Harmony

If stepping back from OCR in any way gave him the time and focus to put out the awesome stuff I've heard from him lately, then I can't help but be glad he left. Stay away Navid and continue to spit that hot fire!

Voted Seconded

I agree, but I didn't have the heart to recommend using that beautiful brand spanking new bell-and-whistles Yamaha as a midi controller

With my super cheap Casio, I turn it's volume setting as high as it will go and then reduce the gain on my audio interface until it doesn't clip. That seems to give me the best signal-to-noise ratio. You'll have to experiment with what settings work best for your setup. The first clip isn't bad, but a little noise reduction would certainly help out. The noise reduction in the second sample was applied way to heavily; you can hear how it has muddled the higher frequencies and given a little of the dreaded warbbling effect. Some noise reduction plugins have the ability to selectively apply noise reduction to parts of the frequency spectrum. If Gold Wave's plugin allows you to do this, try reducing the noise only in the low to mid-high frequencies. Leaving the highest frequencies relatively unchanged works best for me.

An audio interface is the same thing as a sound card, so you actually are talking about upgrading your sound card. I can only guess, but the iMic might give you less noise, not because the hardware is any better, but because it sits outside of your laptop away from other noisy components. I personally would just buy the much cheaper cable (and adapter if needed) and start with that. Wait until you an save up a little more money and get one of the better audio interfaces. Some of the prices on that website are alright, but some seem a little high so you should also shop around as much as possible. EDIT: Oh, and since the iMic isn't Vista compatible, it probably won't work with Win7 either.

Hmm, I don’t know where to start. Ahh well, some thoughts: 1) When you connect the headphone out to the mic-in, the biggest issue you’re likely to run into is noise or hiss. However, while it’s not going to be the best recording known to man, the hiss shouldn’t be detrimental. Plus, there are ways of minimizing that hiss using noise reduction programs and equalization (EQ). 2) If you can play and arrange your music the way you’d like in the Yamaha and then use the playback function to send the recording to your computer via the headphone jack, that’s great. It’s not a workaround, you’re just using the keyboard as a sequencer. Plus, music creation is not programming; workarounds are fine. Even the biggest wealthiest producers use “workarounds” of some kind to get the sound they want. 3) If you want to increase your ability to arrange and fiddle with your music more than the Yamaha will allow, then you should look into getting a sequencer (sometimes called a host or DAW) like Reaper (which is shareware). In addition to opening up your creative possibilities with your keyboard sounds (I’ll explain in a second), but it will also allow you to start using thousands upon thousands of free sounds and effects that are floating around out there. In some cases, these sounds will be better than those that came with your keyboard. 4) So if you were to get a sequencer like Reaper, you could use the midi in/out features of your keyboard to control up to 16 different sounds at once. You’d accomplish this by connecting the Yamaha to the computer, and connecting the headphone out the keyboard to the mic-in. Once you get Reaper to recognize your keyboard (this tutorial might help), you can now enter midi data into Reaper. The easiest way to input that midi data for you would be to use your keyboard. You would set up Reaper to record midi data, then play your keyboard normally. The midi data is input into Reaper, that data goes to your keyboard which tells the keyboard to play a note, that note is played and the audio is sent through the headphone out jack back into Reaper. You can directly record that sound as you play in Reaper, or for more versatility, you can just record the midi notes so that you can edit them before recording the audio that gets sent back from your keyboard. Of course all of this still uses the mic-in which will be hissy, but with reaper as your host you can load a variety of plugins that will reduce this noise. Hope that helps a little.

haha, I read the title and had to hear this. Nice work so far. A few comments: I agree with Doug that it sounds a lot weaker than it should because there's no bass to actually pump up. Bring in some hard thumping bassline and I think you'd really get the crowd (i.e. me) jumping. And personally, I don't like the primary kick that you're using. It's too acoustic sounding and doesn't have the fullness that I'd expect from this type of track. The boomy kick that comes in right at the end would be much better suited to carry the bulk of this track, imo. Finally, I think if you toned down the reverb it would make for a cleaner more punchy sound. If you add a bassline, you'll probably need to take down the reverb anyway in order to keep everything from sounding too muddy.

Luscious, even for the genre; I know Jordan was happy to hear this one. All-in-all, very cool as usual Jimmy. One of my favorite BGC tracks ...man that tape stop is perfectly placed. Love it!

Nice creative space Q.K.

