Kanthos

Seeing this, I'm wondering if BGC didn't propose by writing the proposal out in the playlist window in FL Studio.

Happy birthday! Happy birthday! Happy birthday! Nice, Shadow. Happy birthday! Happy birthday, and may all your past girl troubles resolve themselves nicely.

Happy birthday! May you continue to entertain us with your graphical wizardry.

OCR date, anyone?

Especially since they were pushovers in FF VII in all the places you fight them. Here, you fight 3 of them at the right levels and they'll beak you for 3k damage each. Mission over. Mind you, they're not as bad as movers with their stupid delta attack.

Maybe using your hands in different motions is easier to a point, but it's not that hard to find pieces that are easily harder than playing similar parts with both hands. Chopin's Fantasy-Impromptu (6/8 in the left hand, 4/4 in the right hand) is a great example.

Fair enough. Although at least in this specific case, zircon seemed to favour a preemptive warning rather than having to edit out a link after the fact.

$200 CDN is pretty close to $200 US at the moment, so it probably doesn't matter either way. ZZounds doesn't ship to Canada, but I highly recommend Kelly's Music and Computers (www.kellysmusic.ca) based in Manitoba. I've bought from them a number of times and have been impressed with their services and prices. Only catch is sometimes they don't have things in stock, particularly academic versions (which are always special orders for them) so there can sometimes be a delay on shipping. I imagine keyboards are fairly standard though; things like less-common software synths are more likely to be delayed. They also ship at least some of their items for free too, if you're willing to use standard shipping service instead of express; I've never bought anything as heavy as a keyboard, but I've never paid them shipping. For an example of price: I ordered WayOutWare's TimewARP 2600 VST this morning. It cost $193 CDN at Kelly's, and would go for $250 US on WayOutWare's site, and that's as a download version. I've seen similar price differences on the entire Native Instruments product line as well. I've actually never seen Kelly's sell for the same or more as the software manufacturer.

Haha, nice adaptation. Although, lyrically, you'd want to replace Fithos or Wecos with Kanthos, not Lusec. (Apologies to all students of Latin for my spelling abominations).

No, of course not, and I didn't say that or even imply it. I did imply that for whatever reason, it's forum policy not to openly discuss pirating, and zircon, as a moderator, is responsible for enforcing that policy. So it's understandable that when someone raises a comment that sounds like an advocacy for pirating, it'd raise a red flag with zircon.

Depends what you mean by "learn". I transitioned from classical to playing with a worship band at church where I was given just the chords and lyrics to play with; jazz came a bit later. So when I got to jazz, I knew my way around the basic chords (major, minor, sus4 and 7) without having to think about it, and could find good voicings and so on. With jazz, I didn't really connect theory and playing. I listened to a lot of music and started developing other voicings and chords on my own, and when I play now, I often ignore the given altered tones of the chord in the fakebook and do something that sounds right (often the same chord, although I don't realize it as such unless I listen to a recording of myself playing and analyze what I've done).

I play almost everything by ear. Classical piano pieces are typically too hard to do by ear, but that's not necessarily because of difficulty (I play at a level 3 or 4 grades below where I played at my peak; thanks tendonitis) but because Classical music requires precision. Sure, I can take something and make it sound pretty much like the original using ear alone, but that won't do it justice. My playing style is generally to abstract music down to chords and melody (i.e. jazz fakebook style) and fill the rest in myself, or just stick to chords if I'm playing with someone else or as part of a mix.

Consider yourself lucky then; everyone else I know who's even attempted piano would argue it's much easier to play the same thing. Of course, being able to play both ways is important.

You a beginner or something, both at music and logic? It is inherently more complex to play two different parts than to play two similar parts *assuming the pieces are of equivalent technical difficulty, all other things being equal*. Sure, the notes themselves may be different, but if you're using the same rhythms in both hands, there's no way that's harder than playing, say, quarter-note chords in your left hand and a melody with dotted eights in the right (ex. Pachelbel's Canon in D).

Happy birthday!

Nice work Bean. Love the dedication too

It read to me more that he wasn't knocking sound design so much as he was knocking prefab loops. The only thing I thought that sounded arrogant was the statement that classical music will outlive everything, and I definitely don't agree with it. Sure, your average top-40 song has very little melodic and harmonic creativity, but there's plenty out there that does. Some jazz arrangements are significantly more complex than a lot of classical music, for that matter, simply because when compared to the baroque and classical periods, jazz uses far more advanced tone colors and voicings. There's also the fact that some of the earliest users of synthesizers did a lot to push the musical envelope while still using more arranged techniques: the big 3 jazz keyboard players (Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock) come to mind.

I was reading up on some classic synths today (ARP 2600, Oberheim Polyphonic, Minimoog, that kind of thing) and found one, can't remember which, that was going for $8,000 back in the early 70's. When you think that some artists, like Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock, had a number of electric pianos and synths that they used to record and tour with, none of which were perfect or one-size-fits-all solutions, spending $2,000 on a keyboard like this isn't a big deal. Obviously, not everyone can or will do that, but serious keyboard players will consider something like that. Just because you have a limited income doesn't mean that everyone does.

There's a lot of problems with the music industry, but I don't think this is terribly bad. Based on my brother's comments with Band-In-A-Box (he's used it at school), I think we're still a long way off from having professional-quality backing tracks generated on the fly. And even when that comes, it's becoming gradually easier for indie artists to get exposure, so I think we're progressing towards an environment where the consumers, not the record labels, decide who's good or not and spend their money accordingly. Basically, if you're a crappy artist who can't do your own parts or put together a band, even just using session artists, this technology isn't going to help you much.

Because previewing in the sense of downloading MP3s shared illegally is also illegal? You and DJP's simultaneous posts aside, you didn't try very hard to find it legally. I found it in about 10 seconds on the Canadian version of Amazon, probably in less time than it took you to post that you couldn't find it.

DJP, is there any way to get other international retailers involved in contributing a portion of orders made with them to the site? You'd have gotten a fair bit of donation money from me if Amazon and ZZounds weren't US-only.

Contributed

Been over a year since I last used FL Studio, but I find it hard to believe that it doesn't handle 32nd notes. Someone who knows it better can speak to that. Are you using prerecorded drum loops here, or programming a MIDI drum track to be played back? If the former, your only solution will be to stretch the audio. If the latter, I'm pretty sure you can do 32nd notes, or notes of any length really if you record from a MIDI keyboard or click and shrink the notes to the duration of your choice and position them properly in the piano. Wait, I think I got it. Are you trying to do your drums in the step sequencer instead of the piano roll? If so, that's your problem there. Do your drums in the piano roll (really, you'll probably want to do most things in the piano roll), so you have more control over note durations.

I'm curious to know whether this will break existing audio software and hardware or not. I certainly don't want to be looking at massive software upgrade costs to get my music system functional the next time I get a new machine.

I'm not clear on what you're asking. You can change the note duration (make a quarter note an eighth note or a half note) or you can change the tempo (go from 70 BPM to 140 BPM), or do both, but you can't have 70 BPM and 140 BPM notes playing at the same time. Or are you saying that you want to have things play at 140 BPM while you work on the track but release it at 70 BPM? If so, you can probably change the global tempo of the piece to 140 BPM for editing, and switch it back for playback.