Melchior

Thanks for the comment. Do you mean the synths in the beginning are used too often in my peice or in general within the music community? Right now, I'm just using some cheep/free soundfonts. From what I've learned about video game music, a composer shouldn't distract the gamer with music that sticks out too much. Maybe I went a little overboard on that concept? This game reminds me of the earlier Bomberman games (I know, obscure reference) so I tried to keep it at a mid-range excitment level.

Hey hey, Being a composer, my dream job is to write music for video games (like most people here). I'm just now getting a handle on making music on non-notation music sofware like Fruity Loops (I usually use notation software like Sibelius). After all my research into the genre, I made this little demo for a game my brother is making (he's a grad student at Digipen). Any feedback is appriciated. Enjoy! http://www.esnips.com/doc/b8f05e19-d4b8-4e3a-bfb5-6bb5f5514e9f/videogamemusicproject1 btw, I haven't done much balancing, panning or any other production to it yet. Waiting for more feedback. PJ

Here's an updated version of Tenda Nation. Attempted to fix problems listed above and I think the outcome improved things a lot. I plan on finishing the rest of it in the next couple weeks (as this is less than half of the whole thing). Again, I would really appreciate any feedback. http://www.esnips.com/doc/a8c016d3-49a9-4eff-9edf-e810199faf56/TendaNation_v2

Nicely done! The arranging is great while still keeping the music's original beauty. Nice instrumentation, dynamic contrast, and the mix seems well done. Yeah, the samples aren't amazing, but they aren't bad either and you made them sound pretty good. Just going to throw some things on the table for you because I personally don't have any complaints about what you have written so far: This could easily be a multi-movement (fast slow fast?) if you wanted to go that route. Or even just a slow to a fast movement (using another fast number from the SoM of course). Another thing to consider is to start this with a soloist or something mysterious to set up the low brass that you have starting it. Keep up the good work. I'll be putting this on my iPod when it's finished for sure

Great comments so far! Keep em coming! OA, I kinda get your comment about the hand-drum being too close in the sound field, but I'm not too sure how to fix it. I'm guessing you are not saying that it is over balanced volume wise. I still want it to have presence if it's farther back in the sound field. Also, I do agree that the arrangment is pretty stagnant and thin sounding. I might mess around with what you said and also make some bar cuts. I used Fruity Loops Studio 7 XXL and Kontakt 2 with some Tapspace percussion samples and a few free soundfonts. What fade-out part? Are you talking about 1:58ish? Also, I wondering if anyone thought that the reverb or the general timbre was making everything too muddy. Thanks so much!

Very cool atmosphereic style; however, I feel this could use a lot more just one thing: contrast. More dynamic contrast, rhythmic contrast in the drums, harmonic contrast, even change the melody up (or add a counter melody). Also, I think it would give me goosebumps if the drums came in again somewhere towards the end and would tie everything together (but that's just me!). Just a thought to consider. Keep up the good work!

Really though. I'm itching ever so desperately for some feedback. Even a, "You suck Mr. McSucktington, and here are my reasons..." Since this is my first attempt at something like this, I feel I can't move forward unless I know what I need to improve on.

Hey hey, I'm working on my first project to get an arrangment onto OCR and I could use all the feedback I can get. I've been working on this for about a week and have been learning the robes of this biz for only a couple weeks. There's gotta be some things I'm doing wrong so I would love to know what they are (tear me apart!). This arrangment is based off of the Tenda Village theme from Earthbound (SNES), and it has always stuck out to me. It's only about 1/3 of the way done as of right now (so don't let the ending confuse you). Style influences include: West African, Java Gamelan, and some Thomas Newman in there. Anyways, let me know what y'all think. Here's the link. Speak up if it doesn't work for some reason: http://www.esnips.com/doc/b0f7f146-e5b0-4a6f-a809-a5d355ff85b1/TendaNation_v1

Nevermind, I guess FL won't let you use volume controls for MIDI-Out. Gotta find a different use one VST for all my instruments now. Looks like I'm back to square one.

