Moseph

The lyrics aren't laugh-out-loud retarded like Friday's, though ("gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal"), nor is the metric flow of the words as bad as in Friday, nor does the subject matter seem vaguely inappropriate to the genre as in Friday. They're Norwegian, too, so there's at least a possibility that they're just not that good with the English language. The people who wrote Friday have no such excuse. ... but, oh dear, key changes like that have no business existing.

Can you further explain this? I don't really understand what you mean by "noir-ish category."

You're likely to have more luck looking for film scoring techniques rather than specifically video game scoring techniques. Film scoring is a much more common academic subject, and it deals with matching emotion to picture at least as much as video game music. Even if you don't have any real interest in scoring films, I think there are a lot of things involved in the process that are relevant to your goals.

This is for a laptop, right? I ask because if it's a desktop you're better off adding an internal drive (or getting an external eSATA drive if you have an eSATA port) -- the data transfer will be much faster making it much better suited to sample libraries. I have a LaCie external drive that I've never had any problems with. I used to run samples from it on my laptop (via Firewire) and have retired it to backup duty now that I primarily use a desktop.

A desktop is better for music production. You get more power for the money, it's more upgradable, and you can dedicate multiple entire internal drives to sample storage if you so desire.

I'd recommend finding a composition teacher to give you private lessons. College students studying composition would be good candidates for this since their rates would be low and a lot of them would be eager to get the teaching experience. If there are colleges in the area that have composition programs, email one of the composition faculty and ask if they have students who might be interested in giving private lessons. EDIT: Also, this is exactly the sort of thing that's better dealt with in one-on-one instruction than in classroom instruction.

Actually, you know what? If you already have an external drive and the EWQL bundle comes on another drive that you plan to put in an enclosure and use as an external drive, there's no reason you couldn't move some of the libraries over to the old external drive you already have and then run libraries from both drives at the same time. If you split the libraries so that things you're likely to use at the same time are on different drives, it should help solve the load time issues. I think the way PLAY loads samples (it lets you pick where you want to load from rather than forcing you to set a single sample folder), you might even be able to just copy the EWQL drive onto your existing external drive and then alternate between drives when you go to load instruments so that you're always using both drives equally.

Longer load times, yes, but long load times cause a bigger issue than just making you wait around on a loading screen for awhile. The loading screen load times are what you get when the sampler loads data from the hard drive into the RAM when you first set up the instrument or load the project. This is annoying, but not that big a deal. The big deal is this: The sampler has to access two areas of storage for playback to occur. First is the RAM. Reading data from the RAM is basically instantaneous, but there may not be enough RAM to store all of the samples. So the sampler also reads from the hard disk when the sample it wants isn't found in the RAM. This loading from the hard disk occurs during playback, so having long load times may cause dropped samples or other playback glitches. The upshot of this is basically that the external hard drive's load time is likely to be one of the first bottlenecks you run into when playing a lot of instruments at the same time. I doubt USB will be that much worse than Firewire. The libraries should certainly be usable on your system with an external drive; you just may have to get comfortable freezing tracks to free up RAM and/or disk bandwidth.

If you're not , you're not composing!

I haven't used Voices of Passion, but it's not at all the same thing as Choirs. Choirs is a standard four-part choir (e.g. a church choir or symphonic choir) and Voices of Passion is ethnic soloists. Compare the Voices of Passion demos with the Choirs demos.

Firewire is an external hookup similar to USB. The consensus seems to be that Firewire is slightly better for an external drive than USB, but I can't speak from experience since I've never used a USB drive. Like USB, Firewire is still much slower than an internal drive. You might be better off putting the samples on the internal drive if you can, but the external drive would be a lot simpler given that it's a laptop with limited space. The reason I went with an external drive rather than the laptop drive was that my laptop's drive was only 100 gigs and I also didn't want to have the samples on the same drive as the Windows page file (which is where stuff from RAM gets put when it's still needed but not needed immediately). The page file thing is a speed/stability consideration, but it probably isn't really a pressing issue given that the alternative of an external drive slows things way down anyway. Streaming from the disk is something that all modern samplers do (PLAY included) -- it lets the sampler load some of the samples into RAM and then read the rest directly from the hard drive during playback. It doesn't change the amount of space that the samples take up on the hard drive. Reading the samples from both RAM and the hard disk allows you to load more and larger instruments than you'd be able to if you were limited to loading everything only into RAM. This of course assumes that the hard disk is fast enough to keep up with the sampler's requests for data which is why streaming from disk can become a problem with an external drive if too many instruments are loaded at the same time. If you're at all interested in using orchestral instruments, I'd say definitely include Symphonic Orchestra. I have Stormdrum 2 and like it a lot -- it's really good for filmscore-style percussion. Choirs is extremely difficult to use well -- I recommend against getting it unless you actually have a use for it, are willing to put a lot of time into learning it, and have a clear enough grasp on how a real choir sounds that you would be able to tell if you're using the library effectively. If you aren't going to use the wordbuilder, you can get other choral libraries for a lot cheaper than it, although depending on what other EWQL things you're interested in, it might still be worth getting Choirs just to fill space in the bundle.

