Meteo Xavier

I'm really quite sick of this answer every time the question comes up; not because it's false but because everyone who simply punches "network" like a buzzword over-simplifies it down to the point of ineffectiveness and it is an irritating cliche.
Yeah, "networking" can be pretty useful for getting music jobs, but "networking" practically requires a social talent in and of itself to succeed; the gift of gab, the gift of sales, the gift of moxie, the gift of charisma and the gift of being able to do kick-ass music on top of all that. I'd argue if you have to be told what all that is, you don't have it in the first place. Rather bluntly, a lot of composers with little experience in getting commissioned work for their art don't have great business skills (it's sort of a natural trade-off in gaining skills in art, IMO) and instead of going on to get training in business communication or such, what I see them do then is friend request all the successful music composers, and every one of their friends, and join every forum, Facebook group, collective and whatever, and then fly out to every convention going on... and then don't do much to spread their name out except hand out the same business cards game developers have already seen 400 times and post that they do game music. These composers are pretty much fated to mediocrity because they've only managed the hollow aspect of "networking" - they got their name out and expect being friends with Zircon and Virt on Facebook will mean one day they'll say "Well, I'm kinda filled up on game music jobs right now, why don't you try HoboKa"?
It doesn't work that way. You got your name out there, but so what? Game developers don't need more names, they have hundreds or more applying for them every time a dime is freed up in the audio budget. Game developers who want to hire a freelancer want someone with some artistic significance and cool accomplishments to their name. The crop of newb composers treat their work like they're an essential function of society - like they're plumbers, contractors, auto technicians, farmers and such - and that, I'm pretty confident about, is exactly why they have trouble getting work in the first place. When people hire a plumber or repair person, they don't want an artist, they want an expert to do the work. When people hire a musician for something, they want an artist.
They want someone who can deliver something awesome and unique.
They want someone who stands out from the crowd.
They want someone who has done some cool, kick-ass things in the past and established themselves as an artist.
They want someone who cares about the significance of each track and note they do.
They want someone who does this kind of stuff not just to get a payment and some fame, but because they also do it for the art itself.
That's why so many Ocremix artists have gone on to do pretty successful careers in game music - Ocremix is all about the art. People who pushed the envelope for what game audio can do and mean and made it awesome just because they felt like it. We hone our art and skill and develop unique sounds and personalities here. That's how Ocremix artists manage to make networking succeed for them.
You're not going to get the answer to how to find good work in an industry that is 150:1 overstuffed with supply of composers versus demand for game music with a single word answer. It just doesn't work that way. For a "teacher" to answer their students with such an oversimplified thing to a very complex subject is something I would consider infuriating. Being successful at "networking" for game audio is a whole book, "networking" isn't even the full title of the book cover!
 
 
 

BIG NEWS!
The mastered tracks are finished and have been delivered to Ocremix staff! Now the staff, who as we've seen with this week's release of the 62nd OCR project album are extremely efficient about releases and have it down to a science by now, have all the finished and mastered audio!
At this moment I'm unsure if we still lack enough artwork, but I don't think that should be a huge hurdle to complete. Any other hurdles from here should be minor. I know I've said that before, but now that the top brass has the full mastered content, it's extraordinarily unlikely anything should mess it up now.
Thank you for your patience and hanging on with us (or at least restraining yourselves from REALLY dramatic acting out on it). We hit a MAJOR finish line FINALLY and things should go quite good from here to release.
Look forward to it! It may come up sooner than you think (a first for this project!)

BIG NEWS!
The mastered tracks are finished and have been delivered to Ocremix staff! Now the staff, who as we've seen with this week's release of the 62nd OCR project album are extremely efficient about releases and have it down to a science by now, have all the finished and mastered audio!
At this moment I'm unsure if we still lack enough artwork, but I don't think that should be a huge hurdle to complete. Any other hurdles from here should be minor. I know I've said that before, but now that the top brass has the full mastered content, it's extraordinarily unlikely anything should mess it up now.
Thank you for your patience and hanging on with us (or at least restraining yourselves from REALLY dramatic acting out on it). We hit a MAJOR finish line FINALLY and things should go quite good from here to release.
Look forward to it! It may come up sooner than you think (a first for this project!)

