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Hey Puniho

I agree that some dares have seen more discussion.
But I think often the dares where the best discussions take place are those where there are common elements: For example, everyone is using the same set of 10 samples.
Here most people were using different software, so there are less common elements to discuss as a group.
Most of the discussions centered around techinca difficulties that some people experienced. Hopefully those discussions help them to find ways to resolve.
This dare was actually quite 'difficult' - You all had to restrict yourselves to non-natural, non-accoustic sounds (perhaps against some people's preferred way of working), you had to work as groups (first time we did this) and this is a very busy time of the year for most people.
I think it went rather well
The most encouraging aspect for me is that pretty much everyone tried their hand at doing some synthesis - I had left the easy option there of allowing the use of synth sounds from Freesound, but no one did exclusively that. I thought that was great!

On the other hand, and to your point...
Often, the best way to find out about something is to... ASK!
If you thin the discussion about synthesis could have been taken further, take the first step!
You can tell us what you did (not necessarily about everything you did), but what was the synthesis aspect of your work (or your partner's) that really made you go "Ahhh!".
And we are all friends here. IF there is a sound or section of someone's work that made you go "Ahhh!" - ask them! HOw did you do it? What sound, what synth, what effects?
Those discussions can be public in the forums or taken privately to PM.
The point with every dare is to have fun, share and learn !

Thanks for all the great comments guys!
I enjoyed this Dare and was able to get it together with Bliss just in time.
I've been wildly busy doing tutorials and demos and by the end of the day, I'm beat!
It becomes difficult to be creative after being wrapped up in time consuming work.
But, it came together nicely in the end.

Up to this point, I haven't gone into too much detail as to how I put my half of the piece together.
So, here goes!

My general method when starting a dare is obvious, but essential.
I READ the dare, then read it again.
I think over the main points and rules of the dare then try to imagine a story or scene to go along with it.

For instance, with the Collab Dare, Bliss sent me his track (which turned out perfect for the intro), and it reinforced this idea in my mind of a robot uprising.
Powerful, moving, and metallic, were words that hit me upon listening to his track.
It's a good idea to have a theme in mind, this makes finding sounds easier and the whole project moves more fluidly.

While hunting for samples, I sometimes try to find the LEAST downloaded files.
There's gold in the most unexpected places.
I NEVER download MP3's (unless as a ringtone ), they just sound bad.

Another tip for finding samples:
If you find something you like, check to see if it belongs to a sample pack;
when sounds are grouped together by the author, they often have a unifying theme or sound.
For instance, if you download an acoustic kick drum in a room, you'll want to get the rest of the drum kit IN THAT ROOM!
That way, all the samples have the cohesiveness and sound of a natural drum kit.
Maybe this is obvious, but it's worth going over.

Instead of looking for samples of "Robot Uprising", I knew I'd have to create a scene or feeling.
This was achieved by stretching and mangling samples of race cars, kick drums, and voices (i.e. Attention Please!).
I used Reason's sampling and MIDI capabilities, but I don't want to get hung up on programs.
You can achieve similar results with any DAW.

We were running short on time, so I ended up putting my piece together in basically two nights,
then started having fun inserting Bliss' piece over mine in certain places.
If you listen close, or at all, the end of the song is HUGE!
I took a big part of his song and placed it right over my piece and filtered out some of the lows and highs, so as not to collide with my part.
We agreed on a key and tempo early on, so it fit beautifully in place!
It was truly meant to be.
We had good communication toward the end of the deadline and turned it out in time.
Stressful at times, but all in all, a lot of fun.

I know this is long, but I thought I'd share some insights into my process and see if anyone is interested.
If you're not too shy, open up a bit and share some insider secrets!

I could go on and on, but I won't.

- Jordan

Mojomills,

Thank you for sharing.
You are absolutely right: the method is at least as important as the technique!
And, of course there is the creative aspect to add to it all - i find that working as part of a collab increases my creativity. When I start to get stuck, my partners have always provided the necessary help and inspiration by means of their contributions to the piece.

If you read through the descriptions in the last 7 or 8 samples in my collab-1 pack, you will find how some of the sounds came to be: they were inspired by the piece itself and previous sounds created by Snapper4298.
The first sounds on the pack were sounds created specifically to replace samples Snapper4298 had used in an initial draft.

On another aspect mojomills is also 100% correct: read the dare a couple of times before starting to work.
Think about for a while. Allow the ideas to grow and develop a bit before starting to work.

Another thing i find absolutely inspiring are the sounds themselves!
Once you have a concept, search for freesound samples. Listen to some of the sounds. I quickly find myself thinking: "What would go well with this?"

@AlienXXX:

Well said.
It is the sounds themselves that inspire us to keep making noise .

Inspiration is something that can be learned.
Many musicians and creative people in general, will say they can't 'get into it' or they hit 'writers block'.
I've been there, of course, but I try to keep that mentality from bringing me down.
Most of my inspiration comes from discipline.
The rest comes from playing!

That's why I love these Dares.
I don't just do them for fun, they present a good way for me to meet deadlines.
There are self-imposed expectations, but the community is here to keep me motivated.

