Kanthos

This is awesome! I hear hints of Return To Forever and Keith Emerson in here.

It just sounds like a bad piano sample to me; it's certainly nothing like this (incidentally, a great, and cheap, Yamaha CP-70 Electric Grand sound; I use it in my keyboard rig).

Do you want an actual keyboard that produces its own sound, or just a MIDI controller? I can help you narrow it down (though ultimately, go play a few yourself to see what feels best for you).

I'm playing about as fast as you; I'm partway through Act II in Normal as well. My battletag is Kanthos#1438

Pretty sure you can only get Emotional Piano through the vendor's website. As for the other music gear: Check out Kelly's Music And Computers for music gear. I've bought from them a few times (I'm in Toronto), and the prices are reasonable. Shipping is free if you spend $200, and cheap if you don't order a lot of heavy stuff (eg. try to buy stuff like keyboards locally). For general computer hardware, try Canada Computers or Tiger Direct. There's a few Canada Computers locations in Ottawa; you could try shipping from Tiger Direct (I've never done this, though; my work is 5 minutes away from one). Omnisphere is great; beyond Kontakt and some samples from Komplete, it's the best part of my live keyboard rig, and I'm not even using a lot of sampled stuff. It can do some very unique things that other synths don't get close to. For an audio interface, might you be interested in a Native Instruments' Audio Kontrol 1? I've got one that I've been trying to sell on craigslist; there's nothing wrong with it, and I love it, but I needed something with a second mic input, so I upgraded to the Komplete Audio 6 when NI had a deal for people who owned Komplete 8. Shipping wouldn't be that bad from Toronto to Ottawa; alternately, I have cousins and an aunt and uncle who live in Nepean; if you don't mind waiting until just after July 8th at the latest (my cousins will be out then; my aunt and uncle may be out before then, but I'm not sure), then I could get it your way without the shipping. PM me if you're at all interested.

There's a limit to which skills you can learn and how you can build them up. Not quite the same as "trees", but the concept's not entirely different either. There's also 5 classes instead of 4. Doug's facts aren't entirely straight, but they're close enough to make the point: Diablo III shows that they've learned from WoW as well as their past games, but it's not going to be WoW with a different setting.

I took Classical piano lessons from when I was 5 to when I was 14, so the technical skill I have, I gained from that. I've only developed my actual keyboard chops over the last 4-5 years; playing keys for a band is about choosing the right sounds to fit the moment and playing them authentically. A B3 organ, Rhodes or Wurlitzer electric piano, pads, leads, strings or a full orchestral section, they all have different playing techniques, so you can't just sit down at a keyboard and play it like a pianist regardless of which sound you're using. For your purposes, you're going to want to stick mainly to synths, so that makes it a bit easier. I'd probably do a combination of trying to play easy parts back at a slow speed and looking at youtube videos. A few years of piano lessons would go a long way too, enough so that you learn the basics and have the ability to continue on your own, but if you don't have the money for that, it's not the end of the world. Expect it to take several years of regular practice, though, before you get a decent level of skill, and if you're trying to do things like play fast lead lines a few years down the road, I would strongly recommend getting at least one or two lessons, just so a teacher can notice any bad habits you might have and fix them before you damage your arms or fingers. How I keep songs sorted out is fairly simple. I can't post a screenshot from work, but since I don't actually use loops all that much, I usually have only a single scene per song. Ableton lets you set the background color of each scene and clip, so what I do is make dummy scenes with a bright color to set up barriers between groups of songs. My scene list is currently something like this: Default Scene 1 (orange) Default Scene 2 (orange) Default Scene 3 (orange) Setlist Start (green) Song 1 Setup 120 BPM 4/4 Song 2 Setup 72 BPM 4/4 Song 3 Setup 115 BPM 4/4 Song 3 Intro Loops Song 3 Verse Loops Song 3 Prechorus Loops Song 3 Chorus Loops Song 4 Setup 141 BPM 4/4 Setlist End (green) All Songs Start (blue) ...Song sceneslike the ones above, in alphabetical order by song; songs with multiple scenes are ordered by when I'll use the scene in the song, just like Song 3 above. All Songs End (blue) Work In Progress Start (red) ...Scenes that aren't ready to be moved to the All Songs area Work In Progress End (red) The blank rows are untitled scenes with nothing in them, just for spacing. The default scenes contain a default set of MIDI clips for sending program changes to my VSTs or doing a few other things; I always duplicate the one I need when building a song; they're not worth explaining unless I get into specific detail about how I've organized my MIDI tracks and VSTs. So when I'm preparing for a gig, I drag the songs from the All Songs area to the Setlist area and arrange them in the order we'll play them. You probably won't need this, but one of the typical things about playing at a church is there's a large number of songs that get played infrequently; for you, you'd have a smaller number of songs and likely use most of them every time you gig. You could also take a look at this user's videos on youtube. Again, he's a bit keyboard-centric, but he uses loops a lot more than I would, and he demonstrates some techniques for playing, using loops, and even building loops. I got a lot of my ideas from him, though I've been refining my keyboard rig for the past 3 years. My keyboards are actually really basic. My Roland is only really good for B3 organ sounds, so beyond the drawbars and other controls that you'd find on an actual B3, I don't use the other buttons. My Oxygen 49 is a cheaply-made keyboard, and I don't even use it every time I play. None of the buttons or knobs are mapped to anything; all the button mappings are on my nanoKontrol and laptop keyboard, both things I'll always use no matter what other gear I play with. As for practicing, you can't really do that without the hardware you're going to play on. Either figure out how you want to launch things without having any extra gear, or wait until you get the gear you need. You can't get used to launching things with a launchpad without the launchpad, and really, most of the practice here is in how you use your controls. You could practice turning effects on and off and playing around with which effects to use when; you'll still need a way to actually turn effects on and off, but you can at least get a feel for which effects work well in which circumstances regardless of what controllers you'll actually use in your final set.

