Recognizing Live in a song

[shuutobi]

I think beat repeat is the most noticeable effect, corpus maybe second?

[Muzik 4 Machines]

erosion too (and the soft setting of the bit crusher)

[nathannn]

i dont know how you people spot these presets, it seems like you would have to be using the same preset in your song in order for you to know the preset so well in the first place.
and what songs and what presets are you hearing in commercial music?
im at the point i no longer care if i use presets or other people use presets. i dont have the time to create sound after sound from scratch but i do have the time to tweak them. the only thing i wont use presets for is guitar mainly because they never sound like what i want, but with synths there are so many presets that sound just like what im going after that its a waste not to use them.

[Tarekith]

You know what I hear a TON of... When people time stretch/warp with the "beats" mode, but they use it over vocals, melodies, instruments etc, and it sounds terrible!!!

+1

[ze2be]

A vinyl techno DJ told me recently he could hear the "ableton sound" on some records, and gave the impression he didnt like that. I asked him if he ever had used Live. He hadnt, so I gave him a little lecture from a users perspective. I think a lot of his vinyl music is actually made on Live, but the once he can hear it might be written somewhere in an artist intervju or something. Anyway, I think the sound he talks about is bad warping and certain internal effects. If you dont want that sound, simply avoid using those. An ableton warp pitch transition sounds bad to me, and so I dont do it. And I dont use beat repeat on the master. I use a lot of third party plugs, and I dont think anyone can hear that im using Live, if I dont want them to.

[phonographiq]

I always feel so excited when this happens. Though I notice Reason presets a lot more, probably because I've been using it a lot longer. It's that feeling you get when you recognize a sample, nah mean?

[bartend7]

Whenever I listen to some random music on radio or whatever and suddenly recognize:
-its made with live
-untweaked presets (synths, drum machines, ect)
-straight out of the box effects

...I get a little dissapointed

Is this a normal reaction, or would that be "cool, he using beatrepeater.." ??

you really hear it on the radio so much you decided to post about it? can you name 3 songs on the radio at the moment that backs up this claim? challenged!

[ze2be]

Whenever I listen to some random music on radio or whatever and suddenly recognize:
-its made with live
-untweaked presets (synths, drum machines, ect)
-straight out of the box effects

...I get a little dissapointed

Is this a normal reaction, or would that be "cool, he using beatrepeater.." ??

you really hear it on the radio so much you decided to post about it? can you name 3 songs on the radio at the moment that backs up this claim? challenged!

Yeah, let me try: anything from skrillex?

[Muzik 4 Machines]

rape me i like it
im not the only whore in the world?
almost everything that plays on the canadian NRJ actually

[trevox]

A lot of people that make electronic music nowadays are lazy when it comes to sound design. Some say they don't have time, but I woud answer that you are better off spending more time doing something properly than doing a lot very quickly. If you do not spend the time and use presets all the time, your music will more than likely sound fairly generic. If that is what you are after that is fine by me, but I generally don't listen to it for the simple reason that in my view I have heard it before. If you do spend the time properly learning the tools you use (both hardware and software), you will begin to develop your own sound which is bound to be more unique and interesting - less generic if you like. And you will probably find that after you do properly learn how to use the tools, that creating your own sounds becomes quicker - or you can re-use some of the sounds you created before. There is also the element that you will never come across a "happy mistake" and find a sound that you were not even looking for, which are more often than not those sounds that separate you from the rest. Sometimes I spend days just creating sounds, so when I go to write some music, I have a load of interesting sounds to choose from and I have learned to enjoy the process. I suppose it boils down to people that like the process of making sounds vs people who don't want that hassle and personally, I think this makes a big difference.

[nathannn]

the only time i would worry about presets is if (like many of you) i was making purely electronic music. if i was making just electronic music i would stick to recording my own samples and just a few synths and totally stay away from synths like omnisphere.
i have made many patches myself but they do take time, they take almost as much time to make as a song because im just experimenting. when it comes to classic sounds i really wont mess around with expermenting because i know what i want and i know there is a preset that sounds like what i want.
the sound i am thinking of the most is the slightly detuned saw pad or, the saw pad with slight lfo on one of the oscillators. these two examples are just pointless for me to recreate all the damn time. i just load the sound up (because it has been done to death and it still sounds good) and i might adjust the filter cut off or add reverb/chorus.

anyways im really going off topic now so back to the topic and my first thought/ question. How do you people know you are hearing a preset? is it because you used the same preset? how else would you know if some used the damn thing unless you did it yourself.
can you really know every preset from a synth by just fucking with the patch bank? you have to take at least a little time with the preset in order for you to know where it came from. basically what im saying is people who say "im sick of hearing people use presets " are full of shit. if you where such a fucking purist you would have never scrolled through the patch libary. you would delete every preset and start from scratch every time!
but guess what you finger pointing pricks NO ONE DOES THAT! no one even learns how to program a synth with out pissing around with the presets! most people dont even buy a synth with out messing with the presets!

[nathannn]

and there is no way anyone is recognizing live in a song! you may recognize time stretching but you can not hear live. live does not make a sound on its own.
you fucking noobs. im sorry i had to pull the old noob thing out but seriously you guys sound like "i think i know it all" noobs!

[nathannn]

im sorry guys, i haven't had much sun lately and im really bitchy.

[trevox]

Mmmm, I presume that was directed at me? Firstly my post specifically said people who make "electronic" music. Anyway, I am certainly no "noob" (people really need to fuck off calling other people that - it's childish and pointless) - I have been writing, producing and recording electronic music for close to 20 years. You will note in my post that I don't really care if people use presets - at all. That is entirely up to them. I even went on to say that you could create your own "presets" once and reuse them - just like your example. That way they are not identical to the "out of the box" presets, so should still be a little unique to you. But if you make a track full of presets and a load of other people do the same, it is going to become a generic sound - that is all I was saying. So over time you WILL begin to know what synth or even DAW (if you use the built in instruments) played what etc which even partially ends up defining the music. And I stick by my opinion that people who only use presets are a bit lazy and maybe do not want to go to the trouble of learning synthesis/sound design which is a shame. Still, each one to their own and all that.

And as for your "how do you know if it's a preset".... Call me a purist if you like, but I do in fact end up deleting pretty much every preset. Or should I say overwrite them over time. I may dick around with them for a while at first, but that is about it. I never once said I did not do that. I am talking about when I go to write some music, I do not go to the out of the box presets. Presets are generally designed to be quite generic and any weirder ones are quite identifiable. Listen back to late 80's early 90's techno and you will hear an Oberheim matrix 1000 a million miles away because they are all presets with little option for even modulating parameters (you can use sysex to create sounds, but that came a bit later). I bought one 5 or 6 years ago and heard many sounds I instantly knew from a multitude of tracks. But I started creating my own sounds using an editor I found as in no way is the full potential of that wonderful machine realised in the presets. So if I didn't do that, I would not use it nearly as much as I do.

Anyway, seems like you are having a bad day, but you completely misunderstood what I was saying. I actually agree with most sentiments you were portraying - though I must say I don't care much for the way you have done it.

[ze2be]

im sorry guys, i haven't had much sun lately and im really bitchy.

its ok, since you are noober then me and all