Patrick Burns

You politely brought up some interesting points -- it's not out of line. I think bringing such coherence to a project of this scope would have taken an inhuman level of coordination. And at the end of the day, with the monetary support this project received and the expectations that come with that support, the diversity of approaches might go a long way in helping everyone find a little something that they really enjoy. While I think, In general, there is something to be said for focus -- both in the length of the album and the styles involved (and I say this as someone who remixed a source on the album that had a couple other remixes already) -- ultimately, I think the scope and variety of this project is a unique and valuable event for the community.

Oh, can I give you a shine?

My personality tends to do the same to people, so maybe that's why I like him

I don't know why I never found this guy through OCR, but grammy-winning mixing engineer Dave Pensado does a pretty in depth show about all things mixing. He's got tons of tips and interesting interviews, and it's probably the best thing I've seen on YouTube, made all the better by Dave's idiosyncratic, modest style. He does all his work in Pro Tools, but the knowledge is completely transferable. Here's a good taste of his pro tips series, .I can watch this guy all day. He's so unassuming, but he knows his stuff and can be pretty hilarious on occasion.

Yeah, iTunes has its issues, but back in 2001 it was pretty consumer-friendly relative to the landscape. And as a product it had a lot of initial sway in getting music company's to reconsider their distribution strategies while they were licking their Napster wounds. Daily buying and selling stock is an affair between owners/investors of the company, not the company's daily business or cash reserves. As I understand it, the only way stocks ever affect the company's bottom line is by issuing new stock, such as an IPO or a follow-on offering. But a company needs a really good reason to do that. The IPO offers a way for the company to get some initial cash while giving the initial owners and venture capitalists an avenue to cash-in on their ownership if they so choose. Issuing new shares later on, i.e. a "follow-on offering," can again raise cash for the company but in the process dilute the value of the stock. An important way to consider follow-ons is that a company has opted to do that INSTEAD of issuing bonds (like getting a loan) to raise cash. It doesn't look get when a company dilutes the value of its stock for cash instead of issuing real debt it plans to pay back in the future. TL;DR, No, not really. (But I'm not a business major.) The best way for a company to get cash is to earn it, the second best is to issue bonds, and the third is issuing more stock. Follow-ons are a finite and sometimes unconfident strategy. --- Anyway, it's really fascinating learning about trading stock. You may ask, if buying and selling stock doesn't affect the company's cash or revenue, why does a company even care about it's stock price? Well, for starters sometimes those in management own a lot of stock, so they hope to cash-in someday. Also, shareholders collectively have some control over company management, so as a manger you want to keep your shareholder's happy with a healthy stock price. Also, if the stock price gets too low, you become an easier target for a hostile takeover by competitors. And the price of stock is often used as indicator of company health, so if a company wants to get bonds with low interest rates, they want to keep their stock performing. Otherwise, stock price is a surprisingly detached and arbitrary value. There isn't really an authority that "sets it;" it's just based off of what people have been able to get lately when they sell a share to another person. It's almost akin to currency in that it only has value as long as people agree that it has value, and the tend to agree that it has value when the company issues a strong quarterly report, pays dividends to shareholders, or repurchases its own stock. --- Back to Pandora, I'm anxious to see how they evolve in the landscape. There's an ecosystem of music services out there, each with compelling features (song identifying like Shazaam, music discovery like Pandora, ease of purchase like Amazon & Apple, social media aspects like Soundcloud), but not all of the services are hugely useful or profitable as balkanized as they are. The future is conglomeration, but I don't know what's going to happen to Pandora. They won't be the ones to do the whole ecosystem, but they might be acquired. It may depend on the value of their Music Genome Project, but I'm not always convinced of its music-discovery value over other more basic forms of data mining, like "people also bought." (The categories seem highly arbitrary when I check them on my Pandora playlists.) Apple will obviously be using whatever "genius playlist" algorithms it has on iRadio, so it will be interesting to see which one users find more accurate. I think the personal touch of the Music Genome Project analysts probably creates a better library of music, but who knows . . . unless something changes, it seems Tim Westergren is on track to liquidate all of his holdings in the next couple years. Maybe that's his opinion on the value of the Music Genome Project; maybe it's just smart housekeeping.

