Harmony

Gotta be honest, I'm pretty familiar with the OST so I tried to guess the source (didn't know the original was called Ceremony) and the way you've changed some of the notes threw me off. I just couldn't make the connection. I eventually got it though so maybe I'm just slow Battle theme came through loud and awesomely clear. In anycase, nice atmosphere; you're putting those samples to good use. The drums feel like they get overpowered during the DnB section so you might want to work on their mixing. Good stuff so far, I'll be watching this WIP.

I think that 99% of what we recognize as talent is, as has been said, just plain hard work. The "talent" is really just the dedication to continue working at something when others would get bored or overly frustrated. People tell me I'm good at math. Well, I think everyone can be just as "good" as me if they worked as hard as me at it. Sure hard work will only get you so far, but I honestly don't think that most people go far enough in most things to run into talent barriers. Same thing with music. I don't feel I have any special talent except for a simple love of music creation. I can't get enough of it and while other people are perfecting their jumpshot or kickflip or dancing, I'm playing with chorus plugins till 3am. Everyone has their own passions. To answer the question, I started piano lessons when I was 5 and took private lessons until I was almost 14 when my family moved and I was forced to stop. I kept up the practice myself until I picked up a guitar in 1999 and dedicated most of my musical time to learning it. Around the same time, I bought Voyetra's MIDI-only Orchestrator music starter kit. I started messing around with that and I was instantly hooked. Orchestrator -> Orchestrator Pro -> Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 + Fruity Loops 3 -> SONAR So, in terms of recording, I've been at this about 10 years. As OCR goes, I've never had a remix rejected, but I submitted my first one in 2005 after 6 years of recording experience and with lots of musical background. I don't want to say that it takes years to get on OCR though. With the free stuff that's out today, you can literally download an entire musical setup in a couple of hours. With Google and forums like KVR and the ReMixing forum here, you can learn to use it in a few weeks. Then, with the great presets out there you can throw something together that is AWESOME in a few days. Just takes creativity and a lot of hard work. Now is a great time to be getting into music creation.

Ohh, I was just about to get up from my desk and head home from work but this song came up in winamp and I'm transfixed. Gotta sit back down and let this one ride out A sax this sexy and a piano that smooth are the only things that could keep me at work any longer than necessary on a Friday afternoon. Agreed on both counts. I wish the piano owned a little more sonic ground in the mix. I'd love it if it were both louder and wider, but that's a minor gripe. And yeah, Anthony's performance makes me want to give up my dreams of having enough money to buy some decent solo sax/trumpet samples. I'd be much better served using that money to buy a sax and learning to play it...or just using the money to hire Anthony.Nice work guys!

I would love it if you were right on this one, but nah, assuming my friend isn't lying, it was a $49.99 limited sale and he picked two up with tax+shipping for about $70 each. He now laughs at my Acer 20" that I paid almost 3 times as much for

That was hilarious. omg. Highlight: "my giney tickles" LOL

lol, yeah I know I've gotta stop with the dragon thing.

Glad everyone is digging this!

Happy birthday!

Oh, nice work! I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. In terms of passing there are a few issues that'll probably get mentioned. Firstly, I think I'm hearing some clipping from 0:00-0:25, but that may be the cheap headphones I'm on right now. Also there might be an issue with the open hi-hat sample you're using. It sounds like the left channel cuts out mid-sample (e.g. 0:20) creating an odd panning effect that isn't too appealing on headphones. Arrangement is pretty conservative, especially for such a short song and especially for one that repeats itself for the last half of the song. Performance is pretty cool, maybe a tad mechanical, but still cool. I especially like 1:07-1:24. But man, this song would have been 10 times better imo if the drum track really rocked. It's ok as is, but it's pretty simple and it repeats with little variation on the main beat. What you need is a friend with a marching snare to really go to town on this sucker. That would be sweet. All in all not bad, but I'd keep working on it, make it longer (you're teasing us at only 2mins), mix up the arrangement some more, and spice up the drum track. Good luck at the panel!