I never played them, but I should; they seem similar to the King's Quest series, which were some of my favourite games as a kid.

Get a trumpet sample however you'd do that, then use iZotope Vinyl; it's free!

Now, some actual tips that I've learned from developing my rig: 1) Be flexible. If all you're going to do is play a track, just put on a CD. You have to be able to change things up, or it isn't musical. Live Mode will help a lot with this, of course, but how you arrange things, in a way that works logically for you, is important too. 2) Use one FL Studio project for your live set. No one wants to wait while you open a new project after each song. 3) For each song, bounce all the tracks to audio and assemble them in your live set in a way that's consistent. Don't try and load the VSTs you used for each song part all at once; that'll just eat up too much memory. (I get away with it in my keys setup because I'm loading a fixed number of VSTs, not one plugin for every sound used on every song) I have three Key Loops tracks (not just keys, really, but anything melodic) and three Beat Loops tracks; in each Live scene, I can have up to six different parts playing. They could all be combined into one big Loops track, or one Keys Loops track and one Beats Loops track, but I like it this way so I can bring individual parts of a beat in and out. Regardless, the point is that you should figure out how to arrange your clips in a way that's not tied to a specific song, and make that consistent for everything. 4) In general, keep things consistent. You've got enough changing with each song, or part of a song, using different musical material with different sounds. You don't ever want to guess ANYTHING else about your set. Set it up the way you want, be consistent, and you'll have a lot less to worry about onstage. You'll notice that I've got *a ton* of buttons going (plus, almost every key on my laptop keyboard is mapped to something in Live too). I get my head around it by being consistent: in Live, all the VSTs (or audio tracks from VSTs) are in a specific order. I repeat the order exactly everywhere else: in the MIDI tracks that get incoming MIDI from my keyboard, in the other MIDI tracks I have if I want to trigger sound from a VST by a MIDI clip or to send a program change, in the order of my On/Off buttons on my nanoKontrol. The order is the same, and that makes it much easier to memorize. 5) Have a panic button set up, whether that's a quick way of muting what's coming out of your audio interface or a surefire way to stop all sounds. 6) Effects are another great way to change up a set, especially if you trigger them on and off live. Consider getting Stutter Edit and a MIDI controller keyboard or other MIDI controller like the nanoKontrol (25 keys will be fine on a keyboard, if you don't intend to play anything) so you can easily trigger effects live. And don't just consider glitchy effects: things like filters or multi-band compression are great too. One of my favourites right now is an EQ and Compressor on my piano track to add heavy compression while EQing the midrange up and the lows and highs way down; that makes the piano sound really "boxy", and also means that the clean piano sounds that much better when I turn the effects off, as a way of playing some piano and then opening up the full sound at a key moment in the song. 7) Consider getting Ableton Live if you can. I don't know what FL Studio's performance mode will be like, but odds are, Ableton will be better, and will continue to stay ahead of FL Studio, since live performance is Live's main draw. This includes things like being able to map a computer keyboard key or MIDI message to virtually everything. Ableton also has effects racks: you can group several effects (eg. the EQ and Compressor for my "boxy" piano sound) into one effects rack, and you can turn the whole rack on or off easily. 8 ) Practice a lot before you try to get gigs. Make sure you're comfortable with your setup, that you've got all the buttons and knobs memorized, that you've got stuff set up to give you the flexibility and musicality that make a great live set.