You know, I've wanted to make a keyboard drumming tutorial for some time now. Mostly for fun, but it might help some people program some more realistic drum parts. I'm not a drummer at all though, so I'm a little hesitant to give a tutorial where I'd have to make up a bunch of drum terminology and have the DrumUltima's of the world laugh at my ignorance You can download the kit from the link in the op to see how it's arranged, but it's basically GM-improved. There are identical kicks at B2 and C3. I have three identical snare samples on D3,Eb3,E3 with the only difference being the velocity mapping of the layers (medium-hard,light,hard). The snare roll at 0:51 is played using the medium-hard and hard keys. My favorite non-GM placement is having identical closed hi-hat samples on Gb3 and Ab3. Putting the pedal hi-hat on the Ab3 as in the GM spec is terrible for playing. Fortunately, most kits I've seen don't do that anymore. Other than that, the only special item (other than 4 splashes...I love splashes) are the choke samples on all of the crashes/splashes one-octave above their standard positions. Sometimes it's cool to have a single generic choke key that cuts whatever cymbal sample is playing, but with the sfz specification that this sample set was arranged in, adding a choke key doesn't easily allow you to control the attack and release of the choke. So I took the easy road out and did individual chokes. One thing that I have yet to experiment with is placing another kick somewhere else, like B4. That would allow some really cool double-bass techniques that are basically impossible with the kicks so far left of everything else. In fact, I've been trying to learn for keyboard and I don't think it's physically possible without a kick towards the right of the range

Thanks OCR, glad you enjoy! Dude, for someone who types at 166 wpm you shouldn't be all that jealous. Your fingers move pretty frickin fast too. In fact, if someone were to steal your mouse, you'd probably start programming all of your phat beats from the keyboard just like I do...only faster...and without any misspelled notes...

I’m sure there’s a tutorial out there somewhere. If you find one for Vienna, it’s virtually the same as Viena so you should be able to use that. A soundfont is a collection of wave files bundled with instructions on how they should be played when midi info is passed their way. At its core, a sf is made up of “samples”. These are just the wave files. For example, someone might record a snare being hit at 3 different volumes. These samples are then collected into groups called “instruments.” If we were making a drum kit soundfont, one instrument might be the 3 wave samples of our snare. Another might be the wave samples for the hi-hat, and so on. Most of the editing you’ll do to pre-made soundfonts is in the instruments. Here, you define what samples you want played and how you want them played when you press certain keys (or however you input your midi data). Instruments have further divisions like “layers” and “splits”, but those aren’t really important right now. Finally, instruments are arranged into “presets” or “patches”. So for the drum kit example, the snare, kick, and hi-hat instruments would be collected to form at single preset, say “drum-kit 1”. That preset is what you finally select in your sf player. When you open up viena and load a soundfont, the left panel shows a tree of your samples, instruments and presets. Open up your harpsichord sf and you should see 116 samples, 2 instruments (Petit Italien-Jeu 1 and Petit Italien-Jeu 2), and 1 preset (Harpsichord) which is made up of both instruments. What I suggested before was to delete the second instrument Petit Italien-Jeu 2. However, since the preset Harpsichord depends on Jeu 2, you first have to delete that instrument from the preset. 1) On the left tree, expand the Presets directory, expand the Harpsichord Preset, left click “Petit Italien-Jeu 2” and press ctrl-x. That should delete it. 2) Now, expand the Instruments directory, left click “Petit Italien-Jeu 2” and press ctrl-x. Now it’s gone. However, the samples that Jeu 2 used still remain and the file size is still large. 3) To get rid of them, expand the Samples directory. In order to find out what samples were used by what preset, you could have double-clicked on the sample names, but that was before we deleted the instruments that depended on them. In this case, just trust me that all of the samples with names that start with “II” were used by Jeu 2. Delete each one of those by selecting it, and pressing ctrl-x. Save and you should be done. As far as effects like chorus and phasing, I was talking about applying them outside of the soundfont; nothing to do with Viena or soundfont editing. When you load your soundfont into whatever sequencer you’re going to use, you should be able to apply any number of effects

The drum kit now comes with a demo video!

Got a new camera for my birthday and recently built a new drum sample set. Put the two together and waddya got? Enjoy! For those interested, this is the same free drum kit that I posted in the remixing forum a little while ago. SO much fun to jam with >> NEW VIDEO << New video for Zircon's Groove Bias drum sample library! For a limited time only, this video comes with increased production value!!!

So the Harpsichord you posted works fine for me in Viena. It is so large because each of about 60 keys is sampled in stereo with each sample running about 15 seconds. On top of that, each key has a jeu 1 and jeu 2 layer, which undoubtedly are harpsichord related terms that I'm unfamiliar with. So, in my crudeness, I just deleted all of the jeu 2 samples and that brought the sf2 file size to 80mb. The difference in sound is noticeable, but not detrimental imo. Nothing a good chorus or phase effect couldn't make up for.

