[Electronic] Polyphonics (.it)

[Combinebobnt]

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Or if you prefer soundcloud:
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Here's something recent I made with (of course) lots of polyphony.


I do have a side question for later stuff I'm going to make though, and that is: how do I make an overall song louder in OpenMPT while avoiding clipping, as this song starts to clip a lot in the latter half.

[ida]

I first checked it on SC and the first thing i thought was whoa, this sounds really clean! The instruments are simple but they sound effective.

I usually put my sample volume on 128 rather than 90, and compose and after that mix the song from there. I think the song is loud enough already but to help you minimize further clipping, the first four channels really interfer with the other channels in terms of loudness. They're really overpowering the rest around the end, yeah. That's because their volume is all the way up. Turning them down to about 40 helps a lot. For mixing i always put percussion as high as possible and instruments at least 52 or under. It makes the percussion stand out more which is good and avoids lots of loud sounds, and thus makes for a cleaner mix.

Also, it seems like we've both used exactly the same kick sample.

[arseniiv]

@Combinebobnt
If you use VST plugins, you can additionally assign some limiter to master. (There's a checkbox in 'Mix Settings' area under 'Plugins' in 'General' tab.) Sometimes it's the good thing, they say.

[Saga Musix]

Before using such blunt techniques as just killing dynamics by "making everything louder" with a limiter or compressor, you should always first check if your mix is OK - that is, if instruments are panned nicely (panning gives you room in the mix, as different frequencies will not fight for the same spot in the mix) and the levels between instruments are okay in general. I'd say your tune is already loud enough due to the samples it uses and doesn't require any further compression. Please don't be part of the Loudness War if it's not even necessary.

[arseniiv]

(Oh. I hope my post didn't sound as an ultimate answer, I didn't mean that. )

Btw, for some sound file formats there exist ReplayGain tags that many players now can understand and/or set. If only SoundCloud could have some way to do it too!

[Combinebobnt]

Thanks for the replies and yes I know about the loudness wars and compression stuff; seeing how most of you guys said it was already loud enough, I guess I don't have to worry at all. It was just that usually modules I make in openmpt don't seem to be as loud as other modules.

[Saga Musix]

Well, you always have to be careful about which things you compare - if you have any particular examples of two songs that you compared against each other, that would help with providing further hints.
There is one very basic thing when comparing modules that's very important: The number of channels. I have observed that often it seems easier to make a clean and loud mix in e.g. a 4-channel ProTracker MOD, simply because you don't have the opportunity to layer dozens of instruments that fight against each other and phase cancellation is less likely to happen, etc. This is a bit more difficult to handle in a multichannel module.
Comparing against modules with clipped samples is also a bad idea, even if they might appear louder.
Another random hint: Try to play with global volume to make loud parts of the module more quiet if you want to maintain a constant volume level. Watch the waveform of your module in an audio editor (loading it into a sample slot in OpenMPT is good enough for that) and see if you spot any quiet parts. If so, slowly fade down the volume on all other parts and then in return raise the sample / VSTi volume in the General Tab.