The PLAY sampler itself should run fine. I used PLAY with EWQL Choirs from a Firewire drive on a PC laptop with specs very similar to yours (and 2 GB RAM) and didn't have any problems beyond RAM and transfer bandwidth limitations. Expanding to 4 gigs should help. One caveat: They're in beta for PLAY 3 now -- I don't know what the required specs for that will be once it's actually released. I was able to use two or three of the multisample patches for EWQL Choirs at a time, and those are much larger than a standard sampler patch, so you'll definitely be able to load multiple instruments at a time -- I just don't know how many. If you attempt large projects with lots of instruments, you will definitely have to do some track freezing. For comparison, I could get maybe ten (large-ish) instruments at a time from the VSL sampler -- I'd expect the situation with PLAY to be similar. Also, if you haven't considered this, loading things from an external drive introduces its own bottleneck if you're streaming from disk, and the initial load time when creating an instrument or loading a project will be a lot longer than with an internal drive. My sense when I was streaming from disk was that my Firewire drive started having problems about the same time my 2 gigs of RAM started having problems -- although it's hard to say for sure, since when things would go south from having too much loaded at a time, they'd go south fast. PLAY lets you load samples entirely to RAM if you want to, but that in itself would reduce the amount of samples you could load to what would fit in the RAM -- if you end up with 4 gigs of RAM and the external drive is giving you trouble, this would be something to try.

Staff paper is the beta version of FL Studio. And when you memorize things, you're using FL Studio with your mind.

Classical music contains all of those things.

Doesn't that arguably cover all non-VG music, too?

Some version of Pro Tools -- that's what comes up when googling Xpand2, anyway.

These are the only kinds of SFX. Either you record a sound or you generate it electronically, or some combination of the two.

A couple things about Baroque music: There's usually a fairly rapid and steady harmonic rhythm (i.e. a lot of chord changes). At least in the late Baroque, which I think is the type of music you're thinking of, it's much more counterpoint-based than today's pop and movie music (several melodic lines that fit together in complicated ways). The Baroque feel in some of your examples comes from melodies played with rapid eighth- or sixteenth-notes using Baroque melodic idioms -- lots of ornamentation, lots of repeated patterns, lots of rhythmic drive. Specifically, the harpsichord lines in Huge Game Table and Baroque Virus exemplify this. To some extent -- also most clear in Huge Game Table and Baroque Virus -- the conventions of Baroque harmonic progression are followed or at least referenced. These conventions have to do with how chords are expected to move. For example, in Huge Game Table, you can hear beginning at 0:35 a very bare harmonic progression in which the notes very clearly move according to Baroque counterpoint rules. You can also hear the same sort of thing in the strings at the start of Baroque Virus. Also, pay attention to the harmonic progressions in general in Baroque Virus -- they don't sound like what you normally get in EDM because they reference Baroque harmonic conventions.

I didn't create the universe. I'm not a real composer.

The point is that he doesn't want to hook things up to the computer to record (noise/mobility issues). Both of these solutions require that he hook up to the computer.

Man, I haven't logged in since just after Beta started. It's nice to see that my castle has new neighbors and hasn't been blown up in my absence.

Is the mic plug a smaller one (1/8") or a larger one (1/4")? A lot of portable recorders have some kind of line input -- you'd just need to match the jacks with the type of plug your mic has (and make sure the jack will accept mic-level input -- the write-up for the product should specifically say that it's a mic jack). I don't have any particular recommendations, but for reference, this is the sort of device that I'm talking about: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PalmTrack/

Right-click, save as.

I may be in the minority in thinking this, but IMO EQ'ing sampled orchestral instruments is not something you should consider as a first line of defense in getting a good mix. (Note that I'm talking specifically about sampled orchestral instruments and not about synths or things you've recorded yourself.) In my general experience, orchestral libraries don't sound bad if you don't EQ them. EQ can be used to great effect in polishing up the sound -- if you know what sound you're going for -- but level balance and orchestration tend to be bigger issues for orchestra music than EQ. Part of the reason that I take this view is that traditionally orchestral composition has been for live performance on acoustic instruments and EQ as such hasn't existed as a way to modify the orchestra's sound. In these cases, it's orchestration techniques that determine whether the frequency balance works. If you focus on using digital tools such as EQ to change how the orchestra fits together without any clear idea of the effect you're trying to achieve, you can end up with something that doesn't sound realistic and might have been more properly addressed through orchestration. As an extreme example, if the problem is that you can't hear the flute solo over the loud brass, the solution is not to kill ~1.2 kHz in the brass and boost ~1.2 kHz in the flute -- the solution is to recognize that from a performance perspective what you've orchestrated doesn't work, and trying to make it work without reorchestrating it will only make it sound unrealistic.

Elaborating on this, I think the biggest problem you're running into, mickomoo, is that you have some fairly complicated things going on in the music from a harmonic/melodic perspective, but the performance of the music (the programming of the instruments, the timing problems that others have mentioned, the dynamics, etc.) isn't up to the level that it needs to be for music this complicated to sound really good. For the listener to parse music like this, there needs to be a very clear sense of phrasing and overall direction. When there isn't, the music tends just to sound noisy rather than musical. To work on this, I think it might help to step back a little from what you've been writing and write some really simple stuff and work primarily on constructing a good performance. Once you've got some more experience in the performance aspects of the music, you should be able to come back to the tracks in the original post and make significant improvements. Here are some things to google or ask people about that you'll probably have to learn at some point: expression control, quantization (I know from other threads that you're already aware of this one), tempo maps, and possibly filter automation and velocity layer crossfading if your sampler supports them.