Well, I don't know much about production, but one album you might want to check out for the sound is "An Electric Storm" by White Noise, who were a kind of psychedelic electronica band from England in the late sixties/seventies. It's worth hearing because, as well as being a great record, it's entirely a studio production: they made it in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and they used film samples, sound effects, speed altering, and orgasm noises to give it a unique kind of sound. It's kinda hard to describe, but it fits under ambient-ish electronic music and you could probably make something like it on a computer.
Handily enough, it's also available to download free on a music blog. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the link here, but PM me if you're interested and I'll give you the link.
Yeah I'll definitely check this out, in fact it sounds like the exact kind of stuff I'd be interested in.
So I thought maybe a visual aid would help:
This is the most recent song I did - the whole program is like a modular synthesizer all laid out on the screen (as opposed to back in the 70's/80's when they looked like
this) So each box acts like an effects unit, unless it's at the end of a chain, then it's a sound generator. There's some more hardkor programs out there where a generator is literally like... the "Generate Tone" function in Audacity so all you have is the type of wave and a frequency "knob". Buzz is a little easier to handle, usually a generator is like a synthesizer, it already has a filter and stuff built in and there's a tracker view so you can put down notes. Also most of the synths seem to have at least 2 oscillators, so you can combine a sine and a saw wave or some stuff like that. The "Infector" box is really cool because it lets you set a wave type for the sub oscillator too, which can really drastically change how it sounds. But "effects" in Buzz can be anything from a delay to an equalizer/mixer/sound meters (HVision is a spectrum analyzer, I think) so it's cool how you can just add whatever sort of unit you need. For the most part they look pretty plain like a Windows pop-up but I dunno I think it's easier to look at that way
But anyway one cool part about getting to work with filters/effects directly is that once in a while I'll come across a sound that sounds just like a certain song. The Chemical Brothers use a lot of modular stuff so I end up making a few familiar sounds from their albums, like at one point I was using a flanger or something and I made almost the same sound at the beginning of their album "Surrender". A lot of sounds can be made multiple ways but there's always the chance that you might be doing the exact same thing they did to make that sound (aside from drugs lol), so it's always an exciting experience. One day I annoyed the hell out of my brother because he had some trance music playing and I'd identify when they did a filter slide or laid down a whole bunch of snares to do that sort of "buildup" sound ;)
Edit: Sorry if this is kind of blurring the line between Music and Music Creation :/
Gaming World Forums
Well-produced Albums