I'm familiar with Ableton Live, but I just took a look at the alpha testing videos for FL Studio's performance mode, and they're pretty similar, so most of my comments will be relevant. Why don't I explain my live setup and point out the most interesting parts, and you can ask questions if anything's unclear? I'm a keyboard player, and I play mostly at church, both in a standard Sunday morning service (~5-7 songs, often not a lot of preparation put into it) and a monthly service that's maybe 15-18 songs with several rehearsals. I won't go into much detail on the keyboards since it sounds like you just want to play pre-recorded material, but here's the summary. I'm using a Roland V-Combo VR-700 for organ sounds and as a main keyboard, and an M-Audio Oxygen 49 (it's sucky, but I already had it at home) for a second keyboard, to play two parts at once. Both send MIDI into my laptop. I run a program called Bome's MIDI Translator to filter or transform all incoming MIDI, and send most of it through to Ableton Live on various channels. I'm using software called loopMIDI to provide the virtual MIDI ports that let two programs talk to each other. For keyboard sounds, I've got a number of VSTs loaded in Live. They can all respond to program changes sent in from a controller or triggered via MIDI clips in Live. I've got a Korg nanoKontrol that sits on my main keyboard, and I use it to adjust volumes for each part and to turn each VST on and off (rather, in Bome's, turn rules that allow MIDI to pass through Bome's to Live on and off for each channel). That lets me do things like have separate strings, winds, and brass orchestral sections and combine them together. I've also got a Line6 FBV Shortboard foot controller, for tap tempo, to turn piano and synth FX on and off, and to send program changes to Guitar Rig, which I'm using as an effects unit for my electric piano sounds. Lastly, I've got a Launchpad for playing clips. I use clips in two ways. First, a brief overview of how Ableton handles clips. In Session View, each track is a column; the rows are called Scenes. I can put a clip in every slot if I like, but only one clip can play per track - starting a new clip stops the old one. I can use a button on my Launchpad (the rightmost column does this) to trigger all the clips in a scene; I can also put tempo changes and time signature changes into the scene name, and Live will use those (eg. "Some_Song 136 BPM 3/4") For every song I do, I have a setup scene that will set the time signature and tempo and has a MIDI clip for every VST I run, just to send a program change to the VST. I don't have the time on stage to manually change several plugins between songs. I also have a few songs so far that I run loops for, and this would be more like what you're talking about. I can use a Scene Launch button on my Launchpad to bring in all the clips for a scene, or I can trigger them individually based on what the song needs. For my purposes, I'll run a loop that's as long as a single chorus or verse; in situations where we do two choruses, I'll let it loop again (in case the lead singer decides not to do a second chorus on the fly).

