Knives

The front is cool, but it'd be even cooler if you added some crescendo and diminuendo to the strings while they play the notes. In other words, since you said you were using Reason, don't just set static velocity values for each note, also automate the master volume knob on the NN-XT during the note hits to give your strings a more passionate and animated feel. The bass is wicked cool. The violin stabs feel a bit weak, could use some more weight, especially after ~1:00. Uhh, yea, it's already a pretty kick ass song, though you should make it longer, it feels short ending at around two minutes, if you could insert another minute or two in there that'd be awesome.

If you wanna hear what an example of an EXCELLENT remix of the chocobo racing theme then listen to Golden Feathers by Another Soundscape here: http://ff7.ocremix.org/tracks/ (scroll down until you see it, then download from a mirror). I'm not saying your remix has to be exactly like that to be awesome, but try to incorporate more of the type of elements he used, I'll get you started: 1. a drum beat 2. instruments besides soft synths 3. more variety, having something repeat for a while tires out the ears real quick 4. more originality, add in some of your own melodies, harmonies, transitions, or modifications to existing melodies and etc. 5. Use mastering and mixing tools, like EQs and compressors, cause your the synths sound a bit cramped within the frequency range of your remix I think you should spend some time just reading some tutorials on the internet about stuff like mixing, it'll teach you some great tips and tricks on how to get everything sounding clean. You should also try listening to other people's music in the genre you're remixing, it can give you some great ideas of stuff to add to your own piece to spice it up and give it more flavor.

What do you mean 100? It's 80 bucks for a download. And aside from that, is it really just a lite verison of their flagship product, GPO? Or does it contain all the samples the GPO VST has? I can't figure out why the VST costs 200 and the refill is only 80.

Hey, that's not too shabby, thanks. Now someone just needs to make the orkester samples sound good ;P

Man, this song is nuts, it's like everything from tribal to rock to electronic to some crazy genre that doesn't even have a name yet. It was very interesting, and congrats on getting your first remix on the site Anso

You can get a really good pair of monitor headphones for a relatively low price, say like something around 80USD. BUT YOU WON'T REGRET IT, TRUST ME! Everything sounds damn amazing through a good pair of headphones, I've given up almost entirely on my laptop speakers (which aren't bad) not only for mixing but for general listening as well. It's not one of those things just to help you mix your music better, you get to hear everyone else's work as they heard it while mixing without it being blemished or degenerated by crappy speakers. Everything's cleaner, sharper and more pristine, it makes listening to music overall a lot more enjoyable.

Hardy har har Tweek I think a possible solution might have included some crazy use of the matrix sequencer to hold down the different notes in the nn-xt for you, but I'm not sure how well that would have worked or any limitations or problems it may have imposed.

I HAVE IT! R4 IS IN MY HANDS RIGHT NOW! But man, going and checking out the stuff at Guitar Center was so much cooler than actually getting R4, I got to play with turntables, huge mixer tables, midi controllers and other neat hardware gear. I've never really done this before, so my first experience can be summed up as: IT WAS AWESOME. I would have probably left that store with thousands of dollars worth of equipment if I had any money. I've become a sucker for tangible knobs, faders and hardware devices ;P EDIT: Woo, my midi-2-usb cables should arrive soon too, this is gonna be great And also, the two orkester demos in R4 are the same ones they used in R3, they aren't new :/

Don't do it, 1. Those insterested in getting the blog usually already have a blog on googlepages, blogspot or elsewhere, and have it linked in their forum profile. 2. Subtle popularity contests and jealously may arise when certin remixers' blogs get more attention and comments. 3. It'd add unnecessary maintenance (look to number 1) and clutter to OCR. 4. It's depressing to see no comments on blogs and unless the blog gets considerable visible attention, it'd most likely be abandoned by the author. 5. What my sig says. Adding a function to something because it'd be "cool" is not a valid reason to do it. If blogs take on a major role then the focus of OCR may shift from the music to the image of the artists, like it is on myspace and almost every other music site. We do not want or need our washing machine to do toast. That's about it, don't want to start an argument or anything, I'm just saying all the reasons why I feel OCR blogs are a bad idea, take it or leave it.

Out of curiousity, does "Gary Oak - Pokemon" mean gary's theme or the championship battle theme?

Uh, you could say that, rewire is an application which basically allows you to use Reason as a VST in another DAW. "Rewire" was developed by the propellerheads, the same guys who created Reason.

You can pretty much rewire Reason into anything, I'm sure the list of DAWs that it is uncompatible with is much smaller than the list of ones that it is rewirable into.

So basically, what this is saying... is that if you only use third-party software (VSTs) to make your songs then it doesn't matter what DAW you get or use? Since they all process and export audio in almost the exact same way?

I'm with kwarp on the music, I've heard a few tunes and thought it was so-so, but man... the fanboyism surrounding this BT guy and his album is INSANE. There was this one clip on youtube where a guy actually said that the dvds from TBU changed his perception of life and god.

