Flexstyle

Haven't forgotten to check this out, just haven't had time to sit down and give it a proper listen. From a very cursory listen-through, sounds like you're pretty well set, but I'll try and get to it soon!

You wish. The Conquistadors > everyone else. #fact

So, uh, is this contest still a thing anymore?

I heartily endorse this album, and not just because I have a song on it! Listened to the entire thing at work today, and it's excellent.

Can't wait to hear what the requirements are for Round9.

I honestly haven't used it hardly at all--haven't had time to get involved there. I do know that they offer a LOT of exposure and prize packages for the remix contests, so there is that side of things.

SwiftKey 4 just got released, so they've got a sale on it. Just $2 to pick it up. Worth every penny and more--it's a massive improvement over the stock keyboard on my GS3!

Have you looked at Indaba Music?

This is one of those mixes I look at the date on and go, "Wait, this was done back in '04?" It's managed to age VERY gracefully. Also, LOL at the "overcompressed" complaints in the original jooj-thread. Just sounds like a tasteful master, these days.

+1 to all the above. A good place to start for an all-in-one solution as far as a software soundbank would be Native Instruments' Komplete series, from what I can tell (don't own it, but know a lot of people who do). That + a good DAW + a good MIDI keyboard controller (assuming you have a half-decent computer to start with) would be as good a place as any to start. If you have any friends who are into digital music creation, see if you can't pester them to let you play around with their setups as well. If you're interested in poking around at the software side of things, Reaper and FL Studio are two DAWs that I can think of which provide nicely-featured demos to tinker with.

Well, gosh, since you asked nicely. Not trying to be harsh, here, just being honest! <MODREVIEW> First impressions: - Love that little sine arpeggio you start off with. Reminds me of some stuff from Animusic. - Alright, there's a fairly basic bass, but ya never know. - Hrm, string samples are really fake-sounding to me. They just don't really fit in with the synthetic vibe you established at first, either. - You waited about 50-ish seconds before really bring the main melody in, with not a lot of anything exciting going on before that, not sure that's a great idea. - Actually, a lot of your sound choices are reminding me of Animusic. - Everything is really dry-sounding. Very little in the way of ambience. - Ending with the sine arpeggio is a safe choice, but the way it was executed doesn't really make the song sound like a complete entity. Right, time for some explanation and dissertation. The overall feeling I get from this track is that it's (a) very close to the original source, and ( suffers from poor sound selection a lot of the time. I've already mentioned the strings as being off, but I'm really not a fan of that bass, either. It could be used effectively, but not with the bassline you have written for it or with the percussion you've chosen to use. It's super-dry, and it's rather heavy in the midrange, rather than the actual bass spectrum. You can get away with that if your kick is quite low in the bass spectrum, but in this case your kick and bassline are fighting each other for space in the mix. The mix hasn't got very good separation of the stereo field--you've got a good stereo effect on the main lead, and a bit of stereo delay on the sine effect (did I mention how much I like that sine sound?), but everything else is crammed right in the middle of my head (I'm on headphones). Let the mix breath a bit--at least introduce some stereo detuning or something! The drum patterns you've used aren't terribly varied. It's the same pattern over and over and over again with one or two fills. Switch it up, man! Also, don't introduce all the percussive elements at once. Bring the hats in and out to manage tension and signify different parts of the assignment. Oh, speaking of signifying different parts of the assignment, I don't know if I heard a single crash cymbal in there. Not that you have to have crashes, per se, but either a crash or a white-noise sweep of some sort will really help signify the different parts of the song. As it stands, everything kinds blurs together and I'm at the end of the song going, "Wait, where was everything?" I'm not sure I dig the organ-esque synth, either. That's also a bit too dry-sounding, and I'm not sure it fits into the mix very well. Basically, you're crowding the mid-range (off the top of my head, I'd guess between 200hz-4000hz). You can fix that by either VERY VERY careful EQ tuning, or just modifying your arrangement so that not every instrument in that frequency range is playing at the same time. In the digital music world, half the mix is done in the arrangement alone. So, in summary, you need to vary your patterns for drums and bassline so they don't get boring. You need to clean up your soundset so that it fills up the stereo field a lot better, as well as dealing with the midrange EQ clutter. Finally, I'd really work on the arrangement. Let me know that this is a song, and not just some patterns thrown together. Really sorry to have to throw the book at you like this, but I do think this needs a lot of work. Best of luck, and feel free to bother me over Skype or AIM or whatever (details on my profile) as you're working! </MODREVIEW>

