Meteo Xavier

I disagree, an orchestral score for an 8-bit game might be a solid and challenging choice for a game score. Same thing vice versa. Sample choice still comes down to "arrangement", and not mixing. Also, where do you even get Roland SC88 samples? Other than random soundfonts, hard-to-obtain Virtual Sound Canvas, and questionable "sample packs" on Ebay, I don't think you can even find those anywhere without the module itself.

What's different about mixing VGM music as opposed to any other kind? You EQ, compress, reverb, and separate as best you can with the tools available same as any other. Looping isn't really a mixing thing (or at least I've never heard of it as such), that's more a question of composition and arrangement.

Light on updates, sorry, January has been a historic clusterfuck for most people I know now (seriously, the stories I could share with you border on surreal), but I just wanted to make a little post to show work and progress are still coming and nothing's been stopped or intentionally slowed down or nothin'.

What exactly did you hope to accomplish with a comment like that, 'blix? If all you wanted to say was "our other book recommendations are actually quite similar to this one", I have to wonder why you didn't just say that as opposed to something baiting for more argument. Moving on. I actually have the polar two, and the Dance Manual I quite like as well. Tell me about the middle three, please.

Maybe gamer standards are reaching unrealistic heights? I feel this statement tells me everything I need to know about Nintendo gamers today. The Wii U has games, but you're not playing them because they're not Zelda and Smash Brothers. Those are the only Nintendo franchises anyone seems to care about these days anyway. I won't go any further on it because I'm not a modern gamer in any significant capacity anymore, but every time I read one of these topics and I see gamers pretending they're market and industry experts (a lot of times even before they play systems and games), I have to wonder if a lot of it isn't just the gamer culture itself being more and more difficult to pin down and please. Worth a thought at least.

Undoubtedly. I gave an example from the MIDI Orchestration Guide earlier, but that was one of several goals I had for this topic.

Give a ring over to Shnabubula. He's the best keyboard player I've ever met and watched performance videos of from here.

I thought you had a keyboard player now...?

Aaron Mark sent me some samples of his Game Development Essentials: Game Audio book, or whatever it's called, and while I browsed through them and found a few useful tips, they are also more general "guidance" abstracts as opposed to solid information on how to do it. I'll probably get it anyway, or at least try to get a library to special order it, but not what I need know. On the other hand, I was also able to browse through The Complete Idiot's Guide To Music Composition and, praise the Lord, it is FULL of solid, useful information that I was lacking. I didn't get a chance to really go through it, but man alive, I probably should've gotten that a long time ago. I believe I will be drawing up an amateur syllabus thing once I get a chance to digest all this information, and either reformat this topic from my personal questing drama into showing off the texts and why they are useful, or at least do another topic on it.

Whats your definition of an awesome one, and what are the "mediocre" ones you're talking about?

Yes indeed.

No bridging options, Argle?

I ain't driving 4 hours west for that every week.

They have, and I will definitely be getting it. That was the best recommendation so far. What it looks like now is I will be getting that, that Hal Leonard Samples and Loops thing if I can find more info on it, and possibly the Game Audio Essentials by Aaron Marks if he gets back to me today. I contacted him on Facebook and he offered to send me sample sections of it for a preview. Hopefully, and this was the other real goal of doing this topic, I will be able to digest them and be able to build something of a casual... umm... I don't know if I want to use the word "syllabus" or "curriculum", but something out of that to give other burgeoning computer musicians lacking better access to music knowledge a good head start to getting their shit together for doing this stuff.

??? When did I say this? It's the first 50%-90% I want so I can go back and look for things to cover my gaps. Hard work and repetition don't do any good if you're missing parts from the first quarter of it. I was also sure I gave up on looking for a DAW bible. And yes, I may find that Coursera thing useful. I confess some intimidation at it as I look at it, but I have bookmarked it all the same, and may see if it's available and within my budget come Spring.

