Moseph

I assumed it was, in the opening bit, because he couldn't control his powers (I think crushing the guards' helmets was just a result of generally making every metal object in the room go berserk and not specific intent) and then, in the subsequent training that wasn't shown, because he recognized the value of the training, although that still wouldn't explain why he didn't go for the kill after he felt he had sufficient mastery of his powers. Maybe the war ended and training was interrupted before he reached that point.

Technically, yes, they should touch if you want an absolutely accurate transcription, but Sonar doesn't round the corners of notes -- adjacent notes look like one long note -- so I shortened the duration slightly just to make it clear that it was two notes. In constructing a performance, you don't really want all your notes to be perfect anyway -- you'd have to release the piano key to restrike it, for example. Remember that when you're dealing with the piano roll, it's best to think of it as creating a performance and not as notating a piece that someone else will perform for you a la Finale.

Yes, use VBR.

And for reference, my screen captures are from Sonar 8.5.

Right. You can also set your pencil tool to draw notes of, say, triplet length, but they won't snap into the correct position unless you also have the grid set correctly. If you're using step record, the grid doesn't matter, and you just set duration then play the note. It's similar to Finale's Speedy Entry. No, all the durations are correct.The vertical lines are note velocity, which is how loud the note is played. With MIDI, this is a value from 0 to 127. All the notes in the examples are 90-ish -- if I were making an actual performance, the velocities would vary according to how loud I wanted each note to be. Tempo is different from velocity and is set either in the transport box (where the playback controls are) if you aren't automating it or (depending on how the specific DAW handles it) possibly in a separate window where the tempo can be automated so it changes over time.

(Grid is set to 16th-note triplets) (Grid is set to 16th-notes) In general, if you're unsure of how a given note duration should look in the piano roll, you can set the grid value to that duration to check it. Most DAWs have some sort of step record, too.

buuump for great justice I've submitted two requests, which is two more than last year.

I don't know how much of a difference it makes, but it does make some difference. I had much clearer highs after switching from a laptop's onboard sound to an E-MU 0404 USB.

By the way, your request from last year is currently waiting in the to-be-posted queue and could hit the front page any day now.

Speaking as someone who's really good with both Finale and a piano roll ... Learn to use the piano roll. You can write faster, you can fine-tune the performance to fit the samples better than in Finale, you don't have to waste time exporting/importing from Finale, and DAW playback is more flexible than Finale's. Also, complex stuff is easier to do in a piano roll rather than in notation. It's just a matter of getting used to how things look on the piano roll after reading sheet music for so long.

You have to worry about it less, actually, if you're writing sheet music as long as you're aware of what strings sound like played divisi. The issue Yoozer's talking about is that sample libraries with, say, violins that can't do divisi will put the entire violin section on every note of a violin chord, artificially increasing the size of the ensemble in a way that may not sound realistic. If you're trying to do very realistic things, it's a huge problem -- I don't have a divisi-capable strings library, and I'm feeling the pinch in the things I want to do with the library.

I don't use Logic specifically, but every DAW I've ever worked with applies inserts from top first to bottom last. I'd be astonished if Logic were any different. Is there any reason you can't just turn the output gain down on the distortion plugin to lower the level? Or just lower the level fader on the channel strip? (I'm assuming there aren't transient spikes you need to get rid of, since you said the sound doesn't vary in intensity.)

Even for orchestras, you'll want to play around with the panning a little bit depending on the effect you want. For example, while you could look at a seating chart and then spread the panning across the whole stereo field for a more studio-engineered feel, if you're going for what an audience member would hear in a concert hall, you'd want to squish everything more toward center. I recommend filling the entire stereo field and then using a stereo imaging plugin to finetune the stereo spread since it's obnoxious to continually have to individually re-pan 20+ instruments to get exactly what you want.

Something liiiiiiiiiiike ... draconian DRM systems?

If you're doing this with MP3 files, use something that doesn't have to re-encode the file, since you'll lose sound quality if you re-encode. I haven't used it, but MP3Gain looks like a good bet.

