Move on to something more fulfilling than chasing nebulous goals. Create your own things instead of trying to emulate the unknowable other.
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Honestly any kind of synthesis can be reproduced ITB. You just have to learn how synthesis works & maybe pay for your VST’s. You absolutely don’t need physical box to achieve a certain sound.
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I don’t really know the works of Sophie at all, I have a faint idea of what her music sounds like but what I do know is that at the point when she started going big she had years and years of practice under her belt. So I guess maybe you should stop comparing your music and yourself to a master and accept that you’re an amateur on the early part of the journey towards being a producer and think more about how you like to work. Is it ITB or OTB? Do you like to have a lot of gear or a few synths you know inside out? If you don’t know these things yet & haven’t figured out the workflow you prefer yet, maybe hold off on buying rare & expensive equipment until you do.
Learning synthesis & production takes a lot both study and work. It’s going to take years until your music starts to sound like your idols.
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Weren’t they only like 30?
This is debatable but I get your point. I started electronic music with covers of songs I’ve heard and it taught me a lot but it also took way longer to get out of that sound than it did to learn how to recreate that sound.
She started making electronic music at around 8 years old.
@pilotpenguin Don’t get too discouraged, check this quote from AG Cook:
" Part of my education consisted of just watching her build and re-build her music. I remember hearing a version of HARD that sounded great to me, but she felt it wasn’t gelling. Instead of tweaking or ‘fixing’ it in any way, she simply started again, remaking every sound, every drum, every synth part from scratch. I thought she had lost it at first, but I realised that she saw each component with such clarity that it was simply easier for her to remake everything than to force parts that didn’t truly fit together. There were certain pieces of equipment or software that she enjoyed using, but she saw everything on a fundamental level, and had no problem taking one idea and recreating it with different tools. What was clearly the result of years of concentration and determination was by that point fairly effortless, and it was a pleasure to watch someone just turn their mind to music."
If SOPHIE’s music was easy to make everyone would be doing it and it wouldn’t have been so special.
Also her composition/arrangement is great and a big component of how her sound design comes across (there’s never too many things at the same time).
I just had a play around in Live trying to make some Sophie-ish sounds and didn’t come close but if you really dedicate your time and effort to it I’m sure you can get near or come up with something interesting of your own along the way.
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Oh. Were they a child prodigy or something?
Apparently.
To unbiased ears, you could have told me this was a sophie track and I would have believed you. Honestly I can’t hear a difference. I respect all artists and I find their sound a derivative of the weird FM synth sounds of late 2000s, early 2010s mixed with pop.
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This. This a hundred times. So close yet so far.
I heard the track and I was feeling the vibe but somehow it’s so close to being distinctly her until 0:13, where for some reason it doesn’t feel like it anymore and I can’t point my finger on why.
Every time I’ve tried to make a track, it always ended in chaos. Too many elements, a sense of disorientation and dizziness, until then I never really thought about arrangement, seeing it as a “we can slap something together last minute” kind of thing.
Boy, was I way off mark.
For some reason when trying to emulate her harsher sounds, I still don’t know how she was able to make something like white noise and hyper-resonant earbleed sounds pleasant but when I try to do the same thing, either my ears hurt or it doesn’t have the same impact
Yeah arrangement is super important in electronic music.
I also fall into the trap of adding more and more because it’s so easy to do when working with software.
That’s actually a nice thing about hardware, those limitations are built in and make you work harder with the options you have rather than just piling more things in.
The only solution with software is self discipline.
Regarding making noisy fm sounds less piercing you just have to get stuck in with eq and compression. Use narrow bands to deal with the unpleasant resonances. It’s a lot less fun than coming up with the sounds but it’s part of the process.
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Reading A. G. Cook’s in memoriam piece felt insightful and reading an interview about how she wanted to challenge the deification of her image and music in an interview is making me reconsider the way I’m approaching things.
So, thank you for sharing that.
I forced myself to use only six tracks and Live stock plugins and found myself running back to the usual familiar setup of VSTs, chord progressions with a top melody (you can thank YouTube production guides for that). I’ve listened to music I liked and tried to emulate their arrangement but it’s always been unsatisfactory, it felt like a knockoff of a knockoff and trying to find my own would always results in an uncanny valley that made me uncomfortable.
Reading the part where she was apparently shifting slowly to a Mac-based software-centric setup might validate the idea that I don’t need a Monomachine to make innovative sounds but the knowledge to make innovative sounds doesn’t come overnight and I’m trying to find things that I can see as small victories so I have the necessary persistence but it seems to be a long road.
I feel maybe the principle of “if you can work without hardware, then you’ve earned yourself some hardware” might come into play here but I don’t know, I haven’t made music in what’s felt like months and I haven’t been able to force myself into making anything that makes me head bob.
It’s really only worth doing if it’s something you really enjoy, there’s very little chance of money or external validation with music these days.
That said you might find it useful to dig into the SOS Synth Secrets Series, lots of great information about the nuts and bolts of generating sound in there.
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For what it’s worth I got a SOPHIE type sounds out of the Octatrack by FMing lots of effects parameters… what I found to be crucial for me was chorus and compressor, lots of compressor… when you think ooh that’s to much compressor, go past that point and you’re set…
Not a faithful replication of SOPHIE but I really enjoyed the results and the process of getting there…
But like others have stated, don’t go chasing waterfalls …
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