Tensei

Well if anyone's interested in playing, Tensei-San on US east :3 -Tensei

I think EZdrummer is good as long as you dont expect it to do things like the 'big' drum kits ( DFHS, BFD, AD to a lesser degree). It's meant for people who don't want to bother with processing and sequencing the drums and just want to lay down a semi-convincing drum track in a short amount of time (i.e. LAZY people ). Personally I can't stand the minimal amount of tweaking you can do with EZdrummer, but what the heck, AD for me. -Tensei

I have it installed in anticipation of the huge amount of people who will definitely start playing it because of the D3 announcement. So yah, I will play but I want more people to join. -Tensei

Since when have you moved on from IRC to Forums? >=() Also, Doug, this sounds pretty good. I wouldn't exactly call it orchestral though, it would need some, well, orchestration for that.

Right, I'll share my thoughts on this again, as there's some new development. Now that I've heard that the 'votewhoring' actually IS hurting non-OCR artists, I'd like to discourage people from doing it this way ("If I get this and this you can download my songs for free etc.") IMO the OCR artists here should just encourage their fans to vote. Period. Not vote FOR them (blindly), but just encourage them to participate, if they have some free time. At the same time, the fans should just vote for what they like personally, and not immediately reach for the 'Y IS FAR BETTER THAN X' button once Zircon or SGX shows up. Sure, it's alright to have some bias, but when I heard a sweet Melodic Death Metal song get lined up vs. one of SGX's songs I voted in favour of the Melodeath song, because I honestly preferred it! Remember, as a listener/voter, look at this as a chance to get some exposure to new songs/bands, take time to listen to songs you might potentially like, even if that means it takes more time, and you won't be able to vote for all 300000 battles. Thing is though, doing it this way shouldn't even make THAT much of a difference for the OCR artists, since, as I stated above, most of the songs in the finals are crap, and (at least the current) OCR entries are easily top 10 material to me, so even if you do it without any bias you would be upvoting them quite a bit, while this would at the same time feel morally 'right'.

Haha, this thread. Come on, people, at least TRY to pretend you're mature and responsible. Nobody is forcing you to vote, nobody's forcing you look at this thread and nobody's forcing you to reply. So why does everyone feel the need to threadshit? Sure, if people want to start discussing this seriously, I'm all for it, but please cut the whiny drama queenery ( I'm not going to post here anymore, alright ban me then, BAWWWW) and the sarcastic remarks. As I've said before, everyone's asking for votes at this point. Yes, it's a popularity contest, but that's not the fault of OCR, that's a flaw that's inherent to the contest itself. I can see the point where rallying one's fanbase might be considered immoral, but puh-lease; I can tell you now that if any of the critics here had a song up there in the finals, they would be votewhoring like crazy too. As for the 'It's all a huge amount of butt-kissing'- remarks: Zircon asked me politely on IRC if I could spend some time to vote, so I did that. In fact, he didn't even ask me to vote for HIS song. If it were someone like PhiJayy, I would have done the same. Fact is, you people saying it's all a bunch of nepotism should actually LISTEN to the competition. I wasn't even planning on upvoting SGX but I ended up doing so anyway just because most of the other songs were all three/four-chord acoustic pop-crap. Out of the 48 finalists there were about 10 decent songs, and yes, all the OCR songs happened to be among those.

How can people outside of OCR tell which artists are from OCR?

PhiJayy, I think you might be forgetting the fact that just about ANY artist who makes it to the quarter finals will probably be begging all his friends, family and fans to vote. Hell, I would do the same, it's 5k on the line! Sure, in an ideal world people would only vote for the music they really like, so I agree that this kind of votewhoring is a bit immoral, but everyone does it, and that's the way it's going to be. I'm sure the non-OCR artists who get consistently high placed do just as much 'votewhoring' on their Myspace/facebook/forums/whatever as the artists here, so please don't place all the blame on OCR. It's just that artists here have a much more efficient way of asking things of their fanbase (through this forum and through IRC), and thus have a very good shot at taking first place once they make it to the quarter finals (which by itself is pretty hard actually!) That said, I think it's kind of silly how you refer to the different artists as a single OCR-entity, it's not like OCR is a hive-mind or anything. Edit: Also, the reason you're not winning (the reason you didn't make quarter finals), is just because your music wasn't good enough! (Same here though) You can hardly exert any control over the standings pre-quarter finals ( I asked Zircon about this once I submitted a song there, I immediately wanted to start votewhoring), so at that point it really comes down to the quality of the song itself, rather than how much of a fanbase you can conjure up.

Wait, it was possible to play D2 and NOT be on battle.net? Also, Necro & Druid totally got nixed for the Witch Doctor, calling it now o/

<Lastair> diablo 3 announced : <Sapphorite> Yeah, I'm still reeling, I've got little happy tears. <PrincessTensei> WTF <PrincessTensei> I came <PrincessTensei> instantly <Lastair> tore your pants right off <PrincessTensei> yeah, you know how dolphins, when they come, they ejaculate like 14 meters far <PrincessTensei> well something like that So yeah, this is awesome! Edit: actually, from what I hear from the people on IRC watching the stream: - There will be breakable walls and physics stuff - Huge amounts of enemies on-screen - Cleavable and decapitatable enemies, all in real time! Edit2: lol

Download some jam tracks?

