Meteo Xavier

I haven't been getting much in the way of hate, just fair marks on the parts where the mix was weak, because it really was problematic. Thanks for the compliment dude - it's good to see people are still enjoying it. It was a much bigger hit on Youtube than it was here.

This is news to me. I've been bumming around various studios and equipment setups, including the stage ones at Dollywood, and the only time I've ever seen a Mac was at my old community college studio. Maybe its different in Nashville, but to the best of my knowledge, everyone down here use their own performing skills to record, not with computers.

I have to wonder if topic progressions like these actually help the topic creator or just confuse him further.

Frog Pocket

At the risk of starting an argument on DAWs, bullshit. Fl Studio can be your go-to program for that just as well as those. If you figure out how get a thing going in there, you could do album after album on pretty much any DAW.

I agree with this general point, because in my day, I've had as much as an interested publisher actually BREAK INTO MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT to see if I'm bad-mouthing any of his associates and lost one because I was (without known he was an associate), but I haven't seen much of this. Does this kind of thing happen much on Youtube?

Our local boy Skrypnyk does the IDM, why not you should look him up?

You don't know how game collecting works, do you?

Is this related to the rest of your post, or is this a side note to it? If it's as a result of Square-Enix bollocks, there's really no reason not to contribute if you wanted to - we're not celebrating Square-Enix, we're celebrating an awesome craft of work by an awesome composer. Also, from here on out, let's keep the Square-Enix kicking to a nonexistence. There's so much of that across the internet that this project thread doesn't really need to be a station for it either. It's a subject that, quite frankly, makes me want to puke and I think we should save our posts for better project construction instead of repeating the same love-hate complaints people have been posting about SE for the last 7 years. It's redundant, pointless and may serve more negative needs down the road. We don't need it here.

I like how every single discussion remotely surrounding around Final Fantasy becomes a volume of vitriol against Square-Enix by people who refuse to acknowledge the company anymore, yet won't hesitant to passionately destroy it in online literature as though they were referring to the man that killed their father. It's a really bizarre dynamic and many of the people I see writing it are much younger than I am, and I was just barely old enough to appreciate the classic Square-Enix catalog that build them in the first place myself - so what is this emotional attachment stemming from then? I'm not saying the vitriol isn't justified, I'm just fascinated by the contrast. If you hate something so much and refuse to lend it any support, the same thing you've been saying for 8 years, why still talk about it? Normally people just ignore that kind of thing altogether...

There are many albums and symphonies currently available to fans. You can chill out now.

If they don't want it in the public domain, that's their business. The public doesn't get granted these rights just because they enjoy them a whole hell of a lot. Sucks for the fans, but, hey, not everyone who creates generation-defining content like Square-Enix has in the past really wants to be as insanely open about what they do with it as others.

Pretzel himself did not give me that distinction - probably because a video of someone playing the video is not useful in a trailer format. That comes off nasty when I don't intend it to, but I'm not sure why you're even giving that clear. A video of someone playing it on their TV screen is no good, what would use it for? Who would even have the cart to play it on? (Actually, if I bought a cheap copy of it, I could on my modded SNES)

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT There are some new developments that every remixer should be currently aware of and will make some differences to the final product. I have only learned this today, and even though we have time on our side, I want to get it out ASAP all the same. As part of OCR's agreement with Square-Enix, there are new restrictions making album projects from their game catalog and we need to check to make sure every facet and asset of the project is compliant with those restrictions. These include: 1. No use of ANY official artwork or logos - fan art is ok, but we can't use anything they developed at Square Enix. 2. No use of ANY samples from SD3 itself. ALL REMIXERS NEED TO CHECK THEIR REMIXES to make sure they don't have any of the sound effects or instrumentation they programmed at their offices. I myself have a remix with the Whale Call sample from Secret of Mana and this needs to be edited out. 3. No use of ANY gameplay for the video trailer. Sort of ironic considering how long we tried to get some for the video, but we need to make do without it. There might be more, but that's what I have for right now. Additionally, there was another surprise we were going to get for the project that I'd been hinting at and trying not to disclose publicly. Right now, as another result of Square-Enix not being too thrilled with OCR, that surprise is looking pretty unlikely to happen. It still might, which is why I'm still not saying what it is/was, but right now we're likely going to go on ahead without it. So, everyone involved, PLEASE CHECK YOUR REMIXES or your contributions to the project and make sure none of it is using any IP that came from their offices. We cannot use any of them. Thank you!

