what other music production forums do you use?

[buonacc]

... The noise to signal ratio is higher on GS (Gearslutz) than almost every other audio forum, excepting the audiophile type places of course.

this comment got me thinking...

i've been doing this for about 20 years now (bought my first synth, an SH-101, in September of '97), and overall i can't think of any better music production forum than Gearslutz. sure, there's a lot of crap that you need to filter out and it's not the best place for everything (can't think of any better place to learn the fine art of sidechained reverb/sub-bass than Subsekt), but i've never found anything else that compares for so many things. ...and i've seen just about every one of them, as far as i'm aware. started out on "The Gas Station" at Sonic State and the "drummachine.com" forum (anyone remember those?), then spent a number of years on the "Harmony Central" forum. i used to read "Analog Haven" quite a bit, but don't remember ever really getting involved due to the bulletin board feel of it. the "MPC Forums" (Akai MPC, obviously, and hip-hop in general) and "electro-music.com" (Nord Modular) were great for their specific focuses, but not much use for anything else. a bit late to the party, i finally found my way to Gearslutz in 2009 when the HC forum killed itself. other than that, pretty much every other forum seems like it's full of beginners and/or rather "dead" compared to GS. nowhere else that really kept me going back, never felt like i was able to learn or talk about certain things like i can at GS.

wondering what other forums are out there that anyone feels are worthwhile. ??

other forums that i visit (some more often than others):

- 'Muffwiggler' (mainly the 'Artist' and 'Off-Topic' sections actually)
- 'KVR' (great for software/VST talk, not much else)
- 'WATMM' (i usually just check the 'Autechre' and 'Expert Knob Twiddlers' sections, but the whole forum is pretty much a frustrating waste of time. horrible, like watching British humour)
- 'chipmusic.org' (and '8-bit Collective' before that. Commodore 64, GameBoy, and NES music is/was an interest of mine)
- 'Native Instruments' and 'Ableton' forums (self-explanitory)
- a few others that aren't really worth mentioning

this place is cool, it was refreshing to see the blunt humor at first ("cunt" is one of my favorite words - it's hard to find anyone that appreciates it as much as you do here), but rarely feel that the conversations really go anywhere. i'd love to contribute more, but spend most of my time arguing with jack-offs at GS. i've come to enjoy that almost as much as music production itself, it's one of those things that gives me reason to get out of bed in the morning.

[Alume]

Ive been on the elektron forums for a while now, but im fed up with all the nagging and spec driven discussion(obviously its a music technforum, i know). Its fun though, i like the fact that its heavily modded. Its clean and functional

Been around muff lately, but its a bit large to take in a once. Thoough seem to be a lot of like minded chaps, not a lot of complaining and sensoble answers/questions.

Use to be a heavy user of a dutch drug forum too.

[Alume]

Oh yeah ans the dutch synthforum!

Awesome for second hand deals in the neighbourhood

[Lost to the Void]

I find specific forums better than generic. I don't use many. There is a vinyl cutters forum I use for very specific technical enquiries.

[Plyphon]

I've found over the years that a lot of big forums (GS, KVR) have a looooaaaad of people that adopt that "internet circlejerk circle of knowledge" type of thinking -

In that, they just blindly repeat what everyone else has said before them, regardless of if its true, effective, or even the question asked.

GS in itself has become more about synth vanity and directionless discussion over synth releases rather than anything about making music. People just talk about hardware completely out of the context of making music. They talk about why X is better than Y, but not how X fits into a music context. It's all just synth top trumps.

I do wish the "electronic music production" forum there was actually about production, and not just synths and begging for Akai to make another hardware sampler.

There used to be good content there a while back.

Here is the closest I've found to people with good technical knowledge but who still have the creation of music as the goal. I don't even listen to or collect techno much, but the knowledge level here is generally quite high.

I occasionally use reddit/ableton for quick DAW related questions as there is a large number of users for quicker feedback there.

