Olarin
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Posts posted by Olarin
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Sorry if this one is too obvious, but if it's not already in your collection, might I suggest the classic Vince Guaraldi album?
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Where DrumUltima mentioned Estradasphere, he actually posted a second link to Neskvartetten. And they're worth linking to twice, but the excellent mix he was trying to direct you to is here, if you didn't already find it on your own.
...ego... too big.... can't resist.... pushing..... my own remix
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Oh yes, I have to reinforce the Myst series reccomendation, the first game in particular. Not sure why I didn't think of that one immediately (I still listen to it all the time).
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Forest temple in Ocarina of Time.
Also, for music that is slightly less 'atmospheric' but still sets the appropriate atmosphere, Ultima 7. Not only the music itself, but the way it's used; the game doesn't barrage you with music all the time, but subtle tunes play in certain areas of the game or for certain reasons, and may or may not loop depending on why they were invoked. None of the tunes are instrusive, yet most of them are still memorable, and there's a consistent texture to the entire soundtrack as a whole that seems to fit appropriately with the aesthetic of the graphics and the rest of the game.
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Yeah, string instruments generally appreciate in value over time.
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The 'evil' and 'good' musics for the eight main townes in Ultima: Ascension employed six themes (truth, love, courage, and their opposites) in different combinations representing the interrelations between the three principles and the eight virtues the townes are associated with. Nothing mind-shattering, but there were some nice variations to fit the atmosphere of each towne. Incidentally, the soundtrack was actually recorded by a fifty-piece orchestra (not unheard of for games but still not yet common either), and it has a really nice sound. (If only the plot and the dialogue had measured up.)
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First of all. Is it supposed to hurt so much and/or will the pain eventually go away with practice?
Do not just play through pain! You could seriously hurt yourself doing that. Admittedly I'm a bassist/cellist and not a violinist, so I can't speak to the specific instrument, but in any endeavour pain is important feedback from your body and you shouldn't ignore it. Obviously you can't be afraid of a little muscle fatigue - you are exercising muscles in your arm, hand, and fingers, after all, and training them to do new things - but if you're experiencing serious pain there may be some subtle problems in your approach that could lead to serious injuries later on. Trying to learn the correct hand positions for a string instrument from just images in a book can be awfully difficult - if you can't afford or don't have time for private instruction, at least find a friend who plays the instrument and can spend a few minutes helping in person now and then.
Also on the topic of practice being like exercise, consider stretching out before picking up the instrument; get the body and the fingers as limber as possible.
Maybe I should pick up some weights to do curls with when I've got free time?Well, weight-lifting is good for your health (as long as you're doing it safely), but as Gollgagh said I don't think it's likely to affect your violin playing noticably. Most of your problems probably have to do with smaller sets of muscles; hand-strengthening exercises (of the sort used to counteract / prevent tendonitis, for example) would probably be more beneficial. Also consider what else you might be doing in your daily routine that could be causing you pain or wear; some minor improvements to my computer setup several years ago completely eliminated some wrist pain I was having playing bass.
I find that I my left shoulder and wrist barely cramp as much when I let the neck of the violin rest in the palm and wrist of my left hand but would getting used to this kind of "incorrect" positioning be a problem later on in the future?Most people will tell you you're better off learning 'correct', orthodox techniques, and that's generally true; such techniques were developed for a reason after all. Unorthodox technique could potentially result in injury, but if you're careful to pay attention to pain and not stress yourself that shouldn't be too much of an issue. The more likely problem from 'bad' technique is that you may find yourself limited later on, unable to do things you want to do without relearning fundamentals of your approach. However, keep in mind that everybody's body is different, and what's best for most people's hands may not be best for yours; a good teacher will leverage their knowledge of different techniques to help a student find the approach that best fits their physique, rather than try to conform them to one exact method of playing. It's also worth noting that occasionally dedicated musicians manage to flourish with unorthodox self-taught techniques, and possibly even develop their own wild innovations.
But referring specifically to left-hand shape, yeah, you'll be far better off learning to arc your hand correctly, with the tip of the thumb against the back of the neck; gives your fingers a lot more freedom of movement (this is true throughout the string instruments).
My biggest challenge right now is learning and getting the hang of understanding/reading music. That is, associating the musical notation to the actual sounds to the finger positions. Any hints or advice on how I can speed up the learning process?Work with a keyboard (if it's an acoustic piano make sure it's decently in tune) - it gives you the sound associated with the note (assuming you know which key to press - get a little strip of paper with note names on it if you need to). Then work with your voice - sing along with the keyboard so you're hearing that pitch in your head, still looking at the music so you're associating it with the written note as well. Then listen closely whenever you play your violin to your own sound, focusing especially on intonation; develop a familiarity with the fingerboard such that when you hear a pitch in your head, your fingers know where to move to make that sound. This sort of approach will also develop the equally important (if not more important) skill of reproducing what you hear without needing sheet music.
