Kanthos

I'd be happy to. Still playing through Y (I only started a couple weeks ago) but I could use a Spritzee trade evolve too, and others down the road, for sure. 4081-5772-1984

Ah, cool, that makes a lot of sense then. In that case, yes, the right adapter will do the trick. If your headphones naturally are 1/8" inch and you're using a 1/8" female to 1/4" male adapter, that adapter is almost certainly stereo to stereo (especially if it came with your headphones), but you're feeding it only a mono signal and it's not designed to convert mono to stereo. At least the adapter you'll need to buy is really cheap

The XBox was a better console, spec-wise, than the PS2. The GameCube most definitely was not. I spent a co-op term working for EA on MVP Baseball 2003. We generally targetted the PS2's specs (we didn't have the time or manpower to make a much better version for the XBox), and had to scale things back a lot for the GameCube.

Is there a reason why you'd want to plug your headphones directly into the receiver? Why would you want to mic something just to hear it in your headphones? What does the rest of your setup look like? Mics being in mono is a standard thing, so I'm betting that plugging headphones into the receiver is either temporary (eg. "There's a problem with this system, or I'm checking component by component to make sure everything works") or that there's some other problem down the line (eg. you're trying to record a band or a singer into a stereo audio track using a mono signal, so you're only getting their voice in the left channel when you listen from your audio interface, so you've gone back to check the receiver and are hearing the same thing). What are you actually trying to accomplish here? The adapter MetalMan posted is exactly what you want, unless you have headphones that are 1/4" only. You connect the 1/4" mono male end to your receiver and plug a 1/8" stereo male end into the female end of the adapter. Incidentally, I should get one of these, since I'm often plugging my headphones into a mono line mixer at church (to give me independant control over my keyboard volume and my monitor mix); I should start listening in stereo again.

Load times really refer to two different things. When you load in a sampled instrument, your sampler won't load all the samples by default. There'll be an initial load, and then, as the samples are used, the remaining parts are streamed from disk on demand. Keeping initial load times low is nice, but won't really affect your work that much other than when you first load new samples or open the project. I wouldn't consider a hard drive based on disk speed alone. Beyond that, there's a tradeoff between amount of RAM and disk speed. The faster your disk is, the more you can stream on demand, and thus the less you need to load into RAM to begin with (which of course shortens load times as a secondary benefit). If you have slower drives, they'll be able to stream less and you'll need more preloaded into RAM. There are other tricks too, like only having a few sampled instruments loaded into memory and bouncing your other tracks to audio (which also helps reduce CPU load; it's much easier to play back an audio track than it is to trigger a virtual instrument and the effects assigned to it). The bottom line is this: if you have enough RAM and a fast enough CPU to work with a small number of virtual instruments plus the remaining audio tracks for your project, any upgrades are more for convenience or to improve your workflow; this is why big-name orchestral composers have many networked machines, all playing back various orchestral samples at the highest quality. There are two important questions though that I haven't seen you answer yet: 1) What are your needs in terms of sampled instruments? Are you wanting to add strings to a rock track? Are you wanting to get into orchestral writing where you need a full orchestra's worth of instruments in one song? If you're a hobbyist, you don't need to spend a ton of cash to try and meet the optimal specs for your sample libraries; you can often make do with less. 2) Have you run into any actual problems with your current rig so far? If you're spending money to fix a definite problem, especially if that problem hampers your creativity (eg. if you are being forced to bounce a lot of tracks and the inconvenience of doing so is hurting your musicianship), by all means upgrade, but if you're mostly just concerned about wanting a better rig or being worried about minimum and recommended specs for sample libraries without seeing how those stack up with how you'll actually use the libraries, it might be better to wait. Even waiting 6 months on an upgrade will mean you can spend the same money and get something better than you would if you upgraded now. About minimum and recommended specs: I'd check around for any libraries you're thinking of purchasing and try and get an idea of how your specs will measure up, the way you'd actually use the library. If you're using a few articulations for a solo flute, for example, you can definitely get away with less than the recommended specs. Worst case, if you have the money for both your desired library and a computer upgrade, is you can always buy the library, see how it performs, and if it's not where you want it to be, upgrade then, and if it performs well enough, hold off. There's all kinds of tradeoffs here; make the choice that's right for you based on your needs.