[buonacc]

Ive been on the elektron forums for a while now ...

not sure how i forgot about that one, i was a regular there before i even owned any Elektron gear. gave up on it when they closed the old forum, haven't been back since. sold my MD-UW MkII and OT a few years ago.

GS in itself has become more about synth vanity and directionless discussion over synth releases rather than anything about making music. ...

oh, dead on. i guess i'm just so used to it that it doesn't bother me. actually, that's sort of what keeps me there, i love talking shit to the ignorant OTB/hardware zealots around there.

Here is the closest I've found to people with good technical knowledge but who still have the creation of music as the goal. I don't even listen to or collect techno much, but the knowledge level here is generally quite high.

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ?? seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else. while i'd agree that he's completely lost it, i was a little surprised/bummed to see that "Whoretits?" is a dirty word around these parts. [lol, wtf? it's even auto-censored. hilarious.] i've got to say (without any sort of shame) that he was a big influence for me early on, i still love his all his stuff from 10+ years ago. i actually really like a lot of "mnml" Techno (that's another forum that i forgot to mention, though i never really frequented it), i don't care what any of the "cool kids" think of it. love Techno, but have never considered myself as being part of the "scene", i just listen to too many other styles. i don't keep up on it, and only listen to a small selection of artists on a regular basis. i think i'd be perfectly content listening to nothing but Basic Channel and Chain Reaction for another twenty years, as far as Techno goes. i don't think i've barely seen them mentioned here, much less any discussion about their production.

honestly, i do notice a bit of a "i'm so legit, you're a bloody wanker" vibe around here sometimes, though it's generally good spirited. i just thought i'd find a more broad appreciation of the genre and it's history when i found this place. i know for sure that there's a ton of great info and discussion here, i just need to dig a bit deeper for it. you're definitely right about the focus on production methods over the gear itself, i do appreciate that.

[Plyphon]

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ??

I mean, separating technical talk from art/music talk, a lot of the posters here really know whats up. Look at the stickied threads, Voidloss's kick compression guide, master bus compression guide, etc. That stuff is absolute gold, and there are a few posters who have that sort of knowledge and are willing to pass it on. You'd never get such an in depth post at Gearslutz, for example.

What was the word that was censored? Thats hilarious.

Like I said, I'm really into my house right now, I hit peak techno about 3/4 years back and don't really listen to "straight up" techno at all anymore. I grabbed Paranoid London's latest bits and occasionally a DJ will have a techno bit during their set that exposes me to some dope stuff, but that's about it.

I've been encouraged to post house-related topics here, but honestly from a technical point of view many of the techniques are the same, there's a lot of crossover. Occasionally I'll ask a question and use a house track as the example, and I don't get shot down in flames (see my recent thread on hi-hats).

What is super valuable though, is we have users here who go to nightclubs and listen to music as either a DJ or a dancer. That is so so so properly important in dance music, and people so quickly forget that the context for a lot of this stuff is the dance floor.

You have posters on GS weighing in on house threads who havn't set foot in a nightclub in 30 years, speaking as if nothings changed.

A few users here put out vinyl also, which means at one point more than one person thought their records were good enough to cut and stock in their shops - that is also quite valuable.

[Lost to the Void]

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ?? seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else. while i'd agree that he's completely lost it, i was a little surprised/bummed to see that "." is a dirty word around these parts. [lol, wtf? it's even auto-censored. hilarious.] i've got to say (without any sort of shame) that he was a big influence for me early on, i still love his all his stuff from 10+ years ago. i actually really like a lot of "mnml" Techno (that's another forum that i forgot to mention, though i never really frequented it), i don't care what any of the "cool kids" think of it. love Techno, but have never considered myself as being part of the "scene", i just listen to too many other styles. i don't keep up on it, and only listen to a small selection of artists on a regular basis. i think i'd be perfectly content listening to nothing but Basic Channel and Chain Reaction for another twenty years, as far as Techno goes. i don't think i've barely seen them mentioned here, much less any discussion about their production.

