I finally feel like I'm in a place now where my technical ability can keep up with my creative output - like, if I have a sound in my head, 90% I know how to make it happen. But I still think that actual composition is the most important part, and the technical know-how just comes with recording enough shit to know what works and what doesn't. I've been recording with reaper for close to 4 years now, and I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. Something that helped me learn mixing is to find a professionally made song that you want your song to sound like, and just do an A/B comparison between your song and theirs. See where the levels are, what effects are used, etc. ----- Volcas are cool, saving up for an FM at the moment. Apart from a Casio SK-1, the Beats and Keys are the only non-acoustic gear I own. Another tip for the Beats' snare is to fatten it up with the built in delay - set the time knob almost all the way to the left, and then set the depth to max to get a crunchy snare with more of a tail. Not great for every track, but it can be a cool effect to make it feel a bit more organic. If you record each instrument from the Beats individually, you can also get some good sounds by pitch-shifting things down. I also am a sucker for using the claves and agogo together - they're on the track I put up yesterday. If you record them live, you can get this kind of effect by hitting the claves and then agogo a split second later (just slide your finger from one to the other).I've got ample access to stuff to make quality recordings but not the know-how to do it.
Neat, I totally want a volca keys next. What parts/tracks have you used that one for? The fm is pretty nice. It's my first synth that isn't a plugin, and it's got a lot of capabilities that I haven't tapped yet. There's a lot of sounds in it including various cheesy ones.
Cheese is the best part ;) I've used the keys for textural stuff on a lot of tracks, and it features heavily into an electronic/new-wave project I'm working on now, Drive link to a rough mix of one of the songs here if you're interested. It's basically all the electronic sounds you hear on this, bass included. I've recently been messing around with the ring mod a lot, you get can some pretty gnarly sounds out of that thing. I would guess that there's not much that the keys can do that the Bass/FM couldn't, though I don't have access to either of those so I can't say for sure.