Moseph

Ah. Have you tried a lubrication spray? WD-40 or electrical contact cleaner or something? It's a shame to have to throw out an entire interface because of the failure of a $5 part.

Broke how? Did the plastic break leaving the metal stub? Those dials are generally a standard size -- you should be able to buy a set of them and just stick them on the interface. Something like this. Do a Google search for potentiometer dial or potentiometer knob.

Derp. Google Shopping has led me astray. You're right, it's ~$400. I got it on sale, so that's not what I paid either.

These don't work with Kontakt Player. We've already been over that. EDIT: You mean stand-alone Kontakt as opposed to Komplete, right? (Kontakt Player is what they call the free version.) $250 may not be that expensive in the grand scheme of things, but it's a little much for an impulse purchase just to use some libraries that are on sale.

Are these from a song? It's hard to tell anything, really, out of context like this because you have a bunch of enharmonic spellings of the same things (e.g. D-sharp vs. E-flat), which generally don't occur within the same key. Just going by chord spellings, I'd guess probably D-flat major/C-sharp major or B-flat minor/A-sharp minor like Rozovian said. Rozovian, the augmented chords are probably just modified dominants (V) and secondary dominants (V of ... ), although you can't really say anything for sure out of context.

And I should clarify that by "reaction," I don't mean only emotional reaction, although that's certainly included in the concept. I'm speaking about the sorts of things that tend to come up in WIP threads or discussions of music in general. If someone, for example, says, "The melody doesn't work with the harmony" or "The low frequencies are muddy" or "This makes me feel all tingly inside," that's a reaction. In a perfect world, you as a composer would know everything about the music you write, including how everyone who heard it would react to it, but in reality it's impossible to know everything. One of the ways composers improve their skill is by familiarizing themselves with the various ways that people react to music (and to sound in general) and trying to understand what elements evoke those reactions in people and how to reproduce and combine those elements when writing music. From a mixing perspective, for example, anticipating people's reactions means knowing what makes a good mix. It means being aware that (some) people hear, say, mud in the low frequencies, and knowing what this mud sounds like, and knowing the ways the low frequencies can be changed to evoke different reactions. More easily said than done, obviously, but the first step is always awareness. Even if you can't predict how people will react to what you write, you should always try to be aware of your own reasons for doing things. Why am I writing a bassline that leaps around? Why am I EQ'ing this flute? Why does this guitar's distortion sound good to me? That sort of thing. EDIT: Don't mix on earbuds. Check your mix on them, but don't actually mix on them. They don't accurately represent the frequency spectrum which makes it really difficult to make good mixing decisions. You can get entry-level studio headphones for under $100. I've heard a lot of people recommend the AKG K240 as a good inexpensive model.

Has it occurred to you that even if you could accurately convey the complete context of the music to others, they might still criticize it within that context? Returning to the film score analogy, it's entirely possible that I could disagree with the person who scored the film regarding what makes for good music in the film's context. This isn't because we're trying to think of the music in different contexts; it's because we disagree about how the music ought to relate to the context. We might both agree that the scene calls for creepy music, but what he finds creepy I might find comical. So, are you able to articulate to yourself and others why the music sounds good to you in your imagined context? From a theoretical perspective, it's not enough to say that the music makes you feel a certain way or "fits" a certain scene and expect a productive discussion to come of it. You need to discuss why the music makes you feel like it does, or why the music fits the scene. If you're looking for constructive criticism, your focus in justifying your work to others shouldn't necessarily be in explaining the context to them or simply hoping they'll respond to the music in the same way that you do. Your focus should be first in discussing what reaction you want people to have to the music and then in discussing why you think the music will cause people to react that way. And if people don't react the way you expect, press them for details. They may or may not be able to give a coherent statement about why they react the way that they do, but the very fact that they don't react as you expect at least gives you something to work with, because it demonstrates that your understanding of how people interpret meaning from music may not be complete.

