Harmony

Phew, I was running out of OCR wiki pages to read!

LOL. Too bad it's a MIDI RIP NO OVERRIDE.

I enjoy most of the music I've heard from you so I certainly know you're more than just a bass player. And highly sought after in your area? And you feel that instruments are a key to your success? Cookies all around! What I'm concerned with is your blanket statement about Kanye and Timbaland's work. If you hate their productions because of some subjective opinion concerning their melodies, beats or sound, then fine. But that really doesn't seem like what you're implying. It seems like you're dismissive of their body of work because you don't appreciate the process by which they created some of their music. If so, I wouldn't expect such a narrow view of music from a musician.

Totally agreed.

In some cases it may be an easy fix, but the point is that it is completely unnecessary. The soundfonts are certainly not the problem as I have tried multiple free/commercial soundfonts (ns7-free kit, Sonic Implants Blue Jay drums, etc) and none of them with mute groups work properly. Again, I am absolutely sure that most of the SF that are giving me this problem have the choke groups properly enabled within the file (the mute groups come up correctly in SynthFont, Creative's Vienna, Viena and SFZ) but SC is not reading them properly. And honestly, it's not really that easy a fix if when I want to load, for example ns7, I have to go through the 700 samples, find the 40-80 samples that should have the choke turned on, turn on the choke and hope that I don't have to edit anything else. That is tremendously more complicated than: load SF, play. If RAM is that big a concern for you, SFZ allows direct from disk streaming which uses 0 ram I didn't see that in SC, but I didn't check. And although I guess being able to selectively load patches is fine, I like loading the entire font because it allows me to quickly change patches without opening up the SF player. Yeah I posted about trying to do it in SFZ a little while ago and no one seemed to know how. That is a big plus for SC and I think this may be the primary use of it for me.I didn't mention it before, but as far as quality I was happy with SC. The soundfonts that worked sounded just as clean and glitch free as SFZ.

Congrats P and C!

It's Orkybash' FFX remix wait a minute...is this request the same as this?

@ ajax: Char broiled patty and pastrami on a single burger? Count me in. You know they say pastrami is “the most sensual of the salt-cured meats.” Mayo and ketchup on fries, count me out @ James G: Conference center sounds interesting, but I wonder if they’ll let me walk around randomly with no real purpose for being there. Maybe there’s actually a tour or something. Sandy City looks nice on wikipedia and I like to cruise, so I’ll consider the drive. That is, I’ll consider it if I get a decent car from the rental place. Nothing against anyone who drives one, but I have this thing against this new wave of ridiculously tiny cars, and I’m thinking that by reserving an “economy” car from Hertz, I’m gonna end up with a *shivers* Honda Fit or something. @Calpis: Haha, my friend and I were looking at Antelope Island on Google Maps the other day and it looks like a giant patch of sand from the satellite photo. We asked ourselves “what the hell is there and why would anyone want the find out!?” Still, I am a nature loving guy so I have to do something lake related while I’m there. Ski-season starts around mid Nov near here in southern Pennsylvania. Guess you guys have to wait a little while longer? Although I do love skiing, I didn’t feel like dragging my ski stuff all the way out west for such a short vacation anyway. Looks like it’ll be a toss up as to whether I try to hit Sandy City or Park City…although Park City’s wiki page is cooler. Site of a recent senseless murder you say? And it has a Brazilian restaurant? Yep, Trolley Square is on the to-do list. “Trash Birds”,lol. As a photographer I feel it is my duty to feed the seagulls and record the ensuing Hitchcock-like mayhem. I’m not cruel enough to attempt the Alka-Seltzer stunt, but I’m not above photographing it if I see it in progress. Sounds like the most interesting thing for me to see will be the extent of the LDS influence. I mean I knew there were lots of LDS folks in town, but it sounds like everything from politics to shopping is restricted by (or adheres to) the tenets of the faith. Destroying malls the size of city blocks...ravenous missionaries who mob strangers that wander into their territory...hiding liquor on Sundays...wtf is going on in SLC? @ Pezman: Well, technically I’m still a doctoral student, but short answer: aerospace engineer. Longer but completely more impressive answer: computational fluid dynamics engineer.