Yea, what Fray said, 'cause I have a PSR-240, and it's like not even manufactured anymore... and instead of buying a brand new midi keyboard I'm just getting a midi-to-usb cable and hooking it up to my laptop to control Reason (software/DAW). Other than that it has no real other use to me except for casually playing around on. If you're thinking of getting a midi controller and software, or just a synthesizer or sampler for making pro-quality music, then I think there are several better options out there than the PSR.

I think that might make some patch names too long, I think simplifying it to "[original patch name] TWK" is good enough. Also, any tweaked factory presets better be tweaked extensively, not enough to make it completely different sounding, but enough to make the tweaked version an actual contribution to the refill. It'd be silly to include a tweaked factory thor patch that only raises the wetness on the delay a little. All the other rules sound just fine though Anso, good work.

whoa... intense! Thank avaris, but as for not sacrificing the step sequencer in Thor, how do I send the same midi data to my external audio device and Thor at the same time without having to use two sequencer tracks? I thought whatever midi you send to the combinator it simultaneously sends to all the devices within itself... but when I try making a patch with my external audio device, Thor (with the step seq. turned off and the midi box turned on), spider audio, and a mixer, it doesn't work =/

Questions: Is the R4 factory and orkestor sound bank the same as R3's but expanded to 2 gigs with new patches and samples? Or does it come with completely new content? I have a yamaha psr-240 and a psr-270, both +6 years old and probably not even manufactured anymore, but I wanna use them as midi controllers for R4 as soon as a get it as well as a couple of midi-to-usb cables. Everything should work out fine, right? The keyboards being very old shouldn't cause any kind of compatibility issue with R4, the cables or my fairly new laptop? EDIT 2: I looked on the props site and it says you can set up any kind of basic midi keyboard to control Reason, so I figure my PSRs should work as long as I get the cables. OS and my computer are irrelevant information then I guess. EDIT: Is there anyway to use Thor's awesome delay, chorus and filters for stuff outside of Thor? Perhaps using some kind of routing/wiring that I'm not aware of?

We ARE going to put all of this into ONE refill, right? Since I already have a bunch of free refills and my reason folder is actually getting kinda messy, I've been thinking about getting a refill unpacker and packer just to put my favorite patches and samples into a single, complied refill for personal use.

Oh yea, checking with the demo songs is a bad idea since they aren't that CPU heavy. Well, using a modified version of malcos' deefgroove.rns I made a cputest.rns to use, rebooted my computer in safe mode and here's how my test went: R3 CPU usage: CPU1: 40-50% CPU2: 0-5% R4 CPU usage: CPU1: 30-40% (-10% from R3) CPU2: 5-20% (+15% from R3) These are rough estimates but in total R4 seems to use a little more CPU, though at least it spreads it apart a bit by separating the graphics and audio processing. It's sort of like a really minor dual core support but hey, like you said, at least it's something.

HOLY COW! According to my testing it seems like Reason 4 actually uses both of my cores... at least the demo does... this is incredible, they may have actually added multi-core support, though I'm not a hundred percent sure though, cause I just can't believe my eyes, I didn't think they'd actually listen... or whether I'm hallucinating. Though a backdrop is that thor and the new sequencer seem to be a bit more taxing on the cpu in general, it's still great stuff. Oh and yea, V was right, you can have R3 and the R4 demo on the same machine at the same time, no problems at all. EDIT: the new sequencer is really growing on me, is there anyway to completely hide the automation clips and velocity edit section or... can those only be minimized?

Agh, in pain... so much pain. I've been downloading the demo for 4 freakin hours and then it just stalls and stops at 93%, and doesn't move or do anything, just stuck at 93%, so I had to restart it, and I'm gonna have to wait another 4 or something hours ;( Somebody should seriously set up a torrent mirror for this thing. EDIT: oh good, I think I found a torrent on it, now this should only take about an hour.

But... that's no fair, it's just a demo... it's not like the full verison or the beta =/ I'll try to install it without uninstalling R3 anyway, just to see if I get any problems.

I was going to make some breakfast while the trailer for R4 was loading when I visited the props site this morning, but when I came back it was already finished... and now I can't watch it ;_; Oh, and does anybody know whether I need to uninstall R3 to install the R4 demo? I'm getting the R4 upgrade next week but I wanna get a head start with familiarizing myself with the new sequencer and thor. And on a closing note, listen to the props, quoted from their site: "Propellerhead Software strongly advice all new users to take care that no domestic animal hungry for plastic cards is waiting to jump you while opening the Reason packaging." EDIT: Poor props... they released the R4 demo on their site today and now hundreds of people are downloading it. I'm only getting like 10 kbs from their site, it's gonna take two hours to download this thing, lol.

LOL! That demo is probably the best synth demo I've ever heard, not particularly because of the sounds, but the execution and song choice made it really amusing and fun to listen to :DDD!