I'm Sure It's Nothing, But....

[Amberwolf]

Now has a name, "I'm Sure It's Nothing, But....", and is now on Bandcamp at

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/im-sure-its-nothing-but

 

Basic layout done;  any feedback would be useful.   No name yet; still waffling among several ideas (none of them feel quite right). 

Older version still here:  https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14942877

Meant to be a bit mysterious, sparse bits of instruments among the base bass / percussion.   

 

EDIT(s):  A number of significant edits made, mix changes, added parts and instruments, etc.   Most recent version number at the bottom, first five versions at sounclick link, all more recent versions at bandcamp link at top. 

2-13-25:  020825 000027h (first public version)

2-13-25:   020825 000039j

2-15-25:  020825 000044k

2-16-25:  020825 000048k

2-16-25:  020825 000054m

3-3-25: 020825 000058n

03-07-25: 020825 000001 100063p - cahnged from sonitus eq to lp64 eq to calm down the 35hz and lower by 24db.  (is only 6db at 35hz, rolloff starts at 50hz AFAICT on the scale (hard to tell on it's gui), presumably is down by 24db by the time it hits 0hz. 

 

Edited yesterday at 05:54 AM by Amberwolf

[Bajan Blue]

Some interesting sounds and synths in this - I like it

A change up of some kind could be good

Apart from that, Cool

Nigel

 

[Keith Wilby]

It's not my cup of tea but I can appreciate why others would like it and the effort that went into it. My only crit would be that the tambourine is too loud. I found it a tad irritating TBH. Otherwise a job well done.

[Amberwolf]

On 2/13/2025 at 3:58 AM, Bajan Blue said:

Some interesting sounds and synths in this - I like it

A change up of some kind could be good

Apart from that, Cool

Thanks--there's really only two "synths", the bassline sound and the arp'd one with the "melody" (such as it is) which is also used for the complex bassy parts using a similar overall pattern.   

The longer sustained parts are some long samples of a sitar and a flute, trimmed, stretched, squished, pitchshifted, etc., as needed to fit the stuff around them.

There's a bunch of vocal snippets, which include the "doob" sounds that accent some beats; i snipped these off some of the Divine Vocal Mantras.  Most of the others came out of Shymer, some I don't recall.  

 

Still wroking on the whole construction; haven't fitgured out the "change up" yet but there will be at least one.   

 

On 2/13/2025 at 7:59 AM, Keith Wilby said:

It's not my cup of tea but I can appreciate why others would like it and the effort that went into it. My only crit would be that the tambourine is too loud. I found it a tad irritating TBH. Otherwise a job well done.

I cut the tamb by about 6db for most of the song, more in some places.   is it any better?

(same link in the first post; lots of edits and some adds).

 

[Keith Wilby]

On 2/16/2025 at 3:59 AM, Amberwolf said:

I cut the tamb by about 6db for most of the song, more in some places.   is it any better?

Yes I think that's spot on now 👍

[treesha]

Interesting. I agree that a change of some kind would add to it. I am a definite lover of bass and deep low end, but the low end in this seems overpowering. I also wonder how it would sound on playback devices that don’t handle those low low lows, if they are missing it could sound a bit empty. I like how you use vocals in your music. It does sound mysterious indeed ha

[Amberwolf]

There's a new version up at the Bandcamp link in the first post, and now it has a title, "I'm Sure It's Nothing, But....".   

The old version is still at the Soundclick link there.

 

I udpated the snares to vary them more and better fit the accent spots, removed some of the clips here and there to let it breathe more, fixed some of the mix, turned the bassline down.  

 

On 2/17/2025 at 1:02 PM, treesha said:

Interesting. I agree that a change of some kind would add to it. I am a definite lover of bass and deep low end, but the low end in this seems overpowering.

I don't have a system that can reproduce really low lows, so I guess I can't hear that. 

I turned down the bassline by 9db; how does it sound now?

 

On 2/17/2025 at 1:02 PM, treesha said:

I also wonder how it would sound on playback devices that don’t handle those low low lows, if they are missing it could sound a bit empty.