Here's my update - http://tindeck.com/listen/dshf.

I actually did a little more work to mine earlier this week to help round out the weaker latter section. I added some chords in some places and now it sounds a little thicker and stronger. I will continue to tweak it and see what other improvements I can make. I have not yet been able to get a synth bell in to double the lead, it might not be worth the trouble. I know DT wanted one in there, but it's just not working out and doesn't really work for the composition IMO anyway. Also, my studio headphones are broken and I can't do any hardcore work until I get them fixed. I'll send you the newest version I have later, Stevo.

I still want Brad to build me another computer down the road, I just haven't needed another one and probably won't for a while because of the quality of the one he built me in the first place.

Really? Holy shit - why haven't I started a Kickstarter already? I could make a fortune and not have to deliver anything! Seriously though, I find that fairly difficult to believe. I don't know much about Kickstarter, I largely stay away from it because I have yet to see enough in it to put faith into giving strangers large sums of money for something they haven't finished or even begun yet, but I would assume something that large would make some sort of obligation so people couldn't promise something, collect funds, but not have to produce anything.

And how does that work in this context? If you don't get a working system in a reasonable frame around the timespace you thought you were getting it at, and your money is not returned, you were conned. There's not a lot of gray area in there.

No, just that the level of "investment" into it is not an indicator its not a con. I'm on the fence on it myself, could go either way. I didn't add any money to this thing as I never believed in it in the first place, and it did turn out to be a scam, I'd probably be laughing at those who funded it for putting their "OMG WHAT AN AWESOME GAME SYSTEM I MUST GIVE MONEY TO KICKSTARTER RIGHT NOW" mentality over logic and thinking it through further. That'd be a really dick thing to do, but I can't lie and say I wouldn't do it.

How much is too much? If you're going to con people out of millions of dollars, there's some work that goes into it.

Ah ok, I misrepresented the question.

I want to present the devil's advocate side of the discussion, because I'm actually quite damn sick of not having a specific genre I fit into. I started out as one of those guys who would sneer at being "boxed in" to a genre specification and, like most others (and no shots to anyone else posting in this thread), I was doing it because it makes me look cooler and more enhanced as an artist, but also because I didn't understand enough about music and genres to make something identifiable and decent at the same time, I was just throwing any compositional shit I could into my tracks and just saying I don't follow genres to make up for it. There other problem with not having a genre comes AFTER the music is done. Since 99% of musicians do not do music for just themselves to enjoy, then comes the problem of how you build an audience with it. If you don't follow a genre, how do you expect them to find you? They don't get on message boards asking, "Hey, what are some good recommendations for quasi-industrial-dubstep, partially 80's electro-house albums that were inspired by classical music and Final Fantasy, written to sound like Yasunori Mitsuda did a prog-metal record with some Pink Floyd thrown in there?" They also don't go looking for your "official" music website because they've never heard of you in the first place. People look for very narrow music genres - either simply dubstep, electro, drum and bass, ambient, new age or something else. Cross-genre albums are also horrible to market and get press for, because 99.5% of all labels and press people are not really interested in wildly cross-genre works. When I did ESPERS, I thought it was a shoe-in for new age and ambient labels, only to constantly hear back "I LOVE it - but it's too electronic for our new age label" or "Man, this is awesome, but it's too new age for our electronic label." You can better get away with that shit when you really establish yourself as an artist. Point I'm trying to make is - don't let this pretentious thinking of not trying to be a genre get in the way of your music, if it does - that kind of freedom can ironically box in your potential just as badly. Remember this: It says something about an artist who can make something awesome without limitations, but it says a shitload more about an artist who can make something awesome WITH limitations.

In terms of projects, August is not too early to be thinking about those things. May would be.

Edit: My comments in this post are no longer valid and have thus been deleted.