Don't even bother with the stupid RSE engine, the sounds it produces are incredibly muddy and it's a cpu hog, just play along with the midi. Dunno about the notation question, I never use notation.

Meet rapebug: He's a badass.. Until you see the way he moves around: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGtqP1lmFA

I think the fact that japanese (or asian bands in general) get no mainstream exposure in the western world, unless you count the hordes of sweaty anime fans who refuse to listen to anything but J-pop, can be blamed on a variety of reasons: - For one, the accent. Yes, it's English, but if I can barely understand it that doesn't make much of a difference. I have NEVER heard a japanese band that can pull off convincing accentless english vocals. For me, it doesn't matter a lot, but mainstream listeners will get turned off by the silly engrish. - Exposure through gigs. You always hear about some hot new Western band touring Japan, it seems like it's almost a rite of passage nowadays to be popular in japan before you really break through in the west. On the other hand, you never hear anything about japanese bands touring Europe; I'm sure this is some kind of vicious circle, but nevertheless I believe this is a major factor. - Language barrier. As far as I can tell, Japanese generally don't speak English very well, which hampers their ability to achieve mainstream fame through the internet. I mean, if I look up a band's website and see it's all in Japanese or bad bad Engrish, that makes it much harder to find any relevant information as to where I could find or buy more of their music. - Stylistical differences. Look at it any way you want, Japanese music sounds Japanese, even if you ignore the lyrics, which isn't a bad thing, but again, it isn't something a mainstream listener is used to, so they won't listen to it. I think bands with a heavier sound can generally become pretty popular in Japan, while over here people prefer estrogen-laden emo rock and hard-rock and heavy metal are more niche genres. This brings me to the conclusion that no, this band can't and won't become famous in Europe or America, mainly because of the trouble of gaining exposure over here, as well as the general style of the music (too heavy for mainstream exposure)

This sounds like an acoustic drumset with a LOT of compression applied to it. Some slight overdrive on the drumset might work as well, it just takes a bit of experimenting.

Obviously you aren't much of a fraud if you don't claim the most popular remix on the late Ormgas, Triforce Majeure. Thankfully our friend has this one covered too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjjc_8rrnXs&feature=user

After watching this game, I predict the Netherlands will totally destroy their group, then lose in the quarterfinals to something like Poland (no offense though )

How about you post this in WIPs? Fake edit: Don't, it will get moved anyway.

Attack of the killer piano's. I sense awesome untapped potential for a whole new series of monster movies involving musical instruments that kill people.

MISERY. Cavestory is an awesome game, and Misery is an awesome pixely villainess who like to teleport around and fuck shit up with black magic. Too bad she's just a henchman(henchwoman?), she totally needs her own spinoff game due to interesting backstory.

Yeah this is a good idea, just tune your piano without knowing anything about the instrument. Never mind calling professional piano tuners, they're only after your money.

Why hello thar fellow countryman. To be honest, the chat tends to become pretty active around 21.00 or 22.00 PM, you should remember that there's also a lot of other Europeans hanging around in #ocrwip. Besides, you can always just pop in, link to your wip and ask for feedback, go AFK and do whatever you need to do, then come back and see how many people have responded. P.S. You shouldn't remove the link to said wip in that thread, if you hadn't I'm pretty sure you would have had a lot of feedback already

I have to admit that I'm sort of guilty of this. I browse the wip forum pretty often and I consider the feedback I give mostly at the 'useful' end of the spectrum. That said, I have a HUGE bias when it comes to listening to stuff, never mind actually giving feedback. I'm 10x more likely to click on a new wip thread from someone I know or if it uses a source tune I enjoy. Heck, if you have the words " Metal Remix" or "Rock Remix" in the thread title that's pretty much a guaranteed listen from me. My point is, people are biased, people are lazy, and people generally don't have 7 hours to spend with reviewing wips like Nekofrog here. I really can't think of any feasible way to solve this other than actually PMing/IMing people you want to look at your wip. Again, I'd like to point anyone who wants feedback to #ocrwip, where I hang out for most of the day and if I'm not AFK and someone asks me to listen to something, you're GUARANTEED to get feedback from me.

ADSR envelopes are your friend. If you're using something like sampled strings in the NN-XT sampler (which I'm assuming you do) set a slower attack, this will automatically make each note fade in (though you'll have to automate the attack if you're alternating between slow and fast legato passages with the same patch). Same goes for messing around with the Decay and Sustain to do a smooth fade-out. Of course, the best way to circumvent this is by using a sample of crescendo strings, which quite obviously have the most natural dynamic change. If all else fails, stick with the channel volume automation, and mess around with the slope and the curve at which you make the notes fade in, I'm pretty sure it's possible to realistically control it with the channel volume slider, it might just be a bit of a hassle to find the correct curve. This is definitely the most flexible option though.

Analyzing Chords = Recognizing the notes and intervals that make up the chord = what you were talking about here? VVV