Dunno what posts you have been looking at but we rarely talk about big room techno here, it's not much liked in this place really.
Quite the opposite for me, I would rather talk about anything other than that sound.
Ritchie is shunned precisely because he is a big room cheesy boy.
We've had lots of discussion around dub techno and the basic channel sound in the past, it's pretty much covered though, it's a very limited set of techniques to make that stuff, and the sound is mostly devoid of innovation these days.
In fact most stuff has been covered from droney minimal, through to noisy stuff, "industrial", broken beat, dumbcode. Pretty much everything has had some sort of "how do I" discussion around it, and it often deviates into more philosophical approaches about deviating from the norms or using the techniques specific to the question to explore further.
Honestly have no idea where you are coming from actually.

We always get newbs asking about "that" bass rumble sound, and try to reach a balance between "stick your cliche cheese up your ass" and "maybe take these skills as follows and try something different with them"

[Mattias]

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ?? seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else.

[terryfalafel]

i've got to say (without any sort of shame) that he was a big influence for me early on, i still love his all his stuff from 10+ years ago.

Me too, which is why his fall from grace is all the more of a disappointment.

I don't really tend to go anywhere else for production info to be honest. Maybe Elektronauts and the Cirklon forum for hardware specific advice, and a very occasionally trawl through the archives on mnml.nl cos that used to be quite active some time ago. Occasionally DOA, but there are far fewer people on there who have a decent idea about things.

But yeah, mostly here for techno production stuff.

[Pelecaras]

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ?? seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else.

'Big Room' Techno?

Is that the dance music equivalent of saying "put big light on"?

Personally I like dark, dank rooms for techno.
The Dielectric club in Leicester had a grubby basement that was perfect for it.

[tsaro]

Was on DOA for a while (2003-2007-8ish) started reading/posting less and less over the years though, as I was listening less dnb as time went by. Also the forum jokers/trolls were really taking over , so I was mostly just there for the grid in the end.

Not really joined many forums after that, but when I did I always seemed to get into arguments with mods or people with massive post counts, who derive some kind of feeling of status/power from their online presence (not sure how to put it really, but you knwo what I mean...), so then I'd usually be on my merry way again.

Now I'm a bit older and a bit calmer I guess, so I rarely go off on people like that anymore , I guess I was partly to blame for those situations, even though most times they really had it coming

The atmosphere here really invites people to genuinely share knowledge and ideas, which is pretty rare in my experience. Before I came here I was mainly just reading some bits on production forums on reddit (to kill time mainly), but there always seemed to be a couple of persons sharing misinformation and trying to package it in as convoluted ways as possible it seems to hide the fact that they didn't knwo shit about the subject, so I was growing pretty tired of that too. Finding subsekt was really a neat surprise, it's (one of) the best production forums you're going to find, even if you aren't into techno.

i guess? really, i don't want to talk bad about this place, but i guess i was expecting a bit more. ?? seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else.

'Big Room' Techno?

Is that the dance music equivalent of saying "put big light on"?

Personally I like dark, dank rooms for techno.
The Dielectric club in Leicester had a grubby basement that was perfect for it.

I'm a bit confused here too, did you check the archive for example (at the top of this page), buonacc?

Lots of different things are being discussed here, not really sure where you got that idea from tbh.....

[rktic]

seems like most of the talk revolves around modern "big room" Techno, and pretty much ignores or shuns anything else. while i'd agree that he's completely lost it, i was a little surprised/bummed to see that "."

An indicator for how we get along to those who frequently joined who are not into big room Techno.

Maybe some of you get why I'm avert to certain kinds of questions more and more frequently popping up recently.

To add an actual answer to the question:

I'm sometimes posting at Muffs for Eurorack related things. Lurking at KVR to be informed about plugin news. Registered with GS as well. But in case of KVR and GS I'm not posting there due to a certain mentality. I feel like there's a strong waterfall between giving and taking. Mostly noobs wanting to grab some fast fixes for their problems.

