Meteo Xavier
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Posts posted by Meteo Xavier
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Constructive Devil's Advocacy:
(you knew I was going to do this)
Pretty much any and all advice on how to score more gigs and "make it" in music (or arts in general for that matter) is only going to be effective up to a point, and not a very high point. What ultimately decides if you land any kind of gig in music is being the right person at the right place at the right time for the right project. You have to hit all four checkpoints there. It's luck.For that reason, any and all advice amounting to "No, people don't land jobs on Gamedev.net, it's all about who you know and networking." is both true and false to certain degrees. I've tried Gamedev.net and had no success I can think of on it, but I still check the forums occasionally anyway. Why? Because it's opportunity. Because in doing this for 12 years, I've found what I would consider success in the strangest of places - places outside all these industry leeches tell you to go and places they tell you to avoid. There aren't magic tricks to getting music success - if there was, we'd all be doing the exact same things and it would be self-defeating anyway because then all the employers would get overwhelmed and sick of looking for talent in an "industry" willing to cannibalize itself just to make $300-a-minute.
And you know what? All these composers and "industry" people all say and do and think the same stuff anyway and then they wonder why the "industry" they cling to is failing them. Honestly, you could make a dystopian sci-fi/1984 story out of the game audio racket - you just replace "state" or "empire" or "system" with "industry" and you're good to go.
The point I'm getting at is this - the whole mindset of focusing on getting work might be the problem of getting work itself. I'm in a lot of game audio groups and such, and all of them talk so much more about the "industry" of game audio then the art itself. It's all money, money, money, money and fame. Everyone's desperate to sound like Hans Zimmer and Nobuo Uematsu in the race to get those coveted big bucks and strut their shit around the interwebs, but if everyone sounds like everyone else, how do you stand out? If you're doing all the same shit all the forums tell you to do, then you're just waiting in line. Why should you avoid Gamedev? Because other people didn't find it useful? If it wasn't useful, there wouldn't be such a huge community there at all. Destroying possibilities in the desperate race for gigs is exactly the opposite of what you do to objectively improve your odds at landing gigs!
If luck is the real determinant for success, then how do you create more luck? Well, mathematically, that would mean you create more chances. How do you create more chances? You do more things. You do ALL of it. You do NONE of it. You post on Gamedev. Buy some fucking ad space on there even. You get chummy with other musicians and indie gamers. You apply to big companies. You apply to small companies. You apply locally and you apply globally, and then when you're done with all that, you get creative and think far outside the box of what you can do next. They're ALL opportunities and they're all chances. You only fail for sure if you don't do it. That is just straight up math.
So let's review:
1. Don't get narrowminded. Try all of it and more. Go ahead and try Gamedev. It won't kill you.
2. Focus more on your art than trying to get work and be famous. If what you have is incredibly good and you price it right, people will beat down the door to get it. This is a fact of business.
3. All advice for music success is only helpful to a point, including this very fucking post I'm typing. Success is skill plus luck. Nothing else can be counted on. Pioneer your career.Finally, don't quit your day job. The irony of being an artist for a living is that the one thing that truly helps guarantee success for them is the one thing artists don't want to do - work a job. With steady income, you don't have to become dependent on the lottery tickets of music success. You can afford to take risks, be unique and have tools at your disposal to keep your product at envious quality.
Sounds like a lot of work? It sure does, but being successful always takes a lot of work one way or another.
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Here's what Wikipedia had to say:
The onboard Yamaha YM2610 sound chip gives the system 15 channels of sound with seven channels reserved specifically for digital sound effects.
Sound chip: Yamaha YM2610
4 concurrent FM channels (voices), four operators per channel
3 SSG channels
1 programmable noise channel
ADPCM-A: 6 ADPCM channels, 18.5 kHz sampling rate, 12-bit audio depth[31]
ADPCM-B: 1 ADPCM channel, 1.85–55.5 kHz sampling rate, 16-bit audio depth[31]
2 interval timers
1 low frequency oscillator (LFO)
Sound/Work RAM: 2KB
Sound ROM: 128 KB on-board (only less than 32 KB used), up to 512 KB sound ROM on cartridgesHaving not a great reference or much thinking into what composers did for the NEO GEO, it sounds like what they used was pretty similar to all the other arcade stuff at that time, which was closer to the Sega Genesis output than anything else for a while. Sega Genesis is YM2612. It looks like they could handle some samples as needed and likely used a lot of the popular modules at the time for it - Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kurzweil. So if you take a look at what modules were released in the late 80s and early 90s, you can figure that's what they used.
An article for the NEO GEO CD says it could read Redbook audio, and that's where you'll get much more of the module use. It's pretty much impossible for anyone to tell exactly what was used if the audio people themselves didn't detail it fully at the time, but you can bet they used all the big ones and mixed them up together as needed.
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Umm... nope, not gettin' it. What would you need to flip that upside down for?