This is definitely the best part of this whole contrast, for me. And it is a key direction these services/technologies will continue to move in. The 1) more targeted the plays are and 2) easier the songs are to purchase, the better off musicians are as a whole (and the less convenient piracy becomes). iTunes set the precedent for ease of purchase, and Pandora set the precedent for ease of discovery. I foresee increased unification of these kinds of services and others (like song identification, a la Shazaam), incrementally making everything more streamlined. All these advances breathe life into niche markets and smooth the bell curve. I have a question from left field, though. Do you think it would ever be practical for these services, if they become streamlined, unique, and valuable enough to the consumer, to NOT display the artist/album/song names until the user purchases the song? The user could favorite the songs, incorporate them into their personalized channels, etc., but they would be denied and textual information until they owned the song. edit -- as for the whole CEO salary thing, it's just the reality of what value is: Tim Westergren's industry knowledge, contacts, company knowledge, etc. have very huge concrete value to a company (and its competitors) that has been providing valuable solutions for music consumption. Retrofitting artists into that equation, we're simply creating solutions to problems that don't exist yet; i.e. there is no pre-existing problem of the lack of Patrick Burns music in this world.

I guess this is a bad time to realize that I left two important notes of the main motif out of my remix . . .

I'm not a marketing expert, but I think that concentrating project releases/floods into more punctuated, singular events helps foster buzz spikes that take word into farther reaches of the internets. Especially for audiences/channels outside of the core OCR fan base, you only get a brief window of interest before people form an opinion, share it, or decide to gloss over it next time. That's how it seems to me, at least. Though dyed in the wool OCR fans might get hyped up with the kind of build up you describe, maybe the project-gasm model has more . . . penetration?

This -- time travel is the tortilla, love is the beef and cheese. Also, the Power of Love is a better song. To me, Back in Time has some more of those idiosyncratic 80s harmonies that just don't translate well out of the decade (unlike the movies themselves). You know the ones I'm talking about? It's they pushed major tonality, minor pentatonic, and some harmony clusters all too close together -- not just pop, not quite blues, too light hearted to be funk . . .

Hey I'll take a shot. I was going to enter this contest but couldn't come up with a sound I liked. I'm not exactly a bass/kick expert, but it's something I've been trying to improve at lately because my work has had less than adequate attention in this area. So low end mixing-wise, my first impression is that the track sounds pretty weak beneath 100hz compared to what's going on just above that range: it sounds a little crowded and muddy in the 100hz - 300hz zone. It sounds like a combination of the bass synth itself having that muddiness combined with the kick clouding up that zone as well. As you learn and experiment more with the low end, try to get a sense of different 'zones' that you start to pick up on and keep them in mind as landmarks. To my ears: 100hz and below kinda gives that gut punch feeling to instruments. 100hz to maybe 175hz has a 'boomy' sound 175hz to 300hz has a more 'tubby' sound Also, the kick needs some more punch or definition. It's up to you how to accomplish that -- better sub/tub balance, having it's own space in the spectrum compared to the bass synth, sidechain compression . . . all things to explore. Otherwise, today's listeners are very bass savvy and used to really interesting bass synths. The sound you're using just isn't very interesting, especially compared to the Cinematic Sample pack used in the intro. Hope that helps! Just my impressions. I think you'll be figuring out all of this on your own -- really the most important thing I can recommend is for you to be able to hear it in the first place, so you need a set of monitors or headphones that give you that information. You also need to make sure the room you're mixing in isn't radically boosting/cutting the bass response in strange ways.

Thanks for the listen! I think you're right -- if I took this tune further I'd probably want to build off the production happening at the end.

I went into a Logic time warp for the past 48 hours and made this. Let me know what you think. http://www.audioembryo.com/just/steeldrumsinmycereal.mp3

Mr. Roget's track is amazing. Is that entirely sampled?

Found something I thought I'd leave here: lots of data on musicians' income: http://money.futureofmusic.org This isn't a single report; by going to the "findings" section you can see their survey data presented through the lenses of different topics. Also, be sure to keep in mind the composition of their participants.

Last year they saw a slight viewership drop on Memorial Day, so they skipped it this year. I'd like to know how many people will stop watching because of this past episode. I know Martin likes to keep things realistic as far as unpredictability goes, but … I think some people seek out fiction for something a little more than reality. I'll still be watching, of course. Love this show.

Thought I'd resurrect this thread. I've been reconsidering the use of my real name lately . . . My musical endeavors have been, stylistically, all over the map, but lately I've been trying to locate an identifiable sound that I can live and grow with -- something to help guide my original music endeavors -- and part of that consideration is branding. Any thoughts on what makes a good handle? Anyone regret using a handle and wish they just used their real name?