I think perhaps a comparison with the uncanny valley in robotics is apropos.

QFE regarding use of CCs. I've spent the past year or so trying to figure out how to do a decent orchestra mock-up with samples. The things I'm automating at this point are expression, volume, low-pass filter, master tempo, pitch (every instrument's pitch is slightly different and constantly changing -- the ensemble is never perfectly in tune with itself), and velocity layer crossfade on certain instruments. And all of this stuff, except for volume, is continuous automation, not just occurring in certain places. And it's never copy/pasted -- it's rerecorded for each individual instrument, and in cases where I layer instruments, each individual layer. And I've had to start using the motion sensors on a Wiimote instead of standard controller wheels/fader/pots just to get automation curves that sound natural enough. And there are still a bunch of things that I'm NOT doing that would probably make the music sound more realistic (automated sample attack time, custom articulation combinations, articulation crossfades, performing instrument notes instead of drawing them, etc.). At this point, the big question is just how much time I'm willing to spend on a diminishing return. And my orchestral ReMix that's waiting to be posted is no longer up to my own production standards, which makes me kind of sad. I've even heard official demos for expensive sample libraries that sound bad because the people the company hired to write demos that are supposed to sell the library just didn't use the samples very well. And probably the engineers and marketing people can't tell, because they themselves can't use the samples at such a high level (presumably, they'd be writing the demos if they could). (This issue makes it discouragingly hard to tell how good a library is just by listening to things other people have done with it.)

I find it's mostly a workflow thing rather than a quality-level thing. I like to have a general outline of what I'm doing before I even sit down at the computer to start a project -- not because the project will necessarily ultimately turn out better that way but because I work much more efficiently when I've already settled on the big picture and can focus mainly on details when I'm dragging notes around in the sequencer. It's easier to sketch large-scale ideas on paper, where you can take notational shortcuts, and it's easier to do detail work in a DAW, where you can undo infinitely and let the computer play things for you. I tend to think it's best to assign the compositional task to the medium that best supports it and to order these tasks so that one won't distract you from another. I find the result of this isn't necessarily that it's a "better" piece of music, but that it gets finished a hell of a lot faster.

I didn't catch that since I've been putting off watching X3 on account of how terrible everyone says it is. I rewatched X1 last night after seeing First Class (and actually didn't like it as much as I'd remembered) and will watch X2 again, so I'll probably just go ahead and watch X3, too.

My sense from the movie was that it wasn't intended as a reboot. The opening in Poland is pretty much a shot-for-shot re-creation of the opening to X-Men 1, and the constant cuts between locations also seems to be a throwback to the storytelling technique of X-Men 1 -- I think the location titles even use the same font. And Xavier's pickup-line about mutation is almost exactly what he says in the opening voice-over to X-Men 1. On the other hand, there are small inconsistencies, such as Xavier saying in X-Men 1 that he was 17 when he met Magneto whereas he meets Magneto in First Class after finishing a doctoral dissertation.

Because you never try to do it on Friday and you're a crappy housewife.

It's definitely better than the unhumanized version. I'm not sure what your resources are as far as samples go, but these samples have a really percussive attack. It works for some of the notes, but I think legato would sound better on the scales. ( of a real flutist doing the articulation that it sounds like the excerpt is using.) If you keep this articulation throughout, you might want to shorten some of the notes to emphasize the sharp attack. The passage sounds right now like it's somewhere between staccato and legato and can't decide which it wants to be.A couple of the rhythmic humanizations you've added are just a little off and sound more like performance stumbles than polished human performances.

If you don't have a wrap feature available, you can copy/paste the ending stuff before the beginning so you'll pick up the reverb, bounce all of it, then trim the start of the wav so it begins in the right place.

Opening your DAW on a new computer for the first time and discovering that your stress tests don't even come close to overworking the processor/RAM is the greatest feeling in the world, especially if you built the system yourself.

Could it be that Microsoft is moving toward the more-frequent-updates-with-fewer-changes model that Apple uses for OSX?