[linux-audio-user] Accessibility: Tips for making sounds for the masses?

[Carlo Capocasa]

After my thread got hijacked so nicely about drawing in developers with
little musical interest to help do music tools coding, I felt encouraged
to raise another discussion.

It is my goal to make music as accessible as possible, IE it's gotta be
valuable to your average working man (or teenager) in terms of
entertainment, identity, cult status, etc.

The reaction I want from people is: "MAAAAAAN that's so cool why can't
the sucker produce as fast as I can listen? MORE MORE MORE!!!!"

:)

One technical approach I found that is quite effective at that is to
jack everything through compressors. (I know, it's not new, I just
didn't know that). Get some white noise with an envelope, a formant
filter, and a low pass filter, and pipe it through two sets of LADSPA
compressors jacked to max (small attack, small release, large knee,
maximum compression, small theshold) and it sounds like your average FAT
dance track snare from scratch. Penetrating enough to make your average
metal worker notice it.

Another strategy I found effective is to combine the familiar with the
new... That makes it an adventure with a guide. A little adventurous,
but not so much as to be perceived as different and strange. (Personally
I WANT to be different and strange but I respect that not everybody does).

So ya wanna use generative synth? Fine, with a dance beat. Gonna make
completely synthed tracks? Cool, add some vocals. To me, that makes
strange synths sound "household object".

So you wanna make stuff that people can enjoy ("people" meaning in terms
of popular listening familiarity NOW)? What do you do?

Carlo