Tensei

VST support sure would make it a lot buggier and less compact/cpu-friendly. At least, that's what they say at Propellerhead.

It's an Ebow!

Gah, unfortunately I couldn't come up with any good idea's in reasonable time, and I'm really too caught up in other projects, so I'll have to pass. Sorry ;(

Yeah, what AnSo said. Chances are you got one little frequency peaking, so you can't boost it anymore before it starts clipping. I think it's better to go back to the mixing stage, find out which instrument/track is causing the peaking, and boost the volume on/eq the other ones accordingly.

(Melodic) Death Metal Arch Enemy - Excellent Production values, arrangements of near-prog metal complexity, virtuosic instrumentalists and an AWESOME female vocalist make this band a must-hear for anyone who isn't instantly turned off by growled vocals. Also, they're catchy =) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4sk8Eyy-ns In Flames - The veterans of the genre, they're still going strong nowadays, except they've made their music a LOT more accesible (catchier lyrics and melodies, less emphasis on heavy riffing etc.). If you watch this video wait at least until the chorus before you decide it sucks, because it's just that damn awesome. Children of Bodom - By far my favorite band from this genre, perhaps even my favorite band period. Their music is a unique melange of different metal subgenres, but all that matters is that their music is absolutely stunning, their leadguitarist/vocalist has some incredible solo's up his sleeve, and yes, their songs are possibly even catchier than the previous two bands =) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J7iThdiXQ0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUOE9wYamfg Power Metal/ Synth Power Metal Dragonforce - How can you be on a forum centered around video game music and not suggest this band? They're loud, they're fast, and they try to mimic classical NES/c64/atari/whatever sounds with their guitars, so what's there not to like? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6cK-nDd_bI Sonata Arctica - One of the veterans of the genre, but judging by their latest single they're still awesome as ever. Amazing Synth & Guitar soloing, very emotive and evocative vocals & melodies are what defines this band as 'epic' =3 S.S.H. - Pretty much the artist that defines Synth Metal for me: Sampled guitars, incredibly high tempi and high energy synths are what he's all about. His sequencing is some the best I've ever heard and all his songs have an uplifting, energetic quality to them (hence why I put it under power metal). Known mostly for doing stunning remixes of videogame tunes, and adding several minute synth and guitar solo's to them, definitely check him out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojGDgnGAtTk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U75szPTGoBw

