bustatunez

No worries about Darklink Arek, we'll figure something out. At the moment I'll only include his name on the list, his friends can still come to the non-private areas of the Lucas campus. I have contact info from the following: Arek & Nekofrog Yosho & Upthorn Globaltrance Battousai Darklink42 Slygen Starla & Justin [not attending tour] Revelation Orange [not attending tour] This is a heavy list already (as far as Lucas tour goes), I'm gonna see if I can start registering names right now just in case I need to pull extra strings/favors tomorrow. PARKING SOLUTION Yes, $32/day is ridiculous. Two possibilities: 1) We meet up at Embarcadero, park briefly and otherwise check in with me, and then caravan it to the Lucas campus. I can get you free parking nearby. 2) OR, since we now have a solid list, we can entertain the idea of meeting right at that aforementioned parking lot and bypass Embarcadero altogether. That would actually be much more convenient for me, esp. now that there's not much point in Embarcadero besides public transit convenience. So far Arek, Yosho, Upthorn, and Neko have confirmed this is fine for them - GlobalTrance, Darklink42, Slygen and Battousai can you please confirm this in a PM or a reply ASAP? There will be no lunch @ Lucas b/c the size is so much bigger than I'd anticipated. But there are shops nearby if you wanna grab something quick, and plus we'll have to go there anyway to get BBQ supplies after the tour. For those of you joining us at the beach, we should be over there by 2pm. You can park near my apartment at Lincoln & Stillwell. Arek and Nekofrog have explained to me that they'll need to stay overnight at my place, please tell me right away if anyone else absolutely needs to as well.

Here's info on parking btw: http://www.embarcaderocenter.com/ec/about/directions.html#parking It's pricey at first but capped at $32 for the whole day, which is likely what it'd end up being for most.

Remember tonight's the cutoff for getting me your real names so I can register you tomorrow. Please send me your cell #s too, again you can find mine at my website. Thanks - looking forward to seeing y'all!

One more very important note, which I'll reiterate once I go back and edit the first page: I need the full legal names of everyone who's going, by Wednesday, April 1st. This is for the Lucas tour, they'll print out visitor badges for you and have you sign the obligatory flotilla of NDAs that say you'll get shot if you reveal any secrets you see on campus, you'll get disintegrated if you try to take any photos, George Lucas now owns all your thoughts, etc. (jokes aside this is very important)

So here's the deal, you guys seem in favor of bbq and not so much walking around. FYI the generic aimlessly-tour-SF thing wasn't part of the plan anyway, that was another option that got veto'd in favor of going on Friday and getting to see ILM / etc. - The "walking tour" of the Presidio area really was my way of dressing up the fact that we'd have to do quite a bit of walking anyway to go from one bus to the other - We don't have to do lunch at lucasfilm if you wanna just start the bbq early - We don't have to do the Marina District at all - We can even skip the Lucasarts bit altogether if the consensus is that you just wanna chill at the beach grilling the whole time. My apt is very close by (much closer than you're probably imagining). - "Bleeding" into Saturday is totally fine too, and in fact I have a very large living room and a sofa. No carpeting and only two extra blankets (one's a sleeping bag), but, just throwing it out there. - PLEASE reply to this post suggesting exactly what you want / need me to get for a BBQ, I really wanna make sure you guys are happy with whatever so feel free to suggest anything - especially if you have dietary restrictions, etc.

That's odd, I could've sworn I removed the option1/option2 thing and had it as a solid plan a long time ago. In any case, it should be changed now and less iffy - sorry for the confusion.

Yes, Arek, it is, and the date / time / meetup location is the same as mentioned at the first post. Now that we're just a few weeks away you guys can start posting whether you're coming as a definite or as a maybe. Seeya soon!

I dig! Really nice sound design and atmosphere, and I actually agree with the form - it shows a good amount of restraint while still preserving forward motion. The payoff moments when the full melody comes in make it all worth it. Curious, what elements did you record to tape? I'd thought about doing that for synths earlier to get a richer tone (or at least as an interesting experiment).

