Splunkle

Okay. Being a newbies cool. But I'm not sure what your problem is - that sentence was kinda a mess. I'll try to deciper it: 1) You have added approximatly 3 audio clips, and everything is good. 2) You add another 2 audio clips, and now some of the audio clips don't work. Is this correct? If it is, I'm thinking hardware issues. Try disabiling background programs, and try setting your buffer length (found in options>audio settings) higher.

Prophet: Really? Each to their own, I guess. Chav: I've decieded to make an example, so you can see how it works: http://www.users.on.net/~fido/example%20of%20volume%20slide.flp

Chav, that's just the thing - slides affect all note properties, not just pitch - they affect pan, velocity filter cut, and so on. I'll have another go at explaining. lets say you have a note, C, which you want to go from velocity 30 to velocity 80. All you do is: 1) set the notes velocity to 30, 2) drop a slide ALSO ON C SO THERE IS NO PITCH DIFFERENCE <---IMPORTANT 3) Set the slide's velocity to 80. DONE. You now have a C note that will increase in volume from whatever the volume is at velocity 30 to whatever the volume is at 80. Easy. Much easier than mucking about with events.

There are a few ways of doing this, but I will start with what is probably the easiest. Use a slide. Slides are like normal notes, except instead of just playign a new note, all the current notes will slide to it... usually this is used when wanting to slide up and down notes - but it can used for gradual volume changes. What happens is all the note currently playing will slide to the volume of the slide. So here is what you do: 1) Play the notes you want, just like you normally would, but make there velocity such that the volume is what you want to start at. 2) When you want the notes to start getting louder, start the slide. Its a button on the piano roll - look at the help file to find out where it is. Anyways, the slide should placed on the same note as the highest note currently playing in the piano roll. So if you playing a Cmaj, (C-E-G), then the slide would go on the G. This is just to make sure the notes don't go sliding around in pitch, which isn't what you want. 3) Make the slide's velocity such that it is the volume you want the notes to end on. The slides duration determines how long it takes the notes to get there - by the end of the slide, they are at the volume of the slide. Okay, that was all kinda confusing. I'm not explaining this well. Go look up slides in the help file, it will explain it all there, and then fiddle, thats probably eaisiest. There are other techniques, like volume automation or crazy-ass envelope manipulation, but they would be more hardwork, methinks. Slides are great once you get used to them.

I have no idea if this will get the effect you wanted, but a stream of highhats that go up and down in pitch can be done rather eaisily in most slicers. When I get home, I might try to whip up an FL example, but I'll text it out here. Oh, you seem to use FL, and I'm most familar with its slicer, but all those who don't use it... well, I'm sure you can figure out how to do similar stuff in your slicer of choice. 1) grab whatever drumloop you want, and slice it up right. 2) If you only want this drum loop to play hats and other high-up sound effects, switch the filter over to high-pass. Play with the resonance and filter cutoff until it sounds good just playing by itself. you don't have to use a highpass filter - I just like it, because it means I can dedicate this loop for doing smacy high end topping stuff. 3) Lay out your patten. I don't know too much about how pro's do this, I just lay stuff down until I fidn something that works. Probably not the most time-efficent method, but it works. 4) Fiddle. down the bottom, you can see that each note has a velocity. Play with that to change the volume. But you can click on the button currently labeled "velocity" to fiddle with other settings - like, pitch, filter cutoff, resonance. Fiddle with all these for cool variations and stuff. Considering you said pitch, you will probably want to play with that setting the most, but don't foget filter cutoff. 5) Layer. Get multiple drumloops down, and start layering up patterns, for some awesome little fills and stuff. I like panning one loop left, another right, and a third in the middle for a really full soundscape. I'm hope you are getting the picture now. The last three steps are preety much interchangeable, too. Also, Disclaimer: I'm not some huge pro dude. This is just one of the things I do with high end percussion. If you find something that works, do that. Doomsday's idea looks preety hot, too. I might try that out soemtime.

Quick reply: =( Long reply: Well, really sucky news about the guitar part. Mega suck. This would have been awesome to see on OCR. As for the keyboard solo, I actually thought it was really good, until it hit this part that was preety dodgy. Then it got back into doing its thing, but lost it again a few times. If you fix up the sucky bits, which I'm sure you can hear, it would be quite the pleasant.