True, but you've been here long enough to know that the style in which you post has at least *some* affect on how people take your message

A well-rounded musician will know how to transcribe, and ultimately, anyone serious about remixing should learn that skill, or at least something comparable like being able to deconstruct a song into chords and notes in your head, or pick it out on a piano. For a beginner though, it's not as essential. There's nothing wrong with using a MIDI as a way of getting started. If the thing you want to do first is choose sounds and make them sound realistic, or rearrange the original and make your own additions to that, that's not wrong. Make sure you learn what you can from that, and recognize that using a MIDI will give you a head start but will ultimately hold you back, but don't force yourself to learn theory and transcription before you've ever done anything else if it's going to kill your enjoyment of music or demotivate you. People get defensive because your initial comment comes across as abrasive and flippant. You could've said, "You really should do it yourself, because transcribing the MIDI helps with your arrangement. As you learn how the song is constructed you naturally come up with ideas on where you feel it should go." No one would've attacked that if you'd opened with it.

And, many VSTs don't let you set a range, or don't let you set an uneven range (I prefer -12/+2 for synth solos in my keyboard rig, but most of the VSTs I run don't support that), so you may be stuck at -2/+2 for some instruments no matter what. The reason for this is that pitch bend, as defined in the MIDI spec, is a code to indicate that you're sending a pitch bend message on a particular MIDI channel plus a value from 0 to 16383 (8192 is the middle point and means nothing is bending). It's up to each instrument to decide how to map those values to pitch.

It's fairly bright; what about Native Instruments' New York Concert Grand? You're not going to get any sample set that's exactly the same, out of the box, but you should be able to get pretty close with something like this, and use effects to get you the rest of the way.

I agree that it's a problem. The best composers, people like Jeremy Soule, often have a good number of tunes that have memorable melodies (though I wouldn't say I noticed that quite as much in Skyrim, beyond the theme), but it's all too common in game and movie soundtracks that atmosphere and ambient music is making up more and more of the soundtrack. That's certainly ok, and probably adds to the game or movie experience in a better way than overly focusing on melody for melody's sake, but it does mean that the music is less memorable. Expanding a bit on what tweek said, I think the problem with technology is that listeners have built up a dependence on hearing fully-realized music, and it's no longer ok to use a sketched-out concept that's not arranged using the right instruments. Admittedly, it's hard to make a track consisting of orchestral ambient textures and sketch that out on a piano, but even for more melodic music, people are becoming less able to hear a rough concept plus a description and make sense of it. That's a bad thing as it requires composers to invest a lot more time into music that may be rejected. Not that rejection or suggested revision on a piece is bad in and of itself, but it becomes more costly, and if people who commissioned the music don't let the composer take the unused tracks and use them for a demo reel or try to market them in other ways, time spent on that track is largely wasted for the composer.

No problem; I'm not much of a remixer, but I know workstation keyboards fairly well, so I'm happy to help. At various times, I've owned a Nord Stage, Korg TR (the little brother of the Triton Extreme), Yamaha Motif-Rack XS, and I currently use a Roland V-Combo VR-700 (only worth it because it has a nice keybed and great organ section with physical drawbars, unlike my old Nord's digital ones) plus my laptop with a bunch of synths and samples loaded, and a smaller MIDI controller so I've got two keyboards to use at once. I don't know about the M50 having the issues that you mention; I've only tried it briefly in store. It wouldn't surprise me though; the keyboard felt cheap, and I actually bought my Korg TR after the M50 had come out; I only saved $200 or so (not a big deal to me) but wanted something more sturdy. The only conceivable reason to buy an M3 is if the Kronos is too expensive. Seriously, I'd have bought the OASYS over the M3, despite the M3 being newer than the OASYS; the fact that the Kronos is now ~$3k instead of the $8k OASYS makes it that much better. Seriously. The Kronos is basically the M3 PLUS several synth engines PLUS an organ engine PLUS really good sampled Piano and Electric Piano engines PLUS patch remain PLUS easy sound switching - it has a live mode where you put your combis and/or programs in order and have 16 visible on screen at once, and you can just tap the touch screen to change your sound.

Yeah, if all you're doing is playing back one program at a time, you'll be pretty hard pressed to run out of polyphony; the only way you'd be doing that is if you hold the sustain pedal and slide your hand over the keyboard so you make every note sound. I was talking more about if you layer a number of programs together in a combi. The M50 is perfectly fine; I just suggested the Kronos in case you weren't aware of it; you said you had the budget for more than the M50 but didn't say how much more, and the Kronos isn't unreasonable as far as flagship workstations go.