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Forgive my ever expanding idiocy, what is vertically flipping a MIDI?
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7 minutes ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:
That's actually why I want the better samples. I'm currently working on a game soundtrack, biggest and best paying gig I've had thus far. However, even though the client is satisfied with the results, this game is definitely advertising for me more than before - having been at trade shows and streamed in charity tournaments. The soundtrack is requiring increasing amounts of orchestrations and when someone can play my game and say that the music itself is really good, but walk just down the hall and play that other game where the composer who got a student discount on CineSamples has a mockup where you can hear all the little transitions between notes in the melodies, was recorded at MGM's scoring stage, is really deeply sampled, etc. that stands out even to the layman.
Forgive me, I find this confusing. Who are you competing against and where is this taking place? I'm asking because from the look of it, you're trying to spend the whole wad on a hypothetical situation.
Not trying to derail the topic, but $2,400 is a LOT of money (aforementioned exchange rates be damned) to make sure gamers don't go to "the other guy", which is what I assume is the crux motivation here based on how you say it. If your client's satisfied, and the music's good, what else do you really have to do?
Cinesamples:
YES - if you personally like Cinesamples better than PLAY for its sound quality and ease of workflow.
NO - if you're trying to compete with other composers for gamers' attention.
If that "other" game happens to have Jeremy Soule and whatever AAAAA symphony studio he's got working for him, or some crazy chiptune soundtrack, then much of the point of getting that super-expensive set was moot to start with. Sure you'll still have it for future work and kick ass with it, but was it really necessary? Could that have been done with $700?
Seguing into the last part of my point here, I remember a guy on KVR told me back many years ago that you should never spend a lot of money for sound equipment for a single job unless you expect to make eight times that cost back in the job. I don't know how far that koan goes around or if 8x is unnecessarily high, but it makes sense to me at least. Best paying is a good promise, but until it's all said, done and paid, a promise is all it is and we all, by now, know anything could happen in the interim.
Again, my primary concern is the high budget itself. $250? Meh, go ahead, that's not too heavy to lose. $1,000? Pretty big, be careful on it. $2,400? Wow. That's a lot for one promise, dude. Food for thought.
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I might suggest you not blow the entire JUST-under-$2,500 on samples alone. No matter what you end up getting, save some of that money for advertising what you do with it to help justify what you spent on the samples, fam.
I'm a bit blown away by that number too. I've been buying VST stuff for 12 years and I don't think it's totaled $2,500 yet. <:O
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Died at 96? ***damn, he really hung in there, didn't he? Should change his death certificate to indicate "Alan Old" passed away...
I'm just joshing out of respect. Anyone who hangs in there close to 100 is worthy of admiration and more. They should make a shrine for his Scottish accent alone, it was awesome enough to warrant it.
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A good suggestion! Didn't look specifically for field recorders, so that I'll go hunting for. Thanks dude.
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"Meteo, how many times can you resurrect a dead topic?"
AS MANY TIMES AS IT TAKES.As I wait to get the XV-5050 repaired and collect the Behringer to test it out, I had a new question. Do they make audio interface devices that also record to .WAV right there in the box and let me take the song out with a USB stick or something? I figure they do, but I haven't come across one yet.
With some of these audio interfaces seeming to have driver issues with Windows, I figured it was worth asking about. Thank you!
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I realize this is probably not the best place to go looking around for a programmer for a particular type of engine, but I'm asking around elsewhere and I'd always like to give OCR people the gig if possible.
I've been attached to do music and additional admin work for a game since about this time last year and I'm asking on the director's behalf for someone who can help us get together a demo of our game. We lost a lot of progress last month due to a calamitous event and he needs to hire someone to help us get back on track.
It is a paid gig, though I don't know how much is being offered yet. It's indie work, but not peanuts or anything unreasonably small like $50 or $100. And for right now it's just to help us get a demo together, not the entire game.
If anyone's interested in this or knows someone I can talk to, please PM here. Thank you!
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On top of recommending Willrock too, I recommend you clarify your topic title that you're really only looking for a guitarist and not someone to provide additional original music.
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Probably not. I'm not in charge of that, but I shouldn't think there's any problem there.
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It comes to me. Eventually.
Phrasing. Boom. Nailed it!
How are you enjoying it so far?
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Need to tell us a bit more than that, sir. More about what your channel is, what type of remix music, the main motivation of working for you (like compensation), etc.
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Youtube's copyright algorithm and such has been known to be problematic for some time now. I would not be surprised if you're just caught up in the flaws of that program.
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New question! Better to ask it here than make a new thread.
My absence here from last was posted was due to a variety of things, but none the less of which was acquiring a Roland Xv-5050 which will hopefully be the last Roland module I'll ever need. Yesterday I spent some time trying to do a basic line-in recording of it, but I'm having yet another quandary that Google has yet to answer for me.