I'm very curious how that could be done. I've used this VST on Sibelius and have changed the "banks" easily. Also (and sorry to keep beating this dead horse), I have found when I do load, say, 8 instruments onto one VST, for 7 of them I can't adjust their "channel volume" in the piano roll (or any of the channel controls for that matter). I use those a lot so this is yet another obstacle for me.

And ravaging they did. That's really good to know Zircon. Thanks!

Actually, I knew the more sounds you had going on at the same time uses more CPU power. I'm not that big of a Noobite . What I was wondering, was that having multiple instances of a VST that hosted these sounds was what was overworking my computer. I've run MUCH more samples that that before. For each of those 14 samples, I had 1 instance of that VST hosting those sounds. Instead, I was figuring out how to get 1 instance of that same VST to host all 14 sounds. Which, actually, I did figure it about 2 hours ago. In case anyone is curious, all I did was open that VST (Kontakt Player 2) load all my 14 samples onto it, and open a MIDI-Out channel for each of those 14 instruments. Connecting them involved making sure that the Port number matched up from the VST to the MIDI-out channel (which is what I was having problems with before) and then obviously connecting the channel number with each instrument. I can now play the song no problemo with even more sounds added. Now, I'm just simply curious whether it was those multiple instances of that VST slowing my computer, or some other dark magic noob problem that I am unaware of. It would be good to know and could be a strategy for other nooboligists out there to make there music run more smoothly!

Hey hey. Just wondering if anyone out there can help me work out a noobular problem. Before I go on, let me spew some numbers at you: I have a 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 w/ hyper threading 2 gigs of RAM I am using Fruity Loops Studio 7 XXL On my current project, FL Studio takes up about .5 Gigs of RAM not playing. I have a project I'm working on that has a ton of different instruments/channels. 8 of these instruments are just soundfonts and samples I've downloaded. About 14 of these are samples using a VST (Virtual Drumline 2 using a Kontakt Player) I copied to the plugins folder. (thanks to some useful advice from this forum ) The problem is, on certain points of my project, the CPU peaks out and the music scratches, hisses and flips out like a kitty that has been possesed by demons. My theory: For these 14 channels that I'm using this VST, each one is using a separate instance of that VST. I think that loading 14 of this same VST might be the problem? Each one can hold 8 different instruments, but right now each one only has one instrument because I don't know how to switch to different ones. I also have Kontakt 2, which I'm not sure if that's useful to anything, but I thought I should mention that. Also, someone mentioned in another post (that was somewhat related to this topic) that I could use the MIDI Out feature. I played around with it, but I couldn't figure out how to connect it with Kontakt 2 or my samples. So, each time I load another instance of this VST, I stop breathing a little more hoping my computer will not fry itself. Should I be worried? Concerning the CPU problem, I would think that my computer should be able so handle this, because I've thrown a lot more at it than this. If anyone has any other ideas on why you think my CPU is maxing out, I'd appreciate any help! Thanks. Melchior

Wow, thanks for the quick responses at such late hours. Putting the .dll file in the VST folder did the trick. I am now .3% less of a noob. Thanks again! Melchior

Hey, I'm just now getting into this community and just started using Fruity Loops XXL Studio 7. I've been using Sibelius 4 and Kontakt 2 for a long time now and I'm very comfortable with them. However, I only just started using FL about 2 weeks ago hoping to feed my ambitions to be published on this site. Anyways, I have quite a few Native Instrument samples that, a far as I know, will only work from Kontakt 2. I was wondering if there was a way to connect Kontakt and FL Studio (using MIDI Yolk?) so I can play these samples in FL Studio through Kontakt. I know I can do this in Sibelius making Kontakt the output using MIDI Yolk. If anyone knows what I am talking about I could use the help! Melchior