Meteo Xavier

Making a successful restaurant is NOTHING like making a successful music career. Those two things couldn't possibly be more different for more reasons than I care to type out here. Among the main differences is that most people around the world will enter a restaurant at least once a year, whereas most people will probably never hire a musician for anything other than a wedding or something like it at its closest, much less an indie composer - in addition to the fact that it's very difficult or likely impossible to have and run a restaurant from your bedroom or living room. You can start a moderately successful music composition career with $700 on top of the computer you already own. You don't need to purchase or lease commercial real estate, trucks, vans, tools, hire employees, get special licensing, undergo training and government procedures (except for paying tax)... the entire cost/risk structure is completely different. And I'm not too sympathetic for artists who have to work a "dead-end job they hate". No one likes work, that's what "work" is - stuff you only do because you have to in order to have objective needs met. It goes back to the unshakeable reality of life that sooner or later you have to sacrifice things in order to keep moving ahead. If it's not working a job you should be thankful to have floating your artist ambitions, then it will be the reality that you will have to compromise your art in some way to pay bills and eventually make your "passion" work; where it will give you stress, make you deal with unreasonable people, force you to turn out stuff that can tarnish your name... something always has to balance out there. If you don't choose that balance, reality will choose it for you. In that regard, I'm actually fairly lucky - I actually love my day job AND it allows me to do my music ambitions as I see fit. Sooner or later that reality will no longer be true, but I will give praise to the God or Gods or powers that be that I have it while I have it. Those who can't appreciate what they have will contribute to their failure later.

Well, ***damn, how many mental health disorders can I have? I'm up to EIGHT or some shit. <:S

So? It's not what it USED to be years ago, that's true, but this community is also still far, far from dead. It ain't dead until you type in ocremix.org and a 404 comes up.

They're just more experienced in the field of knowing what that stuff is, having done it themselves. Additionally, that may be a solution where trying to recreate it in MIDI (or, to say it simpler, in your music program) is just plain unlikely to achieve the results you'd like. For needs like that, many people and companies have recorded humans performing them for the reason that programs and humans have different strengths and weaknesses for instrument performance. Even expensive MIDI orchestration books recommend finding a recorded phrase sample for some of those things as opposed to wang-banging the software and note grids to try to replicate it. Sometimes it can be done, but other times it really is just not worth the effort. In this particular song, oddly enough, Uematsu is NOT using the Sound Canvas that he uses for at least 90% of the rest of the soundtrack. I wager he used a real orchestra or at least premiere (at the time) orchestral phrase sample CDs that recorded real orchestras.

There's no point in nay-saying an idea that likely won't cost anyone much of anything substantial that isn't already part of the cost of ambition. Try it. It could fail and die out, but everything eventually does. That's no reason not to try something that, who knows, could revitalize a community that some people think is dead for some reason??? There's new music released all the time here and the boards still show a healthy amount of activity, so don't let anyone sway you into thinking things that are not about the community in a way that might break ambition. Give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen?

I think we've exercised that particular debate item as far as it can go. Not much more I can say on it. You can quote me theory and namedrop as many 300-year-old music geniuses as you like, but as I sit down here to work on my current commission, I need to crank this thing out in the way I've learned to do it over 15 years. I certainly wouldn't call Bach dumb, but I haven't seen how effective he is in doing modern video game music on a deadline on top of a 60+ hour work week. :P

It's definitely case-by-case and isn't directed towards every kind of music generation there is, I'm talking about when you go to design the full production of a track and there isn't already a melody in mind. For times when you need a strong theme, leitmotif or generating some very base stuff that you can store away for when you can't come up with anything else (like I do), then yes - you go to a piano and start coming up with some melody and chord material and save what you like the most. Now if you're jumping into a track without having that in mind (like most of us tend to do) or without needing a strong melody or leitmotif, like a desert track or a bizarro world track or more filler material, then trying to do it that way is more of an obstacle than a production step. Not every track has to have a strong, memorable melody. Good exclusions apply (Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, The Killers' Sam's Town), but honestly, it's exhausting trying to make sure every track is focused melody first and really impractical. Some require something that really commands attention, most others just need something to guide the listener. Without that balance, the album or soundtrack production becomes more of a chore and potentially dilutes out the emotional dynamics at the bottom line. Plus it's easier to do rearrangements and remixes that way, in my experience.