Basically, an element is added to the music every time you progress through a level in a certain area. There are twelve areas, each with six levels, so you get six iterations of each song. The transitions are seamless, so you'll just hear it as a new melody or percussion line (or something) added to the sound as you go. I think the devs will be explaining this further, but the basic premise is you have two choices of direction to go at any given time. Use the up and down arrow keys (or left and right arrow keys) to choose which side of the fork you'll take, and if everything is coming at you too quickly, you use the spacebar to slow down. Slowing down does use up precious fuel resources, so use the slowdown wisely. I've been able to play through the game while it's been in development the entire time I've been on the project, and it's a lot of fun and rather addictive!

Quick double-post: Woot has some very good Blue USB microphones on sale. http://www.woot.com/plus/sing-the-blues-into-blue-microphones

Anyone who's been following my Facebook page knows that I've been working for the last few months on a video game soundtrack for the guys over at Vexel Games. Well, the game is finally on Steam Greenlight (for PC/Mac/Linux!), and I would be honored if you could take the time to upvote it. The link is >>HERE<<, and I can personally vouch for the excellence (and addictive-ness) of this game, Trace Vector. It's fun, it's fast-paced, and it's shiny in a very "neon-lights-in-an-arcade" sort of way. Basically awesome, is what I'm trying to say. Thanks for taking the time to read this!

This might be relevant to your interests: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/C01USBPak/ You can get the CO1U without the podcasting pack, too, and it's just $80. With Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), you'd probably have everything you REALLY need to do voiceovers. The nice thing about the podcasting pack is it includes some more software and a shockmount, that kind of thing.

I'm a fantasy football guy, and wouldn't mind branching out into baseball. Put me on the list of "people who are interested."

I've got a question for everyone: how do YOU vote? Personally, since this contest is specifically for FL Studio, I judge based upon how extensively each contestant utilizes the tools available. How creative have they gotten with effects and synths? How clean is the mix? Have they managed to really wrest a soundset into something completely different? How effectively have they really used Image-Line FL Studio 10? I pay a very small amount of attention to source usage, insane solos, etc., since those don't really matter (in my mind) to the scope of this competition. Anyone can emphasize those things with any DAW out there. A solo is just someone using the piano roll (although clever sliding and modulation will definitely score points with me). Anyone can use source to any degree in any DAW. Screw that, I wanna see real creativity with this software and these limited sounds. Your thoughts?

You know you want moar sexy in your life, Drac. Srsly tho, this is still one of those arrangements that I'm quite proud of, even if it is almost three years old now. Did some things in this one that I would do well to replicate even now.

I am on the edge of my seat! How has this week gone?

As far as legal issues go, that could be simply solved by putting in writing that the buyer accepts all legal responsibility for the song. Not really a problem. That said, $40 really is a tiny amount. I'd charge $150 for that amount of work, m'self, and that works out to approximately $90/minute of music, which is (from what I hear) quite reasonable. Not everyone will ask that amount, but you do get what you pay for.

Here, have some updates: Final mix (with FLP download link in the SoundCloud player!)

D'aww, thanks so much for the kindnesses, everyone! Today has, in fact, been a fabulous day. Also, I'm pretty sure I have the headphones that were modeled in that cake.

Oooh boy, that's a bit of a slippery slope, as CPU manufacturing tends to do a yearly turnover kind of thing, unlike consoles. A better metric would probably be the minimum requirements for the game--if the hardware for the minimum requirements was manufactured X amount of years ago, that would probably do the trick. Thankfully, the issue is made moot by the abundance of console/PC ports, but there are some PC-only gems like Nitronic Rush that have great soundtracks, were released only a couple years ago, but might not have the single most demanding set of requirements. This, however, is why the PC is generally held up as an example of the best possible quality of gaming, in terms of processing power--the technology just moves SO much faster than any console can.