Also, I don't find the musical example in the OP weird, for whatever that's worth.

Anything that makes you write good music is okay. Even beyond that, people listen to film music out of context all the time without complaining that they don't understand it, so I don't see any reason to have hangs ups about imagining a visual context for creative purposes even if the listener won't know what it is.

From the Emotional Piano ReadMe PDF: So it was originally a Kontakt Player library, but is no longer available in that format. Note that Epic Frame Drums is also no longer a Kontakt Player library despite what the FAQ says. Either they forgot to update the FAQ or they've left that stuff there for the benefit of people who purchased the libraries while they were still Kontakt Player format.From the FAQ: I know that Tonehammer's design philosophy is generally not to lock samples or use copy protection, so my guess is that they stopped supporting Kontakt Player because that format requires that the samples be locked and that the library be activated through NI. Releasing a few libraries in the Player format was most likely an experiment that they decided didn't work.

My E-MU 0404 USB works okay on Windows 7.

You might be able to get the old standard PCI version on eBay if you're willing to buy used. I don't know what the driver support for it from E-MU is like, though. I'm not sure if it was discontinued before or after Windows Vista/7, so you should make sure it's usable with your OS before purchasing if you decide to go that route.

Oh man, I'm downloading so much Tonehammer stuff (on sale right now). My track is going to be awesome.

I can answer this without having used the library, unfortunately. Most of Tonehammer's libraries, Zitherette included, according to the product page, are designed for the full version of Kontakt, which means that Kontakt Player can only load them for half an hour at a time in the demo mode for the full version. This is also the case with Emotional Piano. From the Zitherette product page: I figure the savings for Emotional Piano 1.1 make it worth getting even with 2.0 on the horizon, since I assume 2.0's price will be in the $150 neighborhood. From the product description, it doesn't sound to me like the samples for 2.0 are new -- just tweaks, refined controls, and bugfixes, which I can probably live without.

Just purchased Emotional Piano, Plucked Piano, Bowed Piano, Zitherette, and Circle Bells. SJM, if you haven't bought Zitherette yet, I can try it out in the next couple days and let you know what I think.

Definitely getting the bowed and plucked pianos at very least.

Just dropping by to say that nuking my spawn base jumping tower for a redesign is totally okay with me.

It's been ages since I've used Soundfonts in general. My goto sound library right now is Vienna Symphonic SE Plus, which isn't free by a long shot.

It's been ages since I've used SFZ and don't entirely remember how it works, but it sounds like this is a MIDI channel issue. Probably the instruments on the SFZ list are each assigned to a MIDI channel (1 through 16) and which instrument plays is determined by which channel the track is sending to. Your MIDI track should have a field somewhere that says what MIDI channel it outputs on. Try changing this and see if it changes what it plays in SFZ.

Wait, then why are you recommending buying $2000 worth of equipment in a bare minimums thread?

Does anyone really record at higher than 48khz? For that matter, has anyone actually experienced the supposed CPU spikes, pops and clicks, and general performance hits that USB interfaces are supposed to cause? Because I never have. If I had bought a Firewire interface that was $100 more expensive than my USB interface just to have Firewire instead of USB, I'd have wasted $100.

The interface gain should be set as high as possible, which means low enough so that it doesn't clip when the signal is at its loudest.

In a word, yes. I haven't used the Fast Track Pro, but as far as being able to get a good mix, an audio interface is an audio interface, and it will definitely get the job done. I use an AKG K702 set and it's awesome. It will be easily the best set of headphones you've ever used. (Extremely long burn-in period, though, so if the bass seems like it's sort of weak, just keep using it for another few weeks.)

To me, the real concern here is how awkward it always is to navigate in 3D. The movement shown in the video looks cumbersome, like navigating in Maya or Descent -- there needs to be an orthographic view that will let you pan things around in 2D. Or maybe there already is and it just wasn't shown.

This gif makes me sad because it could easily be looped so much more smoothly.