My two cents: I’m using v1.2, since I couldn’t get v2 to work (it didn’t crash, but I couldn’t get anything to actually load or play…and the color scheme was freaking me out). I’m primarily interested in shortcircuit's soundfont player capabilities, so that’s really all I explored. On the plus side, every soundfont that’s given me problems with SFZ sounded as it should in SC. Unfortunately, SC created a bunch of new absolutely unbearable problems. For example, none of the mute groups worked on any of my drum soundfonts which means that, for example, I can play an open hi-hat and a closed hi-hat simultaneously. That makes drums completely unplayable for me. Not that I should have to manually turn that function on, but I do see a ‘choke group’ button which is set at ‘off’ by default. I’d like to click it to turn it on but it doesn’t seem to be that simple, and the mediocre-at-best help file doesn’t make mention of the button. Other problems included some of my samples being randomly panned hard left/right, and some of the velocity layers not being interpreted correctly. I’m no plugin programmer, but how hard is it to write plugin that correctly imports the well-defined .sf2 specification? C’mon. Although I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone as a primary soundfont player, that’s not to say that all was lost in terms of soundfont capabilities. I liked the ‘learn all’ function which assigned samples to keys simply by playing the desired keyboard note. In the list view, grey/white bars pop up to indicate what layers/samples are being accessed as they are played. I’ve never seen anything like that, and with 100’s or 1000’s of samples in some soundfonts, that’s pretty useful for finding exactly what sample needs to be edited. In fact, if this could export in .sf2 format I would probably use this as my primary editor (to replace SynthFont and Viena). Who knows, maybe it can export .sf2, but again, the help file fails to make any mention of soundfonts at all. I’m sure I could mess around with it and force it to do a few of the things I want, but after an hour of fiddling I’m tired. So in the end, for my purposes SC is only usable in a limited sense. I'll be keeping it installed, and the potential is certainly there, but I just don’t feel it delivers well enough in its current form to become my primary anything. Thanks though for bringing it to my attention MaliceX. lol, yeah.

Yeah, I definitely wanted to see Temple Square. For historical and religious significance, sure, but did anyone else see the Mega Disasters episode on killer swarms of locusts? Apparently, after just arriving in Utah, early Mormon settlers (or at least their crops) were attacked by an ungodly number of crickets. As the story goes, an ungodly (or I guess godly) number of hungry seagulls eventually came to their rescue. As a result, that specific cricket species is now called the Mormon cricket, the seagull became the state bird of Utah, and there is a monument to the "Miracle of the Gulls" at Temple Square. I'm going to have to see it to believe it.

I totally forgot until yesterday, but I’ve got a conference (aka paid vacation) to go to in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nov 17th-21st. Never been before so if nothing else I’ll probably enjoy visiting a new place. But other than that, I have no idea what the SLC has to offer in terms of things to do when I’m not nerding it up with fellow engineers. So is anyone from the area? I’d like to avoid sitting in my hotel room staring at the walls all evening, so I’m looking for suggestions. Does the SLC have anything to see or do that I just can’t miss...other than a huge salty lake (which I am actually interested in seeing)? Oh, and I will have a car so a little travel isn’t a problem.

I think the sound towards the end is messed up. I didn't hear any applause for some reason.

Very cool. I was hoping to have, as you initially suggested, some sort of tracking system to give us a sense of our collective contribution. If nothing else, it may have given the community a little extra incentive to try and reach any donation goals that were established. But not tracking donations has its pros as well.

Yeah, but that's nothing new. The MPC in all its incarnations has been popular in hip-hop since its birth. Personally, I wonder why this has been the case. I’d take a keyboard over drum pads any day of the week, so is it the portability of the MPC’s that has got hip-hop producers mesmerized? Is it this famous great quality of the ‘MPC sound’ that I hear about? What? I guess I should ask why, but I’ll go out on a limb and assume it’s in one way or another related to this: No need to start climbing the high-and-mighty live-instruments-are-better-than-samples tree unless you have something more substantive than a claimed ‘edge’ over other producers to keep you from falling. Your ‘edge’ only has a realizable benefit if your final product is in some way better than that of ‘most producers.’ And since we’re talking about hip-hop, I seriously doubt that the ability to play bass gives you or any other producer the ability (real or perceived) to make more successful, popular, creative or unique beats.

