reverb and a little compression.

If you aren't hella worried about having a "legit" recording from your DMG, you can get a 100% clean line out recording of each individual channel via BGB and throw that into your DAW for fine tuning the mix.  A good example of this is Roboctopus's Disco.txt.  Pure BGB.

This is what I currently do and from the looks of this thread will continue to do.
However...
When using BGB I get massive slowdown both while playing/editing songs and recording. Does anyone know of any ways to help with slowdown in BGB? Very cool that roboctopus used it on Disco.txt though I wasn't aware of that.

Until then I'll just continue to use real hardware and try not to be so hard on myself when it comes to my music tongue

Use the latest BGB!! There was actually a bugfix about this last summer.  It shouldn't do that anymore.  You WILL hear slowdown DURING playback but the renders will be perfect!!!

Ninten Kwon Do
Offline
Atlanta, GA
The One Electronic wrote:

Use the latest BGB!! There was actually a bugfix about this last summer.  It shouldn't do that anymore.  You WILL hear slowdown DURING playback but the renders will be perfect!!!

awesome! I'll check it out!

Last edited by Ninten Kwon Do (Feb 27, 2016 2:56 am)

Adzetko
Offline
Ardèche, France
The One Electronic wrote:

This method imo is very debatable in terms of achieving decent recording quality... sure you'll get each channel on its own but you stack up 4x the line noise from the DMG and it's pretty rough trying to get rid of it without squashing the dynamics of the rest of the track.

What you can do to solve the noise problem is recording each channel 2 times, the first time with the muted but recorded  L output, and the second time with the muted but again recorded R output. Then you invert the wave of your muted output (i.e. the left one) and add it to the other one from the same record (i.e. the right one). You have simply remove the noise of 1/8th of your song, and this is the inconvenient, you have to do this 8 freaking times.
But if you want an awesomely clean sound, this is a really good way to have it.

Personnally, I do not consider the background noise as a problem, I'm liking this little particular sound.
But I think if you want to have a minimalist/clean mood for your track, it is a thing you have to think about.
But you know, I don't think substarcting this noise must always be done. It depends on what your track is about.

Last edited by Adzetko (Feb 27, 2016 2:42 pm)

roboctopus
Offline
Madison, Alabama
The One Electronic wrote:

If you aren't hella worried about having a "legit" recording from your DMG, you can get a 100% clean line out recording of each individual channel via BGB and throw that into your DAW for fine tuning the mix.  A good example of this is Roboctopus's Disco.txt.  Pure BGB.

Not every track on the album was recorded with BGB, actually. Most were, but I used real DMGs for some of them. "Born, Dancing" was definitely done with two DMGs through my DJ mixer. I think Pegasus Four was as well.  I actually A/B tested tracks BGB vs DMG and other than BGB needing a bit more EQ on the bass end, differences were negligible at best.

The One Electronic wrote:

Use the latest BGB!! There was actually a bugfix about this last summer.  It shouldn't do that anymore.  You WILL hear slowdown DURING playback but the renders will be perfect!!!

Yeah, sometimes it sounds sketchy during output, but the renders should sound fine.

e.s.c.
Offline
IL, US
The One Electronic wrote:
unexpectedbowtie wrote:

If you aren't already, one of the best things you can do is record each channel individually into a new track on your DAW so that you have more control over them (EQ/plugins or whatever).

This method imo is very debatable in terms of achieving decent recording quality... sure you'll get each channel on its own but you stack up 4x the line noise from the DMG and it's pretty rough trying to get rid of it without squashing the dynamics of the rest of the track.

not really a problem if before mixing the channels you run noise reduction in audacity on each individual channel