I'm going to interrupt at this moment because I was about to touch on this anyway, and this is an excellent springboard to it. This is a recurring theme I keep seeing among posts here, and it's one of the main reasons I keep challenging this idea that there are no books like this, it doesn't look like anyone's actually read a lot of them in the first place. Makes sense to me because they're $40-$100 each, but doesn't make sense to what you guys keep telling me. In the last couple pages, I've listed more than half a dozen titles. Has anyone actually read them? Not looked over, not browsed through, read. It's ok if not, my point starting this topic out was to update and see if anyone had recently used a more modern book to dispel these long-held ideas. I just cannot believe so many guides on these little things exist throughout the internet, on a booming industry, and yet it's impossible to commit to paper and binding.

Yes. I WANT the rote. That's the point. It doesn't matter to me if there are ten different ways to cook something, I would like ONE that others say is pretty good and reasonably easy to follow, and after I conquer that method, I will improve on it personally later. I didn't start music at the beginning, I started somewhere in the middle (as best I can describe), and hillbillied whatever skill I have on it in the meantime. I wasn't able to find much because the only music advice anyone ever gives is "just listen to it a shit-ton of times and you'll figure it out", which is nonsense. Youtube videos weren't that helpful either and there are no DAW tutors where I live. I found textbooks are actually far more useful to me than the others, based on ones I already have, so I ask if anyone can recommend others similar to them. I've explained my position here a dozen times, I don't know what the hangup is or why we're still going in circles here. I really don't think The Dance Manual and The Guide to MIDI Orchestration are the only two books that exist in the less abstract format of teaching music creation to someone like me.

It's all good man, I'm aspie as the day is long, and while I don't understand where the miscommunication is at either, I'm pretty used to this. I'm quite sure my approach here is not skewed, as I own at least one book that provides instruction on composition and MIDI sample production without being abstract about it - THE GUIDE TO MIDI ORCHESTRATION by Paul Gilreath. I haven't read much of it, but what things I have found in there is exactly what I'm looking for. The problem is it mostly pertains to Orchestral music, and I want to see if there are equivalents of this book for other genres or just general ones. I know they exist, but for some reason, this just confuses the hell out of people and I can't figure out why. Think of it this way, from my perspective, it's like me asking "I want to make chicken parmigiana, can anyone recommend a recipe for it?" and then having every response on a message board full of qualified chefs going, "What? What are you talking about? There are no recipes for chicken parmigiana." "But there are. Here's some right here (links), I just wondered which ones you might recommend if you'd tried them?" "Uh, what? No, there are no good recipes for that. Your approach is flawed. You can't make food by listing ingredients and instructions. You need to eat a lot of chicken parmigiana and study how it tastes, then you practice at it for 10,000 hours just randomly doing shit in the kitchen until you magically figure it out yourself. This is how professional chefs today have been making chicken parmigiana for decades - by spending 15 years developing a tongue, expert intuition and NEVER WRITING ANYTHING DOWN." If that was the only answer anyone ever gave you for anything on cooking, that would be pretty frustrating, yes? I know people write this stuff down and sell it on Amazon and I know you don't have to be born with natural music savant skills to do OCR and VGM music. Music is an art, yes, but there has to be some science behind it too that isn't just abstract theory. If it was, much fewer people would be doing music today. Anyway, I don't mean to rant on about how frustrating this process is and hopefully now I'll be done with it, I just wanted to know if anyone ever owned or read these books and found them pretty useful and reasonably specific in learning music production and composition on the computer. I know they exist. In other news, I recently got a hold of Aaron Marks on Facebook, and he recommended his other book - Game Development Essentials. That one, according to him, teaches how to create game music and game sound effects, which is definitely a skill I could use. Anyone read that one?

In the context of multiple books, yes. I was hoping to digest a maximum of 1200 pages combined at this time. Anyway, semantics. I was able to view an online version of that Game Audio book and it seems as though it doesn't actually cover anything production or composition, it's mostly just the business and technical end, which I need to read anyway, but below the priority of increasing quality.