That would depend on the particular mic. There isn't anything inherent to a mic being USB versus XLR that would affect the frequency response. USB isn't an audio protocol, so the mic could send whatever it wants over USB; how good or bad that signal is depends on how the mic is built, not how it connects to your computer.

There are some games you could buy through the PlayStation Store on the PSP that you can't play on the PS Vita, though not many. DLC is another story; I have DLC for a few PSP games and none of them work. I've heard of tricks involving downloading the DLC on a PS3 and transferring it over, but that doesn't help me since I don't have one. If I were you, I'd only buy PSP games from your Vita now; that way, you know it'll be compatible. Also, any game on UMD only obviously won't work on Vita, and there are enough of those, mostly older games, before the PlayStation Store really took off.

Super Mario 3D World gives great value for the money. Link Between Worlds is better than Link to the Past, which was my previous favourite Zelda game. Castlevania: Mirror of Fates was good; a bit different from the DS Castlevania games, but I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favourite. Felt to me like it favoured combat over exploration. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is always fun. Etrian Odyssey IV and Etrian Odyssey: Millennium Girl are both good. Millennium Girl is probably the gentler introduction to this style of hardcore RPG if you play in story mode.

Also the remakes of Disgaea and Disgaea 2 on the PSP (and Disgaea 3 on the Vita). I highly recommend Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Never played any of the original ones, but I loved this. Also making my way through Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. Another good game; gotta love a caper movie turned into a game.

What you want to do is go to your local music store and talk to a sales rep. They'll be able to help you out far better than probably anyone else here. If you think Tom will be serious about lessons, you want to find a digital piano (or, maybe even a real one? You might be able to find a good deal on craigslist or something?) that has the three pedals a piano would have. A beginner isn't going to use anything more than the sustain pedal, but if he's interested in taking lessons long-term, the other two pedals could be essential as well. If you're going digital, make sure that it either has MIDI out or MIDI Over USB; those are what you'd use to connect to a computer. (Probably unlikely that you'd find something with neither, but that'd still be what you want to check for). This is the proper term to use when you say "connects to a DAW". Don't consider anything that doesn't have weighted keys. It may be a bit more expensive that way, but it's honestly a waste of time to take piano lessons on something with semi-weighted or synth action keys; those kinds of keybeds are better used for playing in a band setting and for different sounds than a piano. You *can* do it if you have to: I have a keyboard and a sound module - basically a keyboard without the keys - hooked up via MIDI, and my keyboard has semi-weighted keys so it's better suited for playing organ parts and synth parts than piano parts. But then, I'm playing rock music in bands, so I don't need the quality of the keys or the dynamic range that you'd get out of a weighted keyboard, so I can make do. Ideally, if you have a pianist friend, take him or her to the music store with you. Buying a keyboard or piano often comes down to preference; there usually isn't a single obvious choice, and someone you trust might be able to give a different and potentially better perspective than a salesperson (really, that depends on how good the sales reps are, if they're more concerned with making the most profit for the store versus selling you the right thing).

iLoks also are problematic should you wish to resell something. If I want to resell something on an eLicenser key, I just need to get a second key (or have the purchaser bring one, if we're meeting in person), and I can transfer the license from one key to another. With an iLok, I think there's a fee in addition to any restrictions the software vendor might place (eg. you can't legally resell EWQL products).

I'm curious to know what differences, besides the obvious (samples being played back in NN-XT versus Kontakt) there are in the libraries. Seems odd that the whole package is ~4.5 GB while the Kontakt libraries are much bigger (eg. 9 GB for Koto Nation alone). Does the difference come from compressed vs. uncompressed samples? Are there parts missing? For the record, I'm not questioning the quality of the refills; just curious why the size is so different between versions.