These dares are not unlike being commissioned for a piece:
There are stipulations, expectations, and relationships that all come together much like the creation and execution of a Dare.
So, I see this place as a way to stretch my boundaries and try to go beyond what I think is expected of myself.
It only gets better.

Puniho wrote:
Well, I found it disappointing that the theme of this dare, synthasise, was largely ignored. It,s such a huge subject with so much potential, and yet very little discussion or exchange of creative ideas took place. I enjoyed listening to the tracks, but, for the most part, I heard very little in the way of creative synthesis. Mostly it was just the usual use of samples and at best tweaked presets.

Sorry to have dissapointed you Puniho....
Cajo and me did the best we could, we never did something like this before.
I can asure you we didnt use any samples, and synthesised the hell out of everything.
What exactly do you mean with "creative synthesis"?

Talking about dissapointing, I just read the description on your piece on soundcloud...........
You used presets yourself!!!! And you come here and say this?
Are you having a bad day? You should be ashamed..........

I totaly agree with EscortMarius
(now please don't get mad, take it easy mate).
I had troubles but this dare was very interesting, and to me useful. More, I worked with a perfect unknown distant guy, which resulted so patient and enthusiastic - hearth warming experience, more than every technical trick.

May be that we are at different skill & knowledge levels:
I suppose that, for an expert, talking about latency with midi is boring.
To listen to your works I often feel ignorant about audio & sound techniques, and about music too - but here anything goes, hobbists like me are welcomed, a good place to play.
From my point of view there are few words here about music composition. in the discussion forum I shared my thoughts about notes and chords in our collaborative work, and no one talked back: well, no problem, it's a complex matter, and I liked very much the other two entries even if I don't know a bit about the musical construction you followed. And I find very interesting your talking about Buzz even if I will never use it. knowledge, informations, so precious.

If I compare Freesound to a socialnetwork I could say we are too well accustomed, here one has a problem and many voices spring out to help, many active reactions to almost all inputs. In Your Work made with Fs forum there are some real gems... without echo: like that poet which sent verses in a folder without destination address and drop it in the mailbox. Social can be stressing indeed - let's enjoy the light aspects.
this is a warm human environment. indeed.
pardon for my poor english.
have a nice Xmas you all gentle Freesounders

escortmarius wrote:
Talking about dissapointing, I just read the description on your piece on soundcloud...........
You used presets yourself!!!! And you come here and say this?
Are you having a bad day? You should be ashamed..........

Now, as i said: "we are all friends here". Sometimes we disagree, but we are always polite. Right?
And i think you missunderstood. I see no reason to give Puniho any hard time here.

Please make peace with Puniho.

@puniho
Speaking of comments and discussion on synthesis.
The subject is very vast, the dare open-ended, different techniques and software used by all.
I am considering some mini-dare challenges (continuum style). Which would be focused on a specific synthesis challenge. Users would describe how the sound was created, others could comment on the sounds themselves and ask questions.

I think this would be useful, even for students who use Freesound.

Well firstly, let me say its still Xmas day here in the sweltering sun of a New Zealand summer and I've had a few beers... I may have had a drink too many the previous time I posted my grumpy comments as well and I'm sorry if tey offended anyone. They weren't intended to.

@Escortmarius - I didnt feel ashamed ,but as soon as I'd posted that comment I thought that your piece was probably an exception and I specifically went and had another listen. Also lstened and commented on one of your other tracks. Like I say, I enjoyed all the tracks, it was more a disappointement that the theme of synthisis was kind of only tokenly followed and represented - but, this is just my feeling, and I guess because I have been particularly interested in programming and learning about synths and synthesis in general for a while now. I started this interest about 12 or so years ago when I got a Korg Triton Workstation and realized you could program your own synth sounds! Since then I've been using Reason and spent countless hours programing Subtractor, Maelstrom, THor and most recently Predator synths. SO all of the sounds I used were ones that I had painstakingly built from the basic waveforms. Apart from the kicks and snares, like I say in my description, which I used as I was already over the timelimit. So I literally just used the first ones that popped up in a Kong preset.

THe way that Jeffcarter and I worked for our piece was that we initially exchanged a few PMs and mutually agreed to do a piece in dminor at 90bpm. We each did a small 30 bar idea. I had a synth sound I'd made on the Predator and I used a rythmic gate and a hass effect and played the first thing that came up in dminor. I had another nice sound I wanted to use that I'd prgramed on two THors using phase modulation, which had a bell like organ sound, and I played a bass line and a little melody over the gated synth. THen again using one of my Predator sounds I was keen to try out - this time using the self oscilation feature of the filters - I got a really nice bell like sound. I made an arp for it and played that over my little tune to spice it up. Then we swapped our parts. That ws when the fun started! JeffCarter had made an ambient piece and I had a lovely pad sound I made in the Maelstrom - which, for those unfamiliar with it is a wonderfull synth that uses graintables - little microsamples that can be looped etc. It's a great synth for making lush and atmospheric pads! THe Maelstrom pad seemed to compliment Jeffs ambient soundscape as though made for it. But I had a problem trying to play a melody in Dminor adn I eventually figured that it was in gminor. This is why the piece modulates in key so much ). By then Jeffcarter had finished working on his bit and sent it back to me in yet another key... lol So that was partly why it took me so long to piece my bits into it, but that was the challenge and fun of working in a collaboration! I used Jeffs ambient piece to open it and looped various parts of it with my additions and my more rythmic pieces in the middle and then the last part is Jeff's agian with a bit of my tinkering and noodling to tie it in with the middle. THat was the general idea anyway. I also had an interesting effect I'd made in another thor using white noise that sounded like a birds flapping wings and that became a linking element throughtout.

