[quote]jjdejong0 (03/01/2012)[hr]Also on a slightly more positive note, I really like SA giving sample packs as prizes for original tracks posted by its members. A great incentive and a massive confidence boost if you win.[/quote]
stop being an *** Kisser Jan lol. in the another note I kind of hate that there is no way that 1 person qualified can just determine if a track is great or not.
for example a Teacher that is great producing Trance . cant judge well to someone who produce Electro . Tech House or other generes. at least we need 5 people who can take over this task .
maybe SA might need to hire some other people to make reviews and pay them for every one of them . charging somehow extra.
What was said previously remains 100% true, regardless of the tone change in this thread.
The irony is that if you cant find it in your heart to reach out to people in a way that doesnt involve money - then you will never be able to convert contacts into sales.
The only way they’ll see you is on the dodgy sites.
You have to roll your sleeves up & build a relationship with your customers & potential customers. Find a way to make it happen - even if it means going the extra mile… cos like it or not… thats what people want.
BS talk about competitions being cool & SA charging people this that & the other for whatever… FFS - take the blinkers off. If thats the problem & the solution - good luck to the lot of ya! 
I’d give far more credence to the constructive criticism in this thread right now than to the “yes men”.
You aint gonna get blood out of stones in this economic climate without giving more value (and that my friends - usually & unfortunately means providing something for free).
Anyway - Thats my parting shot. Will continue to watch with interest 
The feedback from our new customers is overwhelmingly positive… It’s only the ones who have been here for a long time and have progressed to a higher level ( or not ) that seem to have any issues. And even then it’s a minority.
We have around 5k active subscribers only 500 or so are active in the forums. And only a small handfull of them have negative things to say… The rest are getting on with making music.
I have always seen our site as like an advanced sample pack… It’s a place to spark your ideas and help creativity. I think we do a great job in that respect.
I see what you’re saying Phil but, perhaps, by trying out the things that have been suggested, by pushing harder, those 5,000 will become 10,000 or 15,000 or even more.
Also, are your churn rates ok? From what you’ve said, you view the business model as one aimed at beginner to low intermediate producers. Let’s face it, as we’ve agreed, it is harder to attract new clients than it is to retain existing ones. Perhaps your biz model does work well in attraction and now it’s time to look at retention. At keeping people beyond the one year or two year subscription period.
The problem is that catering for the 5% advanced users takes 5 times the resource. The reason why it went tits up before is the previous people in charge threw lots of resource at the problem and ended up spending more than we where making. and never really achieved significant results.
Hence why the company went bust and we had to step in and bail it out with our own (and Family/friends) money.
We are being very careful not to get in to the same position again and building things more slowly. So we dont disappoint all the people who believed in us enough to give us their life savings.
That being said… we have invested a LOT of cash in developing new features and products aimed at advanced users that will surface shortly.
I am of the opinion that the most important part of the learning process is beginner to intermediate. The intermediate to advanced is more about experience and talent than education. It was for me anyway. once i knew how all the stuff worked i just kept practicing and refining my skills.
@Jon - Good man talking about churn & retention… I thought about the same thing after I turned off the laptop last night.
@Phil - Fair enough - you guys are the drivers. Drive where & how ye want.
One other point is that there are people out there with disposable income. I would gladly resub if for no other reason than to stay involved, support you guys & indulge my passion/interest in music production. I’m not driven by looking for beatport success - all I want is to find out more & more & more.
I’d actually just love to support you in general cos I belive in the serivce you provide.
So there are lots of people like me who would keep up a sub if there were simply regular tech tips every week. I would have resubbed if there had of been… but there wasnt. They would be the perfect vehicle to talk about specific issues / techniques - whatever.
I see other companies doing it - and why you neglect that trick - is honestly beyond me.
We would LOVE to hear ideas for tech tips… we struggle with thinking of new ones so would be delighted to hear any suggestions you guys have.
Our churn/re-sub rate is great… as ive said the majority of people love the service and are really happy. We get emails every day to that effect. and regularly get people attributing us to their success.
with infinite resources and a ton more money could we do more… of course and hopefully we continue to grow and be able to do more in the future.
[quote]phil johnston (04/01/2012)[hr]We would LOVE to hear ideas for tech tips… we struggle with thinking of new ones so would be delighted to hear any suggestions you guys have.
