Moseph

This is about the same as my experience, also with a Core 2 Duo laptop. I usually run into CPU overload, filled RAM, and hard drive bandwidth issues at about the same point. As a result, when Sonar goes down, it goes down hard.

If you're doing rock 'n roll style drums, you usually have some variation on this pattern (other genres use their own conventions): Kick on beats 1 and 3 Snare on beats 2 and 4 Possibly ride cymbal/hi-hat playing eighth- or sixteenth-notes throughout Fills at the ends of phrases (e.g. a roll on the toms, a crash cymbal) Listen to some rock with this in mind and pay attention to how the drummer embellishes the basic formula. The drum and bass lines don't necessarily have to have any particular relation to each other, but keep in mind that the kick drum compliments the bass's attack very well, so if you find that your bass line isn't coming through very well, you might rework the kick pattern to emphasize the rhythms the bass is playing or something like that.

preeeeview! (still very much subject to change)

Gross Beat looks really cool.

Thanks for the responses, all. I'm abandoning the RAID idea and am just going to use eSATA to connect to the new computer the external drive that currently holds my libraries and will add a second internal drive if that doesn't seem fast enough. Much more budget friendly this way, and hopefully no lengthy library re-installations unless the move to Windows 7 requires it.

If you don't have ASIO drivers for the soundcard, Google ASIO4ALL. Put as much RAM in it as you can. Use external speakers or headphones. If you're streaming large sample libraries, maybe put them on an external hard drive.

Also, the wordbuilder functionality is really difficult to use (or to use well, at least). And if you just want the library for the oohs and aahs rather than the wordbuilder, you can get cheaper libraries that will give you good oohs and aahs. I definitely recommend knowing what you're getting into before deciding to buy EastWest Symphonic Choirs.

If you're patient and learn how to record in small segments and edit together multiple takes, it's not too difficult to make an electric guitar sound decent even if you don't play well. I'm an awful guitarist, but I can still fake both rhythm and lead by editing creatively. If the guitar is going though some sort of overdrive or distortion, you can get away with sloppy edits that would sound terrible with an acoustic instrument.

I have at least one track that's entirely Reason 3.0 without any samples/ReFills beyond what's included with the program. Fat Man Meets Magic Turtle (remix of the Mario Kart 64 credits music for a PRC a few years ago) Reason files are here (unmixed -- no EQ, panning, delay, compression, etc.) and here (my mix). If anyone who doesn't have Reason really wants to mix it, let me know and I'll put together a zip with wav files.

It might be because letting people download multi-gig files uses a lot of bandwidth on their end and increases hosting costs.

This is pretty obscure and I can't find anything on the web that demonstrates it, but ... If anyone remembers the PC game Creatures 2, there's an animal called a Doozer that makes a squawking sound when you click on it. The sound is a backward, sped-up clip of a crowd yelling "Hell no, we won't go."

Your real name is listed in posts right below your forum name. You can clear the Real Name field in the Edit Your Details section of the User CP if you don't want it to show up.

Thiago Costa, the guy who created this, works at Ubisoft.

Here ya go! Drums are a little wonky with the compression and reverb since having them all in a stereo track instead of individual tracks limits what I can do with them.

I think Zelda has been stagnant since Windwaker. The timed gameplay mechanic of Majora's Mask was just enough to differentiate it from Ocarina of Time, but everything since then has felt like Ocarina of Time Deluxe.

Sonar is actually a little inconvenient on my dual monitor arrangement because my second monitor is in portrait orientation. Sonar contains all of the panels (but not plug-in displays, fortunately) within a single master window, so I either have to waste space on the portrait monitor or resize the master window so that the status bar along the bottom (which includes the save/load progress bar and the global mute/solo status) is off-screen on the main monitor. I really wish everything was free-floating.

I'm speccing a new computer system that will be used primarily for audio work. A possibility I'm considering is to have three internal SATA drives: an OS/page-file drive and a two-drive RAID for storing sample libraries. The RAID will be set up to increase the transfer rate rather than to mirror data. My goal here is mostly to cut the initial load times for large projects (I assume that playback performance would be better improved by adding RAM). Has anyone here used a RAID for sample libraries, and if so, are load times substantially decreased? Would it be worth adding an additional drive so I could use RAID 2 or 3 (which, if I understand correctly, require three drives) instead of a two-drive RAID 0? EDIT: The limited reading I've done on this indicates that it may be a better idea to break up sample libraries across multiple drives rather than using a RAID. Confirm/deny?