I'm going to be assuming in this tutorial that you've already messed around with a few sequencers and DAWs, you have access to some 'decent' VSTs and soundfonts to help you out, you know some basic theory about harmony, melody, scales and the like (possibly the ability to read notes), and you know at least partially what I mean with words like "Chorus, Compressor, Delay, Parametric EQ". If not, then I encourage you to look through the tutorials in your DAW so you know at least the very basics. As a final note: Due to the midi sequencer I'm using you're either going to have to be able to read notation or guitar tablature to keep track of what I'm doing. I will be adding sound files for your convenience though The right track for the job I'm pretty sure this point may differ VERY much from mixer to mixer, nevertheless I think there's one 'rule' that pretty much everyone should adhere to: ONLY REMIX THE SONGS YOU LIKE! It's easy as that. I think the problem that so many projects are progressing that slowly is because people want to get in on it, so they quickly pick what's left, and don't even listen if the song is workable for them. And yes, even though it's good to be able to adapt to material you might not find very enjoying, I think by far the best results come from the nostalgic songs you can still remember today, even though you played the game where you heard them years ago. What I look for in a remixable song is a catchy hook, since I tend to be a very melody-based listener. In the concrete song I'm remixing in this tutorial (Cave Story - Last Battle)The bassline during the intro is a dead giveaway for me; it's extremely catchy, and it has a sort of ominous build-up quality because of the rising melody. Another part I like is the melody backed by the chromatically descending chords that comes in exactly half-way. Overall there are no arrangemental sore spots for me, and EVERY part of the source seems quite viable to incorporate in the remix, which makes this a very good source. Of course this is a very subjective question, and you might not like this source at all, but still; whenever more than 50% of a source seems memorable to you, it should be a viable source. Nobody is expecting you to incorporate the ENTIRE source, but 50% should be a bare minimum. After picking a viable source, it's time to go midi-hunting on a site like VGmusic.com. Whether to use a midi as a basis or not is a question of personal preference. Avoid doing it because of laziness; if you think something's too much work to do at THIS early point, you can just as well give up. If it means transcribing the source by ear, definitely go for it, since it will give you a great opportunity to change around the melodies and harmonies while you're at it. In this case I chose for using a midi as a basis because I wanted to keep the source's structure in tact, and I DEFINITELY wanted to retain that wicked bassline from the intro (as well as most other melodies). By now, you should already have started planning and have some musical idea's in your head, and you should have decided on a musical genre for the mix. Structure, concept, etc. For your first mix, pick a genre that is EASY, keep in mind your restrictions in terms of theoretical knowledge and the capabilities of your DAW and VSTi's. Don't bother trying to do something orchestral or classical just yet (unless you're a composer with EWQLSO, and good knowledge of orchestration, and if that's the case, why the hell are you reading this? Well, except if your forumname is Bustatunez of course ). By far the best thing is when you play a live instrument (electric guitar?), and you tend to play a lot of stuff from a certain genre (Garage Rock, Thrash Metal?), in which case you should be QUITE aware of the conventions of that genre (i.e. What sounds right). Besides that, you'll be aware of the capabilities of your instrument and how to have it play a convincing role in the context of the rest of the mix. As for song structure, try to start with whatever arrangemental idea comes to mind first, even if it's an idea for the chorus or verse of the song; you can build your intro and other stuff up around that later, since it's way easier to do that if you have a steady base to fall back to. If it makes it easier for you, it's perfectly alright to take one of your favorite songs in the genre and use it as a model for yours. Arrangemental hospital Right, let's cut the crap and get to work. I'll go pretty in-depth into the intro because it has the most complicated drum patterns of the whole song, but I won't go into the other sections that much since they're all basically built-up the same way as the intro. We can start with the intro right away, since we have the bassline from the source. The source tune is quite fast and short (a bit more than a minute at 190 BPM), so we'll have to elongate some parts, because 190 BPM is quite a useful tempo for the genre we're aiming for (Extreme Power Metal), so we're keeping that the same. We'll extend the original 8-bar intro to a nice sixteen bars. The bassline remains the same, except it now gets repeated 4 times instead of twice. Our 4-bar bassline from the source tune. (click for sound) Of course, the downside of this artificial 'elongation' is that the intro would become a bit too repetitive if it didn't have any development, but we'll leave that role to the synth and drums. We'll also have to keep in mind that the bass isn't meant as a lead instrument, yet it plays the main melody here, so it could give us some complications during the mixing if the other instruments parts would get too complicated. The next part is easy for me; we have to add a chord backing, made up of rhythm guitars. I don't apply any theory here, I just mess around on my guitar to figure out some nice chords to back up the bassline. I've kept the phrasing (just open chords) this simple to prevent the guitars from drawing the attention away from the bassline. These are the chords I came up with. It's quite a cliched progression, but we can argue that Power Metal is a cheesy genre, so it's all good. Note that I've used inversions of typical power chords to emulate a seven-string guitar for a heavier sound. Now, for the hardest part, the drums. I could write a whole book about drums, and I could spend the better part of today writing just about the basics, but I won't. For the sake of my own sanity I'll just assume whoever reads this knows every different part of the drum kit (in terms of sound, name and function) and already is able to make his own drum patterns to some degree. If not, please find a tutorial somewhere, look on wikipedia, experiment with making rock drum patterns, then come back and read this. Drums are usually vastly underestimated in the whole context of a mix, and it happens all too often people just come up with a boring one/two-bar pattern and loop it throughout the entire mix. My personal philosophy on drums is that besides driving on the song, they should act as a mood-setter, and vary between 'laid-back' and 'intensive' to accent different parts of a song. Of course, a little virtuosity never killed anybody, so you should feel free to act like your virtual drummer is the best one in the world (though he should still be human!) and give him some jaw-dropping fills and drum solo's to work with. It would be way too much work to analyze the drum patterns I did in the intro, so I'll just give a brief overview; The patterns are seemingly very random/chaotic, with lots of fills and accents on the bassline until bar ten (where you get the snare+crash cymbal playing on the beat), which sort of has the purpose of setting a steady groove and giving a sense of development. At this point you should already be worrying about the humanization of the drums; add snare rolls, bass-drum rolls, flams, cymbal chokes. The way to really get a feel for this is to listen a LOT to bands with good drummers, and focus on the fills and drum patterns the guy uses. I'm sorry I can't give more than these pointers on drums, but to me the whole drum sequencing process is just very intuitive and it's hard to put it into words and analyze it. I think it's best to illustrate the importance of good drum sequencing by posting two examples of the intro: One with what I consider well-sequenced drums and One with a copy+pasted single bar pattern Finally, the synth. Typical Synth strings are more rule than exception in Scandinavian Metal, so if you want to go in that direction, adding some sustained chords is a great way to achieve the archetypical epic scandinavian vibe. There's really not a lot to be said about the synth strings in the intro, they play another cheesy chord progression in a very nervous staccato rhythm until the crucial bar ten, where they start playing whole note sustained chords. Again, sense of development in an intro that would otherwise be very repetitive because of the guitar chords and bassline. Complete Intro with Synth Strings Ok, so I think that's enough for now, if anyone liked it I can write a follow-up detailing the rest of the arrangement, and maybe after that get to the production, consider this a pilot episode

