Rozovian

It is, however, setting up ppl's expectations. The name is important, and what it implies should be considered when naming mixes and albums and whatnot. Which reminds me of this one. I've yet to really listen to this album, but first impressions weren't too exciting. Then again, it took me a while to warm up to the DKC2 album, which I now consider to be one of ocr's best.

I'm not all that familiar with Earthbound's music, but I'd recognize this one. Can't say how accurate it is, but it sounds ok to me. It's to loud, tho, and has some slight timing problems. The loudness leads to clipping which doesn't sound good. Its just too loud. Nice playing tho. Careful with the levels next time.

Nice instruments (esp the bell thing), but mixed terribly. Most of it is dry and harsh. Pick a similar sounding track with better production and listen for how it's mixed. Compare the two. How loud, how shrill, how centered, how deep, how fat, how clear, how dark are the instruments? Use volume, equalizer, and a little reverb to give each instrument its own place in the mix. Sequencing is hard and mechanical, and the arrangement is too conservative for ocr - but it's a good track to improve your production skills on. For variation, see what you can do about the bass (usually 12 of the same 16th notes followed by four 16ths alternating between two pitches). You can screw with a filter or some other effect to change over time, and/or change the bass writing. As long as you stick to the notes in the chords, you should be all right. It's not enough to make it to ocr, but it's probably the easiest place to start and a good place to learn to vary the writing.

Strings are quite bland, and the mixing is raw and... well, bland. Read up on how to mix things to give everything its own area in the frequency range, and use your ears to figure out how loud each instrument should be. I found it really helpful to pick a track (a well-mixed track by someone better) with a similar sound (instrumentation, mostly) and compare levels. How loud are the drums? Can I hear the shaker over the lead? Does it have too much bass? Is the lead centered? What's panned left and what's panned right? jne... Good luck.

The sounds are terrible, there's a huge disparity between the slow lead synth and the hard beat. While I understand a mix going either simple and soft or aggressive and hard, or transitioning from one to the other, you seem to have trouble making up your mind. Learn to do a more cohesive sound design for your tracks and they'll turn out so much better. Repetition quickly becomes a problem, a typical one for a short source like this. You could screw with its rhythm and play it in different scales, or incorporate a second source into it to mitigate the repetitiveness. Keep it up, MM needs more remixes.

It gets weird when the drums turn the track aggressive and you still use the same soft bell sounds. It'd probably work better with a more driving, aggressive sound there, and the bells can come in later to provide some contrast. Nice sound, especially the drums.

It take a while to get used to the standards and to figure out what that interpretation/arrangement thing means in practice. Two years is doable if you work on it more than once a week or have enough previous music-making experience and skill and stuff. I got posted in a little over a year, others have been in less. For some, it takes longer. Some ppl have talent, or a head start in having written, played, or produced music before, while others come here with nothing... and can still get posted once they've gotten good enonugh. We had a thread similar to this some time ago, about how long it's taken ppl to get where they are today. There's also this "my very first song" thread, which can be an amusing read. As for the specific question: 1 year, 3 months for me, with a few years of making crappy original music before that.

Long post short: get Komplete. You get a variety of different synths there, along with Kontakt. Unless you know exactly what you need and know where you can find that for less, you can't go wrong with Komplete. I use Absynth or FM8 in every other track I make these days. Tho you can still do loads with Logic's own synth. I use the ES1 for bass sometimes, ES2 for pads if I wanna automate them a lot. EFM1's interface might be a bit weird, but you get your feet wet in FM synthesis there. If you've got the full version, you should also have Sculpture, which means you've got a physical modeling synths for more organic sounds. Ultrabeat is a fairly lightweight drum synth/sampler, which also comes in handy when I don't need all the options Battery (it's in Komplete) has. just saying.

Hey maybe I can... high-energy. Oh. Flex, share your insights! Share!