That, I don't really worry about--I create stuff based on the sound that I hear.  If someone doesn't have a system to play it back, I can't really help that.  😊    If I had to create based on the lowest common denominator for people to hear everything that was in my music, I'd have to create it for a range of less than the old rotary dial telephone systems, since the speakers on many celphones today reproduce less than those, and that's the kind of device many people play stuff back on.    

 

So i just work with what I hear in the sounds, vaguely like a sculptor chiseling away the marble to find the shape within.

 

 

On 2/17/2025 at 1:02 PM, treesha said:

I like how you use vocals in your music. It does sound mysterious indeed ha

Thanks....I have wanted to use vocalizations and such for a very long time, but until this past half-year had no access to a way to include them, as I can never get anyone capable of making such sounds to work with me (well, I can't actually get *anyone* to work with me on anything, but that's another long set of stories).  I can't make them myself, I have completely the wrong voice for it even if I had sufficient control over it. 

But now there are a number of useful vocal sample libraries out there for free, or really really cheap, and I can use, adapt, or hack them to make some of the sounds I want.  Sometimes they virtually create the music (such as Less Like A Whisper), sometimes they just fit where I want a sound (such as in this one), sometimes they guide some of my choices, etc....and this is what all sounds do for me. 

I hear music in everything--I was taking apart an ancient Schwinn trike to build a different kind from, and the wrench hit the spokes, so I played the spokes for a while with a couple of wrenches just for fun.  Then I recorded each spoke into the celphone, and some other sounds like scraping the spokes and rim, hanging it from a skinny tree branch and whanging it like a gong, etc.   I'll use those in a future project I'm still collecting the sounds for.    

This is part of the bit I played the wheel, after a moment of listening to which spokes sounded more like "normal" notes relative to each other. 

 

On 2/17/2025 at 4:19 AM, Keith Wilby said:

Yes I think that's spot on now 👍

   

Edited March 4 by Amberwolf

[treesha]

Yeah I think the bass works better now.  Taking it down 9db was a lot ! It still sounds rich. Something like Izotope tonal balance control can show you the balance of the song in sections, like low, high, I think 4 sections set to what you are going for like rock or jazz or whatever. I dont trust my untreated environment very much, so check on that. It is true as you say that most people listen on devices that leave a lot to be desired. In my experience my bass is the first to be missing if I listen on my phone. So I try to add some higher frequencies in the bass part so something of the bassline can be heard, definitely not felt.  Hasnt arizona been crazy, its like there was no winter but for a day here or there, like today. 

[Amberwolf]

Sorry the below got a lot longer than i meant it to, i tried trimming it back down but.... 

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

Yeah I think the bass works better now.  Taking it down 9db was a lot !

Down 9dB is supposed to be "audibly half" of what it sounds like at 0dB, from what I have read (6dB is what I learned a long time ago but that only shows up in some searches when I checked while trying this), and since you'd said it was overpowering, I figured cutting it by half should be better. 

I can hear a difference myself, actually liked it better the way it was, but if it's overpowering for listeners then they probably won't want to listen, so I changed it.   If I could hear the problem I would just fix just the problem.   

I tried just using an EQ (actually a stack of the Sonitus EQ) to shelve the lows at various cutoff frequencies up to about 200hz, at -18db for each of the six units inside each EQ, which should have been enough to cut those frequencies totally out and make a hole in the earth deep enough to hold a billion more, but couldn't see or hear any difference in the output, using Voxengo SPAN (the only spectrum analyzer I can use inside SONAR) on either the bass tracks or on the master bus. 

It's pretty frustrating since I inow this should work, but it doesn't appear to do anything.  I know hte eq's work because they do everyting I need them to othe rhtan this.  😕 

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

It still sounds rich. Something like Izotope tonal balance control

Looks like that's a purchase-only item, so out of my zero dollar budget.   also...see****** at tje end of this post

This is all a (necessary for sanity) hobby for me, so any money spent on it has to come out of things like my household / food budget.  I'll never make money off the music so it won't pay for anything i buy for it, so those purchases are few and very far between.  (most stuff I've bought has been thrift store hardware purchases as I run across things I could never afford to buy new but could use for things I can't do easily or at all with thigns I lready have; some of these have been mistakes but at least they were very cheap ones 😆  

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

can show you the balance of the song in sections, like low, high, I think 4 sections set to what you are going for like rock or jazz or whatever.

