DZComposer

I go away for a while and miss this? shame on me. Note: I am not meaning to be harsh. I want you to learn and get better. Especially with the lack of good Star Fox music on this site. The Good: :00-:45 - I like this interpretation of the the Corneria BGM :46 - YES! FINALLY SOMEONE OTHER THAN ME THAT RESPECTS THAT TENOR LINE! Seriously, too many people omit that part and it takes a certain feeling out of the piece. Nice to see someone use more of the Corneria BGM. I like hearing a softer version of the Star Wolf theme once. 5:10 - Where was this kind of thing earlier? The Bad: :00-:45 - Bring the cellos out more, they're buried and it give the piece too bright of a sound. :46 - This transition is too sudden. It needs some lead-up 3:04 - This didn't work. The style of the piece does not match that rhythm pattern. 3:12 - Referencing other sources can be effective if done right, but bringing in the Star Wars Force Theme seemed a bit random. I would only do something like this in a manner that doesn't make the additional source take over the piece, IE use it in a non-melody part. 3:29 - Needs more lead-up. Also, change it up a bit. Fit your style a little better. 4:29 - This key change sticks out like a pimple on a freshman's face. You have to prepare the listener for a key change. If you don't it really kills the flow of the piece. 4:49 - Another bad transition 5:21 - Really Bad key change. It was almost a great transition, but the key change itself ruined it. You set it up in one key and changed to another. The new melody should start on a G rather than a D. It sounds really odd to chromatically climb to F# and then drop to D. If you continue to G and start the new melody there, you maintain the fluidity of the transitional phrase. I realize this will force you to transpose up 5 semitones the entire rest of the piece, but unless you want to completely re-work the transition, you will need to do that. 5:39 - Lose the timpani. You had this nice flow of soft chords interrupted without warning by loud timpani. The timpani adds nothing. Remove the part. Overall: By the 2:00 mark, the piece starts to sound stale. I know you are working with a limited instrument set here, but make use of the strings more! The harp and piano get old after a while. Transitions. The hard part of a medley. To make many pieces into one, you have to establish a flow between them. It can't have the "next track on the CD" feel. Think of a piece of music as if it were a river: It moves from the headwaters to the ocean. A piece of music needs to move from the first measure to the last. Even if it is a medley. Several of your transitions broke the flow. You essentially dammed the river. Transitions are especially important during key changes. To be honest, this is one of my own personal weaknesses. But, with the right criticism I have learned to recognize it and catch myself more often. Destination. Where are we going? You piece has no part that feels like a climax. Establish a climax and make the piece move to that point, and then resolve in a denouement. Remember the plot diagram in English class? You know, the one that looked like a crooked triangle? Guess what? A piece of music needs to fit that model, too. Consistency of style. You need to aim for a certain style. Once you get your style, make your sections fit it. Want to change style mid-song? Fine, so long as you provide an adequate transition and continue heading towards your climax. Instrumentation. The same instruments had the same parts the entire time. Change it up! The instrumentation really needs work. Utilize your string section. Violins and Cellos are great melody carriers as well. Also, too much monophonic piano. Bring in intervals and chords into your piano parts. Also, fatten the parts up. It feels sparse in many areas. Add more non-melody parts where possible. Change it Up! So much of this piece sounded like instrumentation change of the original. Use arranger's license and make the source fit the style of your piece, not the other way around. Do not submit yet. You will most likely get a NO from the judges. You have some really good ideas here, but you also have some lousy ones. In such a case, you need to make a decision. I don't mean to be harsh, but if you want to submit this specific piece, then you need to completely overhaul it. You also may want to give consideration to starting over. You need to build-up your musical intuition. I suggest do some serious listening. By serious I mean listen to the song with 100% of your attention. Don't put it on in the background while you play a game or while you drive. A great example of a medley done right, and one from Star Fox, is the credits from Star Fox Command. It's actually a medley of all of the character BGMs. You can get it here if you don't have it: http://starfox-online.net/media/audio/music/sfc/ . Also, listen to classical music a bit, too. Especially if you are planning on doing future pieces in similar styles. I learned the vast majority of my musical intuition from listening.

Interesting move by Garritan. I would not have expected it.

