FLSM 4.1 released

dermichl

@cokomairena said:
The problem I have with this method is that each consecutive overdub plays again, so i just extend the loops a lot and record.

Is there a way around that?

I didn‘t find any setting to deal with this. But I usually record one take and than drag it outside the loop region (works while playing back and record enabled) to give it another try... Not perfect but has some advantage to it.

cokomairena

You can also mute individual clips but draging is way fastee

alexforgemm

@ervin said:

@jwmmakerofmusic said:

@Telstar5 said:
It’s got an immediacy that nothing else has.

It definitely does! I've been quicker to churn out Lofi tracks in FLSM on my iPhone than in NS2 on my iPad, and I'm pretty swift in NS2 on my iPad! I have created a new beat in 5|4 time in under 20 minutes, and after lunch I will arrange it, mix it, and export it.

I still do my mastering in AUM when it comes to Lofi, and in fact I plan to live perform the whole EP in AUM much like I used to do with making live Ambient. But to be able to churn out piece after piece at lightning speed in FLSM on an iPhone SE 2 without much battery drainage or iPhone overheating is wonderful!

Genuine question: why would one want to churn out piece after piece at lightning speed?

Same reason a yellow belt in Judo might take a long time to learn enough basic positions to be able to grab someone light weight enough, slow, hesitant, and wearing a shirt with a big enough collar in the right place to trip them over or get them in an arm lock, while a black belt should be able to have almost anyone on the floor and pinned down in a few seconds.

With electronic music production I've spent so much time over the past 2 and a half decades lost down the sound design rabbit hole, or just dazzled and slightly hypnotised by the amazing sounds just in the factory presets. You can get lost in those places for a long time. Syd Barrett might be an example of one who never managed to find his way back out. Electronic sound production is psychedelic itself even without the drugs.

The huge importance of learning to be decisive and single pointed in order to actually finish things cannot be underestimated. And it's something we really should be getting better at as we grow and develop, not just as musicians and sound engineers, but also as people with a solid grounding on what matters and what doesn't. We should get faster at doing anything once we understand what it's doing, how it works, and where the controls are ...

e.g. I will probably never again in my life waste a second of my time tweaking an emulation of an old 'studio classic' EQ or compressor to get any kind of 'classic sound', or that kind of BS. I think most of that kind of thing is audio placebo and nobody anywhere will honestly genuinely know any different in the grand scheme of things. Coming to conclusions like that can take years of doing things like spending 5 minutes tweaking an EQ that wasn't turned on, or on the wrong track and muted, until you learn how attention/focus-dependent and imperfect hearing is, and mixing is more about capturing that attention, in a world of endless distraction. So the things that really matter have to be a lot more obvious. Often arrangement can be more important than EQ.

On top of that, a lot of club based genres can seem very formulaic or derivative in isolation, but now that we've gone far beyond the point of saturation of recorded music, we're now approaching the point of saturation of ubiquitous access to music technologies, and it's becoming more rule than exception for DJs to do more 'hybrid' sets with some form of live remixing, so others releasing tracks quickly is a bit more like creating a kind of 'bed' or starting point for others to build on.

Or put another way, the less time you spend finding and tweaking that one perfect pad sound that's the best you've ever heard on its own, then takes far to long to mix with everything else because a lot of what you liked about it ends up being masked by other sounds. With age and experience you can see it's better all round if you factor that in from the start and choose your sounds more based on the more obvious traits within the right frequency range for what it is because you've learned what role the other sounds are playing and how they will affect each other.

I'm sure I can come up with loads more examples of how to shave time of the overall process if you're really interested. lol ;-)

ervin

@alexforgemm said:
[...]

That's quite a response. A very interesting point of view, too; one I have not considered before. Thank you for taking the time to write it down. Much appreciated. 🙏