Meteo Xavier

That actually sounds like something I want to watch. I'll look for it.

Then again, it's like you said, we probably should've figured that out a long time ago. Also, compare and contrast the arrogance of most music celebrities versus how much music they actually compose by themselves, and it's still a pretty "meh" event.

Meh. This sort of thing is a LOT more common in all your favorite media than you'd be willing to believe. Seriously, go pick out your favorite games, music, movies, books, etc. there's a sizable chunk of all that being ghost written and the celebrities taking the credit to help sell it.

Sorry, but you guys getting really hung up on this are still missing some key points here. 1. Performers at Halftime only play for 12-15 minutes, not the 2-3 hours they usually do. 2. They see huge boosts in album sales immediately after. They aren't paid directly by NFL, but it does eventually mean some $ coming up for it. 3. Do you REALLY think the top talent they get to do the halftime show would bother if they literally got nothing out of it? You guys are freaking out over virtually nothing. You're making it sound like Bruno Mars agreeing to perform without direct payment suddenly means you need to give up music and get a job at Hardee's because now no one will ever pay for music anymore. Get a damn grip. Let me ask this question: How many of you have seen your album sales directly affected negatively by Bruno Mars agreeing to perform without direct payment? I'm going to guess a hardy NONE. This is all academic, theoretical chaos, not things that were going to have any significant impact on you personally. If you are concerned about how much money you're going to be making as a music artist, I recommend KEEPING YOUR NOSE OUT OF OTHER ARTISTS' MUSIC BUSINESS AND WORKING MORE ON YOUR OWN. Come now.

Gotcha, that makes more sense. The "invite-only" thing still sounds like a standard submission structure labels have if I'm now understanding it correctly. Is that similar to the OCR judging process? I don't have anything I want to submit, I just want to know more.

There were eras when companies really did virtually mill out music contracts to any rebellious dickhead with a guitar. It was still hard, but it wasn't nearly as hard as it is today now that music appreciation is as widely varied as it is and yet still somehow completely homogenialized into everything short of Ragtime. Not to even mention how the advent of the DAW was the music industry equivalent of God flooding the world without giving Noah so much as a head's up.

You can demand payment for art 'til the cows come home, but that won't help to influence potential buyers who can find someone cheaper and potentially better to do the job. He who has the gold makes the rules. We might need to just face facts - the days where you can follow your dreams of doing whatever art you want, get paid a king's ransom for it and have the whole world love you for it might be over. Everybody's wanted that dream for the last 100 years, and the way things are now are because everyone's been trying to get that perfect combination of HAVING IT ALL. We might have to grow up, set our artistic goals more realistically, being thankful for what we get, and get real jobs instead of moaning on how everyone and everything is raining down on us poor artists. I don't mean to sound like a cross between Red Foreman and a Communist, but c'mon, we're old enough to know how the real world works. 100,000,000 artists all vying for the same ultimate prizes means very, very few were going to get anything out of it. We knew the risks the moment the minute we listened to music on the internet and decided to try that for ourselves. Or should have, at least. I'm really not trying to be a buzzkill here, I really just think this is nature's way of reminding us the true beauty of art is art itself, not how much you get paid for it.

I haven't even been able to create a process yet, much less evolve it. Mine is in a constant flux of evolution and devolution. Frankly, all this talk from you lot just sounds like double thought gobbledegook to me.

I have a couple questions I'm confused about. OCR Records is currently "by invite-only, but also non-exclusive". What does that mean? It's closed but open at the same time? I'm not criticizing at all, I just don't understand what that means. Also, I've been seeing records on there that were also released on different labels, like Ubiktune. How does that work exactly? Did the artists pull them from other labels to go into that one or are you paying that 80% to the labels? Thank you!

I could personally care less if a top-selling artist with millions and millions of dollars in the bank already doesn't get paid for 12-20 minutes of performance or however long halftime is. What confuses me is how the "exposure" hook works there, as that is also a pretty useless thing as they get a lot of exposure too. I'm not sure how that gets the AAA talent either. They probably get top viewing experience at least - like you saw at one point the cameras pointing to Paul McCartney, Michael Douglas, etc. Spending 4 hours partying with them at the biggest game of the year ever has got to be worth $1 million or so. *shrug* Now if they didn't pay the stagehands who get those stages set up and torn down on field in fucking MINUTES, I'd be livid from here to kingdom come.

Are we talking the major celebrities like Bruno Mars, Madonna, etc.? Because if anything, Janet Jackson got a LOT of exposure, and SHE'S the one who paid for it, iirc.

Love your hyperbolic bickering there. To the point, FM synth generally can do simple waveform stuff like squares, saws and triangles. With the grinding, slightly distorted nature of the sound, it does actually make some pretty meaty sounding leads that cut through and soar and shit. I get your frustration with FM, I kind it really overrated with mostly chunky, bassy, elemental metal type sounds, but it's still kinda fun and you can definitely do some killer leads on it. I think the key there is actually to scale back to simplicity as opposed to working harder to craft something there.

Why the name change? If'n you don't mind me asking.

Wrong. A composer's job is simply to compose music for a game. Whether he or she has to fit it to something or whether they simply need to come up with something entertaining to listen to during certain segments of gameplay is up to the main director and the composer to work out. What is "fitting", even by definition, is highly subjective. I personally think video game music lost its way, ever since it became being more about providing film score style music to be "background" to the entertainment of a game as opposed to catchy, melodic bits that ADDED to the entertainment of a game. I could care less if progressive rock music in 9/13 is playing over my character searching a dark forest if I quite like the tune. This was a precedent set as far back as two decades ago, and it's a precedent I set for myself as I look for composing jobs. I don't get many jobs because of it, but oh well, I didn't get into this to turn out 153 minutes of minimalist drones and horns and be some amateur indie designer's sound puppet for >$300 or free. Quality trumps quantity, and there's a LOT of quantity out there right now. I now await someone's academic superiority to put me in my place here.