(bump) Also, official plan reflected in initial post. Friday, Apr. 3, 11:30am meeting at embarcadero station

Date's been confirmed to April 3rd (edited initial post)

I'm playing it now, it really is pretty awesome. Ambient music, ambient story, and ambient gameplay - it never actually tells you what to do, you just kinda do things at your own pace. Some people like the goal-oriented videogamey style of doing things, others (like me) are spending more time just taking in the world and flying about. Which, I have to say, is actually pretty awesome with the sixaxis controls - in a way it's the first game I've played where it feels like *I* am flying. And JC yes, there are levels and there are goals, and there is a story. Puzzles too, even trophies. But it's all very very subtle.

Oh by the way, with the date so far away what happens to this thread? Do these things get stickied or do we just have to kinda hope it gets bumped periodically?

Can we say April 3rd then? (the Friday) I spoke to our dept. coordinator and she explained that as long as it's on a Friday, I can theoretically register as many as I want at a time. Again I guess not to harp on it but we'll just have to keep in mind that it's a place of business, best behaviour, no photography of any kind or loud speech, respect the mountain of NDA's they'll have you sign, etc. (I had to say it at some point) Otherwise obviously the tour is free, lunch at Lucas can run you maybe $6-9 depending on what you get, some buses are free others are $1.50 and the BART train system varies (up to $5 for a longer trip from an airport I think). Shuttle from Oakland airport to the BART train system is I think $3, SFO airport is actually on thee BART line so you'd just hop on. And I'd bring maybe $20 for dinner depending on where we go, if anyone wants alkeyhall, etc. (I'm not sure if it's against OCR policy to post about this but if anyone has beer recommendations for consumption at my place, feel free) Barbecue (if we do it) I guess is on me but it'd be GREAT if somehow someone who's more local to the SF area could help me buy stuff the morning/night before... I don't have a car.

Well yknow what this all makes me wonder though: Why can't we have a device that does this for real, but as a simple digital interface? Basically I'm thinking of a USB device that sends an audio file digitally to the device, it has some kind of an audio interface inside that it uses to play and record to tape, then with some latency (physical space between heads) play and record BACK to digital audio. There's a website http://tank-fx.com/ that actually does a very similar thing, but with reverb.

IE, not as a VST effect, but literally recording your mix onto tape, then immediately recording the result back into your DAW? A producer friend of mine mentioned he swears by that technique. I'd imagine you'd need to make sure you're going in digitally (RCA?) to a fairly high-end machine, use the best quality cassettes you can find (what would that be?), and hopefully record it back in digitally. Anyone tried it? Might be worth a shot for warmifying acoustic tracks. (Or perhaps a complete waste of time, but it's fun to try new things )

March 27th/28th doesn't work for me, Game Developers Conference. April 3/4? Again I didn't expect this much interest so that's why the original date was so early. I'm okay with postponing, only thing is the more people come, the earlier I'll need to register you as visitors. FYI I'm not sure about the group visits policy, if I can't use a group reg then I'd have to register 3 visitors at a time under other peoples' names.

Oh, by the way, my roomate also has this thing in the right corner over here: He's got Metal Slug X, 3, and 4, Samurai Showdown, D&D: Shadows Over Mystara, TMNT, and broken-audio-MortalKombat2

@ Batt: Cool! Lemme know. About the date, honestly the real decision is just Friday vs Saturday. If you need more than a month notice then that's totally cool, how's March 13-14 sound, guys? Let's get a general timeframe down first and then make the Friday vs. Saturday decision.

WHEN: Friday, April 3 @ 11:30am WHERE: San Francisco - WE ARE MEETING AT THE PRESIDIO; SEE PAGE 10 WHAT: Meet at Friday before noon and get a Lucasfilm tour, stay around the Presidio area. - Meet at the Lincoln & Fulston parking lot in the Presidio - Lucasfilm / LucasArts / Industrial Light and Magic tour, gift shop, etc. - Shop for cookout supplies @ IGA - Baker Beach cookout - Games/music/chilling at my apt. I have a buncha instruments* you can jam on, as well as the full Rock Band set. I also have the PS3 in another room (StreetFighter4, SoulCalibur4, ResidentEvil5, VirtuaFighter5, StreetFighter:HDR, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone2 and a buncha singleplayer action games) WHO: Going on tour: bustatunez Nekofrog Arek CapaLangley Upthorn GlobalTrance Battousai Darklink42 Slygen Joining at beach, ~2pm: Starla Starla's roomate Justin Revelation Orange * Epiphone Special-II electric guitar, Ibanez Soundgear bass, unnamed acoustic guitar, harmonica, ocarina, tenor and soprano recorders, melodica, flute-I-still-have-to-fix-after-Magfest-but-thanks-for-reminding-me, cheapass Casio keyboard, triangle, tambourine, djembe.

