dannthr

That look they give you? It's called admiration. Enjoy it.

Stretching is important. Loosening up the muscles in the abdomen, the pecs, and the shoulders and neck. Scale exercises, even if you're not singing, but also like vocal ramps. I don't like screaming--screaming incorrectly can be very damaging to your vocal chords.

Is this for a commercial project? Can you talk more about what you're making and what this is for, etc? You mention Kickstarter, so I see this is a venture attempting to get money.

Hey Dissidia, Sounds good, I like the melody, I like that you keep the timbres fresh by moving the melody to new instrument groups, I like that you give us some relief with an alternate section, I like your medieval percussion--all good stuff. If I were your teacher, I would suggest getting rid of the piano. I feel you rely too much on the piano to provide you with harmonic detail when you should be fleshing out your harmonies and rhythms with other instruments (creating a thicker and richer sound palette). Currently, it feels thin because of this. Also, your brass is sucking. What I mean to say is that your brass does not have any natural tail (it sounds like an awkward legato script), and because it does not have this tail, it creates a sucking sensation, as if the air is being sucked out of the sound and space the brass occupy. But for now, I would work on your orchestration.

While it's a really important exercise in ear training to attempt transcription. It is also a very important exercise in good arrangement and orchestration training to study written scores.

Recently, I was watching an episode of Family Guy where Peter is a great piano player when he's wasted. And there's this moment where Stewie is like, "now play the sad walking away theme from The Hulk," and Peter plays this melancholy little piano thing, simple, but pretty. They used that gag for the ending credits of that episode as well, and when it finished, I went over to my keyboard, and hit a note, then another, and found the starting note, and then played the rest of the theme with only one mistake. I was pretty satisfied, even though it was simple, that I could just sit down and figure it out pretty quick. Ear training, it's awesomeness sneaks up on you. Kind of like working out, all of a sudden you can run the whole distance and you don't even break a sweat, and you're like, whoa, I didn't know I could do that. You couldn't suddenly do that, it's just something you didn't notice before, but you worked up to it without even realizing it. Eat your damned vegetables, they're good for you--lots of vitamins and iron and stuff.

Eat your vegetables!

I really think the Zoom H4n is one of the top you can get for the $300 price-range. But I will say, if you're willing to go a bit higher, I would SERIOUSLY consider saving up for this guy: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/R26/ We have the Tascam Dr-100s, which I think is total poop. The Tascam, the Zoom, and the Roland all have internal microphones, so no additional microphones are necessary. But the nice thing about all three of those is that they have built-in mic pres so you can ADD microphones if you want. And the Tascam DR-100 allows you to do Stereo recording from any of its sources, the Zoom H4n allows you to do 4-channel Recording if you want, and the Roland allows you to do 6-channel recording from multiple sources. That way you can add microphones as you go and expand your rig with out overhauling your whole system. Remember, this shizzy is an investment and you should be considerate of the future and where you'll want to eventually expand your capabilities. If you're serious about Field Recording, I will also recommend a Dead Cat for your onboard microphones, if that's what you're using, and I will also recommend a Shotgun microphone or two, a boom pole, a dead cat, cables, extra media, etc.

Depends on what you're going for and what the rest of your mix is looking like. EW's philosophy is to aim for an Out of the Box hollywood trailer sound. You have to want your instruments to sound like they were recorded in Benroya Hall because that's what happened and you can't take the hall's early reflections out of it. This works out great if your goals are inline with this sound to begin with. Audiobro's philosophy is to aim for a versatile dry, scoring-stage sound. The recordings are very raw, so it leaves maximum potential for your mixing goals (especially when you factor in the timbral variances between the divisi sections and any potential combinations). But this means that some mixing is required, and in some cases, plenty of mixing is required. LASS has a harshness that is raw and airy, but at the same time, needs to be tamed. EW has a preprocessed feeling, a lot of the air has been removed, leaving the samples slightly life-less, but also ready to mix with itself (which is its ultimate goal). Add guitars, drums, bass, distorted cello, etc, and you will face challenges on either side of the fence.

iZotope's Rx2 Advanced is going to be one of your top choices for audio restoration with the understanding that there are limitations to what you can fix.

EW has 50% discount for students year round.

As good as it gets.

VEPro's main feature is that it acts as a remote instrument host on a second machine. VEPro is not a sample library. It's instrument hosting software.

If it feels cliche, try an alternative that feels less cliche. Key modulation on its own is not boring, using a method over nad over to achieve an effect is. Avoid the generic.

I don't know the circumstances involved in this approval process, but I have seen people who have been approved.

Dude, I didn't say you could not do it, I said you just had to have permission--just ask.

With permission from the licensor, you can transfer your iLok licenses using the License Transfer Feature of the iLok website. The transfer fee is about 25 bucks per license.

Wait, for the audition you want them to give you basically all you need to finish the track? What else do you need from them after their audition, assuming they "make it?" Moreover, what do they get from you in return for the work?

