dannthr

That's about the gist of it, however to clarify: Kompakt plays instruments, Intakt plays rhythm loops. I wanted to say it like that because Kompakt does play loops--but they're usually programmed sustain loops associated with legato samples, etc. They're not rhythm loops.

Well, the EW ORCH CHIMES has a limited key spread--so I just tuned it down in Kontakt 2. :\

Well, it's not clear. The natural hall sound that Gold's F mics have leave the tune-down a bit dirty sounding, but if you have plat with the close mics and the 24bit source, it'd probably sound pretty good.

re: EWQLSO ORCH CHIMES If you down tune the samples 2 octaves and give it some nice verb, they sound fairly convincing.

Don't forget Nuendo 3 and Reaper since you're talking about just audio editing/mixing.

First of all, G, if you buy a sequencer, buy it from http://www.academicsuperstore.com/ which sells almost any software that does academic licensing. In the case of sequencers, you could probably save hundreds of dollars. The sounds on that remix have that sort of... thin VSL sound you'd find in their earlier sample sets--maybe Opus? It doesn't sound "very, very good" to me, but that's just me. To each ear its own, I suppose. The other thing that should be mentioned, which is where I think the remix you like stands out, is the actual arrangement. If you write well for an orchestra, the sound rendered by orchestral samples will be all the more real because it's simply good writing. There are a lot of good arrangement choices in the Dragon Warrior remix which outshine the samples. Your remix is pretty fair, it has a very nice comic quality but it isn't clear as to what its goals are. It starts off comical and then ends up with some kind of adventure thing--the Dragon Warrior mix isn't confused about what it's trying to be. The sample quality in your mix isn't anything special but what's worse is that everything is played too straight. I have long fortisimo brass sustains that don't have any performance quality--they're just annoying to listen to. Do you play an instrument? Which one if you do? Do you play a single volume level when you sustain? I hope not. Additionally, your mix suffers from just plain bad mixing. There's no space. This enhances the electronic feel of your piece, unfortunately. You need to give it some damned production value. This isn't a purely compositional site--it's a re"MIX" site which means that production is expected. You haven't done anything to this production wise. It's not about samples, man, you've written the piece, now it's time to PRODUCE the piece. That means creating a performance, that means mixing sounds spatially, that means post fx, etc, etc, etc. To Max97230, you can, it's quite expensive, but for about $2000/hr you can have the Czech Philharmonic perform your music: http://www.orchestra.net/ Cheers,

Exactly, this is how people who use sequencers see music:

No, no, no! It's not about your computer's power, bro, it's about TREATING your virtual instruments like performers. Let me give you an example. I'm working on an original romantic piece. Work in Progress In this work, when the solo flute first enters it's WAY ahead of the rest of the orchestra. The reason is because the conductor is waiting for the flute to enter before he cues everyone else. The entire sequence is very sappy and the conductor is basically moving the orchestra around but also following the solo flute. Of course, there isn't a REAL conductor, there isn't a REAL floutist--it's all my imagination and how I'm sequencing the performance of the piece. The sequencer lets me place notes ahead or behind or too long or too short to basically tweak the performance to be more human, and it also lets me control parts of the performance very specifically like velocity, modulation, expression, even drawing in the conductor track to simulate a more emotive conductor. When you TREAT GPO like an ORCHESTRA it will sound more like one.

Do you mean the GPO version of Sibelius? Some people will want to have Sibelius activate GPO samples--in those cases it's still important. Your question sounded rhetorical. What do YOU think? Do you think we should wipe the GPO edition of Sibelius from the planet? Do you think it should exist anymore? What does it matter if it exists? It does, you can't take that away unless you build a time-machine. To the OP: A musical composition and a musical performance are two different things. When you start treating GPO as an orchestra, you will find the results more satisfying. Sequencers will give you more control over the performance of your sample libraries than a notation program. For me, I can spend half an hour writing a piece and composing it and planning it, and then I can spend 20 hours rendering a performance using my samples. Making samples sound good is in and of itself an art.

I'm kind of new to OCR, I'm guessing V stands for Vocal? Is this a song comp? Because there is definitely a vocal remix I've been wanting to have an excuse to work on. Does the source material have to have vocals? Should I just wait until the compo thread is started up before I ask all these questions? Thanks,

All I can say, bro, is that it sounded fine to me and if the true complaint is that the snare is "over-used" as a sound, give it a different sound. Personally, I'd dig a thicker snare sound myself, but that alone wouldn't have made me (were I a judge) deny your entry.

You're also going to need to route the audio back into FL7 from K2 using (if you're on a mac) Soundflower (or if you're on a PC) Virtual Audio Cables (or if you're crazy) "short-circuiting" your sound device. Johnny 5, alive! I'd also recommend MapleMIDI tools over MIDI Yolk for no particular reason.

I tried to help, G, but if there's serious criticism about the snare, bro, you haven't done much to it. Did you even try out re eq'ing the snare? You just need to give it more phat--bass in the right place will hook you up with a thicker sound.