Well with thousands of songs here and no idea how many of all those things were all played live or sequenced in with VSTs, it would be impossible to give you the idea you're looking for.
I'd say don't worry about thinking of things like that. If you can make a quality re-arrangement with the stuff you have and mix it creatively and with high quality, that should be enough right there.

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.

You both make compelling arguments.

I caved and bought a Switch last night. I traded in any prospect of getting any of the Roland SRX cards or synths to record with (since it's evident I still need a LOT more practice recording from hardware) for this system at $299.00 at the Sevierville Walmart at 11:51PM.
I feel proud, weak and guilty all at the same time. :S

just bumping this up. i am still doing computers, and recently did builds for two different active remixers =) let me know if you're interested.

I accidentally read this as "Are PMS limited to 5 people?" and I was thinking "Dude, Brad, work on your syntax."
And we laughed... because it's Monday...

@prophetik music Confirmed, this is currently a hard limit for users of the "Members" group; relevant settings:
Conversations allowed to start per day = 5 Conversations allowed to start per minute = 1 Maximum recipients per conversation = 5 These are intended to mitigate any spambots that might make it through (or, I suppose, overzealous users?) from abusing the PM system.
Do you need more & why? If so, and perhaps regardless, we may create an "elevated" group above regular members for users who have been around a good while, made numerous contributions, etc., and we could bump these settings for these ELITE SPECIAL PEEPS...

No one ever wants to stalk me, I'm the one who usually has to do the stalking. :S

I think he's calling all gaming format files "chiptunes", in this case. It's the wrong term, obviously, but that's what I gather from his post.
NES has the .nsf files, Genesis has .vgm files, SNES has .spc, etc.. From a small search, it looks like the Gamecube equivalent would be the .hps or .adp file format, which does need a special plug-in for Winamp to read the files. I won't link any sites here (for questionable legality reasons), but do a quick search for "gamecube hps adp" and you'll find places to get your Gamecube native soundtracks and the necessary plug in for Winamp.
Hope that helps.

If you add in some gentle wind blowing SFX in the background and give the song title something that suggests it's winter, that's most of the sonic imagery right there. Then just add the bells, flute and harp and you're ready to go.
Edit: Also, let me post here tomorrow and I can link you to a place I found that has more soundfonts than you can fucking count. It's on my laptop and I'm going to bed right now.

Don't you love when people pull this website out just to be asinine and smug in the laziest way possible? It's kinda hard to relate and agree that PLAY engine is horrible if you've never had the experience of it being horrible to you personally in a topic that asks for your opinions and experience with cinematic samples.
This has also been my experience - I've had Play (well, an archaic version of it by now) for quite a long time and I've had pretty minimal fuss with it. Even now as I have newer and better things with everyone's favorite child Kontakt 5, I still end up using EWQLSO for a lot of my orchestral needs. PLAY could be a lot better, but in my experience, so could Kontakt. I stagger to think East West would've become such an industry player in the virtual sample world if their flagship engine really is as bad as all the elite hivemind composers say it is, but I'm sure that's a different logical fallacy on it's own since everything that disagree with the hivemind is...

Sorry - got busy, got sick and forgot.
http://zandro.freeunixhost.com/ed2k/S_/[ZSF] Zandro/SoundFonts/TheSoundSite/

It's probably more a case of inept self-marketing. I'm often called to do such types of marketing for clients at work and I guarantee you marketing is simply a completely different skill than business acumen all the same. You can make an awesome, legit product or service or excellently run a hotel or rental company and still want to make sure BUY IT TODAY is flashing in bright colors and point 144 text all across the page.

It's probably more a case of inept self-marketing. I'm often called to do such types of marketing for clients at work and I guarantee you marketing is simply a completely different skill than business acumen all the same. You can make an awesome, legit product or service or excellently run a hotel or rental company and still want to make sure BUY IT TODAY is flashing in bright colors and point 144 text all across the page.