[/quote]
amen
it gets hard after 100 to put informative tips up. I find the majority of other tips found about the place in mags etc. are more like ‘Did you know’ - stuff that can’t be translated to video because it would literally take like 15 seconds to show it.
but then again maybe thats something we could look at doing, but i tend not to make a tech tip unless its really worth watching.
if you’s have any ideas - send em on.
I’d start by reading the music mags Phil & either going more indepth on a technique discussed or putting your own twist on it.
AND - Subbing to production tuts on YT. You could get ideas of what tangents to go on.
ANDDDD - Listening to other peoples tunes. Maybe take a monthly look @ the no.1 in each of the main beatport charts & pick out an interesting element.
STOP PRESS _ NEWS JUST IN - Reading the forums (unsurprisingly) would also be a good place as you’d pick up on the converstations that people are having (not even mentioning doing some of the tutorial requests in tech tip format)
I’ve so many ideas I could start charging ye :P
Its all there, you just need to be more creative. Far too many reasons why not Lads.
Yeah we do look at the a lot of those sources… and a lot of it weve already done.
Im more interested in actual Ideas rather than ideas of where to get ideas… what do YOU want to learn about?
Look if we do another techno tutorial will that help? 
Your minds cant be that dry lads
You’ve got a constant survey of what people want on these forums.
Anyway - We can only bring you to the water… whatever you do after that is your prerogative.
Now your just trolling ICN if you have any constructive suggestions by all means let us know.
Apologies Phil - I thought a and words meant that we were having a conversation.
Noted.
hello guys and gals…,i subscribe 3 months at a time.this site teaches me everything i need to make music.there is only so much you need to learn and the rest is up to the individuals creativity.i pay nearly as much in 3 months on a certain music making magazine and although i learn from the mag i’m learning alot quicker by watching and hearing how things effect the sound in real time on the videos on this site.i see on every forum people complaining.this site is exceptional for the price.and i also got a reply on the same day in the forum.keep up the good work guys.if i was an advanced user i probably would want to spend my money on kit or software and go in my own direction but im a long way from that happening so will be here for a while.
From a beginners point of view the thing that I struggle with most at the moment is hearing a sound in my head or in someone else’s track and then being able to recreate that sound or variation of it myself from scratch.
Regarding ideas for Tech Tips I think that it would be good to have a regular series of tips where by a selected track is deconstructed into its various parts and then show the process of recreating these individual sounds, the point being not just to create the sounds but to explain the process involved and the choices made in order to get to the end result. For example why use one synth over another to create the sound or what part of the original sound give a clue to the fact that it is constructed with a combination of a square wave and a saw wave for example. Hopefully the videos would be quite short and easy for you guys to make as they wouldn’t need to go into any detail of the arrangement of the track and would just concentrate on the sounds.
Over a period of time this would build up into a large collection of different sounds, but the goal is not just the sounds themselves but hopefully to create an understanding of the process, techniques and effects involved in creating that sound.
The way that I learn’t to play the guitar was just by playing along to the songs of bands that I liked until I had the chords, solos, etc worked out, from which I could then develop these into my own ideas by putting a different spin on it or sometimes by trying to copy another chord, riff, etc I would make a mistake and that mistake was actually really cool and works its way into an original song.
So i’ve started trying to apply a similar technique with electronic music, to begin with I found it quite hard to deconstruct a song in my head into the various parts just when listening to it, but recently I have started loading songs into Logic and playing through from the beginning and then creating a track for each different element and drawing in a midi region when I can hear that element playing in order to build up a map of the song structure.
This has helped me a lot and was a bit like learning to DJ, where to begin with listening to two different songs at the same time just sound like a mess of noise my your ears but then one day something in my brain just decided to click into place and separates them out into two distinct elements.
I have just done this process with Battle for Middle you by Julio Bashmore and as far as I can tell I think that there are 12 different elements in the track 6 tracks of drums, a bass, 4 synth tracks and a vocal sample.
But am now struggling to recreate these sounds - for example I though that the bass sounded a bit like a modified 808 kick, but when I tried to make it, it doesn’t come any where close to what he gets. Similarly all of the other element sound familiar but I can’t think how to recreate them, for example I think that I have made a kick similar to his when messing about previously but now I can’t recall how to go about recreating it again.