Nah Rozovian, I'm not gonna sub this one, but I'm glad you like it. I was just having a little fun. I kinda like the imperfections and simple arrangement as-is and, although not entirely necessary, I'd feel the overwhelming need to perfect the life out of the song if I was going to try to get it posted here. Plus, I left out one of the best parts of the original! Can't post a mix of this awesome song without arranging all of it Eino, if you get around to listening to the song you'll hear me laughing in the song at the same point for the same reason

http://www.mediafire.com/?zmgqhttzdmy The samples as well as the SFZ file are there. I've tweaked it some more and I absolutely LOVE playing with this kit. It's primarily a modification of the GSCW kit but I moved a bunch of stuff, remapped many of the velocity layers, added some toms, removed some of the "performance" samples, pulled in some cymbals from various places, and added chokes for all of them. Personalization rocks

Hey OCR, this is just a little something I threw together yesterday afternoon for fun. I couldn’t stop humming it this morning so I figured someone else might find it catchy too Hope you enjoy! Tune: Me and My Dragon Source: Secret of Mana “The Dark Star” Lyrics: Me and my dragon, walking 'round downtown Minding our own business, but you know trouble’s gonna be found Cuz when they see something different, the world, they gotta frown. Sometimes if you’re different you feel like you just don’t wanna be around anyone...anymore...stay at home...shut the door. I put a little hat on my dragon to try to make him norm But now I’m walking with a dragon in a hat and the people laugh more So I run into an alley just to get us out of sight Even though my mama told me never run when you’re right And this time I am, cuz this is me. Me and my dragon, we’re unique. We shouldn’t care what the people think, but we do. That’s part of me too. What to do? What to do?

Best Buy online was offering that monitor at $50 this past weekend and as usual, I missed the awesome sale >

1) Happy Birthday Jill! 2) You guys are all awesome, thanks so much for the birthday wishes 3) I agree, a harmonious guitar part and some pixietricked-out vocals would make for a great birthday duet!!

Sorry, I already have a casio and a hammer that will do just fine if needed

I love stuff with character like your Edirol. Of course I love soulless new shiny stuff like DJP's Kurzweil too

haha, I'll have to find a place to put the larger samples, but sure

Ah well. Out of curiosity, why aren't the libraries that you guys are developing offered in sfz, for example? Wouldn't that allow people like me, who don't have a proprietary sampler, to buy your product and increase your sales? Is it the copy protection issue I mentioned before? Do you feel the library would lose too much in translation?

Exactly, sfz does away with that aspect of soundfonts. SFZ is non-monolithic, in that the sfz file itself is just an ascii text file where as the samples (.wav or ogg-vorbis) are distributed at your discretion in various folders. I guess I can see the marketability issue. It would be incredibly difficult to implement copy protection with sfz in its native form, but for us poor folk who unfortunately don't own Kontakt or similar, it seems like an excellent way to distribute and develop sample banks. For reference

I've been messing around with it for a few days now, and it is simple, flexible, rife with possibilities, in a word: awesome. It removes most of the restrictions we had with soundfonts and makes the sample sets easy to create/modify without the need for a special editor. Sure, VSTs are great but try building or modifying your own. It took me 20 minutes to grab some samples and build the greatest most playable free drum kit I've ever had using only MS Wordpad. And its all non-proprietary. Am I missing something? Why haven't sample developers jumped on this? Why don't I see any sfz gui editors out there (sfzEd is apparently dead)? Where are free alternatives to sfz and VSTsynthFont?

You can adjust the attack on just about any decent soundfont player, so take your pick of the good SF's that are out there. Clavinova is pretty good, but TASCAM's CVI piano vst (free) is great. You can also easily adjust the attack on that as well.

They do if you only speak English

Upgrade. I have the FastTrack Pro (also USB) and it's really not bad at all. It has the phantom power you'd need in both of its pre-amps, its setup is easy, I don't have problems with huge latency or dropouts, it's perfect for a laptop setup, and its under $200. Problem solved!