@ Taucer: Hey man, ubercongrats on the vault and the meet!!! I showed my coworkers some of your videos a little while ago, they were like "holyshiiit!" --- BTW this is a pretty awesome thread, shame I didn't notice until now. Some of you might know that I started working out 8 months ago, sort of in a different boat in that I started off scrawny and was mostly just trying to get bigger. I eventually gained ~20lb of mass (5'6": 140lb --> 162lb) and maintained about the same bodyfat of 8-9%, mostly b/c I have a bit of a pathetic frame and find it ridiculously hard to put on weight. Right now my goal is to get to 170lb, 15" arms, and bench press 285lb (I'm 162 / 14.75 / 260lb).

I'll always love the unforgettable JRPG-engrish, "Help! I'm being oppressed!", "This guy are sick", "Experience is a skill learned with job training", "Welcome to Assaram" come to mind. That and all those terrible "The End" puns from MGS3. There were some awesome oneliners from SW: TFU though: Stormtrooper: (after seeing some jedi kill like 15 dudes) "....This one's being stupid, sir." Stormtrooper: (upon death) "I have... ...no regrets..!!!" And for some reason, years ago I thought these two were funny enough to take screenshots of: (if this thread were open to music program error messages, http://rogetmusic.com/temp/sonar_error.jpg would be the clear winner)

Happy birthday, Fusion2004! 'k I did it. Can you believe he actually IMed me asking me to post this just now? "fusion2004p: can you post me a happy birthday thread on ocr while its still my birthday, please? fusion2004p: (within the next 25 minutes)" Honestly. Some people. 9_9 So how old are you now? I'm too lazy to Facebook you and don't feel like pressing alt+tab again.

About the Continuum, it really is more than a pitchbend-on-steroids. It really is continuous 3-dimensional control in a way you can only get with bowed strings or wind instruments (pitch, volume, and intensity). Remarkably easy to just start using right away, too. Yes it's overpriced, but honestly if I personally were into live performance then I'd get it in a heartbeat (the novelty factor helps a lot too ). Only caveat about this is that every single note is its own MIDI channel, since it needs to express pitchbend / controller data on an individual note-by-note basis. So it can be problematic if you're thinking of using this to control, say, Kontakt. But, they do have monophonic modes, as well as internal sounds, so it's still a very usable instrument. About Play 2.0, basically their whole deal is getting back some of the customization/editing features that were lost on the move away from Kontakt. It's got a friendlier overall UI than Kontakt, and has a Python-based scripting engine. I asked about the scripting functions and whether or not it had a useful tool like Nils KScript Editor for Kontakt, to which they replied with something like "..... ....it uses Python." Oh well. Otherwise, I'd say if you've already bit the Play bullet and it's working for you then go for it - it's got some great sounds and will now allow almost as much editing capability as Kontakt. I just can't recommend it to new users as stability is such a huge issue (especially on PC), and they've been historically reluctant even to admit this. And about the Moog guitar, it really does sound how you'd expect when sliding and tapping. I only had a tiny bit of time to play with it, and it seemed like it had some kind of additional logic to determine when you want a continuous fingered line, so it may take a bit of getting used to. But then again I only play a guitarist on TV, maybe someone who's actually good at the instrument wouldn't have this problem