I think this is a good idea, and if you don't mind I would love to give insight in the creation of my most recent mix (even though bla bla no posted remixer yet, etc). I used a MIDI sequencer, FL Studio and Reason in the creation process, and I put a lot of thought into the drum sequencing and processing, so I think it would definitely be helpful if I gave a step by step walkthrough through the creation process. Here's the end result by the way I do think it would be better if a lot of other remixers would take the trouble to do a similar 'walkthrough' since after all, no-one does everything the same way, and it could be helpful for veterans too. PILOT EPISODE VVVV

Both players use savestates/rewind button, so they're both equally TAS. But fine, I digress, don't mean to start an argument or anything, either you like the commentary or you don't

Judging by the other reactions, some people considered the SA player's voice a welcome addition.

It's a Church Organ, Pipe Organ, whatever you want to call it. There's a decent soundfont on hammersound.net called "Jeux", it has a lot of different settings/presets, but I think this one is a Ripieno/Tutti.

TAY ZONDAY: Import midi, replace all instruments with piano and an Ahh-choir sample, tuned down two octaves.

Thread over

I live in the Netherworld. In a province called North-Holland in fact.

How is this not advocating piracy?

You can see this as sort of a Christmas present from #ocrwip to the Remixing Forums, hope you'll all make good use of it! =3

I should probably point out that saying " The game's music sucks" usually isn't a good incentive for people to start remixing it.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

It wasn't even a photoshop by the way! Apparently the developers are just that cool =)

No, I haven't ever tried sidechaining anything on an acoustic kit, but yes, if applied subtly, I can see it working. You just have to make sure it doesn't cut out the bass completely or that it doesn't start to pump like a Techno Beat

I mean, look at the sliders, I'm thinking the .dll got corrupted or something like that. Definitely caught me off-guard with that.. But seriously, Merry Christmas to everyone in the Remixing forum, and yes, in my country we celebrate christmas eve as well, so I'm not early with this at all.

Edit: sorry double post

First you want my lead synth tone, now you want my production techniques?! my oh my... Rhythm Guitars are recorded through Guitar Rig 2 (Because I like the recording flexibility of its loop machine), Lead Guitars are recorded through Amplitube 2 (Because I prefer it's rectifier sound to anything Guitar Rig 2 can do). Bass is the Broomstick Bass Demo ran through a distorted Guitar Rig 2 preset. Drums are a self-made Addictive Drums preset. As for the kick, try this; Subtle compression (something like 2:1 or 3:1 ratio), BIG-ASS BOOST at 50-60 Hz (something like 10 dB), roll off everything below 45-50 Hz (depends where you boosted before). Now if you want the kick to pretty much dominate the mix (like it does in mine), give it another HUGE BOOST somewhere between 3000-5000 Hz. If you want it to be more subtle boost between 10k-12k Hz. I actually put distortion on the 3000-12k portion of the kick to give it even more of an agressive bite. Finally, make sure it has a substantial 'scoop' between ~200/300-600/1000 Hz so you can accomodate the rest of the instruments in that frequency range (again, the final settings depend on how much you want the kick to dominate the mix). The instruments have to be set up around the kick so they don't start to mask each other out too much, I did it like this: Bass-> Rolled off at 70 Hz, Boosted around 400 Hz for presence, boosted around 1500-2000 Hz for attack. Guitars-> Rolled off at 200/250 Hz, boosted at 300/500 for fatter mids, boosted at 3000/4000 for bitier attack and crunch, Lo-passed at 7k to get rid of any annoying high-end. I don't know why that guy goes on so much about heavy compression, especially at a 15 ms attack. Try it out for yourself, you'll notice that it cuts off all the body and even a part of the click. If anything, I would never go below a 30 ms attack for a kick, much less with any substantial amount of compression =/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb And remember, every time you post a new thread without a difficult to answer (i.e. not google-able) question or a valid discussion topic in it, god kills a kitten. Think of the kittens.. =( Edit: Fine, fine, I have tried convolution reverb before, but yeah, it was a memory hog and I'm quite sure that in non-orchestral environments it would be pretty hard to make much of a difference in sound quality.