I second what's been said here, Symphonic Orchestra is going to offer more by way of orchestral sound than Colossus. Their brass is usable, but not the best--it has its limits. My perfect brass set-up would be Project SAM Brass with VSLs Epic Horns. But, with Project SAM you could spend all your cash on just brass. The Gold XP bundle is going to give you a well rounded beginning. EDIT: My comp crashed when I was revising this with some samples. I'm a Gold XP user, so I thought I'd give you some idea of the brass in and out of context: Solo horn, one legato patch (if you want something more convincing you'll have to switch articulations a bit more than this--this is played live on my keyboard): http://www.dannthr.com/music/tests/ctytheme.mp3 It's actually not that bad. Ideally, of course, I'd be switching from legato to portamento or stacato samples depending on the note character and there's a bit of layering that happens at certain modulation levels which can happen when they're trying to blend between two samples, but otherwise it sounds fairly decent. Solo brass ensemble (quintet) the short articulations are quite nice: http://www.dannthr.com/music/hippo/HippoIntro.mp3 The brass fx can be convincing and dramatic: http://dannthr.com/samples/sketches/battle_cue_sketch_a.mp3 Here's brass in context with an orchestra: http://dannthr.com/samples/sketches/dan_reynolds_evesmechanicalbody.mp3 The DXF patches can be quite nice at times. So, it's definitely usable, especially with regards to remixes.

You might want to try increasing latency a bit, see if that lets the instruments catch up. But, I'm not a cubase user, so...

Yeah, I should've mentioned, I would've been lost using Prominy LPC if I hadn't at least a little background in using a guitar. I've heard people speak of Real Guitar as a great performance tool, but I really dislike the sound (they recently released Real Strat).

Definitely take advantage of the resources of this forum and the people who frequent it, there's a lot of talent here. max97230, Prominy LPC is probably the most complex electric guitar sample library and one of the most expensive. Paired with a quality amp sim, it's actually quite impressive. Of all their demos, this is what sold me: http://www.prominy.com/demo/LPC/Just_A_Wish.mp3 All of the guitars on that demo are their product. EWQL, on the other hand, has released a broader product that has some fairly decent if not a bit overly-focused electric guitars (rock guitars) called Ministry of Rock.

I'm sure someone on this forum: http://www.head-fi.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=59 would be able to compare them for you.

If you're going to keep using your laptop, I would suggest getting a PCMCIA based sound card if possible because you're more likely to get better latency that way and even if a firewire and USB 2.0 card might be fast enough (and they probably are) you'll have to contend not only with the drivers of your soundcard, but the interaction of those drivers with your USB/Firewire chipsets in addition to whatever plain driver issues you have. PCMCIA will cut out one of the middle men, so to speak. That's not to say that there aren't good, reliable firewire cards out there, but just to consider what is available--when choosing your stuff. You'll also want to consider, if you're going to be doing a fair amount of recording, the quality of your A/D transfer and potentially your D/A output for proper monitoring. If you've got some cash to spend, you might want to look at an RME or Lynx card, because they're championed to have world-class A/D/A transfer and they're widly accepted in the pro communities as good, solid sound interfaces. They also tend to be fairly expensive. They tend to be out of my budget, for sure. There are a lot of people who dig Presonus, but there are also a LOT of bad reviews for both product quality and support out there. There are a fair amount of people who dig Focusrite, but I wouldn't recommend them unless you were going to do a lot of mic work. I have a buddy who used the E-MU 1616 for a while, really enjoyed it, but the PCMCIA version had the card blazing hot, so that didn't work out too well. Otherwise he would've kept it. The other thing you want to consider about your sound card is what kind of processing it will do for you. If you're using a lap top, getting a DSP sound device is going to lighten the CPU load when doing sound processing. Some of the upper-end prosumer devices and many of the mid to lower end pro devices will do this for you. I know that RME is one of the few DSP manfuacturers that gives your comp an internal mixing bus, letting you route audio signals all over your computer. Very cool. Just some thoughts.

Which is the best part, as far as I'm concerned, because sometimes when you're recording your source, you're not sure how the final mix will sound. An amp sim software will let you apply and tweak the fx afterward.

This is... so wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNobCQSLTYg What? Dancing Uruks? What's annoying, maybe, is that it's based off the movies which are themselves an adaptation? And also it's a musical? Has anyone seen this? Is it less than 12 hours long?

In general, for classical recitals, it's good form if the audience holds applause between movements of the same work. Applause is normal between separate works.

If your keyboard has a GM set, try controlling it via the MIDI from FLStudio. That should solve whether or not the MIDI works. If that works, then there's something up with your JV.

It does sound like your card--could just be an actual defect though...

If it's a small auditorium and it's a live performance, then the loudest thing could be the clapping of the audience which you would never be able to sound check. I agree, always leave room for everything. Extremes are for experts .