Meteo Xavier

And this image will remain with me until one week after my dying day. I may need to pass on that textbook for now then. If I'm going to spend $100 on a tome without a class set up for it, I should do better with something that teaches composition in practice. I doubt I'll ever be working on a project that demands high level of music theory on it anyway. Any recommendations for good, fundamental or intermediate composition learning then?

I understand. It's not so much the size of the individual book I'd be weary about, it's the grand total of how much reading and digesting I'd have to do and keep track of is where I start getting weak. I wouldn't mind an 800 page tome if I felt it could do the job easier for me than 1200 combined pages across 4-5 other books. So this textbook you have - does it present its music theory in a context designed to teach you how to compose? Like, could I read this and apply its exercises while I'm in FL Studio (the lack of piano roll is not a problem, I can read most staff pretty well) or is it straight-up theory that I'm supposed to figure out how to carry over to application? I'm not sure if that question comes across as specific as I want to, so I'll put in an allegory - think of it like, if we were discussing martial arts strength building guides, I would ask if your book recommendation is designed to show me exercises I apply directly to martial arts training, or if it's just weight-lifting without any reference to how I use martial arts. Hopefully that makes sense.

Well, let's bring the topic back full circle on textbooks. What titles do you recommend for music theory that goes into good detail on textures and texture reduction? Preferably not a 400 page hardcore tome, but I also understand availability there might be limited if it exists at all.

I have and use a piano after several years of lessons on it, I just don't perform on it. I've used traditional music theory books before (I thought I still had one somewhere?) but I actually need specific context based instruction, otherwise I typically don't get it. There's a much longer answer there, but it's not necessary here. I'm curious enough to want to see why a "music theory for computer music" book exists and what could be learned for that specific context.

Neblix, your post there is excellent and I want you to know that. I have seen some books around that talk about "Music Theory for Computer Musicians" or something like that. Wouldn't that fall under those categories? It seems odd to me that something wouldn't be a basic thing to discuss in most computer music books, but I've only ever seen two and I've barely cracked them open, so I have no reason to think it's false either... Like this one: http://www.amazon.ca/Theory-Computer-Musicians-Michael-Hewitt/dp/1598635034/ref=pd_sim_b_6/186-8169589-8862642

It's all good man, my accolades precede my actual skill compared to many other remixers here - even those well a decade younger than me. Thats why I'm bursting to get what shit I have together and re-build my music education with something focused and proper.

I know this, I've been working on this for 10 years, but I spent those 10 years doing it with whatever I could figure out and find on my own on limited means with a quasi-learning disability. As such, I'm experienced and competent at making tracks, but I'm missing so many fundamentals that I need to take what I've got and apply it to a focused and proper foundation to really do it right. I meant to focus this particular topic into textbooks and organized written material as that's something I don't see represented and shared here very often. I wasn't really trying to do another "how do I get good at doing music?" kinda thing. That book looks pretty good, btw. That's what I'm talking about.

I'll have a look at those later today or tomorrow. Any textbook recommendations you might have?

I think it's been a while since there was a dedicated topic for this and it's a good time to start it anew. I'm still on a never-ending quest to improve my general sound before I commit any more effort to Ocremixing and I never did get a chance where I could dedicate a focused amount of time to improving. I keep looking up production/composition tips and Youtube tutorials, but they really aren't helping that much. Too sporadic and a lot of amateur-level stuff trying to pretend it's professional-level solution, and no cohesion. I figure I either need to hire a private instructor or mentor for improving my DAW music skill (tough luck finding that in East Tennessee), or I need to get back into computer textbooks. I have two already, the Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman and the MIDI Guide To Orchestration. I haven't had time to really crack them open and digest what they have, but they look to be good tools for learning specific types of genres. I'm still on the look out for something maybe a bit more general, something that teaches more on how to get samples to sound more realistic, virtual synth techniques, how to use reverb and get your sounds sounding like they're correctly placed, how to use compression, how to use transitions and song dynamics to change up tracks, how to get songs sounding more lively, fun or emotional... a lot of those kinds of things that I'm still pretty much a beginner on. I've found a lot of books that seem like they teach those kinds of things in objective, easy-to-understand ways, but they're over 15 years old. Certainly there are more modern books out there that teach these things for modern equipment. I know you can go to class to learn how to create competent and quality tracks from composition to production phase in DAW, so there must still be some good textbooks, step-by-step and instructional material to go with. I say let's just open wide the field to get computer music book recommendations for all questions.