It wouldn't help if it just has presets like that, since most of my music doesn't fit in categories like that.  It would need a preset for every different piece I make that adapts itself to that piece.  

I can see stuff fine in spectral analyzers, and can use EQs to fix things, but there are some of them that I can't seem to fix like bass problems, and i can't understand how it doesn't work since it should just be a matter of setting the eq to enough db down in the right frequency band to take out or reduce those frequencies as I'm telling it to...but it doesn't seem to work in cases like this one, or Less Like A Whisper, etc.   and I can't see why not. 

Doesn';t seem like I should need a special tool to see and take out stuff, it should jsut work with these two tools. 

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

I dont trust my untreated environment very much, so check on that.

I don't understand what you mean?  I can't check your environment without coming there to you, and I wouldn't know what to look for?

 

If you mean *my* environment, it doesn't really matter since my sound system has no (usable) sub (I have some thing from an old computer-speaker system but it's pretty crappy) and can't reproduce those really low lows. 

 

What I use most of the time is an old Vizio soundbar because it's "average' and so when I compose and mix on it then what I make should play back on "most" people's sound systems; it's the "best" compromise I could make.   I'd rather use my even older Acoustic Research Powered Partners but whenever I make stuff using htose (which are crisper and clearer than the vizio by quite a bit) it sounds all wrong when I play it back on other people's average systems, (like this vizio sb).   So I don't use them much anymore, as my big compromise  to help people hear more of what I make by limiting myself to what comes out of the vizio instead.  I'd rather use the ARs and hear what I really want to....but then people like it even less.

I have a sub for *a* vizio soundbar but it's not for *this* one and doesn't have any input jacks, just the wireless connection that only pairs with the sb it was designed for, which I don't have.   I have looked up the little info available on the chips inside but haven't found anything that would let me wire up an input jack to it.   

If I did have a working sub I'd be making "music" that includes even more musical bits that only exist down there.....

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

It is true as you say that most people listen on devices that leave a lot to be desired. In my experience my bass is the first to be missing if I listen on my phone. So I try to add some higher frequencies in the bass part so something of the bassline can be heard, definitely not felt. 

Yeah i know a lot of people compromise what they make to deal with people's inadequate playback devices   but since i work by sound, and it's the actual sound that is what my music is, not the notes or whatever, then I can't add in stuff that shouldn't be there just to let them hear it...then they aren't hearing my music, they're hearing...whatever it is that was stuck in there.

To me, it's like having a painting that happens to have a color pallette that is dark, intending to convey a certain look, and then having people with dim lights not being able to see the detail in it...i can't repaint it brighter to help them, it would ruin what it is. 

I relaly don't make "music" as most peple think of it; I make sound sculptures that resemble music in some ways. 😆  

 

 

 

27 minutes ago, treesha said:

Hasnt arizona been crazy, its like there was no winter but for a day here or there, like today. 

Yeah, I miss winter....seems like it's been a few years since we've really had one.  But I guess that's expected the waythings are going. 

 

****** Also, I can't install new things for my old SONAR due to some problem with the VST adapter resetting and losing existing plugins / settings, and causing my existing projects to not work because they no longer see stuff that is still there just like it's always been.   Long story short it's not fixable by any means I have available, as I can't spend more months to manually fix each thing that breaks, so I leave it alone and just use what I have.    

If I could figure out the system which teh VST adapter uses to create a VST ID for a plugin, then I could just manually create registry entries for each new plugin in the right sections, but I have never been able to find any information about this anywhere, in all my years of looking.  

 

Someday I may have time to finish setting up a "new" system and get everything all working in that so I can add new things there, but it isn't going to be soon. 

 

For full mixes I can take them into Audacity which can use some VSTs (most of them crash it or are silent) but this doesn't help me compose, just fix things afterward, and it's difficult to use since most of it's tools work totally different than they should, are very unintuitive, etc. It's even pickier than SONAR for where to click on things and I often have such trouble doing that it's very slow and frustrating work, and no fun.  I still use it for audio editing for samples and such to use within SONAR for things that I can't directly do in SONAR (really just fixing sample-level glitches and the like).     I also use it soemtiems for jsut dropping a bunch of new audio loops or whatever into to hear how they sound togehter or separately when I either already have something going in SONAR or when I don't want to fire that up and make a project and all that stuff, just listen to the raw audio and pick and choose bits for something I will then use in SONAR  (this is how I started out the A Peek Over The Wall project, for instance). 