That was awfully fast of you to pull all of the wav samples out of the SF, convert them to ogg and then convert them back to SF (assuming you didn't just keep everything in SFZ format). Are you sure you went through all of those steps?And Vienna (two n's) is a soundfont editor made by Creative for SoundBlaster only cards. You'll get that message if you try to use it with any other card. Viena (one n) is a clone of Vienna which should work on any sound card. Did you go to the link I gave you? I've never had a problem with it on multiple setups with various soundcards (el cheapo laptop cards included). SFZ allows you to stream soundfonts directly from disk. Cuts the RAM usage way down but it obviously taxes the processor more. Out of curiosity, what do you mean "unstable"? I don't recall ever using anything over 300mb so maybe I haven't run into this barrier, but I thought the stability should be a function of your available ram.

Soundfonts are just files, so you should be able to edit them regardless of your soundcard. The only difference would be if you had a soundblaster which may give you a few more options in terms of editing and playing back sf2 files. If you'd like to give editing a shot, download viena, find a simple soundfont to start out with, then have at it.

Nope, I don't know of anyway to do easily do that. You could convert the sf2 to sfz using something like Extreme Sample Converter ($$$), then convert all of the .wav files to the compressed .ogg format. That would reduce file size considerably without a significant loss of quality . Or you could manually remove some of the velocity layers of the sf2 using something like viena(free) to make a "light" version of the sf2 with whatever loss of quality you see as acceptable. But both of those would take more time than I'm guessing you're willing to invest. Sadly, the easiest solution I see is what DZComposer said: if you're ram-limited get more ram.

Wow, thanks. I rarely get such glowing compliments on my lyrics Glad I could bring some attention to this worldwide epidemic. And just to clarify to all of the people out there thinking that the "dragon" might metaphorically represent anything about us that our friends/family/society see as odd or different, you're wrong. This song is about fursecution. omg, I'm watching some of his videos now and this guy is awesome! Why hadn't I heard of him before? I guess I was too awestruck by and Kaki King (oddly, no relation) to notice the other great acoustic tapping talent out there.

Drawing a blank, but that's a really generic riff you've given us and with generic lyrics to boot Any other more specific words from the lyrics coming to memory? While you think, your plight reminded me of this classic episode of Married With Children: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI3oySI4aeU

Well, dfd can't be helping with the rape of your buffer.

That's an interesting sfz you've got there. That P3 must be causing comedy-related GUI problems as well.But hopefully you're not trying to run it on dfd. That'll slow you down for sure on an older pc.

Ah ha, so the prophet reveals your true problem SOC. In anycase, if your soundfont is decently sampled then it won't use a lot of resampling which means that the quality setting becomes less and less important. In fact, for most of my soundfonts, even the smaller ones, I barely hear a difference between 'draft' and '72' quality. So it's a little strange to me that your soundfonts degrade to 'poo-quality' at the draft setting. Are you sure they didn't start out that way For an older computer, I'd stick to using PR16 mode. That way you use less RAM and have faster load times at the cost of 1) a delay whenever you change patches and 2) samples are played back at 16bit instead of 32bit (SF are restricted to 16bit so who cares?). And if you really want the best of the best quality, you can always just run everything as draft while creating and then up everything to the highest settings for rendering. Plus, I think the P4 is the oldest Intel chip that supports the default SF32 setting. So if you actually do have a P3, that might be the problem right there.

Well, since soundfonts have been around for a while and people seem to like them, there are a more than a few programs that will load them with a better interface than SFZ. Back when I had a Sound Blaster and SONAR 2, Megafont (possibly the most amazingly useful software of its day imo) made categorizing, loading, and searching your soundfont collection faster than getting the sounds out of any VST I've ever seen. But alas, Megafont's time has passed. In anycase, SFZ sacrifices GUI frills for lots of power and sound quality, but that shouldn't be a turn off. If you want to modify attack, cutoff, reverb, etc with SFZ, you just need a list of the controller numbers and you should be able to automate the parameters in your sequencer. As far as editing soundfonts offline, you can do just about everything you need with viena which has a pretty good GUI.

What kinds of errors? I've only had rare problems with crashing (just about as rare as any other plugin) and stuff loads really quickly in SONAR 6. Top that off with the fact that sfz sounds better and has more options under the hood than just about anything else out there and it's been a winner for me!GUI sucks though. Even the screenshots of sfz+ don't really inspire me to buy it.