Rozovian

If you're into making your own sounds from scratch, you might as well get Reaktor. Really, figure out the sounds you need the most. Do you need pads, do you need leads, do you need basses, do you need a versatile synth or one that specializes in some specific type of synthesis, many oscillators, layers, modulation options, side-chaining, what? I mean, synth X might not do complicated FM, while synth Y might not do voice-specific distortion or formant filtering or other effects. There's a plethora of synths out there, and without knowing what you need you'll just have a long list of stuff other ppl use as part of their palette. Also, if you're looking to get anything from Native Instruments, you might as well save up for Komplete. Many synths, and Kontakt, and Reaktor.

We've been playing Dead Air on Expert with Realism on (three levels in, stupid construction site level). Before this, we've only really played Versus, which altho fun gets old. Playing to not shoot your friends, really having to run from tanks and strategize about the witch makes the game so much more about co-op and gives the game a lot of new life.

Well, this is a popular thread. Careful with the levels, I hear the lead being pushed down. Either write it so it avoids the drums, or mix this a little softer. The lead might actually be too loud, along with some of the other melodic, mid-high-register sounds. Avoid sticking too much in the same frequency range. The stuff around 2:50 sounds quite clutter-y, there's not enough separation between the sounds there. Pan, eq, space out, change the writing, do something. Assorted thoughts from a half-focused wip critic. Hope it helps, dude.

The old stuff is dragging this whole thing down. There's some decent ideas in there, but the disparity between your skills then and now is probably making this difficult to work with. I say you should start this from scratch - you're not familiar with the source and you've learned lots since you started this... so take all that to a fresh blank project file and start writing and mixing. If you wanna do stuff in this style, in this sound, listen to stuff like this, listen lots and listen close. Whether it's western movie soundtracks or country music or whatever you can find that you can learn from, learn from it. Listen to how loud and distinct each part is, how far it is from the listener and how it's played. Apply what you can, and you'll improve.

Dude, when did you get good at this stuff? Wasn't it just the other day (months ago?) when you were all newby and faily? Nice groove, nice sounds, nice choice of source, only too conservative for ocr. Bass might be a tad too hard, you could relax it a little. Gonna echo Chris' remark about how it doesn't sound empty in the parts without a lead, the groove carries it well enough, and it's surprisingly varied. 1:50 - especially nice work here. All in all, get interpretive and you'll be a posted remixer in no-time*. *aside from evaluation, judging and posting queue.

Piano reverb is too loud and too small, some of the drum writing could use some better fills and transitions, the mixing is thick and could be a lot more clear, some sound design choices might not fit together as well as you might think... There's a few things you could work on, but I'd say the most important would be to work on your mixing. When you know how to mix stuff right (so it's both rich _and_ clear) your sound design should begin to fall into place. If you're aiming to get a remix posted on ocr, you should also work on your arrangement, both the overall writing and the interpretation side of things. You seem to be pulling this in your own direction, but I don't think it's far enough for ocr. You've got some cool ideas and sound design choices in here, it just gotta be more streamlined and mixed more clearly imo.

Neither of these are pertinent to Meteo's question. You can try to apply the former to your music but aside from screwing with ppl's perception of rhythm I don't think it'll do much. The latter is related to timbre and basic harmony. Look up harmonics and overtones.

lolwhut? David Sonnenschein has a couple of emotion tables in his book Sound Design, but these don't have anything to do with frequencies or any other numbers. Emotion has less to do with the frequencies and timings and more to do with the overarching dynamics and harmonies. Or would you say 440Hz (a period of 2.273ms) inherently has an emotional state attached to it, regardless of its context? More useful: look up modes and scales. Yeah, this doesn't answer Meteo's question, I know. My solution? Make music where it doesn't matter. Works for me.

If an instrument is pushing everything else down, it's too loud. Don't "master" stuff too loud. A limiter or compressor is pushing down everything else when your bass hits, so either don't feed as much bass into that compressor, or use a multiband compressor to process lows and highs separately. Dunno what Maximus does and can do, so I can't comment on whether it can be done there... but just making the bass (and/or compressor) softer should help. Splitting bass and kick is best done with EQ. Give the bass a certain part of the low frequency range, the kick another. The kick will probably have a mid/high-range "click" that you might wanna emphasize. You can side-chain them so the bass always gives way to the kick. Cut out the lows from the other instruments so they don't interfere in the lows.

It could also be a time signature thing. Any track in particular you're having trouble with?

...and a happy new... year? Well, have one. Have lots.

It comes up in every genre with every instrument. If you can make enjoyable music with it, it's good, whether it's accurately simulates electrical heating inside electrical components of instrument x or the dampening of reflections in a piano of wood x. It might not be realistic, but realism isn't everything. Anyway... For lead, you could probably get a more expressive lead using non-guitar sounds and using an amplifier simulation (amp sim). Depending on the sound you want, you could use soft piano or harp notes and just squash (with a compressor) and/or overdrive them, or filtered saw and/or square... all with an optional highly resonant bandpass for squeals and stuff (check if you have a bandpass (BP) filter mode in your synths/samplers). If you can find sampled mic feedback and fret noises and stuff, you can use those for effect. Add some room (or hall, if you're going for that kind of sound) reverb after your amp sim to make it sound a little bigger and less dryly recorded. For rhythm, you could get decent results with a piano. A half-decent sampled piano would be more dynamically sampled than most guitars, giving you more velocity layers to build your sounds from. Again, use an amp sim and other effects to make it more like an electric guitar and less like instrument abuse. As for drums, try layering drums that you like (or ones you don't), just think through how loud each component of each drum should be as you create your own drum sounds from them. My sis impressed me the other day with layering GarageBand's newbtastic drum kits into something much more tolerable. Effects like reverb, compressor, gate, even stuff like distortion/overdrive can be used to further craft a cool sound out of crappy samples. Of course, it all still has to be mixed into the track right, but that's both easier and more enjoyable if you have nicer, richer sounds to work with.