Wrong, I'm looking for "organized final answers" on really complex art forms as an opposition to watching 1000 Youtube "tutorials" by cockney-accented amateurs ranging from vaguely useful to "WTF, you're teaching me to program synth portamento with GROSS BEAT?" I did not ask for it to be quick, I asked for it to be practical, organized, and accessible. I am prepared to put the time in once I can get that, as my pre-existing years of experience will make that go quicker. Short of getting access to a proper tutor for that niche tutoring subject, this is the next best course.

I was thinking about Zircon's 90 minute video, but from the description, it looks like it just shows me where everything in Fl Studio is and what it does, not how to use them properly.

Bringing the topic back to books, again, it seems I've found several ones worth looking into: http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=333733&lid=7&seriesfeature=HLRM&menuid=2899&subsiteid=66& http://www.counterpointdirect.co.uk/MIDI-Sequencing-Made-Easy-p/w-cos185a.htm https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=tU8LAAAAQBAJ&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKTAD0930BO1 http://musicstudiodirect.com/shop/Tutorial-Books-DVDs/Instructional-Books/Image-Line-FL-Studio-Bible-p1119.html http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Guide-Game-Audio/dp/0240810740/ref=pd_sim_b_5 It seems what I'm looking for are books relating to "MIDI" "sequencing" and "Game Audio". I forgot they actually make books tailored to game audio and FL Studio these days. Has anyone looked into these?

Well there's obviously more in an orchestral text I already have, I just was presenting an example of something simple and functionally specific. Perhaps to you (and this isn't a shot btw) having a text list out the articulations and ranges an instrument has provides an idea how to achieve realism in a DAW, but for me it's functionally useless. I already have a text for orchestral music, I'm asking for something that teaches MIDI sequencing stuff in a more general context than orchestral or dance, which I already have, if such a thing exists. That and maybe an intermediate composition how-to book, since I'm likely to get that Mixing Secrets book mentioned earlier for production. Not trying to sound irritated, I just wonder how my replies keep getting distorted or the message not coming across correctly. I have an orchestration book and it kicks ass, I was just wondering if one exists that teaches more general DAW sequencing and production stuff for a wider range of genres.

I still don't really know what that means, it either does or does not provide answers to those subjects. This may be a dumb question, but if there's a "theoretical" approach to composition in publication, is there a "functional" approach to ask for too? Is that maybe what I should be looking for? As I crack open my MIDI Orchestration book some more, I see quite a bit in there that is functional instruction even on random pages. Page 302: "A great way to add drama to a phrase is by building to a FFF dynamic via a crescendo. There are a number of ways to do this, and the brass section, along with percussion, can be very helpful to implement this dynamic change. One approach is to start with a quieter phrase and then add brass instruments, one at a time or group by group, to achieve a gradually increasing thickness and volume. Now that is what I call functional instruction. It's pretty specific and talks in a tone that really seems like a natural answer to "How can I add drama to a phrase?" What I'm looking for is more instruction like that that can be applied to a range of genres working in DAW, if such things exist.

Ok guys, this is really much more complicated and lacking focus than I would have liked for this topic. Please argue about the hardcore academics of music theory in one of the many other topics we have here on that subject. While there had been some good recommendations, the impression I seem to be getting at this moment is "despite the fact that I haven't seen many music textbooks, I can tell you the ones you're looking for don't seem to exist", you might understand why I find that logic confusing. I really struggle to think, in 20 years or more years of computer music, nobody's taken all the things you can find in all the how-to snippets online and organized them in a cohesive way. Particularly as I own two of them that I know do it for very specific purposes. My own questions and questing aside, I'd like to refocus this back onto recommendations for practical written, published, guides and sources for musicians like us. I'd prefer recommendations for beginner-intermediate level stuff that covers a lot of questions remixers and those wanting to be remixers and starting-level VGM composers typically ask here, if you know of any. I myself would probably not be above something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-Music-Composition/dp/1592574033/ref=pd_sim_b_4. Has anyone read or looked at this one?