If I didn't have a burgeoning $100 budget set aside for Fusion Field, this is something I would totally get. If I come into a surprise surplus of money and this is still available, I would like to get it.

Not that I have a lot of popular opinions anyway, but in my 5+ experience as a freelance composer for things, I've found this oft-repeated philosophy to be meaningless air in actual practice. This was something I learned back in Summer of 2012 when I lost a $2,000 composing gig to Virt. I was a frontrunner for that gig until he showed up, seemingly out of the blue, and I quite simply could not compete. I wasn't too disappointed about losing the gig, I knew from the get-go I was lucky I got as far as I did, but I was extremely confused. For years, I had heard every Ocremix musician who went on to actually work in games say this same thing "never charge what you're not worth" "never charge less than $300-$500 a minute for music". They fucking meant it too, and if anyone can actually justify charging $500 a minute for music, it's most definitely Virt. He's still peerless in terms of quality. So why then did I lose this gig to him? There was only a budget for $2,000 and it required more than an hour's worth of music. That's not even $35 a minute. Then a chilling thought occurred to me, and it suddenly made a lot of sense why the veteran composers were always telling the amateurs to charge these high prices for their music - this isn't something they actually practice rigorously, this is something they tell amateurs to remove them as low-cost competition. And the more I dove into this subject, the worse it got. I could sum up what posts by Jeremy Soule I read as "wow, the rich really do want to keep getting richer" while other, less known composers working for A and AAA titles make less than what I made 12 years ago working fast food at a water park, at 1.5x the hours too. The divide between the "haves" and the "have nots" in this line of work could be called "Grand Canyon II" (I was going to make an Occupy joke here, but I couldn't think of a good one). So I see what you're saying and I think, "The sake of the industry? Why would I want to keep an industry like this going?" It is well known that the music industries are cut-throat, but what that actually means isn't often detailed, possibly for good reason. The same composers who you look up to and give you advice are, more often than you want to believe, consider you something to be eliminated so you don't take high $ business from them. They might bad mouth you in private (I've seen that happen) to sully your reputation, they will enter competitions and auditions they are painfully overqualified for (I've seen that happen multiple times), they'll even steal other peoples' music (a common practice in film composing!) and SEO stuff ranging from keywords to whole domain names to capitalize on their brand (Kage, anyone?). Why? Fame and fortune. Same shit as always. If you really could buy a used car for something you composed in less than an hour on the piano and have sections of the whole world love you and think you're a God for it - you'd be hard pressed to give up any grasp you have on that opportunity too. You'd pull some shit to make sure you still had your lottery ticket and you wouldn't even know you were doing it, much less care. We all, to some degree, would. That's why more and more and more people keep wanting to become professional musicians and actors and models and turn it into this human ideal where art is the only thing that matters, and business and hard work are Satan's penis made flesh. All to be a star. What defends this? Simple - "it's business". And they're right, it is. But it's also business for someone like me to want to undercut $500-a-minute musicians for $500-a-soundtrack. If the industry operates on the law of the jungle, then I'll hunt where it hurts the most - the checkbook. That's the only real sin here, isn't it? Well, Hell isn't scary to someone who's already been burned a lot of times. Damn right I'll do $500 voicework for $10.50 and a sandwich (provided that sandwich came from Quiznos and not the client), I don't need to drain a client of money and call it "business". Maybe I don't like the philosophy of greed, maybe I want the client to use the money they didn't spend on a high-priced musician to provide a really good birthday party for their young child, maybe there's more to life than art and getting rich and famous doing it. It's my business after all - who has the right to tell me what to do with it? (Apart from federal mandates that is).