Yeah, preety much all the stickies, save maybe Sephfire's most excellent Mastering one, are kinda old and outdated. I think the idea is that they were going to be fixed when we moved over to the new boards... which still hasn't happened. It will happen eventually, though. But anyways, just for future reference, problems like this should be posted in the sticky. You don't need to read all 100+ pages, just post it to the latest page, and we shall answer you.

ANTISHEEP! Man, I can't beleive it took me so long to get around to this, especially after you did that awesome job on the Zelda Medly. This stuff is, much like the 4 pages before this one state, HOT. With extra chilli of goodness. But just because I hate posting in a WIP thread with no advice what so ever, I'm going to go into ultra-picky mode. Also, because I'm a jerk. Anyways, the only problems I have with this mix are the following: 1) Length. But its a WIP, so that will be fixed. 2) The handclaps. With the rythym, I'm thinking finger clicks would be better. But this is NOT A BIGGY IN ANY WAY OR FORM. If you can't eaisily find a finger snap sample that fits the song, don't worry at all, because wrekcing this mix would be... sinful. 3) Compression. A bit too heavy for my tastes - and I get the feeling that being a bit lighter with the gain would give this mix a bit more room to show off its awesomeness. Again, by no means a biggy. I can't hear any distortion, but I think it would benefit from more dynamic range. This could just be me being anal again. Only worth playing around with if you have the time. So that concludes todays "watch Splunkle try and find problems with an awesome mix" session. I hope it was helpful.

I'm not sure if this is the "black metal" sound, because I don't listen to much black metal, but distortion can add edge to anything. Snares, vocals, cymbals, bass - whatever. But be careful not to overdo it, as if you overdo it everything starts to sound the same. But just distort lightly to edge everything up. Again, I don't know about black metal, but other forms of metal tend to have a lot of high end for the kick drum to give it that click. Snares tend to vary from band to band to band as far as I can see. Rides are usually high and clear, to sit on top of everything. As for samples, well there are a metric ton of acoustic drum samples. I reccomend you start with NSkit 7, google it up, as that is a very well sampled free set. Well, actually, the full thing costs 100 pounds or something, but there is a free version to use, that doesn't feature anywhere near as many samples, but its still a huge numebr for a free soundfont. Apart from that, just scour the internet for drum samples. You are probably going to want acoustic samples, not drum machine samples, but there are still huge numbers of acoustic samples. Good Luck!

ICIC, so Fruity exports to whatever setting you have in audio options then. Makes sense. But keep in mind this:

Blue Magic: Time to do some reading. http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=88462 http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=78465 That second one should be particularly helpful =P Have fun!

Yes. All the Wavs fruity exports are 44.1KHz. I'm sorry, I fogot that Fruity doesn't have an option to change that.

Snapple... I LOVE your metaphors. They are like melted cheese on a cold day - delicious, fatty, and warming. Humorous metaphors aside, he has the right advice. The only person who can tell you what to use is you, after you have used a lot of stuff. So go forth and demo. And welcome to the forums.

I admit that my knowledge of the Dancey scenes is lacking, but I thought a rather essential part of Eurobeat was the chipmunk vocals. NFI how to do those, beyond recording and pitch shifting. Or just singing like a chipmunk. Whatever. Oh, and Eurobeats in the house section of Ishtur's guide, if that helps anyone looking for examples.

OK. If you are asking questions about this sort of stuff, you got to ask the right questions. Which you aren't. So I'll just throw knowledge at you and hope something sticks. Firstly, you may want to read this. Its just the wikipedia article on the wav format. To quote it: and further on down: So, assuming your WAV file contains 44.1KHz PCM audio, the CD encoding program shouldn't re-encode. Unless its made by some dodgy hack of a programmer or something. But you can't burn WAVs straight onto a CD. What the program will do is take the PCM data out of the WAV container, and wrap it in the Redbook Audio container. Now FL Studio can output in a great many different formats. But to keep it simple, if you are burning to CD, make sure you are exporting a WAV with 44.1KHz and a bitdepth of 16 bits. That way you don't have to do ANY re-encoding. Does that make sense? And Chavous: I have no idea what program you are using to burn CDs, but please stop using it. Unless you borked up your WAV file, your program should be able to import WAVs properly.

Listened to the latest version. No more streaming issues! yay! Clear as a... really clear thing. ANYWAYS, this is much much better. I'm not hearing any bass dominating everything, so you should be fine there. I would say that this has a fairly good chance at the panel - not that I'm really experienced or anything. But even if the panel rejects it, they will tell you why - so then you have something to fix, no? Good luck!

