I’ve heard that before, in my dentist’s office’s waiting room, coming from the other side of the door to his treatment room. Root canal caramel. 
Hahaha! Yeah, my girlfriend basically said the same, listening to the first samples I extracted.
But for hardstyle techno it’s perfect … crank it up to 160 BPM, put some wild effects on it … and let the chemical mindset of the dancing kids do the rest!
Just tried to find a clip for you, so you know what we’re dealing with.
Apparently, I’m not the first with this idea:
From 7:43
Also, a few seconds before: the Dutch army, preparing for yet another war that we win 
From 7:00!
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That video’s great. 
So you had the coffee maker idea before you saw this video. Like minds! Rave lights and massive speakers dance to while your espresso’s brewing. Hammer! My Army basic training was NOTHING like in the video. All pain. No gain. Loved the old dude in the record store at the end. 
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Yeah - but the sound of those coffee machines really sounds like one of those harder techno tracks. I imagine that I came home after a loooong party weekend, was in the right state of mind, brewed some coffee, started dancing … and never stopped after. The usual
I watched the whole video and remembered that this was a big thing in Holland. Everybody did this, well almost. Of course our King didn’t look cool in that video, but you could see that “let’s get wasted and daaaaance” glaze in Maxima’s eyes. She is our true King … and he’s the Queen
Anyway, I didn’t care for the very fast and very hard styles back then, so I’ve been to 3, max 10 hard style events (my mind is a little foggy), and this was cause a girl I fancied loved that sound (my mind was a little f#cky :-)).
We became good friends, but nothing ever happened. I blame that sound, it’s not good for “romance”…
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Yeah, this is why we have won every war we started since 1949
My military training was also quite hard, nothing like that (but I enjoyed some parts of it). We prepared for something real, those guys are in the “make love not war” division. I envy them - better than the alternative…
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which is pretty much exactly what i want i used to be one of the people that railed about the loudness wars when that all blew up way back in the 80s. now i clip to zero. it’s pretty much the sound you want if you’re doing the whole industrial cyberpunk whatever the eff you call it now. and yeah i mean you DO of course want dynamic range, but at the same time all the songs i listen to are fat little sausages wav files 
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… which brings me to my next question, thank you: usually I want maximum dynamic range, but I listened to my tracks today at a friend, first on his laptop and then on on his sh#tty little speakers.
I could eat enough for the amount of b@rfing that I wanted to do.
My mixes sound terrific on my good speakers and even better on my superduper headphones, while his mixes sound sh#t here. With his mediocre sh#tty/f#cky equipment it’s the other way around.
So my plan is now to:
- First use Sonible smart:EQ4 on all important midi tracks
- Then use Sonible smart:comp 3 on all important midi tracks
- Finally use Ozone 12 Elements on the final mix. I have this and I can’t afford a more advanced version.
Reason for Sonible: it can analyze and optimize individual MIDI tracks in the context of other tracks (by grouping them and assigning them to priorities high/mid/low), so they don’t get in each others way.
It’s great.
Does that make sense?
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yep got the effect you wanted, cool.
My advice wasn’t about the result, it was about how to do this kind of thing in a way that is way more flexble. End result came out fine though.
Like most things, there’s no single way to get there, but some you can end up regretting later
Definitely for some tracks (vocals and often drums in particular) - less so for others though (synth patches, etc)
Then in mastering, yeah you master to the loudness you want - but then you also need to bear in mind the loudness limits of the various streaming services. If you just go full Loudness Wars there it starts to sound crappy when it gets “fixed” by them.
This is sadly a thing even for stuff you post to your own youtube.
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it does to me, and it’s similar to what I do. although to be honest I’ve only mixed my first song so I have an experience level of exactly one. but I’m smart enough to know that you can as a beginner screw up more things than you can probably fix by just blindly twiddling knobs and hoping for the best. and although you see a lot of people talking smack about different AI mastering tools, or using presets, the simple fact is that they will get you in the ballpark when you don’t know what you’re doing. and the one track that I managed to mix actually sounds pretty damn good in my ears, professional no but better than I thought it would be. much better than a lot of the old SST records that’s for sure. and yes the idea is to learn as you go so that you can rely on these things less and less. I would of course be interested to hear @howard take on this.
Ozone is fine for mastering. I no longer use it but that’s more because DAW builtins in the ones I use are fine.
I haven’t used Sonible’s stuff but that’s also exactly what iZotope’s stuff does (Neutron + Tonal Balance Control) across tracks. Sounds reasonable to me.