Half-Life 1 for about the price of a large coffee.

(off-color joke about title goes here)that it's on the wii makes it even better

I kept expecting to see Yoshis.

ASFSDFHKJHF can't get on TF2 because I have to download the 1 gig update and I'm on a really slow network right now. EDIT: Maybe the update combined with all the Mac people downloading the game is why the servers are busy.

In preparation for a Schenker-style analysis that I hope to post here in the near future ... CRASH COURSE IN SCHENKERIAN THEORY! This post explains Schenker's general theory in a ridiculously small nutshell for those of you who aren't familiar with it. (Schenker is pretty difficult to understand at times, but at this level anything that doesn't make sense is probably my fault and not Schenker's.) The lowest (and therefore strongest) partials of the overtone series of a given pitch create a major triad with that pitch as the root. Because the major triad is inherent in any given pitch, the major triad is the basis for all harmony (the minor triad is seen as a variant). Any pitch in isolation will tend to be interpreted as the tonic of some key because that pitch exists in itself as the root of a major triad. If a pitch exists in context with other pitches, its tonic tendencies will be more or less mitigated by the conflicting tonic tendencies of the other pitches. Ultimately, every pitch/harmony in a piece is thought of in its relationship to the true tonic pitch/harmony of the piece. Music plays out over time, so there must be some way to relate things that come after with things that came before if a piece of music is to be coherent. With respect to this, Schenker was concerned with linear (melodic) expression of the tonic triad in addition to vertical (harmonic) expression. Building off of traditional counterpoint procedures, Schenker identified ways in which melodies could project harmonies (e.g. if the melody moves by step through the space of a third, it implies a triad that involves that third). Since the tonic harmony is the underlying basis for a piece of music (at least in western classical music), the overall melodic motion of the piece can be interpreted as a large-scale projection of this tonic harmony. This essentially means that the melody begins on a pitch in the tonic triad and comes to rest at the end of the piece on the tonic pitch itself. This melodic motion, called the Urlinie, is accompanied by some sort of tonic-dominant-tonic (I V I) movement in the bass, called the bass arpeggiation. This motion in the melody and bass, which taken together is known as the fundamental structure or Ursatz, is a linear expression of the piece's basic harmony. It provides a starting point for discussing large-scale harmonic/melodic coherence in the piece. There is a very limited number of ways to move through the tonic triad, so there is a very limited number of possible ways to construct an Ursatz. Example of an Ursatz. The Urlinie can descend from the eighth, fifth, or third scale degree. It bears emphasis that the point of Ursatz reduction is not to make assertions about how the piece was composed (because it certainly wasn't composed by literally expanding from the Ursatz); the point is to explicitly show long-range connections in the music. The longest-range connection in any piece is the relationship between the opening and closing tonic triads; hence, the most abstract level (the Ursatz) of a Schenker graph deals primarily with this relationship while subsequent levels show increasingly short-range connections. Full Schenker-style graph

It's interesting, though, that even though we perceive the triangle to have a pitch, it's treated as an unpitched percussion instrument in the orchestra in that you don't select a specific triangle that will complement the key of the music. (The Wiki entry for triangle goes as far as to describe it as having an "indeterminate or not settled or decided pitch," which I think is an exaggeration, but it illustrates the point.) That's kind of what I was getting at with the inharmonicity thing -- pitch isn't a binary. It's quite valid to say that one sound is more strongly pitched than another, and the determining factor for this distinction is the degree to which the sounds are congruent with the overtone series. I haven't thought at length about the implications of pitch not being binary. I imagine that if the issue of standard vs. non-standard overtone series had come up, Schenker would have argued that the standard overtone series is the true basis for harmony because it produces the most pure pitches. The Mario analysis will be forthcoming, but first I want to post a crash course in Schenkerian theory in the hope that anyone who's interested but isn't familiar with the theory might still be able to kind of follow what I talk about in the analysis.

Bump. Branching from this thread. Gario, could you explain what you mean about triangles having a tritone-based overtone series? Do you mean that the prevalence of tritones above the fifth partial in a triangle wave is emphasized by the complete lack of even partials, or am I misunderstanding you? My background knowledge of inharmonicity is not great, but don't we hear things as distinctly pitched only to the degree that they are not inharmonic, which is to say, only to the degree that their harmonics conform to the overtone series?

Is there anyone around here who could translate a text into Latin for me?