Kanthos

This is cross-posted from my blog, since I don't have a ton of people who read it but would like a ton of opinions. As a developing keyboard player, I’m realizing I haven’t had enough exposure to great examples of how to play. I’ve developed my own piano style, but am trying to figure out how to fit into a rock/pop/gospel/funk/reggae setting (our music at church is typically rock/pop with the odd song played in one of the other styles), and don’t have nearly enough exposure to B3 and Farfisa organ, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and synth music. I’m looking for recommendations of music in any of those styles. I’m not at all interested in jazz at this point: I have a pretty good handle on what jazz pianists, organists, and keyboard players are doing, and most of it is far beyond my skill. Ideally, song titles are best, since I don’t have the budget to buy a large number of albums (and my iPod is relatively close to being full). I’m not necessarily looking for blazingly fast solos (although those are good too), but more for groove and background parts and examples of innovative sounds. I’m open to suggestions from any genre, although the stuff I’ll use most at the moment will likely come from rock, prog rock, and pop. For organ, rhodes, and wurlitzer music, I’m especially interested in songs that use the instruments in less conventional ways or use effects, as I already have good examples of those instruments played clean or, for the organ, with heavy distortion. As a secondary goal, music that best captures the band as a whole is good too (for example, Smoke on the Water shows off Jon Lord’s organ playing somewhat but is also Deep Purple’s best-known title). Let me know what I should listen to!

Some people even run a site simply because they want to feel ownership over something. The biggest problem with consolidation, both with fansites and businesses, is finding a way to keep all parties happy without having to discard staff (be they volunteers or not), and clearly working out who's in charge. If, say, OCRemix and VGMix merged, who would run things? DJP? Virt? How would they be run? Using the stricter standards here or the looser standards there? If the latter, would the judges get canned? For small sites with small communities, this might not be as big an issue, but things don't always scale up well. Edit: Bah, I should always refresh before I start a post. Poke'G said a lot of what I said.

I came up with something that I used at church on Sunday to fake two-channel output with my gear, but I'm second-guessing it. The scenario is that I play two keyboards at once, with two or more sounds playing at the same time. Most of the time, I want them dry or using the effects built-in to their VSTs (Native Instruments B4-II using their built-in Leslie speaker modelling, and so on), but sometimes I want to run a particular sound through my guitar effects box. If I'm playing two sounds, say a wurlitzer and a B3, I want to process the wurlitzer with the guitar box but have the B3 play clean. Now, my audio interface output is one pair of 1/4" jacks (the interface is an Edirol UA-25). I set it up on Sunday as follows: left output from the UA-25 straight into my amp, right output from the UA-25 into my guitar effects box (Line6 PodXT), and PodXT's right output into the amp. Then, if I wanted an instrument to be clean, I panned it entirely to the left in NI Kore, and if I wanted it processed by the PodXT, I panned it entirely to the right. I then ran the amp into the system. My concern is the final output from the amp. Will the sound in the amp still have the panning, or by converting stereo to two mono channels, will the sounds be mixed together in the amp? In other words, if I play piano clean, it will be panned entirely left in Kore, so would it sound only on the left side of the amp and not on the right?

Good enough then. Just make sure you actually do the exercises, if there are any, or write similar stuff to what they're coming up with in the book if there are no exercises. It's extremely difficult to learn a language without hands-on experience, without the nights of banging your head against a problem to leave it and come back to it. Good luck! There are a few of us here who are experienced programmers, so make a thread if you run into language problems and need some help or another opinion.

Prophet of Mephisto's been building computers for people here, and from what I understand, his prices are quite good. You might want to ask him.

I'm sure zircon wasn't trying to kill anyone's buzz. It's just reality that the music industry, however you want to get into it, is very tough to make a living on unless you do teacher's college and teach music, give private lessons, or have some other day job and gig at night. Particularly with lower-budget games finding it cheaper to use licensed tracks than hire a composer, there's not a huge market for game composers.

