Patrick Burns

If there was a show discussing OSTs, how much of the original soundtrack audio would it be permissible to include in a video

This sorta verges on remixer interview, but I'm thinking a kind of fusion of Unsung Heroes and Source Breakdown: Someone -- a regular 'host' -- invites remixers or composers on to discuss a soundtrack (or two) they personally love and feel is overlooked, and they go into some deeper analysis of it together. It would be planned. OSTs selected before the show to give time to familiarize and make notes. Music theory would only be involved where relevant, not gratuitously. (Personally, I have a degree in composition and find theory & notation, in isolation, two of the most dreadful and alienating topics.). Music theory aside, still focus on being critical -- going beyond "man this is so great.". It would focus on the soundtracks, only briefly plugging the guest's information.. Guests could be selected by the host or through other means: poll, staff picks, etc. Just an idea right now. If the idea sounds ok and the spirit moves me in the coming months, I might contact a guest and make a test run to send to someone on staff.

Yeah, my girlfriend doesn't even play games. She just watches Netflix on a 360 she got from her brother, and when she saw a commercial for XBone when we were at a movie theater she just went "ooh can we get one?" Well, she does play dancing games, to be fair. So maybe the Kinect preview blew her mind.

i know -- just saw an open door to post some favs

oh my god I have to represent for StarTropics http://youtu.be/CpL1IEcpaP8 http://youtu.be/4Q2HHorxZz8 http://youtu.be/BXxNhSxwnXI http://youtu.be/NZ_TWO2wFzI http://youtu.be/PEf0KEuu8sk http://youtu.be/JXLor_2VpMA

I was that lazy guy who paid for gold once. Never received it. Big surprise. A domain that has yet to be registered costs ~$10 for a year's registration. If someone already registered it, all bets are off; it just depends on how much people want it from the person who's already got it and how much they negotiate between themselves. An example from the extreme end of the spectrum: the domain "eBet.com" was reportedly sold privately for $1.3 million dollars this year. (see this list) Maybe I could have negotiated a lower price with these people, but I was so amazed that it might actually work for $350 that I just went for it. According to this census inference tool, there might be 300 people named 'Patrick Burns' in the US alone, so . . . you get the picture. I'm sure if you got those people in a room together and started auctioning it off, I think it would sell for a lot more than $350. (That's what the guy selling to me tried to do, I assume. I guess he didn't get through to a lot of people, or they assumed he was spamming.) There's certainly interest on some level -- patburns.com, pat-burns.com, patrick-burns.com, patrick-burns.net, patrickburns.net, patrickburns.org, patrickburns.biz are all already registered. Of course, it's just a name. It's either worthless or valuable depending on how you use it. To answer your question, I might have paid too much, I might have gotten it for a steal. Depends on your perspective, and depends on if I make good use of it. Domain names are certainly losing some meaning in the age of social media, and Google is also improving it's ranking algorithm to favor quality content and quality backlinks over perfect domain name keyword matches . . . but. Whatever. It's easy to say, remember, and spell.

I would feel bad if I promoted an unpopular business practice, but at the end of the day he did provide a service to me in that I couldn't accomplish on my own -- he brought the domain to market. It was previously held by some construction business owner who wouldn't respond to inquiries and just kept renewing, so I gave up a while ago. It was very helpful to me hearing about the different ways to scam in this area, though. I learned which questions to ask, and how this guy might be legit. Also, the registrar used appeared relatively well-established, and I was allowed three days to verify the transfer before I had to release the funds from escrow. Hey -- I was never able to come up with an alias I liked, so besides the several musician Patrick Burns floating around the web I'm also competing , after all. He's even got a wikipedia page :-/

ok --- so I ignore this guy for a few emails, but he was persistent and I couldn't resist I looked into using Escrow.com and it seemed relatively straightforward and easy to verify -- so I agreed to the terms on the escrow contract, put the money up, created an account with the registrar he was using, gave him my account username, he pushed the domain to me, and I released the funds to him. Then I just transferred the domain to my registrar of choice, just to be sure. I'm not sure what the take away is here, but now patrickburns.com is mine -- locked up at my registrar for the next few years. Typical of me to ask for advice and not take it, and there were a ton of red flags, but it worked out.

In a parallel timeline, if Capcom approached OCR for help with this commemorative album and did not offer to make it commercial, there would be a thread protesting about this big company coming back to get more free marketing juice from a willing community. Blue_drac obviously cares -- it's a legitimate issue for a community that thrives on goodwill and shared interests. But OCR isn't just a gathering; it's a digital machine created and maintained by some relatively modest people, and there are real risks and sacrifices involved in that time investment. Not only that, but the risk is quietly and gladly assumed by those parties (or pretzels). Adding a dash of 'transaction' into the mix of 'donation/goodwill' merely serves to provide a little predictability here and there. I trust the staff to make awesome choices. I even feel weird saying that -- no referendum is in order here, not in my opinion.

Glad you guys have done these. Sometimes it's hard for me to keep track of who's who with just a handle and an avatar.

Just to keep it in perspective -- considering how much of our Western tonal language developed inside Churches, it would be a strange twist of history to feel the subject is somehow unsuited for a community devoted to music that is predominately of that tonality. But I would echo Gario in noting that Christian lyrics are still as open to aesthetic criticism (or even ridicule, as the case may be) as any other subject matter.