The M50's pretty good; it's a cheaper version of the M3. The biggest thing you should do is try it out before you buy it; I didn't like the action on it and it felt cheap. It sounds good, though if you're using it for gigs and try to layer sounds together, you'll run out of polyphony sooner than you'd like - I used to own a TR and had to be very careful with what I layered and how I used the sustain pedal to avoid having voices drop out because. If I were buying a workstation keyboard right now, I'd go for the Korg Kronos; if that was out of my price range, I'd wait until I got enough. The sounds blow away anything else on the market, plus it's got patch remain (when you switch sounds, any notes still sounding from the previous sound aren't cut off) and it's got a number of synth engines, an organ engine, and great engines for high-quality sampled pianos and electric pianos, in addition to the standard sample-based mode that the M50 would have.

The Vita's been hacked already, at least to let homebrew run in the PSP emulator.

I lied, I made one other edit. In the Virus JP Poly 1, I muted layer B. It sounds just a bit too buzzy without doing that.

I got something; it's not exact, but close enough to make me happy. I made a multi in Omnisphere with: 1 - Virus JP Poly 1, Octave 0, mixed at -9.2 dB 2 - Classic PWM Polysynth, Octave 0, LPF set to 0.625, -1.62 dB 3 - Workstation Bell, Octave +1, -7.04 dB I can't remember which patches were set to which octave, since I played around with them, so there's the settings I ended up with; other than the filter and changing the mix, that's all I did. You might want the mix levels a bit higher. Since this is my live keyboard rig and I don't want any sound to be overpowering, I set my main piano sound to a good level and balance everything else against that, so I'm not sending too hot a signal to the main mixer. (One downside of playing in a church context is that your sound guys are often volunteers, and sometimes clueless). I'll post an A/B against the original in the next few days.

Knock yourself out, then I'd start looking too, but probably not until Monday; again, need to make it through the current service before I start preparing for next month.

Please don't take time looking through the Omnisphere presets on my behalf, unless you really want to I can do that myself; I'd feel bad having people do things that I can do too.

My keyboards are a Roland V-Combo VR-700, that I'm using as a main controller and for organ sounds, and an M-Audio Oxygen 49 as a second controller, so I don't have to mess around with splits. Within Ableton Live, I've got a couple instances of Kontakt loaded, for piano, EP, and orchestral sounds mainly, plus NI Absynth, FM8, Arturia Analog Laboratory for more authentic analog sounds, Korg Legacy M1 for the standard stuff you'd get on a Korg workstation, Sylenth, and Reason rewired in. After this Sunday's service, I'm going to add Omnisphere; I just don't want to make substantial changes like that this close to the event. Basically, I've got more than enough options to make that kind of sound; I'm just not sure how to start, and figured I'd ask before I dig through the thousands of presets for the plugins I have loaded. Yep, I know how GM works, and I know that it doesn't automatically imply bad, but on every hardware keyboard I've used that has a GM bank (Korg TR, basically a Triton without a few features, Yamaha Motif XS, and my current Roland V-Combo VR-700), the GM sounds are virtually all worse than their non-GM counterparts. Yes, Colossus and some other software synths might be good, but nothing I'm running has a GM bank, and I'm pushing the limits on CPU and memory resources as it is, so if I add anything to my setup, it'll be Omnisphere and nothing more. Plus, I don't have any more money to spend on this. Yes; one of the other keyboard players in the video (they have 3) is using it; I think he's adding a synth bass part. You clearly see his hands off the micron right at the start, and clearly see someone else playing, so it's not the Micron, unless their keyboard players are all sending MIDI to each other's gear, and that'd be a nightmare. Yeah, it might not be Omnisphere and might be something simpler; Omnisphere is definitely a lot of peoples' go-to synth, and it's talked about all the time in church music circles. Failing any other ideas, I'd start by looking through its presets to see what's close, and go from there.