That's what I always liked and still appreciate about our place here. It's mostly about looking behind the surface, really getting into a topic.

[TimBuys]

Real men (and females) stick to Subsekt.

[winston]

i used the marketplace on kvr
i shitpost on gearslotz when i read something written by a berk.
it can be useful for getting info on gear when it has just been released, or finding info on old techniques that were discussed years ago.
i sometimes end up on reddit when it comes up on a google search, but i don't browse it.

i really only read cdm, djtechtools, RA and here. the first 3 are just for news and subsekt is pretty great, not only for technical things and production (mostly answering unknown unknowns), but cultural things that pop up fairly regularly which end up with me broadening my horizons.

[Amøbe]

I always thought that big room techno referred to Bumload, which I would say is the one label that everyone around here are in love with

Also I like this forum my computer just went to the hospital and it's nice to be back!

It doesn't take long to see that people aren't as cocky as they appear when you ask rumbly questions <3

[Críoch]

My internet patterns have evolved.. I go through peaks & troughs of visiting. It may not be daily.. or even weekly sometimes, depending on whats happening in the outside world. Here, GS & Muff.

Find Muffwigglers are better for telling you about what a piece of gear is like.

GS is busy as they have quantity. Lots of noise. Great place to archive search.. as is DOA.

[buonacc]

sorry, i've been meaning to get back to this. will do as soon as i have time to properly reply. lots of great points made here, i've begun to make my way through the last five years of posts (back to front) and there's certainly some good discussion here.

i will say this for now though - (the main point that i was trying to make about GS.) regarding the recent thread asking about U-he 'Satin'... besides Softube 'Tape', there have been two other "tape emulations" released in the past month or two that are getting rave reviews from pretty much everyone that's used them (Overloud 'Tapedesk' and 'Black Rooster Audio 'Magnetite'). each has a dedicated thread at GS with loads of commentary about their sound, usage, and comparisons to 'Tape', 'Satin', 'Magma', and other popular "tape" plug-ins. this is exactly what i don't see around here. same with synths/samplers/drum machines/fx, where you can get opinions from all sorts of people on most anything. here every thread is pretty much "what does Voidloss think of this?" and that's it (not to discount his opinion/experience, which is generally very useful once you get past the posturing). basically, this is not the first/only place that i'd go to look for advice on pretty much anything gear related (if at all), and i think people might be missing out on educating themselves when it comes to such a thing. it's like living on an island, where the only news about the mainland comes from the guy that delivers the mail by boat once a week. that's all i was trying to say on that, and i think it's valid.

as far as discussing Techno production goes, this place is obviously tops.

[Críoch]

I dunno..

People are using their stuff. Having Fun. Eating. Sleeping. Working. Too busy to write. Sometimes they feel like chatting & sometimes they dont. Sometimes they feel great & sometimes the confidence goes. Not everyone wants to chat or educate / whatever. There is no law to say that YOU MUST SHARE, y'know.

Everyone on GS is in Gen Pop. We're in The Hole.

Cant have it all!

[Planar]

Imo, threads like that are just noise, Buonacc. Who cares if one compressor sounds every so slightly closer to some vintage model no-one has used anyway? GS has you covered for that stuff if you're into it. Subsekt, imo, shines when it comes to getting feedback on tracks that other users post up. I stalk a couple of other forums (DOA, KVR etc) and what always sets this place apart is that people will take the time to listen and give honest feedback on tracks. After a certain point, and your 20 years suggests youre probably there already, there's not much you can read to improve. So having this network of people who who do listen and review material means that you get personalised feedback that can help you improve.

I generally like that there's little hype around new plugins and gear. And I especially like that bullshit audiophile myths get short shrift. There is a lot of bad info perpetuated around some places.

There's no limit to genre here either, open a thread about a topic in rock/trance/blues/dubstep etc etc and it's likely to get a response (maybe after the odd bit of banter if its a bit cheesy). There are a couple of us who don't make techno at all and most of the topics here apply just as much to what we do.