I guess that a lot of this just comes from experience and putting in the time, but it’s just frustrating when you have an idea of something in your head and you can’t get to the point where you can turn in into an actual sound.
Apologies for the massive post, I just started typing and could’t stop hahaha
Lol all he does is Troll.
I wish i had the power over him that phil does… 
Err aline im not *** licking I just felt it was unfair with all the negative **** being said. Also Phil you hit the nail on the head, all this is about is the lack of Techno content. IMO a lack of Techno can only help this site, if you disagree check my sig…
[quote]muz1903 (04/01/2012)[hr]From a beginners point of view the thing that I struggle with most at the moment is hearing a sound in my head or in someone else’s track and then being able to recreate that sound or variation of it myself from scratch.
Regarding ideas for Tech Tips I think that it would be good to have a regular series of tips where by a selected track is deconstructed into its various parts and then show the process of recreating these individual sounds, the point being not just to create the sounds but to explain the process involved and the choices made in order to get to the end result. For example why use one synth over another to create the sound or what part of the original sound give a clue to the fact that it is constructed with a combination of a square wave and a saw wave for example. Hopefully the videos would be quite short and easy for you guys to make as they wouldn’t need to go into any detail of the arrangement of the track and would just concentrate on the sounds.
Over a period of time this would build up into a large collection of different sounds, but the goal is not just the sounds themselves but hopefully to create an understanding of the process, techniques and effects involved in creating that sound.
The way that I learn’t to play the guitar was just by playing along to the songs of bands that I liked until I had the chords, solos, etc worked out, from which I could then develop these into my own ideas by putting a different spin on it or sometimes by trying to copy another chord, riff, etc I would make a mistake and that mistake was actually really cool and works its way into an original song.
So i’ve started trying to apply a similar technique with electronic music, to begin with I found it quite hard to deconstruct a song in my head into the various parts just when listening to it, but recently I have started loading songs into Logic and playing through from the beginning and then creating a track for each different element and drawing in a midi region when I can hear that element playing in order to build up a map of the song structure.
This has helped me a lot and was a bit like learning to DJ, where to begin with listening to two different songs at the same time just sound like a mess of noise my your ears but then one day something in my brain just decided to click into place and separates them out into two distinct elements.
I have just done this process with Battle for Middle you by Julio Bashmore and as far as I can tell I think that there are 12 different elements in the track 6 tracks of drums, a bass, 4 synth tracks and a vocal sample.
But am now struggling to recreate these sounds - for example I though that the bass sounded a bit like a modified 808 kick, but when I tried to make it, it doesn’t come any where close to what he gets. Similarly all of the other element sound familiar but I can’t think how to recreate them, for example I think that I have made a kick similar to his when messing about previously but now I can’t recall how to go about recreating it again.
I guess that a lot of this just comes from experience and putting in the time, but it’s just frustrating when you have an idea of something in your head and you can’t get to the point where you can turn in into an actual sound.
Apologies for the massive post, I just started typing and could’t stop hahaha[/quote]
Good post Muz. I have the same issues with knowing the sound I want to create but not sure how to go about it.
I know experimentation is a lot of it, but more tuts on creating sounds would be great. Mainly to learn the processes, not to sound like the latest hit on Beatport.
[quote]jjdejong0 (04/01/2012)[hr]Err aline im not *** licking I just felt it was unfair with all the negative **** being said. Also Phil you hit the nail on the head, all this is about is the lack of Techno content. IMO a lack of Techno can only help this site, if you disagree check my sig…[/quote]
No-one mentioned techno whatsoever… if you care to look back. We dont expect anything cos it’ll happen when/if it happens.
The 1st person to mention any genre specific tuts was yourself Jan :laugh:
Phil was the one that brought up Techno.
No-one else mentioned anything about it.
We’ve all been talking about a (perceived) lack of regular new content… lack of tech tips… no xmas or new years good wishes (until it was pointed out)… track feedback… developing a better relationship with members… having a larger presence on the forums… churn / retention… conversion… to list but a few topics.
No mention of techno. If we were looking for techno tuts… there would be a more direct way of saying it IMO
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