Hi and welcome. Use our feedback board or talk to ppl on #ocrwip. Other than that, see if you find any friendly ppl with time and good ears, PM or IM them about your track.

Welcome! So says the submissions standards, emphasis mine. If you listen to the chippy stuff AeroZ, halc and others do, you should get some idea of what can be done with chip sounds. You'll find that they don't use chippy sounds only, or not in a raw, unprocessed form. The simple answer is that you won't get a remix on this site with those samples without additional instruments and/or additional processing. Don't let that stop you from making music with them, tho, our remix feedback board is free for any kind of vgm remix, whether intended for OCR or not.

Using the exact same phrasing and including text from forum buttons and a long sig suggests copy-pasting, possibly by a context-sensitive crawler. Most ppl would just write the text anew, and ppl would probably use Image-Line's own forums for this anyway if they weren't registered here already.

This FL thread looks like this off-site thread, except the former also included text from quote, notify and reply links.

Dude, you were recruited during my early days on the project. This project is older than that. We have tracks that are older than yours.

You've got some volume issues, most evident in how everything ducks under bass and kick, and how the delay on the 6-note pattern seems louder than the dry signal. Filter out excess lows from tracks that don't need it, use side-chaining to get some tracks out of the way from kick and snare, and mix the tracks' levels so your output compressor gets a break between drum hits. It's sticking to the same elements you've introduced early in the mix, only adding what just amounts to background material. This makes it sound repetitive. That you're sticking to the same chords and sounds for a lot of the track makes it sound more repetitive. There's some really cool filter effects on your wubwub towards the end, the track - it's sound design, arrangement, structure, whatever - just oughta be that interesting earlier. Need more of the stuff you did right and less of the other stuff.

Raw and exposed sound, kind'a empty arrangement. Drum writing is sparse but has some nice variation to it; adding some percussion layers would of course improve the track overall. The snare rolls don't quite fit with the acoustic kit sound you've got - unless your imaginary drummer has a few more arms than the average drummer - tho it could work with the additional perc elements should you add any. The aforementioned issues with dynamics and the 1:00 part dissonance also apply. It's a good track to work on, you've got a good foundation to build on here. As the source has a few remixes on the site already you can check those out to see what can be done with the track.

Biggest problem - not interesting enough. Slow, sparse and what initial interest the sound design held is not enough to last the whole track. Play with the track, play stuff in different rhythms, chords or whatever, come up with a few ideas for the track and see if any combination of those lend themselves to a more interesting arrangement. Also, bass drum is too loud, choir and pad could have some lows filtered out for a more clear mix. Don't let this get you down, persevere and make more music, you'll get better. And welcome to ocr.

Cringe-y temp vocals, but as long as they're only temp that's fine. Good arrangement overall, it'd be an awesome track if you can manage a strong rock voice. The glides in the intro should occur earlier so they're at the right note on the beat. I'd also reverse a bit of the group vox writing, putting another "moonlight" instead of "strengthen me" and using "strengthen me" as the last line of the group vox part. It's better to write lyrics that fit the rhythm of the track than just the melody. You still sometimes try to follow the melody a bit too slavishly, leading to some weird stresses in some words and phrases. The group vox works ok but there's parts in the rest where the stress falls on the wrong syllable or the wrong word, making it just... weird. ("in protest from" probably being the worst offender) An instrumental version of this would work fine, methinks, so you just gotta do the vocal stuff right and you've got a pretty solid piece here. Keep it up, man, your voice stuff is getting bolder and better with every track.

ppl keep disappearing. Feel free to grab any that interest you guys... just make sure there's some variety in teh metulz and that there's still one or two tracks for the rest of us. To the rest of us: This is not a Norwegian album. We must stop them by finishing all remaining tracks before they do!

DaMonz now can has Meridian Child. Stevo, by email plz, to me, Meteo, and Usa plz. Or those of us whose emails you've got. Tracklist update, first post edit. Also, assuming we have consent to all tracks in my folder of completed ones, and that I can count, we've only got 22 tracks that aren't finished yet. Many of those are in progress, some very near completion. Archangel, Brandon Strader, and I all have almost completed ones that I'm confident we could easily finish. Meteo's recruiting is paying off, so I'm sure there'll be surprises from ppl I've never heard of as well as from old familiar names. Speaking of which, you familiar names should get in touch.

Cut him some slack, guys. Promotional doesn't mean he can use it in-game, just for trailers and expo booths and sunflowery music videos... maybe? Tho a cash prize, even a modest hundred or so, would certainly get some interest up, and feel like the promotion condition isn't as big a deal. And of course, it might lead to a commissioned, proper score for the game, and maybe further opportunities to score stuff for his games.

C# major or Bb (A#) minor. I'm not touching the augumented chords, tho.