 

[treesha]

Yeah using the eq should have done something. And problems with vsts, no fun. Im working on a video project that wont let me add anything new, these things can be amazing or amazingly frustrating !

[Amberwolf]

4 hours ago, treesha said:

Yeah using the eq should have done something.

I got frustrated with it enough that I haven't yet gone back with other EQs to see if they fix it where Sonitus doesn't. If that works, then I'll be left wondering *why* because it doesn't make sense....

But if it doesn't work, it still won't make sense, so... be on the lookout for brainsplatter from the 'splosion.  

 

4 hours ago, treesha said:

And problems with vsts, no fun. Im working on a video project that wont let me add anything new, these things can be amazing or amazingly frustrating !

Which program? 

 

Worth a shot though I can't say for sure I'll be able to help, as I haven't used anything that actually works since...Adobe Premiere back on Windows NT4 or 2000 (don't recall which) on a friend's computer trying to composite some of my Lightwave3D animations into a live video.  (ended up putting the video into LW3D on a "plate" and doing the animation around it, worked way better).  

 

Most recent one I tried was OpenShot, but I couldn't even get it to use the right audio output (seemed to choose one at random, didn't use the system default or the first one in the list, and never got a useful reply from the developers).  All I wanted to do with it was take a single image and a single audio file, and make a video of that so I could upload my music to Youtube.  But it would end up with no sound or garbled sound most of the time when rendering it, even though I know the audio was perfectly fine, and nothing would be changed in any setting or project between the renders that worked and the ones that didn't...but since it almost never picked an audio output I was actually using for the "preview" / playback bus, I could not hear what it "thought" it was doing.  Eventually gave up on it and removed it, and haven't had the heart to try any others so gave up on the whole YT project. 

I don't recall the names of any of the others (all either free or open source) I tried--most of them I couldn't even install either becuase they didn't have offline installers and wanted to install everything "live" off the web (not allowed on my machine) or they had other installer issues (trying to install unrelated stuff, or altering other things on my machine it doesn't need to, etc).  One installed but it wouldn't take wav files for sound (only had lossy compressed format options), and wouldn't take an image to make the video from, only video files, which since that's what I needed it to do (make video from image) it was totally pointless. 

 

[treesha]

Good luck with the next Eq-ing. My problem is corel video studio. Ive read its crashy. I just downloaded davinci free and watching videos to learn it. I used the Microsoft one in photos to do the single image with a song thing you mention. 

[Amberwolf]

On 3/6/2025 at 8:13 AM, treesha said:

Good luck with the next Eq-ing.

Thanks!   I swapped out the sonitus eq for lp64 eq to calm down the 35hz and lower by 24db.  (is only 6db at 35hz, rolloff starts at 50hz AFAICT on the scale (hard to tell on it's gui), presumably is down by 24db by the time it hits 0hz.    It definitely makes a huge difference in the VSPAN display down there, and I can tell there is some difference in the feel, even though my system can't reproduce all that stuf down there.

 

I tried a bunch of things with the sonitus eq after this to match it up to the LP64, but nothing I can do with it makes it cut out the low end unless I start way up in the 100hz+ range, which negatively affects everything.      

 

So....how does it sound now?   Too much low end cut out? Not enough?  

 

 

On 3/6/2025 at 8:13 AM, treesha said:

My problem is corel video studio. Ive read its crashy. I just downloaded davinci free and watching videos to learn it.

I haven't used CVS...but a quick google on versions looks like it's another of their acquire-and-rename products (like the ex-JASC Paintshoppro v5 that I use that was bought out by corel and transformed into whatever it might be nowadays).  Used to be Ulead Videostudio, which I did use back in the 90s or maybe early 00s?  But I don't recall much about it.   

 

On 3/6/2025 at 8:13 AM, treesha said:

I used the Microsoft one in photos to do the single image with a song thing you mention. 

Thanks for the idea.  Must be a feature of newer versions than I have on my old Win10 system.   I'll have to look at the newer version taht's on one of the HP server racks I have awaiting conversion to a new DAW and see if they can do it.