I got some 1/4" adapters for my RCA cable, but I'm finding the Roland's Output A is giving me a lack of balance in terms of stereo when I plug it into my computer's line-in to work in FL Studio 11. Output A is Left/Mono and Right. I thought Left/Mono meant that the signal could be Left stereo OR mono, not Mono and Right and the right side of the recording is significantly louder as a result.
With or without an external audio recording unit, I'm concerned how I'll be able to record balanced stereo if Left doesn't seems to only give me mono while right gives me right stereo. I tried recording in Output B (which is not Left/mono and right) and all that gave me was a super loud and distorted recording. There's an SPDIF out function on it, but I don't have SPDIF recording in and I don't think I can afford to put one in.
One thing I did gather from Google is that a lot of devices have Left/Mono and Right, so there's bound to be some knowledge on how to overcome it without building an entire studio. What should I do to overcome it?
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And to think, not two weeks ago Prince was just an eccentric, nearly forgotten, internetphobic religious nut who hadn't a good album since before Final Fantasy VI was released - now he's ironically experiencing the biggest career resurrection of his life... as it ended.
That's what drives me nuts about the way people mourn artists and celebrities. Where was all this support for him for the last 15 years? Yeah, everyone's playing Purple Rain, When Doves Cry and Red Corvette today, but who's playing any of his more recent albums? The one he gave away with a newspaper? Emancipation? Elixir? Granted, I don't think you can just pull those up on Youtube or anything, but he did a lot more beyond the 80s and early 90s that everyone is centered on today.
I have to wonder if it's really the artist you're mourning or the era he came from. I kinda wish I could find a cover of Prince singing "Don't Know What You Get 'Til It's Gone" to punctuate my post with, but this pitiful acknowledgement that I have nothing is all I can muster.
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She's not kidding about that "dare" part either...
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That and the general difficulty and fickle nature of advertising creative works. C'mon Strader, it's just a joke. I'm not sure if you're actually saying you're buying it there or not, so a humorous jaunt into surreality is my default there.
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Already did. I gave $8 to a 4-K drive and signed it "Brandon Strader".
What is 4-K? Well, it's basically the KKK, but the extra K is for "Kardashian".
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For anyone who may be interested, this book is now in Kindle form.
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If you can't see the full title, this problem is actually fixed and I'm not asking for help. Instead, I'm detailing and archiving the problem/solution so anyone else who might run into this ungodly issue may find it and get it solved.
Problem:
(As previously posted on Game Audio Denizens)I'm having one hell of a strange problem. I've finished a track I'm doing on commission and I go to export a .WAV of it and something in it is causing my Windows 7 computer to have some considerable issues.
- Windows Media Player will not play it and causes it to freeze up. Winamp somehow plays it correctly.
- If I have ANYTHING recognize it, then Windows will start hanging up, not showing certain folder icons, causing other bizarre hang ups I've never seen before.
- I can shred the file with Glary Utilities, but it doesn't show so in the conventional way. It hangs up and freezes too, but the file is gone.
- MP3s of the song works and does not give me the same problems.
- My DAW, FL Studio 11, does not do this with other .WAVs. I did a whole other song file and it didn't give me the same problem.
The fuck is going on here? Has anyone had this problem before?
Edit: Rather, what I posted here doesn't include that one render of the .WAV absolutely would not vanish with Glary Utilities. Nothing I tried, Glary, simple delete, shredding with AVG, FileAssassin, using CMD.exe, rebooting, check disking, etc. Nothing would get this one render to delete, however the solution still applies.
Solution:
(Also previously posted on Game Audio Denizens)So last night I posted an EPIC problem that a .WAV file was giving my computer and was asked to post on it if I fixed the problem.
Well holy ***damn motherfucking hell, I fixed it. After many attempts to delete it through conventional and hardcore computer maintenance means - shred with AVG, shred with Glary Utilities, that CMD.exe method, rebooting, disk checking and more, here's how I fixed it:
Audacity.
This .WAV file is pretty much Pazuzu but, oddly enough, Audacity and Winamp were able to open it and play it correctly. So what I did just now was open the problematic file straight from the original (don't make a copy or anything), put a fade-out on the whole thing (just to put a random effect on it) and export it under the same name. It gave me two files, the one with the same file name and one with old-1 at the end of it.
But praise be to Jesus (and I mean that), that somehow fixed the problem. Not only was I able to delete the file, but I was able to salvage the final WAV too into a properly working file that I can give my employer.
Take this down for future reference, denizens. If your sound file is completely fucking up your computer as if it was a virus, try opening it in Audacity, edit it, and see if that can work.
Big Roland style Synth Brass
in Music Composition & Production
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Synth 1 has some big ass brass in it. You need to get the additional libraries for it, but it's all free.
Roland also released a VST version of their Sound Canvas. Not exactly the fix you might be looking for, but worth looking at. It is not free.