@Glitch: I'm answering your PM here since other interested people may be reading this thread. In terms of languages, learn C++. Learn it in-depth. Try to figure out not just how to make the program work but *why* it works. Find a project for yourself, probably remaking some classic game like Pac-man or Tetris, and figure out how you'd organize the code and the logical parts of the software. How does it all fit together? Teach yourself to plan up-front: a programmer who starts writing code without the end goal in mind is a liability, not an asset. For software, Microsoft has a free edition of Visual C++ you can download, and there are a few others out there as well. For Mac, I don't know what's available, but it's generally not hard to find tools and tutorials online. Depends on your toolchain and process, I guess. At EA, we had two or three artists who did strictly 2D UI design for my project. They had a tool that let them lay out the assets visually and export to a format the game could understand, but it was the UI programmers, none of whom did any art for the game, who wrote the code that could use the assets and layouts produced by that tool and wrote the code to give it functionality. When I made my comment, I was thinking mainly of 3D animation. Certainly, there are some positions at some companies that use 2D graphics skills in conjunction with programming, but it's probably fair to say that in most larger companies, many people who program or create art assets do not do both, and it's probably fair to say that unless you're put in the time to master both (a huge time commitment unless you're a programming genius with great art skills), you'll be less valuable than someone who has mastered one or the other.

Game designer? Good luck. To find a job as a designer (i.e. the people who come up with the concepts for the game, describe what the gameplay should be like, and so on), you'll either need a very solid connection to the industry and have proven skills to that person (to go the "I have this friend who would be perfect for this job" route), or you'll have to get in at the bottom as a tester or junior programmer, and work your way up. As a programmer, which is what your degree will lead you towards, you'll have a better shot, although most people straight out of school have to pay their dues at a smaller game company or at a place like Electronic Arts that works you really hard before you can move on to a title that's actually fun. Places like Blizzard and Bethesda aren't hiring developers who are straight out of college; at very least, you'd have had to do several co-op terms or an internship with a game development company during college. The extra time spent with the army might work in your favour, but that would depend on the individual game company. In terms of skills, it's unlikely any game company will want someone who's both an animator and a programmer. A programmer who has a basic knowledge of animation is valuable, as is an animator who has a basic knowledge of programming, but trying to balance your skills in both fields will cause you to be not strong enough in either. There's so much artwork and animation work that has to go into modern games that there's a need for full-time artists to produce it, and so much development that you need full-time programmers to get it done. By all means, try out animation and learn the basics, but don't throw too much time into it. Time spent trying to code your own game on the side or over the summer will be much more beneficial to you, given your degree.

Hey, it was my master's convocation. I knew about 5 people who were convocating, since we were with all the math and computer science undergrads who I didn't know. Besides, my wife said I could bring it!

University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Graduated with a BMath in 2005, MMath in 2006.

Didn't you guys even say somewhere that it was a Tim Horton's? Maybe this isn't the thread for it, but I'm curious to know what kind of work goes into editing a podcast like that, and how it's recorded (in a bunch of individual segments that get pieced together?)

I don't work for one now, but I did a 4-month co-op (paid internship) with Electronic Arts in their Burnaby, BC studio. I was a user interface programmer for MVP Baseball 2004.

Yes, yes you were linked wrong. No dash between kvr and audio in the domain name. Try this.

Congrats on nearly selling out the first printing! You could record the old-fashioned way with a microphone close to the speaker on your radio You should've brought Internet into your graduation ceremony. I had my DS in mine, only I didn't play it since I was in the front row. Also, congrats on graduating

If they're DLLs, they're presumably plugins in some format FL Studio can recognize (been a while since I used it, but I know it at least recognizes VST and DXI plugins). If FL Studio recognizes the plugin DLLs (i.e. knows where they are, and they're not in a format FL Studio doesn't support), you should be able to add one of those effects in a similar way to the way you added Slayer. Also, KVR does have some ads, yes, but it has a fantastic database of plugins and some good forums. In general, it is *the* place to go for information on plugins unless you know someone on a site like this who has the plugin you're asking about or the manufacturer has good forums on their website.