Thanks for the feedback guys/girls. Though I worked on it a bit last summer right before I submitted it, it's actually older than I thought -- I did most of it as a sophomore in college, and I graduated a year and a half ago! Man, makes me want to get all nostalgic and write an essay about life :-/ Looking back, mmmaybe could've gone with less reverb . . . and maybe a bit less clutter overall. I think the guitar works in context fine, but the first 38 seconds were really the seed of the mix for me. If I could redo everything, maybe I'd continue that smooth, elastic vibe of the intro instead of jump into the synth guitar ideas. The Kirby's Adventure soundtrack is some amazing stuff -- probably my favorite of all time. So much musicality packed into such short tunes. And yes, dfcentre, speaking of nostalgia: vgmusic.com is some serious meta nostalgia right there.

ok ok until we meet again, patrickburns.com

Well, I was going to give it up, but here's a response from the email address listed on WHOIS: I've registered a few domains before, but always one that was new -- never a transfer. Could they actually have the domain and still be scamming?

They came to me. WHOIS has an address in WA state, 9999999 as the phone, and an email. I just sent a message to that email asking if they're aware of the situation. I will call this "Paul Martin" later today, but the problem is I still wouldn't be totally convinced if it seemed ok on the phone.

Not sure if this is for 'community,' but I've had this email conversation recently about purchasing a domain name and I want to know how I should go about completing the process if it is indeed legit: Two weeks later: I'll probably call the phone number provided in the first message after I get off from work today, but it still feels a little fishy. Any thoughts on the simplest way to vet this and make the transfer?

Humor aside, a relevant comment I remember reading from Larry some time ago was something to the effect of "not paying much attention to the kind of person someone is on a forum because people are often very different in real life." I think that's true to a great extent -- for some more than others. There's something about the empty text field, the absence of any non-verbal cues, limited expression/feedback, etc. . . the internet really is an alternate plane of character for a lot of us -- anonymous or not. Living, moving faces solicit empathy and understanding much better than avatars and italics. For the purposes of simply enjoying other people, I've found myself increasingly disinterested in recent years from forums and social networking. It really just feels like . . . saran wrap, for lack of a better word.

Too late! Overclocked posterity will forever regard you as a blathering psychotic. it looks totally normal to me. Really great escalation, fall down, re-escalation on the mix here. It never feels stagnant.

Definitely. And people certainly view them differently whether they're on the inside or outside of said genre label -- those on the inside always seeing a more nuanced, diverse schema versus the outsider's supposedly reductive view. Take, for example, 1) a violinist in an opera's orchestra pit 2) a mandolinist in an alternative acoustic rock band 3) and DJ who specializes in IDM. The DJ will call the violinist a classical musician, but the violinist would protest saying "classical refers to very specific era in Western art music! I specialize in 19th and 20th century works." The violinist will call the mandolinist a pop musician, but the mandolinist would say "I'm not some mainstream pop sellout! I'm keeping strains of folk Americana alive." The bluegrass musician will call the DJ a a guy who plays techno music, but the DJ would say "the word techno doesn't mean anything, and if it did it's very very different from the soundscapes I craft."

A lot of us have had the same love/hate evolution of feelings about dubstep, but I think this discussion goes beyond dubstep itself (which I do agree as being a sub-genre). We've had this discussion play out with multiple genres, and imo it all comes down to the same conflict: skilled fidelity to certain [limited] genres being a necessarily Procrustean act upon certain [differently limited] video game source tunes. Often, a remix just ends up being the lowest common denominator of that conflict. And there really isn't always a good way around that conflict. As remixers we're re-articulating source tunes, and it's ok to use the genre vocabulary of our time, even if that contemporary vocabulary feels colloquial in comparison to the original composer's work.

No, it's just for monophonic material. People seem to be praising the new feature, simultaneously admitting that Melodyne is still the leader, even for monophonic material.

To me, it's all about the gray area where 1) the source isn't very recognizable and you didn't cause "damages" to that original artist but 2) you used enough of someone else's beauty to make your job a lot easier, and you didn't credit or pay them. A song like 'Bangarang' at 0:34 -- the sample that goes "you feel the . . ." -- it's not like it's causing any losses to whomever made that slice he's sampling (if he is indeed sampling someone else's work, I don't know), but then again it is a really beautiful he didn't have to make himself. He just had to situate it. I'm not sure if credit and/or money should go to the sampled artist in that case.

Logic Pro X is out . . . http://www.apple.com/logic-pro/ Flex Pitch is monophonic it seems, but whatevs. Nice update . . . not the 4-years worth of update some might have hoped for, though.

The funding of artists (or more capitalistically, "content creators") is an ever-changing weather pattern. This discussion/reflection wouldn't be complete without this: I think a lot of us musicians focus a lot on file sharing and plummeting record sales as some sort of tectonic watershed moment in the history of music. However, when it dawned on me that selling recorded music is only a tiny 100-year chapter in the history of music, this tectonic shift felt a lot smaller to me, and I started reconsidering what it meant to be a musician. It's one thing to make music for visual media, to teach music, create music-making tools, put on a big show/production, etc -- those are all things that are much easier to construe and trade as commodities. But music, by itself, is something very interpersonal, in my estimation. So instead of criticizing these artists of exploiting their fans like naive investors, look at them as engaging in a more personal relationship with the people who value their work. In fact, I think that's the only way these kinds of artistic endeavors and crowdsourcing platforms will flourish -- by encouraging more of a relationship between artists and fans. Amanda Palmer's talk is a good reflection on this, even if she's a bit of a unique case.

Well the game is completely changed now that Logic X is out with amazing built-in autosampling functions and Melodyne-like polyphonic note access . . . Oh wait, that was my dream last night of Apple unveiling the new Logic at Summer NAMM this week (no, they're not on the exhibitor list)