dannthr

You have to understand what you want to achieve first. Do you want an instrument where you can pound on a Zen Drum and get a beautiful conga quality? You have to have the idea before you can make it happen--no one's going to tell you first. Flying Hand Percussion has a legato script for their drums, so that it sounds like it's one drum head being pounded on. Some of the tonal qualities based around playing the conga depend on where the player hits the drum head, how hard, and what their hand or fingers do when they reach the head. How do you represent that on a keyboard? Or a Zen Drum MIDI Controller. Developing a sample library for consumers is about engaging those kinds of questions, finding solutions, and creating a product that you can stand behind. For me, I am not a performer, so my sample libraries must give me total control over nuance. I'm highly anal about getting exactly what I want out of the library and am often frustrated by built in performances or stiff patches that have no flexibility.

Percussion is real easy if you just want some quick percussion. You just need to plan it out from the start. How many round robin samples, how many velocity layers, how many hit variations (location of hit, strike type, etc). Multiply those together, that's how many recordings you need to capture and edit. Then in the group editor create round robin groups (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) under the Group Start Options when editing all groups, select cycle round robin, then set the round robin position of each of the groups individually. Then select each group, one at a time, and in the mapping editor select "Selected Group(s) Only" view style, and drag and drop your samples onto the desired key, resizing it for pitch range and velocity range. Do this to each round robin group individually. There you go, a simple percussion instrument. Might want to adjust the envelopes to give your percussion instruments a bit of a tail, but that's all up to you.

My recommendation was to shoot for a $100 pair of cans: http://www.sweetwater.com/c412--Headphones I personally use the 7506s, but I'm sure the Sennheiser (HD280 PRO) and the AKGs (K240 STUDIO) are comparable. Can't vouch for the Direct Sounds... I feel comfortable with the 7506s detail and frequency response, even though I know it's got a slight curve on the lows and highs. (If you have the opportunity, you could probably find some local place to try these out--although most headphone shops are geared toward consumer audiophiles and carry phones like Grados (which aren't bad, just not necessarily what you're looking for)).

You can do that in Kontakt, it's called PURGE. OT: RA is a great library, and with PLAY's legato scripting it's even better, but RA, comparably speaking, is very superficially sampled. A lot of time stretching/pitch shifting, which isn't bad, but now-a-days it's not up to snuff. Nonetheless, when I first got choirs and RA I thought my go to would be choirs, it ended up being RA--it was just the right thing to put a little lemon twist on an orch composition. Really good frame drum in RA.

I suggested headphones since he was on a budget, when possible, you should get monitors but if you get monitors, you should also look into treating your space to ensure you don't get sympathetic resonances or destructive spatial elements that will adversely or surruptitiously color your sound. Headphones are a good way to stretch a dollar and get some measure of decent audio monitoring done. Also, it doesn't wake the girlfriend. I would like to recommend Kontakt, since it comes packed with some fair to decent samples (including some old VSL samples) and it will open up the door to great sales like this one: Lyrical Distortion - Intimate Auditorium Guitar 2 -- only $10

If you want to do something differently, man, there's only one thing to do... Simply change by, you know, looking at the man in the mirror and making the change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtGD6t75HS8

I'd like to suggest a listening assignment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riw7j9b8fM8 Listen to the mix, the rythms, the pacing, and how the instruments can convey power through composition, layering, and articulation. At the moment, your work is quite plodding and the drums feel quite disconcerted/confused--mostly do to dynamics. When you move at this pace, you want to imbue your work with some atmosphere. Even the smoke or cloud or fog is easier to grasp than the space you spread your instruments across. Make us feel something.

Hey Weaver, nice REmix. I think this is definitely a work that's worth recording again. If you've just got the one mic, lay down each track separately--get your friends in one at a time and record them all individually. The value later on when you want to mix and place your instruments will be immeasurable. It will also help sort out the busier sections nicely, which this arrangement definitely deserves. Good luck,

closest thing is VAC Virtual Audio Cables--which will let you ROUTE an internal signal from one sound source to another.

How do you "DO" groceries? You can make space ambience noises real easily on your own. Take a recording of some metal bangs or scrapes, for example, and try down pitching it like 3 octaves (or slowing it down 8x) and then and a ton of reverb, etc! Have fun.

More like $8,000-$15,000, musicians in Prague go for about $20/hr.

Probably because you only need one dongle.

Yeah, I looked into doing a very low key chamber style string library with a friend of mine that had competitive functionality/quality--we couldn't get the estimate to be under $250k--or about $50k per section. Doing a solo instrument with competitive functionality/quality was a little more attainable--but still looking at like $10k.

Only if it's specifically scripted to do so, which it is not "more" in regards to EWQLSO's programming.