I'm selling my FCB1010 MIDI Foot Controller. I bought the pedal used on eBay and other than a small crack in one corner of the plastic edge on the casing, it's in great condition. All the pedals and switches are intact and functional. I can provide pictures, but it'd have to wait until Monday, as my wife's halfway across the continent with our digital camera. I also have the box (which is a bit beat up but still fine, as it was used to ship the unit in when I bought it), and I believe I have the manual, although it's downloadable. The unit works fine; I'm selling it because it's too big to fit between the legs of my keyboard stand at home and the pedalboard on the keyboard I play at church doesn't allow for anything beyond a sustain and expression pedal to fit underneath, so I can't practically use the gear as much as I'd like (I can switch presets easily enough with the board sitting beside me instead of in front of me, but can't use either expression pedal when seated). I've modded it with the unofficial firmware version 1.0.2.e, so it's more functional than a stock unit (including, among other things, proper stomp box functionality that wasn't present with the stock firmware). The device can be programmed using the Ripwerx Editor, which is written in Java and should work fine if you have a Mac. You can set up everything on your computer and dump a Sysex file to the device. I was using it with some stompboxes and the expression pedals controlling Guitar Rig 3 and some other buttons for sending program changes to several VSTs run in Cubase. I paid about $100 plus shipping for this, and would hope to get the same back, although I'm open to negotiations. Post or PM me if you're interested or have any questions. If no one responds in a week or so, I'll put it up on craigslist and then eBay. It's been a while since I programmed it, but I still remember much of what I did and can provide

I didn't discover VGDJ until about episode 44 but have listened to them all at least twice now. It would be awesome if you guys were able to do something; regardless of what it would be about, I'm sure it would be entertaining.

The USB is for bi-directional audio and MIDI. I'll use the MIDI cable, however, so that I don't have to bring a USB hub along when I'm playing live, since I'm out of free USB ports with other gear and keyboards and such.

Double-posting just to bump this since the new question I have is related. I'm getting Native Instruments Kore set up right now for live performance. I've got a performance with a bunch of presets where different VSTs are enabled/disabled and I use different sounds. I want to automatically trigger a sound change on the PodXT whenever I do a preset change. This should be relatively easy: the PodXT responds to MIDI input, and a MIDI program change on the MIDI channel the PodXT is listening on will change the effects and amp/cabinet used. So far though, I've only used MIDI to go from hardware to software. Is there any reason why going the other direction wouldn't work? In other words, can I somehow create a PC message in a plugin that gets sent to my soundcard's MIDI out and then to the Pod (which will be connected via MIDI to the soundcard)? Assuming I have a plugin that will create and send a PC on a given channel (I've found one that should work), do I need to do anything else, or should it just send directly?

Even more than the interaction with guests, it takes a very strong presenter to work solo, in my opinion. Much is added by having a second person, even if that second person is less dominant (think zircon's first few episodes of VGDJ). There's a dynamic that can't be captured by one person.

xRisingForce, I challenge you now and forever to stop playing other people's music. NEVER DO IT AGAIN. You can never do it as well as the composer intended, so there is no point. You *obviously* have considerable musical talent and knowledge, so from now on, you must write your own music and perform it and never play anything written by someone else. You may use no backing tracks unless you have recorded them yourself. For you to do anything other than this would be blatantly hypocritical. If you cannot or will not do this, then stop posting in this thread because you have, by your own inaction, defeated any argument you might make.

More meetup report and meetup report themesong

Arturia's Prophet V is much better than the Pro-53 (albeit more expensive if you get the Komplete Synths pack).

The only thing I can say about this thread is that I'm glad you're not arguing religion.

Although, child processes are not entirely unlike what we're trying to accomplish here