Ack! I'm too late! Oh well... Maybe next time

Which instruments have strange attacks? Solos or sections? I've panned my trumpets, horns, and mallets left, concert drums center, and my low brass, jazz drums, and timpani right. Nothing fully left or right, though. For sure I'll re-pan the soloists more center. I'll look into slowing the vibrato frequency on the flugel and solo trombone. Thanks for the Jazz drumming tips. I'm new to Jazz writing, so that kind of thing is helpful.

This is a piece I originally did for PRC a while ago. I have decided to spruce it up for submission. As of now, it isn't too different from the PRC version, I want to get a feel for the acceptance of it before I do any major overhaul on it. The piece is the Theme of Love from Final Fantasy IV. I arranged this for Brass Choir (Trumpets, Horns, Euphoniums, Trombones, Tubas, and Percussion) with Solo Flugelhorn and Solo Trombone. http://www.corneriasound.com/betamusic/brasslove_hi.mp3 Things I know it needs: Rebalancing of some parts more fluid dynamics more dissonance in the Jazzy section a better ending Sample Libraries: EWQLSO Gold Pro XP (Trumpets, Trombones, Horns) Garritan Jazz and Big Band (Solo Flugelhorn, Solo Trombone) Garritan Concert and Marching Band (Euphoniums, Tubas) Virtual Drumline 2.5 (Percussion) Kontakt 2 Library (Legato Horns) Original PRC description of piece: Sequencer/Sampler: Cubase SL 3/Kontakt 2 The piece opens with Flugel, Timpani, and Vibe, the Flugelhorn represents a lonely girl, who starts to dream about her perfect boy, represented by a solo Trombone. As they fall deeper in love, the piece takes on a more jazzy style. Suddenly, she is awakened, and her dream fades into oblivion.

I know that there are ways to compress them for storage, but as far as compression during use, I have my doubts. Especially lossless. If these filesizes are an issue, I would advise that you consider adding a larger hard drive and/or upgrading the memory in your computer (Depending on where your deficiency is). Memory is at insanely cheap prices right now. (I got a decent 2 gig stick of SODIMM DDR2 for $20 recently). Note that 32-bit Windows limits you to 3.5 gigs of memory. Samples take lots of space. Even moreso when you go beyond SF2. For instance, the Garritan Authorized Steinway piano uses up to 45 gigs. Of course the samplers used support disk streaming and things like that.

Oh, I like this piece. And I have no school this week... I think I'll give it a shot.

Ah, nice to see this genre get some attention. And an interesting source, for sure. The Good: ~:22 - Nice little string work. Is this in 5/4? I like the asymmetric feel. Great dynamics in the brass. I love the forte-piano-crescendos. Great arrangement. I find no faults in the arrangement at all. 2:26 I LOVE the switch to 3/4 (6/8?) and the accelerando is brilliant. The Bad: Either start the basses off a little quieter, or when the harpsichord/guitar/whatever comes in, make it louder. Though if it is a harpsichord, remember that they have like zero dynamics abilities. ~:28 Maybe bring the bass drum out a little here, it would add more impact to that beat. ~1:22 - This may be due to the attack on the samples, but it sounds like the low brass are playing shorter than the the strings. Make sure that you have consistent articulation here, and consider using brass sounds with a more prominent sustain here. ~2:17 - Too much attack on the strings Maybe a little too much cymbal in the 3/4 section near the end. Overall/Conclusion: Wow. This is awesome. Zero arrangement flaws. Stunningly brilliant. OCR needs more works like this. While there is no definite ending, it isn't a cliffhanger either. One you get an ending: SUBMIT IT! YOU MUST SUBMIT IT! If you get a "NO", it's torches and pitchforks time. This is definitely worthy. Only negatives I can find are just nitpicks in the performance. Also, there are some nitpicky balance areas, but they aren't bad and only one was worth a specific mention. Maybe just fix that one. Perfection can actually make something sound less realistic. Only thing I really wish to see changed is more tenor-pitched drums, like toms, in the beats there. There is plenty of bass drum and snare, but this needs some toms bad. Regardless, the solid arrangement and just pure awesome-ness makes up for the few flaws that exist. Bravo! Excellent work!