Well Reason has something called a combinator which is a device that can accommodate all the synths in that you want, and play them like a single patch. It's really easy to connect the Mod Wheel from the combinator into all the LFOs of the individual synths. I always consider them to be as basically the same thing, though each one probably works very differently (which I don't really care about), and each one has a bit of a different character to it.

I think I've managed to reproduce it in Reason to a certain extent, so if you like it(wait for the synth solo, I bust out the pitch wheel there), here's how I did it. Very much like a DnB Reese bass, it's barely possible to recreate it with only one instance of a synth, you'll need to set up a lot more, because these patches tend to be complicated suckers. I always find it easier to have only one oscillator active on each of the instances, since it gives you very tight control over every single filter and LFO on it. Layer 1: Saw wave. No attack, decay 1/2way, sustain 3/4ds of the way, barely any release, bit of portamento with a legato playstyle (should be exactly the same for the other layers), detune +12 cents, LP12 filter with cutoff almost all the way up and resonance at about 1/4. The lower register should sound a bit like the bass in Benny Bennassi's Satisfaction. Oh, be sure to turn off the internal delay and chorus effects, those will come last. Now I don't know how to set this up in Synth 1, but I'm guessing you could just automate the LFO amount; Have the LFO set to OSC 1,2 (this controls the pitch), set the amount at 2-3 for now, and play around with the LFO speed until you've achieved something that can be considered a vibrato (Also, set the wave-form to a sine wave, gives the smoothest results). The best would obviously be to have the mod wheel control the amount of the LFO, but I have no idea how to set this up in FL. Do make sure you use the exact same LFO settings for the other layers. Layer 2: Saw wave. Same ADSR settings as above, detune +4 cents, filter HP12, cutoff 1/4, resonance 1/2. Should result in a similar sound to the first instance, except it would have a very 'pressed' sound, sort of nasal, because of the resonance. Layer 3: Square Wave! Same filter, portamento and ADSR settings as the very first layer, detune +4 cent, should result in a very clicky square wave which will make up most of the attack of the full patch. Layer 4: Sine Wave, no filter at all (just set it to lp12 with a maximum cutoff and no res), tune 1 octave up, very high attack decay sustain settings, no release. Should sound like a fading in high tone, which is exactly what we want as feedback Layer 5: Saw Wave, for some extra meat! Detune -1 Cent. LP 12 with a bit over 1/2 cutoff and no resonance, same ADSR as layer 1,2 and 3. Now, for effects, I have a generous amount of overdrive/saturation on layers 2 and 3 and a unison effect on all layers except the sine wave (all unison controls in Synth 1 at 1/2). Now route all FX to a single mixer track, and put on some delay and reverb for a nice and wet sound (I'm sure you can figure out the specifics for yourself), some Blood Overdrive for added grit, and if necessary a compressor, equalizer and stereo imager to make it sit in the mix. As for playing style, try to use the mod wheel on nearly every sustained note to give it an ample amount of vibrato, use the pitch wheel a LOT, not just for bending, but also for 'sliding into' notes and faking guitar tricks like dive-bombs. In a solo alternate between fast, scalar runs, arpeggial runs and sustained melodic notes, with lots of 'decorations' done by the pitch and mod wheel. Whew, that was a long read, but I hope it was worth it. I haven't added the specifics about setting it up so you can trigger all the synths at once with the same piano roll, and I don't know about using the mod and pitch wheels in FL, but I'm sure someone here will be able to add that information to this Oh, in terms of tone this might actually be closer to Dream Theater, but I sure like it and I hope you will too.