Here's the difference, also explained fairly clearly in the manual: In EWQLSO, CC1 or "the mod wheel" is for activating crossfades between sampled dynamic levels. So they maybe sampled 3 dynamic levels in a patch, piano, mezzo forte, and forte. CC1 is used to fade between these samples during the actual note sustain. Giving you the power to create your own "expressions." CC7 is the master channel volume control. This parameter sets the actual total volume control for that particular MIDI channel in Kompakt, Kontakt, or PLAY. CC11 controls the volume WITHIN the range of the CC7 setting. So if you put CC11 at 75% and CC7 is at 50% then the actual volume is 32.5%. CC11 can be used on both DXF instruments and non DXF instruments. Think of it as a fader that controls the volume of the patch within the confines of your already set channel volume. OR, think of it as a manual enveloping control to fine tune the enveloping of a particular phrase. If Piano isn't quiet enough, use CC11. If the whole channel needs to be turned down, use CC7.

Well, they should have Garageband Plus or Garageband MIDI or Garageband Pro or some shit. The problem is that Garageband is made for ease of use, which is great. It's simplified, but it's also totally hosed. My girlfriend isn't techno-savvy at all, she's just a good musician who writes good music. She told me that she wanted to use the sounds from her stage piano because she liked the sound of them more than the ones included in Garageband (she's got the latest, version 5 or somethinger). So I was like, you just have to set up the MIDI out to your Piano and record the audio. She didn't understand. So then I tried to take a look at GB for her. Bam! No go, can't do it. Garageband supports MIDI input but not MIDI output? How f'd up is that? If I stretched my arms as far as I could, they would not get close to measuring how f'd up that is. She just wants to make music and make music that sounds good. All I could do was buy her the Orchestral Jam Pack. I couldn't even lend her my JV-1080... Garageband sucks, period. The tech, now, on the new versions is based off of Logics engine, and it is totally hosed, and it's not just tiered marketing--music software should support MIDI, period.

I've been really disappointed with Garageband's lack of support for MIDI. My girl uses Garageband, and I tried to remix one of her albums and it turned into a big todo with getting someone to import her band files into logic to export them into MIDI just so I could get her piano performances and rerender them with my piano vis. Pain in the ass. Garageband would be better if they didn't hose their functionality--give me an external MIDI port for crying out loud. Ultra lame.

Your DAW has to be 64bit compatible--as in, a 64bit application capable of 64bit memory addressing.

If you want a TRACKER, maybe FL Studio would be best? I don't use it, but I somehow recall it was a tracker in its youth. SONAR isn't really a tracker--unless you're mistaking the term and are looking for a full on DAW?

A soundcard with DSP capabilities so you can off-load audio processing from your CPU is a consideration, but that's the only way I can see a soundcard helping in the situation you describe. You need more processing power, that's what's slowing you down. Now, if you are getting popping/crackling with one track.... you might want a soundcard with ASIO level signal processing and/or tweak your soundcard settings.

re: Making Money One of the distinctions between an amateur and a professional is the ability to really 'hunker down' and pull through a gig with almost no inspiration. To get the job done and hopefully get the job done well despite personal problems, hold-backs/delays, or creative block. The problem here might be that this project of yours might not be reflective of the goals and deadlines associated with an actual professional gig. However, at the same time, 30 hours a week is commendable for a project that doesn't have a deadline, and yes it can be very exhausting. As a professional, there will be expectations from the client concerning your speed, but as a personal project, there are none, so take your time, make it perfect. But most importantly, when it comes to personal projects, your goal should be to learn and grow as an artist. Of course, that definitely means spending the time, the effort, the work, and the sweat to put in the detail and really make something quality, but it also means realizing that each work is a stepping stone from which we launch ourselves into a new work and hopefully a better work. If your goal is not to make money or reach a deadline on this project, then I suggest spending as much time as is necessary before you reach a state of diminishing returns and move on. Put a stamp on it and move on.

A simple sine wave is a fairly unobtrusive sound to begin with--you can get things out of its way though by carving out a pocket in your eq spectrum for it. Instrument basses, like an electric bass or an upright have more character and presence because of all their upper-end harmonic details. A simple sine wave is going to lack these. You could try layering sine waves on top of it or other wave forms to give it more bite.

Instead of simply down pitching your samples or synth, try applying high pass filters. When you down pitch a sample, especially, you're going to get to a point where there isn't enough detail in the sample to hold the sample together musically. For example, if you have a sample at C5, and you down pitch to C1, you're talking about running the recording 16 times slower than the original. That means if you have a sample that was at best recorded to 20khz of aural detail, then you've just shrunk the detail of the recording to include at best 1.2khz or so. That's probably why you're getting a rumble (samples can have a lot of sonic detail that at that pitch change would sound like trash). Now, if you're using synthesis, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to down pitch a simple synth wave to get a clean bass sound.

You're looking for a musical bass sound? Or are you looking for a bass woosh/hit effect?

I think it's a lot more--like more than 90%.