Zephyr

Hey guys, Zephyr Tread, here, you probably haven't seen me around here yet, I mostly hang out in the remixing forum, I got FL Studio a little under half a year ago and have really been enjoying it so far, I've been stuck with a predicament lately, I know the program well and am quite musical, but had no idea how to start a remix of a source tune. After a bit of thought I decided that competitions like PRC could work because it gives you a little project every so often and even had people to judge and things, well it didn't work because; A: it was remixing, not originals, and B: a week is simply not enough time for me to figure anything decent out. I tried one or two but lost interest because I simply couldn't do it. I soon thought that I could probably improve by doing originals because you don't need to copy a source, but it's still something to help my arrangement and composition skills, so I tried to start one or two, but I had trouble doing work without any inspiration. Enter CMC. I saw it before but didn't give it any notice, now that I've checked it out, I'm quite interested and will probably try to do one for this months competition. I't filled both criteria that I was having trouble with (more time and I can do an original composition.) plus I get the inspiration that I needed. I hope to get an entry in later, wish me luck and thanks. See you around. Oh and by the way, for some reason, your pictures aren't showing for me and any links going to warner pacific default to the main page.

Sounds a lot like inverted stereo phasing to me, but I have no idea how this would happen, does it only not work in audacity, or all the time? I have no experience with USB headphones, so I'm not positive why this would happen. If it only happens in audacity then try going into the settings and finding something or other about inverted stereo channels. It could be something entirely unrelated though, as you pan to one side or the other does the sound fade in to really loud or is it instant?

I also purchased an M-audio midi keyboard (Axiom 61), so I got live lite aswell, by the time I actually got my keyboard I had already familiarized myself with FL studio so I went with that instead, but since it comes with lite, I'd try it out and if you like it maybe get the whole version, lite is like an upgraded demo, but gives a really good taste of the program as it can do almost as much, just limited in a few areas.

Fist of all, it's not necessary to create two of the same topic, one generally does the job, secondly I really don't support pirating and if you ask me that's probably why the file went corrupt, my suggestion? Get the program and save yourself some trouble.

Quite right actually, I hadn't thought of that, don't PM me, start a topic. We should really get around to compiling a database of a bunch of newb topics/help sometime.

While music changes with the times, I'd say that one standing principle for me is that I'll take a well mixed track over a really loud track everytime, if it's mixed properly, then a little compression goes a long way and you should be able to make it loud enough to hear everything properly while maintaining dynamics and quality.

Not to interrupt, but on the topic of newb friendlyness, this site is decent, but I think that it could be better, I'm speaking as a freshly graduated newb, there's a threshold there that is difficult to pass before everything is easier to understand. I'm decent at figuring things out for myself so I did that mostly, if I ever had a question I would come here and ask it, and then get a good answer. From what I've seen, all it takes to get help is to have a rather specific question that has a distinct purpose. We've all had to deal with the "how do I remix" newbs, and I can say that there is very little we can do to help them other than to learn an instrument or music or something and try the sequencer demos, but sometimes there is the occasional jerk that comes along and makes someone angry. Now that I've written it I don't really see a point that paragraph other than to promote newb friendlyness, if any newbs need help doing things in FL Studio, PM me, I'd be glad to help any way I can.

You may be referring to "phase" not "phrase" phasing takes and inverted wave IIRC, and using it to subtract and modify the original sound wave, it can give you a sound that's similar to frequency sweeping but has a lot of possibilities, (I may be completely wrong though). A vocoder is another widely used voice editing tool, but it may be quite a bit different from what you want. Either way it gives a nice effect. Vocoders take a voice and use it to modulate a carrier, such as a syth or other sound. Through a vocoder you can make a synth sound "talk". Try one out sometime. Chorus takes a sound and creates copies of it and plays them slightly off from the first, such as detuning it to left and right stereo channels to give it depth or a slight delay so that the phases are slightly different. Chorus is used to give a sound a lot of depth in stereo (Sometimes known as making a sound "FAT") or to just make it a little more interestion. Delay is a simple effect that should be easy to find, it copies the audio as it comes through then plays it again the chosen interval afterwards, creating an echo. Some delay effects have other settings like the ability to choose the amount of feedback and filter cutoff, allowing you to choose how long and how loud it echos aswell as creating interesting changes in frequencies as it echos. I may be wrong in a few of these areas so keep that in mind, I don't know of any editing software specifically for vocals, but any basic DAW should work fine if you set up a mixer insert or effects chain to the audio.

I would recommend that you try all of the samplefusion drumkits on FL Studio's FPC, they're free and while they're nothing special you might be able to find some samples you can use, just open up FPC and click the find drumkit thing, or download or whatever it is. Also, you might be able to find some random drum kits floating around on the samplefusion website, FL users have an account that gives them certain samples for free. If you've already done this then I don't have too many other recommendations though. EDIT: whoops, guess I should really pay a little more attention, kindly disregard this post.