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Actually guys, I think the OP has a very good point here. I'm inspired to go through the archives and write a bunch of negative reviews specifically pointing out why other people's remixes are worse than mine. Otherwise some people might miss out on the full realization of exactly how great I am.
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That's a great idea actually.
some other ideas:
- Have a friend play random pitches on a piano, and identify them without looking. (Also name the interval from the last note.) Similar idea but faster feedback.
- If you're already pretty good with diatonic material, try finding some heavily chromatic or even atonal music to transcribe.
- Once you're pretty solid on transcribing melodies, you may want to turn your attention to transcribing chords from an instrument like piano or guitar. In particular I'm thinking of jazz tunes where you have complex chords to deal with, and the chord player has a lot of different choices on what notes to use and how to voice them.
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You can turn all sigs off in your account settings.
Yes, I gathered that from this thread. I'm thinking more in terms of readability to an anonymous guest user wandering in new to the site.
(Also, in my particular case, I never let my browser store passwords or long-term cookies 'cause I'm paranoid, so I'm typically never logged in until I decide to post something, but that's my own darn fault.)
I don't really see where signatures add anything useful to a forum, but obviously I'm in the vast minority on that issue both here and on the internet in general, so it doesn't really matter.
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Personally, I think the best readability improvement that could be made to the forums would be to remove signatures altogether. Graphical and otherwise.
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Funny you should mention composition and jazz studies - I majored in both of those, so perhaps I can be of a little help. Unsurprisingly, then, my advice is to consider doing them both. Some schools are more amenable to this sort of thing than others, but most should allow for the possibility in some way. Check out the curriculum for both majors - chances are there's a lot of overlap in GEC courses and low-level required music courses, so if you're willing to take a few extra credit hours to get both, it'll give you that much more bragging rights on your resume down the road (and hopefully a little more maturity and well-roundedness as a musician too). They're both useful majors, although how much so is largely dependent on the specific curriculum and faculty of the school in question (and also of course how much time you put into it).
If you do end up forced to choose one or the other, though, due to the setup of the school, or one of the departments rejecting you, or simply time constraints, it's not that big a deal. You're a musician either way. If you end up in composition, go ahead and play in as many ensembles as you can. If you end up in jazz studies, you should still be able to take extra courses in arranging, orchestration, etc. to expand your compositional toolset. Really, in most instances a composer *ought* to be a good performer anyway, and a performer who doesn't have the theoretical understanding of music required to compose is going to be awfully limited - especially as an improviser! I imagine you probably understand that already.
Despite how many people will suggest it, I don't think getting Music Ed as a backup major is always a good idea. I don't really think doing anything as a backup is a good idea, actually. Teaching is a noble and admirable profession, and if you encounter it and find you like it then by all means go for that pedagogy degree, but otherwise you don't want to end up making yourself (and your potential future students) miserable because you feel like failure in what you really wanted to do cornered you into a teaching career (or any other 'backup' career) that you didn't really want. Mind you, I pursued a computer science degree as well as a music degree, but never as a backup - just as another thing I like to do.
Of course caution is justified - low wages and high competition for jobs are economic forces telling us that there simply isn't enough demand in our society for music to employ everyone that comes out of school with a degree. Is that a bleak commentary on our society? Not necessarily - there are simply an awful lot of us musicians out there nowadays! But that doesn't mean it's impossible to do what you want to do, and you sound like you have a good base set of skills to work from. If you want to compose scores for other media, though, get into audio production sooner rather than later. Get some cheap audio software and start messing around with it as soon as possible.
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I know this thread is primarily for NES/SNES RPGs, but since someone mentioned the Ultima series I can't resist chiming in. It's a great series, but the console ports were generally inferior. I'd really reccomend getting the original PC versions instead. You can probably still get the Ultima Collection (Ultimas 1 thru
off of eBay or something for a reasonable price. Here's a quick guide to the series. Keep in mind earlier titles are tricky to run well on modern machines - the Collection packages "moslo" with them to slow them down, but you might have better luck using DosBox.Ultimas 1 and 2: historically important as some of the first CRPGs, but probably not of interest to the casual fan. but if you buy the Collection anyway, you can judge for yourself.