Hedgog, stop being an unhelpful ass. -- Quoted for emphasis. It'll also help to learn what the instruments themselves can and can't do, and how ppl write for them. zircon pointed out in another thread some time back that the best way to avoid certain mixing problems is to not write stuff that occupy too much of the same frequency range. Make each part meaningful. Write no more than you need. If not else, you should have an easier time humanizing a handful of tracks and melodies than if you give every instrument five or so simultaneous notes. And take everything I say on this with a grain of salt, as orchestral music really isn't my forte. This is about s much as I can help with this, not having delved into Kontakt's orchestral palette. yet.

He's got quite a few soundsources in Omnisphere. Where most of the other contributors to its sound library are focusing on old synths and stuff, he's the guy that set a piano on fire and recorded that... among other things. Exciting piano strings with an electric toothbrush, recording lightbulbs, amplifying a cello into kitchenware, playing an old car horn into a piano... For me, without the budget to invest in recording equipment, I've got him in Omnisphere, but I'd much rather do what he does. I have a few ideas, even...

Lemme just say there's no reason to not get this... except if you're deaf, tho even then you can get it for your friends enjoyment. This is the ideal music for when you want that oldskool game vibe without wanting any specific game. Enough reading, now listen to it. Nice work.

I'm here, just haven't been by the computer as much as usual, having been on call to drive boats and stuff. Hence by absence from AIM. PMs and emails work just fine, and posting stuff here also gets my attention.

Tracklist image looks great, most of it... ..except... ...pink? Whaaaat?

Yup, a dry instrument will sound unrealistic, cuz it's not how we are used to hearing them. Those of us with a real violin probably don't also have an anechoic chamber. Just don't starting thinking that adding reverb is the cure to all realism problems. Some instruments will sound better and/or more realistic with some reverb, but the amount is crucial here. If you overdo it, the reverb will just make it sound like a fake instrument played in a big room. (ACO, the concept of "a sample" irks me. I'm ok with extending "sample" to mean a file with a sampled sound and not just a single point of data in such a file, but any decent sampled instrument will have more than a single sample. )

I gave a quick listen to the tracks you've got here. Everything you do will sound better with a better understanding of mixing. Your main problem isn't with achieving realism, it's with giving everything its own space and deciding what's foreground and what's background. Having better source sounds helps the overall quality, of course, but while LASS gets you some really nice strings, you'll still have to mix them in with everything else.

Aries, you've been whining about ocr's totally über-draconian standards since page one of this thread. Either you're being deaf to your own flaws or buying into someone else's deafness. In any case, get over it. OCR isn't for everyone. Considering how fail-y the production on my first posted mix is, I can tell you don't know what you're talking about, but if you still wanna whine about it, do it on your youtube channel with your youtube friends who all put notes a hue too loud at second 25 and all get rejected from ocr for it. Or just grow up. Your choice. - I have this downloaded. Now to find some time to take to _really_ listen. My favorite game series, with some of my favorite tracks, remixed. This deserves more than a passing listen. Looking forward to it.

Can't help you with the mix, at least not atm, but using the sustain cc helps a lot. Using a wider range of dynamics should help, too, but it completely depends on what you've written.

Real is almost always better, but if you don't mix it too prominently you can probably get away with even single-sample soundfonts and vsts. For variation, you can have several of them, send them all to the same amp sim (set to clean settings, not a lot of gain), and just use the one that's right for each note. I have a track on a project where I use two (iirc) samples of an acoustic guitar. To untrained ears (and because of the reverb), it should sound real enough.

Get a room, you two.