It's probably more a case of inept self-marketing. I'm often called to do such types of marketing for clients at work and I guarantee you marketing is simply a completely different skill than business acumen all the same. You can make an awesome, legit product or service or excellently run a hotel or rental company and still want to make sure BUY IT TODAY is flashing in bright colors and point 144 text all across the page.

Just restructure the theme of the album so it's not a 20th-anniversary album. Make it like a "PS1 Hidden Gems" album or something that focuses more on the themes being overlooked. You don't have to kill the entire project just because it's not the 20th anniversary anymore.

Umm, PS1 and N64 didn't really have generated/generic chip sounds/samples like the 8-bit/16-bit stuff did (that's the simple way of saying it, a more accurate and detailed assessment I'm not learned on). PS1 had everything from the Roland Sound Canvas to the sort of real studio music you can get in games today, and N64 also used a lot of Roland Sound Canvas-grade romplers for generating samples.
I'd say if you're looking to get the "1998" sound or something, get you the Roland virtual Sound Canvas software (or the real thing, they're easily available) and the Korg Legacy M1 software since a lot of games even by the 32bit era were still using the M1. That will be more than a good starting place by then.

Perhaps that level of perfectionism should be recognized as the very lofty goal it is and not pursued any further. You're NEVER going to get something to sound 100% like whatever it is you're trying to sound like. Best you can do is the best you can do with what's currently available.

Additionally, I recommend getting the XV-5050 since it's a higher quality XV-5080 with even some Fantom sounds in it and can be found at half the cost of an XV-5080. The only real drawback is that it also has half the polyphony, but with a quality audio interface and some recording know-how, that problem can be worked out.

You should have more hope than that - it's in the process of being mastered on a $150,000 mastering console by someone who's basically volunteering professional grade skill and equipment for the project (as in for free). So, like everything else in this project, it's taking some time, but that time will be worth it.
I'll check on the goings on for that here soon. Everyone's been busy for the last 6 weeks. I myself have been battling a relapse into clinical depressiveness and that's been gumming up my schedule (which is already at 56 work hours a week to help pay the $4,000 I lost in car damages and more over the summer) and frequently annoying me with existential confusion and distraction. I've had to take whatever breaks I can to ease down on stress while the meds do their job, otherwise it gets worse, but with Halloween over and my personal surroundings improving, I'm getting back into a functional state where I can devote more direct effort to this project again.
Such is life, but the bottom line is that things are still moving forward, nothing's stopped, just slow goings.

Just restructure the theme of the album so it's not a 20th-anniversary album. Make it like a "PS1 Hidden Gems" album or something that focuses more on the themes being overlooked. You don't have to kill the entire project just because it's not the 20th anniversary anymore.

You should have more hope than that - it's in the process of being mastered on a $150,000 mastering console by someone who's basically volunteering professional grade skill and equipment for the project (as in for free). So, like everything else in this project, it's taking some time, but that time will be worth it.
I'll check on the goings on for that here soon. Everyone's been busy for the last 6 weeks. I myself have been battling a relapse into clinical depressiveness and that's been gumming up my schedule (which is already at 56 work hours a week to help pay the $4,000 I lost in car damages and more over the summer) and frequently annoying me with existential confusion and distraction. I've had to take whatever breaks I can to ease down on stress while the meds do their job, otherwise it gets worse, but with Halloween over and my personal surroundings improving, I'm getting back into a functional state where I can devote more direct effort to this project again.
Such is life, but the bottom line is that things are still moving forward, nothing's stopped, just slow goings.

Yessir, that would be a particularly sharp/dirty sounding Saw Lead with some monophonic glide and vibrato modulation on it.
A lot of major synth VSTs will have something like it - Synth 1, Zebra 2, Omnisphere, z3ta 2... Particularly, I think you'll want to get Zebra 2 for that because someone here made some Zebra 2 presets that were based on some of the later Mega Man games and one was a particularly dirty bendy Saw Lead that sounded pretty close to what you're looking for there.
Not the pinpoint answer you deserve, but hopefully that will get you closer to what you seek.