I was at NAMM, there was some pretty amazing stuff there. (actually supposedly there's some official NAMM video floating around, showing some turban-wearing dude playing a Hammond.. and I'm cameoing in the background O_o) Anyways I have my full summary at the office but here's what I remember: HARDWARE - Moog infinite sustain guitar - interesting concept, supposedly good make, but I can't see any application for it really. (then again I'm not a real guitarist) - Continuum keyboard - old news, but my personal favorite bit of hardware in the whole show. Some found it awkward, but I instantly caught on and was captivated by how much expression I can finally put into my playing. - CME 80 keyboard - extremely old news, but I finally got to try one. Got a good weighted keys touch, breath control, lotsa sliders, sequencer transports... a no brainer if you have the $$$ DAW SOFTWARE - Cubase 5 - Show-stealer this year. Finally 64bit. Additionally it's got a great melodyne-esque vocal editing suite, convolution reverb, in-line tempo and time signature changing, time-freeze function (so those of us who work on films no longer have to write linearly!), advanced bounce options so you can bounce the wet signal of your effects on separate stems (GREAT for protools/mixing compatibility), and.. my personal favorite.... an iPhone app that acts as a remote transport. - Sonar 8 - Also old news, step sequencer is still useless, but they keep tweaking the audio engine like crazy. I desperately wanna see a true comparison of Cubase 5 and Sonar 8 running the same plugins on the same machine, just to see the effect of all these optimizations they've been doing for the last few years. - Protools 8 - Didn't spend much time there, but they've basically just Apple'd it up a lot to look more like Logic. Added better piano roll and MIDI functions (a few non-destructive MIDI editing features), advanced notation view that essentially works as an integrated Sibelius, step sequencer that actually looks promising (still doesn't hold a candle to FLStudio), and a buncha plugins I couldn't tell if they were any good because the Waves booth nearby was being unfairly loud. Speaking of which, EFFECTS - Waves - A very classless display. Somehow or another the Waves booth ended up being right opposite the Protools 8 one, and throughout the whole show they blasted their speakers at the backs of people who were trying to listen to the Protools demos. I was also disappointed that, upon asking about 64-bit, they literally said "We have no plans for 64-bit compatibility because right now 64-bit is just a gimmicky fad." - Native Instruments - Not much new that isn't DJ-related. I was also a bit disappointed when none of their tech guys could answer a simple question about Kontakt3's RAM overhead (instead they decided to talk down to me and assume I was using Kontakt the wrong way). - iZotope Ozone 4 - YES. This plugin was already amazing, but they've just added some UI features that make things even easier. Global sliders for each effect (and for the whole shebang) for easy control of the overall intensity of the effect, easy intensity-parameters within the preset browser, a new volume maximizer "character", and a new linearphase+analog "hybrid" crossover mode for the multiband effects are the main new features. There's also a jillion new presets. SAMPLE LIBRARIES - Garritan Steinway - My favorite piano library of the bunch. Smaller, but the best tone, never ran into issues with it not having enough velocity or RR, good dynamics, etc. Compared favorably to Ivory, EastWest, and VSL's new pianos. - EastWest Silk - (south and east Asian ethnic instruments library) Sounds good, curiously lacks Sitar though (so if you're looking for that..... www.impactsoundworks.com :) ). Otherwise it's a great ethnic library if you're willing to deal with the buggy Play VI. - LA Scoring Strings (LASS) - Terrible presentation (not their fault.. just underfunded, bad location, bad speakers, Kontakt kept unloading their samples b/c the computer went to sleep a few minutes before, etc.), but shows some promise. Basically the idea is they recorded each string section in three parts: section leader, first half divisi, second half divisi. Each of those parts is its own Kontakt patch for every articulation, so the legato and expression are very fluid. For me, their legato isn't much better than what I have going with my own samples (which curiously work in much the same way with multi-level patches), but what really impressed us was the staccato and spiccato patches. They can get VERY aggressive in LASS, extremely clear and well-performed. LASS also features a unique pattern sequencing script for the staccatos/spiccatos, which works as a velocity control for reattacking notes (basically hold down a note and it'll play the pattern, according to the velocities you've mapped on the grid... hard to explain, but effective and easy). This library will be < $1500, I probably won't get it because I've already spent about 5 years getting my own VSL+EWQL patches to sound just about as good, but if you have the money and want something this powerful right out of the box, LASS is a great choice. - Spectrasonics - Best sample-related presentation, in my opinion. First off, Omnisphere's getting an update with 2000 new patches for free; some really nice stuff too. Trilogy is now being upgraded to "Trillian", with some new samples (including the Chapman stick!) and interoperability with Omnisphere's Steam engine. If I'm remembering right, it also has some nice bass groove patterns that can also be used in conjunction with RMX, with groove lock. RMX's update is most exciting for me though - their new "Time Designer" allows you to sync RMX beats to *ANY TIME SIGNATURE*, any groove feel, anything. It's got a nice groove lock function that allows you to combine any two beats together and synchronize their accents / syncopations, and it even has a "Simplify" knob that can be used to calm down the more complex beats. I can see this being extremely useful for both live and sequenced RMX usage.

Nice tracks man! Great instrumentation and really nice memorable themes. Congrats on the gig too!