Dude, I just got fired for looking at that at work

I wouldn't say you're doing the pads "right" (unless you mean, "I wanted to use a pad, and actually did, instead of using something else", which all in all, isn't much of an accomplishment ). Rather, you made a choice that I, as a listener, found pleasing. Music is really subjective, and from a compositional and arrangement point of view, you can find exceptions to virtually every "rule", so I hope you don't take anyone's suggestions in this area as "things you MUST do". (Mixing, when you get to that point, is another issue altogether). Cool about the arp; I haven't heard the original prelude in so long, so I'm sure you're right and I didn't notice it. Perfect example of a subjective aesthetic choice here, and I don't presume to say "change it and do it my way just because". The bells also is a preference of mine. I did find it really jarring, but whenever I use those kinds of tones in my keyboard playing, I only use sounds that sound in tune. People can take some amount of out-of-tuneness in certain sounds (otherwise why would they have oscillator detune features on synths), but too much often doesn't work. Definitely keep some of that, if that's what you were going for, but yeah, like more people than just me have said, it does sound like too much detune. The key to most things in music is subtlety; too much of a good thing often ends up being not so good. And, kudos for being a beginner who invites and responds well to suggestions for improvement. That's as important a skill as any for a musician to have

You don't need to know where the term came from to know what a pad is and how and when to use it (when I have the opportunity to teach less-experienced keyboard players, I just define it as "a sustained sound playing the basic chord changes that fills in the gaps of a song"). But, after a quick Google search, I believe the term came from the idea of padding something out or adding padding, in other words, to use something relatively unimportant which fills in the space, which is pretty much the definition I use. A couple thoughts on the song itself: the pad is really good. You don't want to use a pad that just sits there without any motion to the sound unless everything else is really busy; a sustained sound that never changes gets old really quickly. Your choice of sound there is fitting. Maybe it's what you're going for, but I'm not a fan of how the bell part detunes when you get higher up the keyboard. Maybe adjusting the key tracking on the oscillator pitch will help, assuming it's not intentional. Or maybe it's a subtle clashing between the slower and faster arpeggiated parts. Lastly, I don't really like how the arpeggiated parts jump down an octave and repeat the same notes (eg. A3 B3 C4 E3 A3 B3 C4 E5 etc. - it's the A3 B3 and C4 that are repeated). Sounds like you're compensating for a keyboard that had a fixed number of octaves. But couldn't you edit the part to drop the notes down to where they are in the original melody?

Code sent. Enjoy!

I just bought a Vita in a bundle with a downloadable code for The Walking Dead and a 4 GB memory stick. I'm not interested in The Walking Dead at all, but the bundle was priced the same as a plain Vita by itself, so I grabbed it anyway. First Vita owner to reply to this thread gets the code; you redeem it by going into the PS Store app and choosing Redeem Codes.

Added you guys as well: 4081-5772-1984

At what point does the OP clearly state that he thinks the site has sold out as opposed to has taken a first step towards possibly selling out? How inflammatory something is or isn't depends entirely on the listener, so to me, what I quoted reads like "Why is it that people didn't read the OP in the way I did?"

I was in grade 9. Up to that point, my musical exposure had been all kinds of classical stuff, 70's folk (mostly Simon & Garfunkel), the Beach Boys, and the popular music of the day that my Mom didn't know I listened to (whatever was on the radio on the local rock and popular music stations in the mid-90's, stuff like Guns & Roses & Nirvana). I had no exposure to jazz, other than it being the music that would cause my Mom to turn off the radio on our drive to and from my Saturday-morning piano lessons. I played with the grade 9-10 concert band in grade 9, and at a music night for all the school's bands and choirs, I heard the grade 11-12 jazz band play. I liked a lot of their stuff, but absolutely loved the big band arrangement of Weather Report's Birdland. That sparked my interest in jazz and kicked off a journey of trying to discover all kinds of new music. In the last 7 years, I've become a good keyboard player for rock/pop kind of stuff, and in an interesting chain of events (I like jazz -> I get my 10-years-younger-than-me brother into it -> he studies jazz guitar performance in college -> his college buddies introduce him to Snarky Puppy -> he introduces me to Snarky Puppy -> they inspire me to stop just playing at church and get back into jazz/funk/fusion), I'm now back to jazz, self-learning the theory and technique to develop some real jazz chops and knowledge, beyond the "fake it" approach I've had so far. As a bonus, I can borrow all my brother's textbooks for free

Nice site; I also love the logo. And the Moog Little Phatty xD