I suppose you're the source of all these half-or-less listened to tracks I have on my Bandcamp analytics then. Constructive though your "Uh, I've listened to your tracks and your melodies actually suck" criticism is, it's not quite enough to get me to change my mind on it. Designing a melody last to fit the rest of the track instead of designing the entire track to fit the melody is not the same thing as discouraging a focus on strong melodies (though not every song calls for strong melodies either), nor does it mean you can't start in the sketching phase going melody-first or that you can't do it in certain parts of a track that could call for it. What I'm saying is that designing a full production - drums, percussion, bass, pad, keys, synth, guitar and strings that are all doing the accompaniment around the melody is a lot more tedious and less effective than designing that stuff first and having the melody fit it. The listeners don't always hear the melody going on 100% of the way through a song, they hear more of the accompaniment and context (chords) of the song than what's actually being said. For that reason and the previously stated ease of changing some notes around as opposed to changing the accompaniment to fit the notes constantly, that is the basis of the position. A strong accompaniment, I am absolutely convinced, takes higher priority than a strong melody.

WTF is a Vig?

There was a time when being on a record label was genuinely worth the effort. These days I've highly reconsidered that notion since all my experience with them has largely been me doing the legwork in trying to get music sold while they do little more than provide web space and artwork with a cut of what I make when it gets sold. I don't feel this is native to the label experience and I'm still trying to get on some others, but definitely it's not what it used to be and a lot of that has to do with music technology integrating with the internet. Supply explodes to 100x the musicians there was, music theft becomes prevalent, labels reveal a major vulnerability to their business model and acumen, end results is that the musician now does the hard work of marketing (of which they are probably the absolute most incompetent pairing of subject and artist EVER, no seriously) but continue to do it so they feel like they're a real musician or something. I was actually talking about this in the car with my wife after describing the definition of a "vanity publisher" versus a "real publisher" and talking about how "real" labels/publishers have deterioriated in terms of quality and reliability and that artists only still choose them because it makes it feel like they have a badge of honor or part of the 'in crowd' with being a labeled musician and she pointed out, "So, basically, artists avoid vanity publishers because they don't really do anything for artists, but they continue to go with real publishers that also don't do much for them anymore... for their own vanity? That's pretty ironic." I LOL'd. That being said, being on a label still has some perks from time to time and I still want to get on OCR Records as I feel they're not part of the label description I made above. Other than that, most enterprising artists would do better to just self-publish since at least they'd get 100% of the net profits after all the same work was done.

Why would that surprise you? Not everyone who likes music is into it the way you guys are. Not everyone wants to enjoy music to the point of studying composition history of the last 100 years of jazz and its roots in rock and roll. It's a pleasure in life that has the distinction of being a universal language, highly variable, and being an obligation to absolutely no one to practice or absorb in any other way that what perfectly fits them. If you don't understand how ridiculous music elitism is, then I invite you to listen to a guy rant about how people don't appreciate waterslides at Dolly's Splash Country and bitch about their "mainstream" construction and design like I did back in 2004 for close to 20 minutes. God, I still can't figure that out.

A bump now that the game has been released and it is now my first truly commercial music work available. Without Within 3 is available for anyone who may be interested in it. http://wowi3.invertmouse.com/ I'm credited under my real name "Jeff Lawhead" instead of 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier. I didn't request that, but oh well. I provided the new tracks for the game and tracks from the previous Without Within series are credited to Efe Tozan. In addition, I got my music reviewed alongside Efe's in RPGFan with the game getting some pretty damn good scores all the way around: http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/Without_Within_3/index.html I have my full list plus some other tracks (I was trying to post this album up to Youtube as a music-to-study-by!) here: Thank you and enjoy.

Goodoldmod. We should make a mini-documentary on Unmod. That could be fun.

