Moseph

I only have a 768 kbps connection (because I'm cheap) and pull 70-80 KB/s on downloads, and downloads like to stall out on me. Rage would probably take me almost a week to download.

As ambient mentioned, here's the link for paulstretch if you're not familiar with it and want to check it out. (Example)

Covered a little bit in this thread.

Well ... If your sample rate is 44,100 per second, then a four-minute song has 10,584,000 segments.

I'm 0.000757575758 miles, 21 inches tall. Also, I'm currently doing a twelve-segment remix of a two-segment source.

Nooooooo! Don't take my underscores from me!!!11 And consider yourself fortunate that I didn't limit myself to eight characters as well.

PM'd. This mix actually turned out a lot better than I expected it to.

FL Studio has a demo version. If you like it better than Logic, use it. If you like Logic better, use Logic. You don't really need both unless you need to do music on both your Mac and your PC, in which case it might be better to switch to something else entirely to get cross-compatibility, since Logic is Mac-only and FL is PC-only.

I sequence drums by hand with many clicks of the mouse. But then, I usually sequence everything else by hand, too.

Regarding non-VGM samples: I'm not positive it wouldn't be allowed (can't speak for the site staff), but the inclusion of non-VGM music samples has been cited as a reason for removing ReMixes from the site in the past, so the odds don't look good. (See items 47, 54, and 71 under heading Pre-OCR01500 Removal Process (Lockdown 2) in the changelog.)

Since I've brought it up and OverCoat has emphasized it, I'm now curious. How do people here who have released albums go about promoting them, especially if they aren't touring or playing live at all?

Find yourself a composition teacher. And it doesn't by any means have to be part of a formal program of study. If there are colleges with music departments that have composition programs close by, email a composition professor and ask if there are any students in the program who give or would be interested in giving private lessons. If you can hook up with a college student who studies composition, s/he gets some teaching experience and you get lessons probably for fairly cheap. Everyone wins.

Seems to me that promotion is probably one of the biggest considerations. Not that I've ever released an album myself.

Ha. Now it's a fully finished string quartet plus synth thing.

I have a partly finished string quartet plus synths thing going on. It will be finished in some fashion by the deadline.

The only track I've submitted to date has been YES'd by the judges, but it's still in the to-be-posted backlog Zircon mentioned.

It's unhelpful because mickomoo's questions were "what's a good orchestration guide" and "how do I achieve realism with fake instruments," and your response was basically to say "you should be able to figure this out by yourself lol." If that's not what you meant, that's still what everyone besides you thought you were saying.

I actually just ran into a similar issue with a piece I was writing -- it wasn't background noise per se that I added to a section in the music but rather a kind of quiet swish noise, and I found that it gave the sound more body and provided emphasis at the point where I cut the swish out and the bass came in. And now I really want to try this with a sample-based orchestra piece and see how it sounds.

What orchestra samples are you using? Is this a combination of free Soundfonts? A comprehensive orchestral library? I ask, because related to Rozovian's discussion of EQ, usually things from a comprehensive library (or a decent comprehensive library, at least) don't need a lot of EQ to fit together well, whereas if you're combining multiple sources, you may need heavier EQ. The problems I hear between the two examples are actually pretty different. In the Cave Story one, I think it largely has to do with an unrealistic and dead-sounding acoustic space, which is mostly a reverb issue. I'd recommend a convolution reverb unit if you aren't using one. It makes a huge difference for orchestra music. Reverberate is an extremely good cheap one, or try Reverberate LE or SIR as free solutions. Also, there's not a lot of performance subtlety here, which is exacerbating the unrealism of the acoustic space. All of the notes sound like they're played at the same velocity all the time, which makes the music sound extremely static. What's available to you in your samples' velocity layers -- if the samples have velocity layers at all -- may restrain what you can do about this, but you should at least try to get some differentiation of level going on so you can shape your patterns and phrases into something that sounds like a real performance instead of a machine. The Chrono Trigger example sounds very thin to me, not at all like the other example. This is likely an EQ issue. You're missing a lot of low end -- it sounds like maybe everything below 500 Hz has been cut too much. Generally, I shoot for a feeling of warm fullness in the low end, which is admittedly a vague way to describe the goal, but the low end end needs to feel like it's present to you in some way, like you can reach out and touch it, if that makes any sense, and that's definitely not happening here. The Cave Story example comes closer to it. EDIT: Also, yes, you need some decent headphones or speakers. It's possible that the mud you're hearing is partially caused by what you're listening on. I own some old desktop speakers that make well-mixed things sound muddy and boomy. I know I've mixed something right when I've gotten it to sound awful on those speakers . The Chrono Trigger example on my mixing headphones (AKG K702) is way more tinny than muddy, whereas it actually sounds pretty good on the terrible desktop speakers. There have been several threads about buying headphones in the past, so you should be able to do a forum search to find info on what to buy. If you're looking to spend under $100, the AKG K240 seems to have a lot of fans.