Now that the Dare is closed, and this won't help any Darer for this one... (yes I'm evil! )

Should the need for non-sampled/non-preset percussions arise again (Dare clauses, avoiding overused e-drums...) you might take a look at model synthesis VSTi's like those in the "Models" section of http://www.xoxos.net/vst/vst.html
Interesting things IMHO, and not just about percussions.

Merry holidays to all!

Puniho wrote:
Well, I found it disappointing that the theme of this dare, synthasise, was largely ignored. It,s such a huge subject with so much potential, and yet very little discussion or exchange of creative ideas took place. I enjoyed listening to the tracks, but, for the most part, I heard very little in the way of creative synthesis. Mostly it was just the usual use of samples and at best tweaked presets.

The sounds I programmed used in the intro of our entry are entirely created out of empty presets. Ofcourse I could have programmed all the sounds, but AlienXXX did not discourage us to resynthesize existing material available on freesound.

Next to this, creating GOOD SOUNDING synthesizer patches is a very lengthy process. As its not only programming the software synthesizers (or preferably analog ones), but also the preamping process, tubes process, EQ process and all that, because software based synthesizers often sound very sterile). I prefered to blend existing synthesizer sounds from freesound so overall the mix would sound better, while still be able to deliver something before the deadline.

Some technical information.

1. Used Albino for the noise drums, it has a very nice brown to pink noise slider. I had automated some LFO's in reaper using splined envelopes, which rounds of the sound. The envelopes for this are generated using Reaper script (or REA script) by generating a sine with a certain frequency and amplitude.

2. Used Bitspeek to synthesize vocals. On top of that loaded the sample into IL-Harmor, to do some Audio Resynthesis.

3. The impact kick drum explosion, is described, its an older sound but it completely synthesized, the source was a 440Hz sine wave generated in Adobe audition.

4. The high percusion tones were made in U-HE DIVA, one of the best analog sounding software synths currently out there. Done with FM cross modulation.

I have used Additive, FM, LFO's, Pitch, Splines, Audio Resynthesis techniques. All in all, I think it was a good practice to do this dare in regards to synthesis and composition.

Sorry to hear you are dissapointed. I could have done something completely freaky, and go down Japanes 80's synthpop such as Logic System (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9mgCUSAfwU). But I did want to create something that was more approachable from a collab point of view and sounded more organic.

AlienXXX wrote:

Now, as i said: "we are all friends here". Sometimes we disagree, but we are always polite. Right?
And i think you missunderstood. I see no reason to give Puniho any hard time here.

Please make peace with Puniho.

<\blockquote>

I am not trying to make war with Puniho, and consider him one off the "nestors" of the dares.
Maybe I was a little hars, but that was not how it was intended.
I have done my very best making every sound from zero point with this dare.
I really learned a lot, I never had done this before......
In some way I totally agree with Puniho, it was dissapointing to see other people used samples that were on freesound, but the rules of the dare are very clear.....
Thats also why I pointed back to Puniho, he used presets, and thats not following the rules.

I had a lot off fun with this dare, together with my new mate Cajo!
Like you say, we are all friends here, and thats also why I said to Puniho what I said, only to a friend you can be honest and open..............
Anyway, if someone wants to fight it out?? SEE YOU ON THE NEXT DARE!!!!!!

And (litlle weird now) Merry Christmas everybody!!!!

thanks Puniho for your interesting report.
lots of useful infos here, all new to me, like great Logic System

Thanks everyone.
From what I can see the theme did have some challenges but everyone enjoyed it.

I am working on my "festive Season" dare piece at the moment.
But I have given some thought to the whole synthesis theme and discussions. There are a few things that I am planning to do... You will see them pop up in the comming days
Hopefully these will also appeal to people outside our small circle of Daring Freesounders...

I'll have to admit that I know little ... no... I know nothing about synthesizing sounds from scratch. So I took the easy way out for this particular dare. I took a pre-existing synth sound and loaded a portion of it into Abelton's Sampler instrument and took off off from there.

My partner, Puniho, created his own sounds. And that's why you'll hear so much of his work in our piece. I was content to let my own parts be the background for his work. Copyc4t's description on Soundcloud ("...it sounds like a Puniho particle travelling through a thatjeffcarter field") is incredibly apt. Puniho's sounds were fun to play with.

I am much impressed by Mojomills and Bliss' work. Whoa!