Patrick Burns

dragging the position bar thing back and forth over an audio clip and the program playing all the samples the bar hits scratching ~ scrubbing

The manual that comes with Logic Express isn't exactly accurate. Scrubbing is a Logic Pro only feature. I had the same problem.

The top two on this page (link) Lava music and Water music from Donkey Kong Country 2 and Wario Land, respectively. They're both pretty much completed, but if there is something that is really bothering someone then I might change it.

Here's part of tyran castle Uptight Reptites It's only half the song, there's no arrangement, no real mixing work has been done to it, and it's just otherwise unrefined. But, perhaps posting it here will inspire me to do something to it. I haven't touched it in a while.

for the first year I belonged to this community, I really thought virt was a born again christian brotha from the hood with a crazy sick doo.

If you're talking about Donkey Kong Land... awesome song. The same song is used in Donkey Kong Country. DJP actually did a remix of it called Stray Donkey Strut.

For any newbies reading this looking for software, I'd like to stress the point about the interface. The Express interface isn't any less complex than Pro. It was the first sequencer I really ever used, and it was a pain learning it all before I could make quality music. I forced me to learn stuff quickly, but it was no fun for a while there. And yes, getting other MIDI devices set up is frustrating. It's really the nature of the MIDI beast, though. I felt like I could have taken on the world after I mapped out the instruments in my keyboard.

all of my recent work has been done with Logic Express 7 out of the box plus a few free plugins. pros: synths are great included samples are fine and plentiful plugins are super my two biggest gripes are a few minor bugs (none of which I don't have a workaround for) and the lack of sidechain input. that means no midi controlled gating - all of the gating done on my Revisiting the Ruins uses DestroyFX's random midi gate, which has enough controlls to satisfy my needs. To be fair, though, about the bugs, I still have OS X 10.3.9 and I can't update logic anymore. It is definitely the best $200 I've ever spent. I don't plan on updating to Logic Pro... ever, really. If I did, though, I get $200 dollars off the update!

Here's a pretty comprehensive breakdown of all things picking. It's written by Tuck Andress. http://www.tuckandpatti.com/pick-finger_tech.html Remember this is just one man's set of opinions, though.

As busy as your life comes across as, how in god's name do you find the time and motivation for this? YOU DYNAMIC / ACTIVE PEOPLE ARE A MYSTERY TO ME. thanks, btw

My two cents on hand anchoring: One thing you need to take into consideration is how steady your guitar will be when you're playing. The whole reason for placing any part of your hand on the guitar is to give you a point of reference as the guitar shifts around a little on your lap or in your strap. If your're going to be standing up using a strap, then it is difficult doing anything but strumming unless your hand is touching somewhere. On the other hand, if you're sitting down, the guitar shifts around a lot less and since the guitar is touching your body in more places you have a better sense of where the strings are in relation to the pick. If you play in the rock steady position classical guitarists play in (albeit awkward looking for anyone else), then your guitar is going nowhere, and there is no need to have a constant point of reference other than the occasional glance at your right hand. The guitarist I respect more than any other, Tommy Emmanuel, almost always either has pinky resting on the pick guard or his palm resting on or behind the bridge depending on whether or not he wants some muting. This guy was a rhythym player when he was young, then he was an electric lead man for a while, and these days he plays solo acoustic. He plays it all and plays it all very well. According to him, he always rested his hand somewhere. (In his case, when I say "rest" I mean just that - not like an anchor to the ocean floor but like a broom on the floor. Resting your hand somewhere is not a win/win situation of course. If you rest your pinky on the pick guard, then your right hand ( your ring finger in particular since it shares some muscle and ligament with the pinky) will have much less mobility. If you rest it behind the bridge, then you will restrict your tone to the more trebley sound. Check out this video to see how well Mr. Emmanuel has adapted to these two drawbacks: guitar boogie (link) You can see that, even when he strums, his pinky is sometimes there waiting to catch the face of the guitar. He does have big hands, though. I'm sure that helps the mobility problem. Edit: Here's a video of the world class gypsy jazz player Joscho Stephan playing. I'm actually just out of the field of view to the left here - great show. Anyway, this guy doesn't rest anything anywhere, and he is the most accurate player your will ever see in your life I guarantee it. I've never seen him play while standing, though. It must because he can't keep up that accuracy unless he is sitting. He's got pretty tiny hands, btw.AS FAR AS YOUR INSTRUCTOR GOES - just take a few more lessons. Don't get too emotionally involved with it all, and dump him if you think you can do better A great instructor will do wonders for not only your technique but also your motivation.

"Stronger" is an inappropriate adjective. V - I and V7 - 1 aren't fundamentally different. If you're familiar with the harmonic series, then you know it goes (in scale degrees): 1-1-5-1-3-5-b7-1 etc etc A dom 7 chord (the V7) just puts more of an emphasis on what is already there. One could say that a V7 chord is more dissonant and therefore less stable, wanting to move to the tonic a bit more. It's all style and taste, though. A V7 will sound really out of place in a lot of styles.

criticism? yes. constructive criticism? no

awesome work. The vocals are good; I'm not a vocalist by any means of the imagination so I won't go any deeper than that. The piano is well done also. It sounds very natural and well played - whether it was purely sequenced or not. The only thing I would say is that the long church-like reverb sounds a little out of place for most of the track. I would have saved it for the end during the marble garden section (*edit* oh wait... it's all marble garden). it kinda the pot and kettle here, though; I think I use too much reverb too. I didn't think this project would ever get off the ground, and I think I said so in it's thread about a year ago. I was wrong - great job everyone.