First of all, I'm assuming you mean you have a violin sound, not a violin or you wouldn't be asking this, second of all, in the sound you linked to i'm not hearing a lot of sustained strings, only quick strokes, so if you could give a time specification in the form of = (the strings at 2:10) it would be a whole lot easier to help. I think you may be confusing vibrato with volume, vibrato is the very slight raising and lowering of a pitch over time, all good violin players use it as it adds a new dimension to the sound, since it's so slight it could be mistaken for volume changes.

I'd recommend going back into the individual instruments and try to keep them all at about the same range of volume before they get mixed in, (also use compressors so that it's fairly consistent) then run a multiband compressor on the master track as well as some EQ, if you do that, then the output of your mix should be pretty steady and you could probably increase the overal volume quite a bit, but since it's still likely to go over a little bit every once in a while, use some sort of a limiter just in case. Another tip, when trying to balance the instruments, quiet down the loud ones, don't make the quiet ones louder.

I can't help but feel that we're being a tad dishonest with our n00bs, it's all good fun but maybe you should add a disclaimer or something.

I think this is a good idea, but would take a massive amount of work as well as someone skilled enough to do it. I think that some tutorials on both remixing itself and how to run programs are needed, but since most people re-mix in almost completely different ways, I think that tutorials on how to use programs would be most helpful to start. When I was just starting, (only about 6 months ago) I looked up a lot of videos and downloaded the demos, I immediately took to FL studio and since I'm one of the people who can pretty much figure out and entire program on my own just by fiddling, I did. I used specific tutorial videos (I find anything other than videos to be pretty much a lost cause) to teach me about specific and somewhat more complicated things until I understood them. Each time a learned something new, I would spend at least half an hour messing with it to help me learn it better. Maybe with these tutorials, we could also give an audio clip or two, and an objective that requires the use of the part that the tutorial teaches. Such as, with an edison tutorial (audio editor in FL studio) we could give a clip of a guy saying a sentence and tell the viewer to download the clip and use edison to chop it up into bits. (They'd do this after watching the video teaching them how to use the basic tools of edison.) I think I could be a decent teacher since I just learnt these things myself, but I was a little worried I might mislead people if I was a little bit wrong in an area or two. Plus I don't have the software to record my computer. Someone should plan something. EDIT: Maybe we could have a one teacher one student pair, the student would be someone starting from scratch with a specified program and the teacher would know what they're doing, the student would ask a question or request knowledge on a specific subject then the teacher would answer it as best as they can, whether with a video or post or something easy to understand, then the case study could be put up for everybody to see and learn from.

I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

Yup, check for ASIO, and if it doesn't have them have a go at ASIO4ALL (free from asio4all.com)

As far as I know and as far as my expierence travels, latency depends more on the amount of ram you have and what kind of soundcard you use. A good sound card with ASIO support can really help with latency. If you're going for latency reduction I would recommend a soundcard instead.

I'd recommend taking piano and theory to anyone that's interested in music, I love it and it's taught me everything I know. If you do, take it from someone, don't teach yourself.

I definitely think that you want a sequencer, unless you actually want to edit some mp3's. What kind of mp3's? Did you record them yourself, or are you just editing someone elses work? If you are editing somone elses song, what for?

If it's only for one thing though, I would recommend just going into the piano roll's velocity channel and rightclicking a crescendo in. Saves time over automation.

Ya, I'd say either go with a real guitar, or pay for something. Slayer is chop full of glitches and pretty much just sucks. It can be done using synths and stuff, but you need to be a guru to do it.

Fix'd, I had "Send master sync" clicked. I wonder why I didn't think of that before.

Just recently my FL studio has been acting odd, every time I open the program, the Midi options panel pops up, it's starting to get really annoying, also when I close it, I can see a flash of the panel before it closes, anyone have any idea why this is? It started after I changed some options there. Any help will be appreciated.

One word, vocoder. Look it up in the help menu and I think there's a tutorial on the FL site. It mixes your voice with a sound, so you just need to make a kind of robotic sound and mix it with the vocoder.

Yup writing music is hard, I've been playing the piano since I was 5, (not that the first years count for much) but I love improvising, I'm not amazing at it, but I love it all the same. Some of the main helps I've found is to know your theory, take some classes run through your RCM theory grades, (or whatever you have wherever you are) and think of practical applications for what you learn. Also, when you're going through a song, and you notice that something sounds sweet, try to determine the theory behind it and how come it sounds sweet. It also helps to try to realize how come some things still sound good when they are out of key. How did they do that key change? How come a c# sounded so good there in a g major key signature? Analyse everything then take some of the chords and sweet stuff and mess with it. Keep taking lessons and you'll get better. LEARN YOUR THEORY!

It's tracked by ip? I did it at school, haha. $50 is a bargain for something like that, the engine sounds a lot like spore. Let us know what you conclude when you're done your analyses.