Relevant to the discussion: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/best-video-game-easter-eggs/2/

Some people are doing work in VR and AR, but it's not nearly as accessible to the rest of us like DAW stuff is yet. There's a lot of foundation that still needs to be laid in that field before we get around to working in it.

I'm lucky get 4-8 hours a week to do any gaming. The big irony with my current day is I have more game music work than I can handle and my money goes on for more game music or video game stuff that I have... no time to enjoy because I'm too busy doing that stuff. My addiction to gaming eventually turned into an addiction to work that desperately needs to be balanced.

Well, it's not an Okami soundfont, but it IS possible to get PS2 soundfonts - and by that I mean soundfonts made from game samples, not any other way. A small but worthy collection of them can be found here: http://glitchkill.proboards.com/thread/6130/popular-video-game-soundfonts

Back in... February? Before it got to be easier to find a SNES Classic like it is now, I managed to get one at the local Walmart whilst going there at 7:00AM for some stupid reason I really didn't want to do. Was worth the trip. Haven't had time to try'er out since, but it was a rare lucky break at a time when I've had to resort to paying witch covens to cast spells on us over Ebay just so maybe we could go 40 hours without someone shattering their elbow or someone getting diseased or some other disaster. SNES Classic was not part of that spell.

Bumping for repeat exposure and to see if it would help get more money to bLiNd's fundraising needs. A bunch of money's been raised, but still pretty far from its goal.

Only you can really decide if you want to submit this to the OCR judges' panel or not. I couldn't give a very helpful judgment for the song itself, and I think if there were a lot of feedback for it you'd probably get a lot of inconsistent ideas of what's good and what's wrong with it, but even on my tinny laptop speakers, I can definitely hear some pretty good quality rearrangement skills and a lot of potential here. It's quite a bit better than I was expecting, honestly. I say go for it. Worst thing that might happen (and I don't mean to speak for the judges here) is that you have to go back and fix some things and then resubmit.

Trying to become "famous" is sort of a recipe for disaster, as the mindset is so pointedly focused on vanity and greed that the art (the real thing people come to look for in the first place) is almost entirely sacrificed. It also promotes an anxiety artists will get when they find out they aren't getting the fame they should, which can entirely be avoided, as well as producing the mental goalpost equivalent of Fester's Quest - one LONG, hard journey, no checkpoints. What I recommend artists to do is take a "baby steps" kind of approach and get a more realistic version of "success" to go along with that. Build 100 checkpoints or however many you want and that can help clear the pretense, reduce anxiety, and focus more on the art. This can be done with Soundcloud and Youtube, but I recommend Youtube over Soundcloud as it's potentially easier to promote work on there (I say potentially because Google Adwords is a pain in the ass, but it does deliver some numbers, that's true). Also, Youtube is not in any danger of closing down or being sold off like Soundcloud has been.

Will it let me use the slide function on more than just FL Plugins now?

JARRING ONLY BEGINS TO DESCRIBE IT! Image Line can kiss my ass until there's nothing left to kiss but a curvy little tailbone! RAWRRRRRRRRRRR!!! >:S

Edit: Wait, I think I misread it originally, are you looking for a converter that needs to be modded to support expanded audio from the VRC6 chip? Edit2: Either way, maybe this is the guy you should talk to. Seems he does a lot of mod work as well as stuff not listed on the post there: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/243676-modsrepair-service-now-accepting-orders/ Original: There's not really a lot of console modding people here, this isn't really an emulation-based video game community, so a recommendation is all that can be found. Luckily for you, there's a lot of Famicom/NES converters these days that make that much easier than it used to be. I couldn't recommend one product over another as I don't have any converters for them myself, but this should get you started out on the right foot: https://www.google.com/search?q=Famicom+to+NES+converter&amp;source=univ&amp;tbm=shop&amp;tbo=u&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwijzvLxvJrbAhWk8oMKHewUCtYQsxgIKA&amp;biw=1366&amp;bih=634

TWENTY!? The hell... I'm still on Fl Studio 11 and it's not been outdated THAT long. I think Image Line forgot how to count..