I was going to go see this movie early today, but then an episode of TNG came on TV and I decided to watch that and catch a later showing . . . . . .and I just got out of that. I guess we all have a similar theme with our criticisms, just to varying degrees. I had fun, but it just feels so shallow. The characters all feel like the Diet® versions of the original characters. It's not the actors' fault, per se, it's just the format. I wonder how these guys would do with their own Star Trek series -- few crazy camera angles and cuts, more exploration. And THEN do some movies. Just my opinion; I know there's people out there less familiar with Star Trek who will really enjoy this film. That said, Zachary Quinto doesn't fit the role very well for me. He's got big shoes to fill and not enough facial expressions to fill those shoes. He just alternates between constipated and condescending.

There was that one part in Halo, Assault on the Control Room I think, where you fly a Banshee up to a specific ledge and creep to one specific point where a piano tune kicks in -- I think it was an older tune Marty O'Donnel had written for another game. This is slightly related, but check out this 1976 tune from early electronic music pioneer Mort Garson. The first few seconds have this big FF vibe and then the melody starts exactly like the Zelda lullaby.

I really like the topic. Because your study is focusing more on the use of timbre and instrumentation, I guess chip tunes are going to be less useful to you than modern soundtracks. (Although maybe you can make the case that some chip tune instruments are emulating certain kinds of instrumentation. Or maybe you're going even more broad with the softness or edginess of sound, in which case chip tunes might still be useful.) If you're using the survey -- in part -- as a tool of discovery for yourself, to find games to investigate with regard to instrumentation/timbre and sense of place, some open-ended RPGs and MMOs would be a good place to look. You can extract the game data and get dozens of cues conveniently labelled things like "forest" and "mountains" etc. I know WoW is that way. PM me if you'd like me to upload some of that for you at some point.

One concept to sort out that you might encounter -- environmental music may be interpreted in different cases as both underscore and diegetic music. For example, the music while wandering Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft obviously has no "real" sound source in the forest. Whereas the music within the taverns of Elwynn, although there is no band present, has both stylistic and acoustic (reverb) elements to suggest it might be coming from within the bar itself. (Music which has a potential on-screen sound source or is within the world of the characters is often referred to as diegetic.) Diegetic music often as a stronger attachment to the culture within the game world, where as off-screen underscore outside of the character's world has more to do with the art direction of the game or other storytelling conventions. For example, WoW's tavern music is obviously meant to be a sort of celtic drinking tune. Now, the wandering environmental music is certainly very pastoral with lots of woodwinds and horns, but it's arguable how much that has to do with the game's culture. Does it have more to do with the in-game culture or our actual real-world culture of storytelling conventions? So, diegetic music within the actual game-world definitely has strong cultural aspects, and off-screen environmental music for the benefit of the player will have less definite splashes of culture, in my opinion.

I remember asking for some help for my own ethnomusicological study a little over a year ago. I think I opted to just write a paper instead, though. I'll take the survey when I have a minute.

Yeah. I want to say, "it's just not my thing" but this genre is actually something I like. I guess I'm just giving in to disappointment. Glad to see others like it, though.

You're right -- often hype can only be judged retroactively, based on people opinions on whether the product delivered. Also, "over-hype" is a bit redundant. My personal opinion is that you can think of over-hype as a marketing build-up that goes above and beyond its usefulness -- to the point where it's actually strangling the release of the product with expectations. Excess expectation is a double-edged sword -- it makes the product a ready-made conversation topic, but that prepped forum can then turn on the product when it doesn't live up to expectations -- which is the most common case with such high expectations as were set with this album's marketing. But rare is the case where over-expectation actually makes sales worse than it would have been otherwise. In my opinion this album is not good enough to be uber-successful by post-release word-of-mouth or recommendation, so the sales this album will have gotten in the short-term from over-hype is really the best sales strategy it had going for it at the end of the day. The downside is that they can't pull off this strategy again until they have a another winner like Discovery to follow-up. It's like a one-use power up. Now I'm rambling nonsense. I'm stopping now.

Great production of course -- can't go unmentioned. But slow or not, the songs don't jump out at me. I understand the sound they were going for on the album, and I really like the Nile Rodgers riffs here and there, but I'm not feeling the tunes. Not yet at least. Digital Love still stands as my personal fav. I miss that celebratory sound. If at the moment you're looking for something to quench your thirst for that same sound, check out some Breakbot -- he's under the same label/manager situation that Daft Punk used to be under. Some highlights of his: , , Sweet Sensation, and .

Yeah, I thought there were some great responses there. I think heartbreak stirs us up in so many ways that allow music to have greater effects on us. Having music with so much meaning, variety, and community behind it is a nice thing to have at those times in our lives.