I was going to try to post a more general overview of techniques, but that turned out to be way too involved for tonight, so I'm just going to talk about one specific thing and try to post more as time allows if this is at all helpful. Ascending melodic leaps: Generally speaking, upward leaps are frequently used in music that is intended to evoke an emotional response. This is probably because leaps stand out in melodies because stepwise motion is the norm. (If you compose a melody entirely out of steps, you might end up with a perfectly usable melody. If you compose it entirely out of leaps, it will likely sound disjointed). This is maybe a subjective assessment on my part, but in melodies such as the Star Wars theme or "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," it's the melodic leaps that stand out to me. So ... There are some formulaic ways to deal with upward leaps. The first thing to consider is the interval of the leap. I don't have a lot to say about this other than to note that leaps of greater than an octave tend to sound very disconnected. Useful if you're trying to fragment the melody, not so useful otherwise. More important is note behavior after the leap. Very often, the melody will step back down after the leap -- the leap is resolved down, in a sense. Some theories of music assert that the listener wants the gap that was created in the melody to be filled in, which is done by moving the melody back into the space that was leapt over. Knowing this, you can play with listener expectations by delaying this resolution or avoiding it altogether. Here are some examples of how this can work out. :Lot of upward leaps, but they aren't really resolved down in any conclusive way until the ends of sections, and in some cases the melody continues upward after the leap. The emotional effect here is one of openness, adventure, and boldness in the face of the unknown. If the leaps had been clearly resolved down, I think the music would sound too stable. Compare this with another John Williams theme -- :Much more assertive-sounding than the Indy theme. Part of this comes from the downward-resolved leaps. Because the leaps are resolved, the music doesn't have the upward momentum of the Indy theme, and it lacks Indy's sense of the unknown. (Zelda):Similar to the Indy theme. An upward leap is played twice and then continues up and doodles around a bit before resolving back into the leapt-over space. Again, the music conveys a sense of the unknown. and (Secret of Mana)Both of these feature upward leaps that leap back down to where they started without resolving into the leapt-over space. This leaves the leapt-to note hanging in the air -- the leap is superfluous and unfulfilled -- and this is especially effective for sad or wistful music, or anywhere that a sense of unfulfillment is appropriate. A particular form of the upward leap -- the appoggiatura -- occurs when the leapt-to note occurs on the beat, isn't a member of the present harmony, and resolves down by step into the harmony. The listener's expectation that a leapt-to non-chord tone will resolve down by step into the harmony as an appoggiatura is very strong, so if the leap you're dealing with is a potential appoggiatura, it may be an especially good candidate for the sort of playing-with-expectations treatment discussed above.

Point taken. I have some ideas about how possibly to approach this, although it may be tomorrow night or later before I have the time to post again, especially if I decide to try to include examples. Do you take or have you ever taken lessons for an instrument? I ask, because the sort of performance considerations that you're interested in are things that are usually taught in performance lessons and not so much in other areas of music study, which may be why you're having trouble finding information about them.