Here is the level music. It's from a few levels from this area:

it's a bit long and technical; read the intro and the section about bass traps to get a good taste of it

Like klm09 said, reverb isn't the only problem you'll have in your recording room. The phase cancellations and amplifications are so diverse and unpredictable that it's almost a waste of time for most home studio guys to worry about the frequency response of their mics. Rooms will boost and reduce the frequencies so much, and most of the time we don't even realize it. Believe it or not we're so used to hearing these boosts and reductions that our minds ignore them. I lived with about a 10-15 db boost around 120hz for several years before I did a little sine wave test. Now it's so obvious I can't stand it. I use a parametric EQ that I enable when I'm working and I bypass when I'm using headphones or bouncing a song. Check out this extremely helpful article. I'm glad I read it before buying my mic, or else I probably would have bought something needlessly expensive or worried about getting matched pairs. Your equipment is really the least of your worries when you're doing this stuff outside of a properly treated studio. One consideration for guitar is to save up and buy a guitar with an inboard pickup and mix that with your mic. For revisiting the ruins I recorded a stereo track with the pickup in one channel and the mic in the other. Then I copied that recording into another track in which I reversed the left and right channels. Left alone, this setup would produce a mono sound, but I added some modulation (Logic's spreader plugin - similar to chorus) to only one of the tracks. If I were you, I would get one decent mic that works well for your guitar and some wind instruments. Then you could use it and your sm57 to stereo record your guitar, and the new mic would also take care of your whistle. Then you'll have some money left over to save up for anything... a guitar w/ a pickup, some acoustic treatment (if you've got the space for it), some new audio software, whatever.

This song came on my playlist and as soon as that section came up I remembered that I wanted to comment on that. I think it's very awkward. Having that melody played on the 16th offbeats or whatever doesn't sound right at all. I think something similar could have been pulled off but without every single note landing on a 16th offbeat (or whatever). Whatever that rhythmic sample is in the background, it's pretty nice---one of the highlights---but I completely looked it over when paying attention to the offbeat weirdness. That was one of my fav parts of the song - not because I thought it was some kind of creative triumph but becuase I thought it sounded very natural and chill.

Thanks for all the kind words and encouragement (though I'm not quite sure it warrants a 10/10... but I like your enthusiasm) This community has been the primary force in my musical development for the past three years; it has gotten me more excited about music than anything else in my life and has certainly changed my projected course in life. We're all lucky to have you guys and gals. To address some of issues brought up: Yes, I played around with the levels of the FM marimbas a lot. I actually brought them down several dbs before submitting it. When I first sequenced them, it was late at night, my ears were tired, and you know the drill. At that point, anything brighter and louder sounds better. I guess I listened to them so much at that level that I lost my ability judge them accurately. All of the sound fx came with logic express. The splash/submerge is a combination of a flowing stream and a cool splashing rock sound. The stream is playing, then the splashing stone is triggered, then immediately it's all put through a low pass filter which closes steeply. To come back out of the water, the filter opens, the trailing end of the splashing stone sample plays to make a little water disturbance, a little breathing-in sound I recorded plays, and I bumped up the brightness for a few secs on all the fx to contrast it a little more. Concerning the arrangement of the second half, yes, I did intend to establish a watery/murky sort of vibe there. At first I thought to have the low passed stream sound playing the whole time and perhaps a darker synth wandering around. I never got around to it. I just took the marimba section, which I sequenced separately for perhaps a third iteration of the theme, and slapped it (heh heh) on right after the splash. Also, the modulated synthy sounding lead at 1:02 is me playing my nylon string close to the bridge with a lot of phaser. This whole song is Logic Express out-of-the-box (except for the free plug-in, Slim Slow Slider C3 multi-band compressor), my Takamine nylon string, and my Studio Projects B1. Thanks again. I hope my explanations shed some light on some things. I know I enjoy reading about others' methods, even the trivial stuff. -Patrick

you've got to have a friend with a PC and CD burner somewhere. just burn the sfpack program and sfpacks to a cd, take it to a PC, decompress everything, burn everything back onto a CD

Is your computer on a different outlet than everything else, by any chance?

Can anyone suggest a course of action for obtaining the wav .rar? edit: wow, somebody could have told me it was on the tracker. you can lead a horse to water, i guess

They stand out against the competition on CD mixes and radio broadcasts. (Atleast, I think that's the reason.) It took me a good year or two to really get the hang of managing the dynamic range. Just keep you ears and mind open and always compare your track to more experienced remixers' tracks from the same genre. Remember also that you'll be the most sensitive of anyone to things like "pumping" (you can read about what that is if you don't already know). What you might consider unacceptable might never be noticed by anyone else. As far as the judging process goes, they'll let a track slide if it isn't TOO quiet. They understand the learning curve of this stuff.

can't argue with a pro

Also, make sure the attack and release are set relatively long.