Ah, good to see one of the more orchestral-styled tracks from this get done. I think I'm gonna go back to my 3-part system I used to use on VGMix back in the day. The good: I like the use of the main theme against the Asteroid beat. It meshes well. No obvious failures in chord structure or rhythmic integrity The Bad: ~0:25 - A little less bass here, please. Though it isn't too bad. Could just be a taste thing. ~0:36 - A little too much flute, it sticks out. ~0:50 - Back the drums off a bit ~0:50-end: Gets a bit repetitive here, change it up a bit. Overall/Conclusion: This needs a little bit of balance. Melody is the most important part. Dynamics are sparse. Add some to make it shine more. Great ideas with the two source tunes. Biggest problem: Repetitiveness. Change things up. Use different instruments. Also, don't be afraid to borrow more source material or throw something original in there. Great potential. Give it a little polish, and it will shine.

With the trend of proprietary sample players starting to take off in the industry, even things like Kontakt may eventually fall into obscurity (Gigastudio is already dead). VSL has one. EastWest has one. Garritan has one.... One can hope for an open standard, but with this trend it isn't likely. Of course vendor lock-in from NI or TASCAM will be decreasing, but I still like the ability to edit instruments now and then, and a lot of these players don't really let you do that.

I thought he meant sustained. Oops, my bad.

What exactly do you mean by this? Multi-note polyphony? Or several, consecutive, notes on an up or down stroke (I think this is what you mean, but I want to be sure)? EWQL does support polyphony on all instruments (at least the ones I've loaded). I can only speak for the Gold Pro XP version, so I do not know what isn't in Silver or is in Platinum. In Gold ProXP there is no "up strokes" or "down strokes" instrument. There are QLEGATO instruments and Buttler Legato instruments. There is also a Run Simulator, which emulates the effect to some degree. There are also things like "Lyrical" and "Expressive" that incorporate dynamics as well. It's pretty much a play with the sounds and find the one you want to use. Remember: These are individual notes that were sampled, so you won't get a 100% realistic sound out of anything, not even something like VSL (though it gets damn-close). And you won't get the best sound with any library straight out of the box.

AMD does not guarantee poor audio performance. I run a quad Phenom 9850 Black on an AMD chipset ASUS mobo, and I have yet to experience any performance or stability issues with any of the software I have. It blows the Athlon XP 64 3500+ that I used to use out of the water, though I didn't have any stability issues on that machine either (nVidia Chipset ASUS Mobo). I did max out that CPU with music, though, hence the reason I built the Phenom box. I don't use GVI stuff, so I can't tell you anything there, but you may want to contact GVI's manufacturer is see if they have a patch or something. As far as the OP, I would seriously consider looking at the Audigy 2 as the culprit. I used to use one and had nothing but performance issues with it for ASIO stuff. Steer away from Creative if you can. When building future machines, buy an "Audio Interface" instead of a "Sound Card." The former will serve your music a lot better as they are tuned for audio production. Sound Cards are usually either tuned for general audio playback, watching movies, or playing games. Audio production is usually just an afterthought.

From what I hear, the latest versions of a couple of popular spammer tools came out a couple of months ago, and they had succeeded in cracking the spam protection on pretty much all of the popular blog and forum software. These things can even answer activation emails. Most of the other forums I'm on have been hit as well. Some of the old tricks like putting in custom required fields seem to still work to a degree. And then there's ReCAPTCHA, which hasn't been cracked yet. It serves the image differently than most CAPTCHAs, and uses private key encryption during the image retrieval process. Spam is becoming a serious issue. Latest figures show that 90% of e-mail traffic is now spam. Forum and blog spam numbers are increasing exponentially. With e-mail, though, there are good spam blockers out there. Sadly, there seems to be no true server-side spam protection system for blogs or forums that isn't tied to one system. Akismet is pretty decent, but it isn't very portable and has some reported accuracy issues. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game between the software distributors and the spammers.

Interesting melody. I may give it a shot.