That does sound like me, I have a near fetish for undercharging. >

Why you're missing the point and responding with irritated arrogance. There is mixing on-the-job experience, yes, but I'm not talking about any of that. I'm talking about the development before that. It takes work (not the synonym for jobs, the synonym for hard effort) to graduate to any point of mixing where you can call yourself a professional. Even at the point where you need on-the-job experience, you have already graduated the prerequisite concept that you're not going to love every minute of what you do to get paid for what you do, or what you have to do to learn it. If this concept isn't learned at the very start of the journey, then it will be eventually as the only paid work that comes in is shit the professional really does not want to mix, and it will be much harder then, the potential for business breakdown is much greater, and all the time and money spent to learn it in the first place is wasted. I don't know how to expand the concept of work development any further. Much of this should be obvious and as fundamentally basic as humanly possible anyway.

Is there a decent unpaid equivalent for unpaid work? I wasn't really wanting to do any in a professional capacity, I wanted to do it as a hobby or let it build into something I could offer for $ if I got really good at it. Not loving the idea of feedback for upped search engine placement either. Good idea for those hiring, but for people like me who just aren't set up well to being a client's magic genie, it's a bit more difficult, and the only people who ever leave me feedback for anything are the crazy people that waste my time, make unreasonable changes, don't pay, and then have the nerve to post "THIS GUY'S AN ASPIE DUMBSHIT. DON'T HIRE HIM." I even got that for buying Dragon Quest V DS...

What is "pay-to-play" in this context? You mean you have to pay to audition for voice work, or they pay you to perform, or something similar?

Did you ever post on how you got so many people contacting you for voice work? Aside from offering quality performances, I thought I saw somewhere you actually went into good detail the things you were doing to network yourself into getting more regular voicework from a load of different people.

What does this have to do with the general concept of "work"? Work is learning to do something you don't particularly love doing, and then doing it. This principle has applied to general humanity and has been the primary reason things actually got done for thousands of years up until the hippies started rewriting ALL the fundamentals for how society works instead of just the things that really needed to be rewritten. We have been sliding ever since. /digression. Anyways, work is important no matter the context, because even in jobs you love, there will be things about it that are unappealing to do, and if you don't learn to do them anyway, you miss out on important elements and skills you need to do your job well.

So should I just give that stuff to you? I hadn't put it all together yet, but it's a bunch of social marketing tools, links, and a spreadsheet of game website contacts (obtained by public contact links, it basically just cuts down 8-10 hours of trying to find them). My book publisher has been using a bunch of them recently, and went from 16 likes on Facebook to almost 60,000 within a month's time, I figured there must be some good use there.

This is maybe the fourth time I've asked someone this, and for some reason the question keeps getting ignored. Who's actually running the label or at least marketing part of it? I have some things I wish to donate to help increase PR and potential sales for it.

Usa turned in a WIP for Reincarnation. It's pretty early and basic right now, but it's got a nice, retro chill vibe a'going. Mark it Rozo, Usa's got Reincarnation now.

I'll take it.

Am I allowed to admit I'm not in the beta? How do these NDAs work?

KVR is a hellhole of prima-donna elitists and boners offering 2 pages of jokes at the expense of your spelling accuracy before someone graces the thread with something useful. You might be better waiting here. Yes, I am compulsively downplaying KVR at every opportunity I get. SOMEONE HAS TO!

Do you mean just the rhythm and drum samples or something more?

Who runs the marketing end of this record label? I've got a shit-ton of contacts, connections, and other tools I've been finding lately and using with my publisher that have produced some really sterling results, and could be useful in general.