Any planar surface which can reflect sound coming from your monitors toward your ears. Typically, your side walls, your back wall, front wall, ceiling, and desk. If you can place a mirror on a surface, sit at your mixing position, and somehow see your monitors, then that mirror is a position where an early reflection is created.

To be honest with you, a 12 x 12 room is probably one of the worst starting points for an acoustic treatment. There is not enough foam you can put in that room to eliminate the kinds of bass nodes you'd get in a room like that. If I were you, I'd focus on just trying to get rid of first reflections and hope that some low powered direct field monitors are your monitoring solution, because anything bigger than a 5" driver is probably going to be too much for that room.

The first one is an iLok authorization error, it means that PLAY can not find the iLok key needed to authorize the loading of that patch. The second one is a missing wav file error, it means that the wav file is not where it is expected to be and would happen if you moved the file accidentally, on purpose, or if you did not install the library properly (or if there was a snafu in the installation). Remember, if you have GOLD, then there are separate licenses for Close, Far/Stage, and Surround mics. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your iLok devices as iLok has had difficulty in the past with Mac x64 among other things. I once also had to turn off power saving features on my USB bus once to solve an issue where the iLok dongle would be unmounted by the USB bus going into power-saving sleep mode. I try not to move samples after installing them, and there's nothing wrong with reinstalling the samples (though it can take some time). However, there are also Library Updates for EWQLSO, so make sure you have those installed as well.

Then it wouldn't sound like a violin.

Violin is 5ths from G below middle C Viola is 5ths from C below middle C Violincello is 5ths from C twice below middle C Contrabass is 4ths from E thrice below middle C - Unless it has a low C extension, in which case it's C, A, D, G as the open notes.

It's not as important that you know the rules as it is that you understand why the rules sound good. Don't think of it as a list of things you can and can not do, think of it as a dictate of relationships--of consonance and dissonance; stress and release. Music is a linear artform, that means it's important what comes before and what comes after because that's how it will be experienced. Before, present, after. Key signatures are confusing because beginners understand them as a skeletal guideline for composing music, when it's really about instrument transposition than anything else. A key signature is a completely irrelevant structure to the composer outside of merely understanding harmonic relationships. (The orchestrator and arranger is more concerned with key signature as it relates to instrument and voicing transpositions.) So in order to press on in your studies, I would recommend shucking thinking about key signatures as a basis for your harmonic relationship analysis and think more closely about the relationships between individual intervals and harmonic expectation. Instead of thinking about everything as it relates to the established keys tonic, think more about how each individual harmony relates to that which comes before it and that which comes after as centered around that harmony as a base point. What this means is that you have a moving frame of reference. Your frame of reference is always the present and what came before it gives you your momentum/direction/force, what comes after is what we expect or predict as an auditor based on this direction or momentum, but what comes afterward is a probability, not a certainty, and there are a lot of potentials. Expanding your harmonic horizons means exploring the more unlikely potentials. Here's a little theme I sketched on the piano earlier today: http://www.dannthr.com/temp/DR_Sketch_2012-02-04_c.mp3 It's pretty simple, I spent maybe a half an hour writing it and learning how to play it on the keyboard without totally mucking it up. But I also wrote it on the keyboard. This sketch was, in a way, a response to this thread. I wanted to express a natural sounding, pleasant melody that started with a predictable harmonic language but then pushed outside of that language in a way that didn't seem unnatural or overly forced (though there was a deliberate force involved in its creation). By the time you're halfway through the short theme, I've created a harmonic expectation which is very conventional/stereo-typical. Then I introduce a not totally wacky modulation from our established key, and then I just start moving and using melodic momentum and harmonic mirroring to create an expectation which lands me on a completely new tonic feeling. The harmonies are all accessible to one another, and this is why writing on the keyboard is good, because it allows you to think about harmonic availability and accessability without dwelling specifically on our key signature. The harmonies are as follows: Cm, Bb, Cm, Fm, Cm, Ab, Eb, G, Cm, Db, Fm, Bb, Db, Eb sus->Eb, F. The first 6 harmonies are very conventional, and the G is not totally unexpected. Moving from Cm to Db is probably the oddest push out, but I use the melody to facilitate that harmonic movement, as it emphasizes the 4th from C to F, which is very pleasing. Then I set up a melodic mirror to facilitate the next phrases so that on the repetition, instead of going from Fm to Bb, we go from Eb sus to F (which is facilitated by repeating the melody so that we fulfill an expectation to arrive at F). Arriving at the F note rather than say, the A part of the F harmony is what makes it work. This explaination is why it works, however, not a description of how I wrote it. You need to sit at the piano and do it, you need to sit down and then write and get used to using harmonies that are close/near-by or accessible and every time you feel like your harmony is resolving toward something super predictable, try to find an alternative harmony that is just a little less predictable.

You can do a license transfer through iLok to another account for about 25 bucks--iLok will do the transfer as long as East West is cool with it and okays it. If they don't, then you shouldn't be transfering that crap anyhow. The iLok license transfer is easy. You just select the license you want to transfer and then enter the addressee's account name and pay the fee. BAM!