I had no idea the ASR-10 was such a popular sampler with the big boys of hip hop production. I didn't bother looking it up, but Kanye claims it's from the early 90's which probably means it only allows up to 44.1kHz, right!? Makes me even more skeptical about the hype and push towards 192kHz recording. And oh, Kanye samples more frequently and more "lazily" than Jay-Z ever has, yet I still love him. I mean what can I say? The man's beats are hot.

Hey just out of curiosity, with the 1000's of one-shots that you have, what do you typically use to load them up quickly and in an organized fashion? I wouldn't think that you're just loading wav by wav as audio clips in FL...are you? Kontakt perhaps?

3 months is probably my average. The first half of that is usually arranging and generally deciding on a direction for the mix. Practicing a solo part on piano or guitar, or working out the harmonies for an accompaniment is a big chunk as well. I also end up doing a lot of playing around that really doesn't end up in the mix. If I get a sweet bassline going for example, I might end up drumming away to it for an hour, just having fun and not really recording anything. I <3 MIDI drums. By far though, the biggest portion of my time gets put into making all of my cheap/free gear sound slightly less cheap/free. Noise reduction on vocals and guitar, EQ on anything having to do with my el cheapo mic, pitch correction for my pitifully untrained voice, applying automation and plugin after plugin to get my predominantly soundfont based samples to sound a little more robust, final mastering, etc etc. Very time consuming, but fun, and I think worth it.

I dunno. Strikes over similar issues have lasted longer than a month.

That's a pretty broad statement that needs some qualification, wouldn't you agree? It takes very little effort to sample a cool drum loop, ctrl+c ctrl+v 50 times, then throw some vocals or a guitar solo over it. It takes more effort to sample a cool drum loop, ctrl+c ctrl+v 50 times, then make significant additions to the loop in terms of song structure, original leads, other supporting instruments, etc. I'd say it takes a great deal of effort and creativity to sample a cool drum loop, creatively chop it up, arrange it, mix it, process it, then start adding other original elements. In fact, I'd say it takes just about as much effort as it takes to "write" a vg remix where the main melody has already been created by someone else.

Just to clarify, wasn't "Lemmings UMD Theme" actually composed long before Follin did the PSP soundtrack? Mirsoft is giving the composers for the original Lemmings games as Tim Wright, Brian Johnston, Malc Jennings, Tony Williams and Jeroen Tel. That's a favorite theme of mine and I wouldn't want anyone to consider it for the project if it's not applicable. Most of the other Lemmings songs being hosted sound original though.

True, I hadn't considered that. If you're importing/exporting at the same sample rates, I'm claiming yes. Barring any oddball problems, I don't see where timing errors could come into the process.

The process I described doesn't have anything to do with tempos. You can set them at whatever you want and you should still be able to position your guitar audio EXACTLY (to the precision of a single sample) where it should be in Sonar. The only way that I can see a problem occuring is if when you bounce the drums to an audio file, the drums don't exactly line up with the midi data they were generated from. I find that possibility to be very unlikely. Even still, if you don't want to go through that simple procedure to get sample accurate timing, believe it or not it's really not hard to just move the guitar track around until it's where you think it sounds right. Like Dan said, that's just the way it's gotta be sometimes.

Awesome awesome awesome. I'm a sucker for tricked out drum work, and this is chocked full of it. And this is almost like two excellent songs in one! The first half is a really clean DnB minimalist take on the source, which I love. The second half is just as cool with a busy but still well defined soundspace. Those crashes that get cutout around the 2:56 mark are really sweet. Tres nice Radiowar.

If I'm understanding the issue correctly then my solution would be this: Always bounce your drum track starting from the 1st bar. So now you know exactly where the drums start in Sonar. Then, when you begin recording the guitar into the laptop, always start recording from the beginning of the bounced drum track, whether you need to or not. Now you know exactly where the guitar audio starts relative to the bounced drum track. Finally, when putting your guitar track back into Sonar, set the Now Time cursor to the beginning of the first bar (or wherever you bounced the drum track from) and import the audio. Your guitar track should be exactly lined up with the drum track in Sonar. Si? Si.

I can do just about anything but fall asleep to his music