The most popular remix song in the entire series. Originality is key here, so let's see what you've got. Nice to hear acoustic instruments at the start. :14 - A little too much bass drum :34 same thing. Back the piano off a little bit when the cello enters. When the chords in the violas come in at first, they are barely audible. I like the feel of the piece, for the most part, but it gets a tad bit repetitive by the end. More on that in a second. Back off the bass drum. It is too harsh for the sound. You should go for more rumble than impact, which can be tough to do with samples, but what you have now is too much. Dynamics could make this piece soar. Also, don't be afraid to do a little phrase shaping. Despite the original idea you have, you fell into one of the most common traps that comes with arranging this song: You passed over most of it. Those six or so bars are not the whole song, and they do not contain a lot of material to work with. Because of this, the song get's repetitive. Using more of the source will reduce the repetitiveness. Also, you need to break that 8th note motif at some point to keep things fresh. You moved it to a different sound for a little bit, but you never truly broke it and it mostly stayed in the piano. You did attempt to change it up a little, but you didn't differ enough to create a different sounding motif. It is really easy to fall into a repetitive trap with this source, so be careful. Don't let the 8th note motif dominate the song, or you will have repetitiveness. Also, there is more to this song than the 8 heavy note melody near the beginning. That phrase itself can get repetitive too. Hirasawa recognized this and threw in another melody and later in the song changed up the beat as well.

Also, to say that the high-end VSL libraries are the only good ones is to take a very narrow-minded view. GPO and EWQL are both very capable of sounding good in the right hands. Even those VSL sounds would sound off in the hands of the inexperienced. I wouldn't say that. It is fun to do. But, just like anything, it takes practice. You can't play basketball like Kobe Bryant your first day, just as you can't compose like John Williams on your first day. If you have some training in music, it makes it easier, though you can't count on that alone. You still need practice.

GPO is a pretty good library, but it doesn't sound great out of the box. You have to learn it's programming and you need some good reverb. I'm not trying to tell you not to buy it, just to be aware that GPO is a different library than most and really isn't a library for the lazy when it comes to getting the best out of it (though that also goes for any library).

The MP3 is corrupt. Just so you know.

You can make decent-sounding electronic stuff with free-beer software, but you can't really make decent-sounding orchestral music with it. Squidfont can only do so much, and if I remember correctly, it had some serious tuning issues.

You say you are a clarinetist, which helps, but have you ever done composition before? Do you know anything about orchestration? If not, you will have a lot to learn before you can do this. I would only advise you pick up this hobby if you are serious about it. Let me tell you something important: You WON'T create a Halo-sounding piece if this is your first time composing. You are essentially taking up a new instrument. Like playing the clarinet, composition (especially orchestral) takes practice to do well. Also, this is a hobby that will require significant financial investment. You will have to spend several hundred dollars to get the right equipment and software to even just start. The soundcard in your PC is not good enough. If you only have a $300 Gateway computer, it won't be fast enough to handle the software properly. Once you get better, you will want to move on to better stuff, and better stuff is more expensive than beginner stuff. Kind of like how beginner clarinets are much cheaper than the professional ones. For this project, you're better off trying to find a composer. If you still want to go through with it: Beware: Using trial software in the manner you are describing is illegal. If you buy this week, you can get a decent orchestral sound library with a built-in sample player for $100 at http://www.garritan.com . Be sure you read the manual on this library, though, as it acts differently that most. There are low-cost sequencers out there. I don't know any off the top of my head, but if you end up using GPO make sure your sequencer can use all of the MIDI CCs and aftertouch. A MIDI controller helps. Many cheap keyboards nowadays have MIDI out, so you can go that route, though I don't recommend it. You at least want a mod wheel if you're going to use GPO. Make sure your computer can handle it. You need an ASIO-capable card. You'll get much better results than something like ASIO-4-All with an ASIO-native card. You need at the very minimum 1GB of RAM, 2GB or more is better. You'll also want at the very least a midrange dual-core CPU in there that is not a Celeron. You also need many gigs of hard drive space and a DVD drive.

How much money are you willing to spend? Budget greatly affects what choices you have. In general, a good sequencer with a piano roll and VST capability will do you well for the actual composing. As far as sounds, you need VSTis or other format instruments (provided your sequencer supports the format) to use. You PC's MIDI synth likely won't cut it. A few popular sequencers/DAWs: Cubase FL Studio Logic (Mac only) Sonar Reason None of those are truly "superior" to the others. They have different ways of working, and it is a matter of tase. Personally, I like Cubase, but I loathe FL Studio. But, FL Studio is definitely a good program. Many here use it, and it may be the most popular one. Best thing to do: Find a bunch of them in your budget range and download the demos and find the one you like.

See if you have to tie each track to a MIDI device. I'm not familiar with Reaper, but the sequencers I've used require that, though many automatically assigned them.

I think I'll pass.

Bah, I have to back-out. Will be out of town this afternoon through Sunday. I'm not done with my entry, and it is not submittable. Maybe next time.