For understanding how dynamics in strings (and other orchestra instruments) work, I'd recommend listening to actual recordings of orchestra music rather than to other people's sampled orchestra tracks since imitating a real orchestra is the ultimate goal. Strings can be as dynamic as you want them to be. Ridiculous ppp to fff crescendos aren't out of the question, and usually in the sampled strings I've heard, the problem tends to be more that there's not enough dynamic variation rather than there being too much. Obviously, the style of music is a factor in this -- Barber's Adagio for Strings is going to have more dynamic nuance than the string backing for a piano ballad. General stuff about strings: The sound's attack can vary from a slow crescendo with an imperceptible beginning to an extremely sharp immediate onset. One of the problems I hear all the freaking time in people's use of string samples is that the attacks on the strings' notes don't line up with the attacks in other instruments. Usually the strings' attacks are too slow because the samples have a slow attack on them, and the string line lags behind everything else. If your string samples have a slow attack and there's nothing you can do about it on the sampler or keyswitch level, then bump the notes to the left in the sequencer until you hear that the strings are lining up with the rest of the instruments. It's usually a good practice to taper the ends of sustained notes at least a little, by which I mean a slight decrescendo at the end of the note if the line ends there and there's a rest before subsequent notes. More broadly, try to develop an ear for phrasing in general. One of the typical ways to shape a melodic line is to have it rise and then fall back down, with the dynamic level increasing as the notes go up and then decreasing as the notes fall. One other problem that is inherent to samples is that they sound -- for lack of a better description -- too solid. The note is on or off, it's in perfect tune, and it had no musical context when it was recorded. It's hard to get delicacy out of samples, especially string samples, unless they're really good samples. Something that I do to try to combat this fact is to intentionally put things slightly out of tune. I record dynamics with the tilt sensors on a Wii controller (a fishing rod casting motion controls loudness/expression), and I map the side-to-side roll on the controller to pitch bend. Since I can't hold the controller absolutely straight when I record, small pitch inconsistencies get introduced, and this (in my view) makes the results sound more realistic. (If you want to hear how uncanny it sounds for everything to be in perfect tune, listen to the demos for 70 DVZ Strings, a high-end library that splits the strings up into a bunch of small, individually-recorded sections, each of which is tuned more perfectly than it would be if they were all recorded together as a full section. It sounds like a very good library, but you'd have to be really careful about tuning to make it sound real. Compare those demos to the relative messiness of a real orchestra.) Speaking of the Wii controller, you should decide how you're going to input dynamics. I started using a Wii controller (after flirting with an Xbox controller) because I couldn't get what I felt were acceptable results from the wheels/pots/faders that you get on MIDI keyboards (using wheels/pots/faders is musically unintuitive to me, and I wanted something that felt more like a conducting gesture). The input method you choose will affect your results. It might be more trouble than it's worth for you, but I also link a movable low-pass filter to my expression/volume automation (VSL, which I use, has one of these built into the sampler -- I'm not sure how easy this would be with EWQL). This makes really soft notes sound less bright than loud notes. It takes a lot of tweaking to set up properly, though.

Just set the project's tempo correctly and the grid will line up. Set the tempo to some value, turn on the click track, play the original, and see if the click track goes out of sync with it. If it does, adjust the tempo and try again. Repeat until you've discovered the tempo.

Every record player is full analog. There is no such thing as a digital record player unless you count the ones that include USB hookups to easily transfer vinyl rips to a computer.

Depends entirely on whether it's a decent model or not. If you can get a model number, Google should be able to tell you. Keep in mind that you might need a preamp with phono input to use it -- unless it's a crummy turntable, it probably doesn't have a built-in preamp. You'll probably also need to replace the stylus. But definitely don't buy it unless you know what you're getting -- I got a decent turntable on eBay (Technics SL-DL5, if anyone cares) for $60 several years ago.