I remember that (though I did forget about it for a time), but a lot of big name stores pull stunts like that all the time, some known and some not, and I very much believe the reason it's particularly sore for Gamestop is because people were hot on hating it well before that. I still say they get more shit than they deserve.

I saw some used copies of Metroid Prime Trilogy at Gamestop for like $43 each, but even better than that, I got them to special order for me LEGEND OF HEROES: TEAR OF VERMILLION for $2.99 and no extra charge. Not sure why everyone hates Gamestop all the time. I've never gotten anything but decency at least out of them.

What was a mistake about it? Seems people liked it well enough.

I'm just going to leave this here... http://kotaku.com/how-to-fix-how-to-fix-nintendo-articles-1512730743

EWQLSO isn't the holy grail of orchestral software that people used to think of it as, but it's not the outdated, over-rated piece of crap everyone thinks it is today. It's good quality sounds with a somewhat difficult engine that requires some real work to get to use correctly. I'm not sure if it can handle really, really heavy, pro-quality orchestration templates without needing a slave computer or something, but I know you can do pro-quality work on a modern computer by itself without really needing a crazy amount of customization and workhorse power to it. If you needed a lot of processing power to use EWQLSO, that knowledge would come with the rest of the hype and infamy that gets tossed out on it now.

I was about to say the same thing. A near $700 Vienna library to START with? C'mon Shaggy, that's a really expensive and borderline elitist suggestion. Edit: Scrub the Kontakt suggestion, I'll just go into more detail here. I've had EWQLSO Gold on a computer that is probably 5-6 years old by now with not much fuss on it. I never built huge orchestral templates with it, but a lot of the infamy the program has with people calling it "for big Hollywood sounds" and being glitchy, problematic, etc. etc. are largely overblown. It can be a problematic piece of software, but I wouldn't say I've had larger issues with it than I have others. If you put some elbow grease into your MIDI orchestration, and you'll have to no matter what you get, EWQLSO Gold can be a starting AND end product. You can definitely make gentler orchestral tracks out of it, and I've heard EWQLSO used in commercial projects that sounded objectively pretty good and realistic that would hold up to quality today. Vienna's amazing, but it's the highest rank software out there and the price reflects it. It's like saying your first car should be a Jaguar. That rhymes.

It's not necessarily a WAYS off, we just don't know when we're expecting it to be done and January has just been historically crazy, creating an obstacle for a lot of people. The next album preview has already long since been planned to be made up and released once we got everything in. I am tempted to wring up a pretty dirty little preview sampler myself to help satisfy, because you're right, the development on this project has just been supernaturally slow and there just hasn't been any healthy way to get around it, but I also don't really have the authority to make or release one. Rozovian's got that and he wants to wait until they're all in. These things just happen. If this were an album project for a major hit game that everyone knew, we would've accomplished this album 3x over by now as everyone on it would've likely been jazzed up enough to do it quickly and we would've gotten support from most of the major remixers on this site. SD3 is only a cult hit, so we weren't able to drum up interest as quickly. Doesn't really matter though, we have a high quality triple album from a LOT of talent across the OCR ages and beyond, and this album is guaranteed not to fail at this point. All it is is a matter of time now. So stay patient, you'll most likely be seeing this album sooner than later. Good to see we still have people salivating for it - keep that hunger alive and you will be quite satisfied once it comes out.

That seems very loosely related at best, but I guess it still technically qualifies... kinda.

I get that, I'm just confused or misunderstanding something as I wasn't aware the implementation was part of the mixing/mastering process. I can... kinda see that it is, but I've never heard of implementation just generally as a part of mixing and mastering.

Man, I JUST discovered Purity and I friggin' love it. I'm waiting to get some more video work in so's I can buy it. Only thing I haven't figured out in Purity is how to make their drum sounds sound as good as the demos. They seem lacking and not great for a broad sound range.

I would expect chiptunes, yes, but I think I'd be more pleasantly surprised and jazzed up if the soundtrack played against my expectations to deliver something that held my interest. With the abundance of FL Studio game composers these days, "fitting the mood" seems to be more of an excuse to be lapse on the quality of the composition and focus more on just confusing players for thinking it's retro. For this reason, on the rare occasions I actually get into talks to do soundtrack work, I no longer focus on what "fits the mood" or satisfies the client (of course, I tell the client this beforehand), I focus on what would actually sound pretty good coming out of speakers as the gamer is playing. Composers today need to remember that they're not just forgettable music artists finally getting a paying gig, they're producing something that gives players a reason to play the game. When I compose for a game, I'm not thinking it's another album I get to charge $9.99 for on Bandcamp, I'm a developer working towards a game quality that players will find reasons to come back and play, and to do that properly, one has to go above expectations and moods. As you can imagine, because of this, I don't get a lot of soundtrack work. Oh well, I don't really want to spend 5-6 months sucking up to an indie developer who doesn't know anything about music just to get a few $ and a lesser quality album with my name on it to blast out on Facebook sponsored posts. I can do that stuff with an original album and still get higher quality with complete creative control on the final product. I think I'm digressing, so I'll stop there for now.