I think its a freaking awesome idea, if only for sheer stupid factor. Much like the keytar.

Most people would probably disagree with me, but I say don't get a keyboard to start with - use your mouse. This teaches you all the tips and tricks of the piano roll, or whatever your sequencer uses. If you find it too frustrating, yeah, get a keyboard. But start without one.

Oh, of course, Mr. Snappleman. I just didn't want some newbie to get the idea that if their song wasn't -1dB RMS, it would be okay. That would be bad. Get all these songs that come in at -6dB RMS which is way way way way way too loud. Thats all. Cerrax: You are absolutely correct. As I said, -7.1 dB is way too loud. And for all those confused about the last few posts, I'll just summersise them here: TURN THE VOLUME DOWN. =/ EDIT: yeah, k, klm is right.

uhhh... nineko. You know that winamp 5 can take all your winamp 2 plugins, right? So anything you can do in winamp 2 you can do in winamp 5. Just because winamp 5 can do something natively if you pay monies doesn't mean it can't do the same things for free with plugins.

Out of idle curiousity, I just loaded up somebody told me, selected the second of track right after the crash cymbal in the chorus (which I figure should be preety loud) and found that the RMS was -7.1dB. While that is mucking loud, its not quite as bad as Ricky Martin, but still way to loud. And it isn't -1dB. Just pointing out that -1dB is a huge exagerration, and would have to be pure squarewave. You couldn't hear anything except the distortion. At all. No even the semblance of music. Man, that wouldn't too hot for speakers, either. ANYWAYS: I tend to find that -12dB RMS is about the highest I'm willing to go. After that even my crappy ear can hear dynamics problems. Protip: Don't limit to 0dB. That will mean it will clip if you record to .mp3 or some other compressed format. Some people say -0.1 is enough, others swear by -0.3. Just leave the poor compression algorithm some headroom, k? PS: Dream Theater are the DUDES. PPS: Bob Katz, a rather strong anti-loud mastering engineer, has a CD "honor roll" of CDs that are well mastered, particullarly with regard to dynamics linky is here. Its not comprehensive by any means, but covers a suprisingly large number of generes. No electronica, unless I missed some... Anyways, listen to some of these for edumacationary purposes.

Okay, just listened to the version posted today. I do like it, especially the way you have been improving. Unfortunatly, I think the streaming is affecting quality, at least for me. It sounded like it was encoded at 64kbits, so its probably just the streaming thing. The thing is, I can't really comment on the bass because of that. So I can't help your there. Sorry, avaris =( But onto stuff I can help with: You have used the delayed piano well. using any instrument with that much delay is kinda risky, because you risk mudifiying the whole mix, but you have avoided that. I'm not hearing any wrong notes either, except for one, maybe, around 1:03. It could be funky chord change though. Also, the beat in the second bit is good - but I think the pads were triggering a quaver earlier. Made the pads sound a little off-time. Thats all I got. I'm really sorry I couldn't help with bass issues. =/

I agree entirely, Snappleman, and find it saddening. But not even Ricky Martin is -1dB. And damn his tracks are horridly mastered.

If a song came in a -1dB RMS, it would have to be nothing but a square wave all the way through - ughh. Anyways, if you want some general mastering tips, Seph just bumped the mastering thread. go have a look at that, for it contains goodness, IIRC.

Darkesword has it right. Learn the theory, then the mixing. Just the very basics is okay, provided you are prepared to learn more. And by prepared, I mean ready to lurk, jump on all the links that can increase your knowledge, activly seek out tutorials, and so forth. There is a huge amount of info in these intarwebs. You just have to find it. Now I'm going to go against what many other say and say that you don't have to learn an instrument. But it helps. Learing to play builds your ear, your ryhthm, and all sorts of things that are musically useful. So if you have the cash, go forth and get an instrument, and learn that. Pay for teacher if you can. Now onto the inevitable crap about programs: Most people find something they are happy with and stick with it. So just demo as much stuff as you can, and see what you like. Many demos are free, so grab them. You probably want some musical experience under your belt before doing this, though - no point in demoing the arpeggiator function of FL if you don't know what an arpeggio is, for example. Keep in mind this is going to take months, at best, to get good. I took about two years, but I wasn't really passionate about it until I started getting good results last year. But its a fun hobby, so as long as you have fun, you'll be fine. Just keep learning, k?