I generally just sidechain EQ this kind of thing by hand, either with Pro-Q or builtins
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I redid it in Studio One:
- The result is MUCH better
- The splitting and exporting of individual samples was a breeze, very very easy
Audacity IS Herpes
About the samples themselves: I knew it would be an interesting experiment, but the result was mind blowing.
I just played all individual 80++ samples in a loop, and it sounds truly aggressive. Like a sadistic robot making hate-love to a f#ckig Cybertruck.
Couldn’t stop grinning
It will be a challenge to create a song. Those samples require a very hard industrial hard style crossover song, something even I would not dance too.
You must be very neurodiverse to like that kind of “music”.
Which means: I’m gonna do it. I have just the right DJ in mind for that: Trash Bandit!
A good friend of mine, as gentle as can be as a person, but an incredible Hulk when DJing…
see?
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I think I keep reverting back to Audacity as I have used this for 20-30 years now. It happens automatically.
But of course, DAWs are made for audio editing too, not only shuffling clips around and applying effects to it.
I will delete Audacity from all my machines, to wean of this bad habit!
Audacity is great as a track recorder and audio file editor for simple needs. But if you are already using a DAW, Audacity is entirely obsoleted by something that does the job far better, and Audacity’s destructive editing is the opposite of the DAW’s logical layering of changes over the (unmodified) original audio. The two play very poorly together.
Cause hearing = believing, I tested one of my own tracks with different approaches:
- Original Mix: Sounds terrific on my headphones & stereo, but bad on built-in smartphone and laptop speakers (due to bass lacking and general frequency response)
- Sonible smart:EQ4 & smart:comp 3: AI settings, 10 main tracks grouped, so they are are set in the context of the whole track. It sounds absolutely BAD!!! But maybe cause I need to learn more about using those otherwise powerful plugins. It works when I use it sparsely.
- Sonible smart:EQ4 & smart:comp 3 PLUS Ozone 12 Elements. Ozone tries its best, but cannot find a way to save the day. It showed a message box that basically said it NEVER wants to listen to my sh#t again and formatted my hard disk after
- Ozone 12 Elements: I’m impressed. It works OK on terrible speakers and I like the result very much on my better equipment. I should know better, but I fall for over compression too. Don’t tell anybody!
- BX Mastering Studio: also quite OK. Ozone Elements is better, but if you don’t want to spend money (it’s free), this is a way to go. On the other hand, Ozone Elements costs about 25€, so that’s a nobrainer…
Original Mix:
Sonible smart:EQ4 & smart:comp 3:
Sonible smart:EQ4 & smart:comp 3 PLUS Ozone 12 Elements:
Ozone 12 Elements:
BX Mastering Studio:
Oh, and the YouTube dark magic really does something with the tone. The Videos sounds very different from the local FLACs, but with Ozone it’s bearable.
Next, I will test the same approach on another song, as that one was produced better.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been a fan of the Youlean Loudness Meter for a long time. When the dev released YLM 2 Pro, I bought it as a show of support. I don’t need any of the multichannel support (which is EXTENSIVE), but I used the free version for so long, I wanted to compensate him for his work.
Here’s the current list of streaming service loudness presets available. The current version of YLM 2 Pro is v2.5.10 from Nov 9, 2024.
The entirely useful base version is still free.
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I have that but didn’t know what to do with it.
The great thing about Ozone Elements is: you throw it on your mix, select a genre, let it do its magic, and the result is very pleasant indeed.
I guess that everybody that produces their own tracks (except for @howard :-)) does not want to spend too much time on the polishing.
You have an idea, you build the track, tweak it, torture your friends with alpha and beta versions … and then you send it to internet hell, cause your mind is already set on the next song.
At least this is how it works for me.
I think, with a little experience, this might change. But I get sick & tired of my own songs after having listened to 50 evolving versions.
In the end, I just want to get it out of my mind and do new stuff!
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If you haven’t, watch the video I posted all the way through. The Pro version is an amazing tool and 47 € is a fair price for what you get.
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But it ONLY measures and does not do anything automatically, right?
I’m really too lazy currently to interpret measurements and polish a mix manually.
When my skills are good enough and the tracks I produce have a quality that I’m not too ashamed of, I will reconsider.
But as it is now, I’m just a newbie amateur hobby tinkerer. At least I don’t do boring dingelidong 80s synth stuff with premade samples and loops, but it’s a long way to where I want to be…
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