Not necessarily. If the VST sounds awful to begin with, it will still sound awful when double tracked. Furthermore, timing is just one little part of what makes a sound different, amplitude, phase, and frequency content also factor in. You're only creating a simple pan effect by using different timing. You'd do better to pitch-bend one track a few steps up (no more than 10 cents, or 6 pitch bend levels if my memory and math is correct; but I suggest only 2 or 3), the other one down about the same. This, while not as varied as two real-world performances, should separate the tracks enough. Or perhaps it's easier to just change amp sim settings. This would create a different frequency content in the amplified and distorted sound. Subtly applied effects, like auto-wah or flanger, might give your sounds some further differences, but be careful as these have more distinct sounds and easily sound like "newb adding effects to make sound better". Using all three techniques (timing, pitch, amp settings) to some extent might yield the best results, but it all hinges on having a decent enough guitar sound to begin with. Also, you don't need to have these tracks in stereo. It's unnecessary and might screw with the sound in ways you don't want. They're basically just left and right channel of the same sound anyway. A real guitar will usually be mono until it comes out of the amp.

If you want something in between your mud and your airy ones, just ease up on the filter strengths a bit. Actually, if you're not talking about eq, you might be going about it the wrong way, as both LP and HP filters cut out everything beyond the threshold (gradually depending on the filter strength). Most ppl will say you shouldn't EQ an orchestra, but unless you're working with the real thing you'll probably have to anyway, in order to get your fake instruments to sound better together. Different make means different sound, and while real orchestra instruments are built to work well together, not every soundfont out there will sound right with all the others, same with VST and everything else. So unless you mean EQ when you say filter, change tool and use eq instead. Just be subtle. Also, carve in the reverbs. Not all instruments need all their reverb, some of them might do well with just half their mid-range reverb, while others won't sound right with too crisp highs in the reverb. A little EQ on the right track's reverb might go a long way to clean things up. Orchestral isn't my forte, so take this all with that disclaimer in mind.

Ugh, slow intro..... nice sound, but there could be a little more going on, more source bits in the background. 1:35, now we're getting somewhere. The music box seem to fill out the mids a little too heavily, you could EQ those down for the main part of the mix where they'd just get in the way of other instruments. New track or eq automation. Quite conservative, but with some nice rhythms to it. It's a bit lacking in the mids. A piano or similar instrument covering the mids would be good here. Some weird notes in the 3:12+ part, clashes or detuning, whatever, it doesn't sound right. I get what you're doing there, but it doesn't quite fit. Some work with the scale you're using there should solve it, tho more source references in parts like that wouldn't hurt. 4:40 now it sounds right. Could of course still benefit from some eq touches, but this part sounds decent enough. Why? Cuz it's balanced. Try to balance the rest of the mix as well. Good choice of sounds, nice rhythms, really nice percussion. Some nice ideas in here, used well. Just fix or filter out the less stellar ideas.

td, don't use other ppl's threads to promote your own. It's ok to reference or mention your own, but then you should at least provide proper feedback. Anyway, the remix sounds a little weird, mainly the frequency balance. The mids are unnaturally high. The first instrument sounds like a bass but then you have a deeper electric bass coming in as well, sounds weird. Once you get into the thick of it, with synths and all, it sounds a little better, but the bass/guitar in the background sounds thin by comparison. The synth bass is too loud. The sound design is ok for most part, but there's some disparities between sounds - like the fat synths and the rather thin guitar/bass. The 2:40 transition is kind'a weird. Once it starts building up again, it works all right, but going into the break it feels like a new song. There's some weird clashing notes at the end, and the drums at the end don't lead anywhere. But the main problem is the mixing imo. You've got good enough sounds and decent writing, you just gotta give the tracks their own space in the frequency range. Compare this to well-mixed tracks in similar styles, and try to listen for how the instruments in those tracks are placed and how they sound - how much highs, how much mids, how much lows, close or distant, soft or hard, etc.. Mixing. Learn it. It'll make your future mixes so much better.

For realism, Pianoteq has some free harpsichord add-ons, Pianoteq's scaled down version is about a hundred bucks, and it can load the add-ons. A harpsichord is, physical characteristics and realism aside, not that hard to emulate with a decent synth, so I'm sure there are close enough presets and freebies out there, too.