Actually, my favorite music is Allan Holdsworth (probably no market), and then there's World Music. I especially like the Albums Sahara Lounge and Asian Groove from Putumayo which pulled together the best of the Asian Underground, Eastern Uprising, Outcaste, Bollywood Funk, Bollywood Break, Bombay Jazz, and Asian Dub scenes. People don't really make all these distinctions anymore. It's just World, Bhangra, or Bollywood categories seems to me in the music libraries now. World often appears to mean South American or Chinese. Bhangra and Bollywood look like they're almost fused together to be the same thing.
People don't make the distinctions between Asian Underground and Eastern Uprising anymore probably because those club scenes are completely obsolete. Since the more marketable chillout, ambient, and goa trance genres blend cultures in a way where it doesn't matter where the music came from or who made it, that kind of killed the (South) Asian Underground. Timbaland and DJ Quick did appropriate/bring to a different audience some elements of this music from the UK diaspora Indians so it still seems to be a "thing" like in travel documentaries covering India.
I don't know why I'm writing all this except that I just like hanging out with you guys and I'm kind of blogging my experience of trying to get a handle on what I can do for the libraries. I'm going to study the TV cues I got from Killer Tracks and Epidemic so I can know better how cues like this are put together.
Seems to be doable but some of the people making this stuff have access to real Urdu speaking and Hindi speaking vocalists, real Sarod players, etc...
A bit hard to compete with that even with the best sound libraries and plugins (which I pretty much have) not that it's impossible.
I saw an article saying to make something sound more real to add a barely perceptible amount of white noise to a digital track. I think they mean to synthesized sound not live instruments sampled in a studio but I could be wrong. What do you all think?
They also said to pan 10-20% not synced with the tempo. They mentioned to modulate the volume 10% with tremolo with the L/R phase set to 0. They said to alter the attack and the decay as well. They said to assign velocities to a low pass filter cutoff and automate the filter around only a couple of HZ. Seems like a lot of work. Increase the track volume by half a decibel on the arrival of the chorus. Use tape simulation with wow and flutter. Especially move high hats from the grid, and tape saturation, eq shelviing, or miltuband compression. Dang that's a lot of work.
Any of this advice seem more important than the others? I'm sure moving the high hat hits from the grid will work if maybe one keeps the downbeat sacrsanct at least. Or is this really the best practice for the emulating the realism factor?
I know it's a lot of questions but I've got one more. One article in response to the question of which style makes the most money said not to focus on that and just do the one/ones you love but I'm not sure that's gonna fly in my case. Even if I try to segue over to Hip Hop, 80s and 90s hip hop is EXTREMELY different from 2021. I think I should adapt yes?