Ultima 3: good place to start if you want to go chronologically. an old favorite of mine. (I actually do have the nintendo version of this one which I did enjoy as it was my first RPG, but in comparison to the original version it's poorly balanced and obfuscates a few key points in the game, although the graphics and sound are nicer).
Ultima 4: available for free, legally! members of the "Ultima Dragons" fan club have permission to distribute this game free of charge, so everyone here really ought to at least check it out. http://xu4.sourceforge.net/ is a good place to download the original game and the fan-made graphical upgrade (reccomended), and they also provide a fan-made remake of the engine to ease setup on modern systems which I haven't yet tried.
Ultima 5: where the plots start getting really good. the original is quite good (although the turn-based tile-based combat can get a bit tedious), but there's also an excellent fan remake made as a (very extensive) mod for Dungeon Siege:http://www.u5lazarus.com/
Ultima 6: great game, doesn't need any serious upgrades or workarounds on modern systems (although moslo or dosbox is still a good idea). somewhat eclipsed by the titles before and after it in the series, but well worth playing and I reccomend playing it before 7 so as not to spoil its plot.
Ultima 7 (and Ultima 7 part 2): masterpiece of the series. unparalleled for its detailed, immersive, interactive world. also the hardest game in the series to get running, or at least it used to be. now you have two excellent choices: for absolute authenticity, use DosBox. Your other option is the amazing fan-made engine, Exult: http://exult.sourceforge.net/index.php Exult uses the original data files and comes darn close to perfectly emulating the original engine - there are a few differences as they couldn't quite reverse engineer everything, but there are also a few less bugs.
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So the rest of the OCR community has nothing to say about this? Nothing at all???
I try to avoid cluttering the internet with forum posts if I have nothing more to say than "ooh that's neat". But if you insist:
Ooh, that's neat.
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Another way to go the wrong way around on U-Turn:
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ooh, I'm not sure if double posting, even if the two posts are of different topics and from different days, is allowed. :/
Well, it would have been ok if it had been two different days. However, in my time zone your two posts occured within the same day, so that's a permaban from the entire internet. There will be a squad dispatched to your house to destroy your computer shortly.
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I went to SUNY Purchase for grad school in jazz performance, so I happen to know that they have a grad program in studio production, as well. Not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for. It's roughly a 45 minute drive from downtown Manhattan.
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Here's another really simple take on Handling.
Nice solution. Mine was a little less elegant:
http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=713180
I had to spend a while tweaking the height of the backwards wheels so that the machine's timing was just right.
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yeah I had a nice conveyor belt setup for Four Balls, but it was apparently a bit much for the program to handle and it froze up when I tried to save.
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Very nice game, thanks for pointing it out.
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I sometimes breathe Jaco and Weather Report but I also like the cheesier Spyro Gyra. Now you know.
I really like the Spyro Gyra album "Stories Without Words" (especially the last two tracks), but what I've heard of the rest of their stuff doesn't seem to be on the same level.
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Expectation and appearance has an incredible effect on people's perception of music. Sometimes this is justified - nothing wrong with using good visuals and showmanship, for instance, to help present the music at a live performance, assuming the music is worth presenting. But it can certainly be frustrating when people make irrational assumptions about something they know nothing about.
I do run into this sort of sentiment occasionally at my jazz gigs, where if I'm the bandleader there's almost always some tunes from game soundtracks on the setlist. Usually it's not too severe, just a condescending chuckle here or there; but every once in a while you get a person, otherwise sensible by all appearances, who starts to shut down on you completely when they hear the words 'video game' or 'computer game'. Their loss I suppose. A lot of today's jazz standards were old Tin Pan Alley show tunes that swing and bebop era musicians adopted and rearranged, so the way I see it, taking in music from modern sources continues a long-standing jazz tradition. Working with a melody that's familiar to and appreciated by both audience and musician provides a nice starting ground for the audience to appreciate the interpretations and improvisation of the musicians.
Regardless, though, try not to get too ticked off at other people for what you perceive as their musical shortsightedness. Remember, you're never going to help them expand their tastes and appreciate and enjoy more music if you just yell at them and tell them how stupid they are for what they (think they) like or don't like, or if you approach them with a sense of superiority.
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All right then, how about a desparate, misguided, futile attempt to throw the thread back on track?
I'm not as well-versed in the genre as you apparently are, but I certainly enjoy Return to Forever and Weather Report, and I'd add electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty to your list.
...Also, VMWare Fusion is great. Nothing wrong with running Windows stuff on an iMac (which I bought mainly for Logic Studio), it's a good machine for some situations. Wait a minute - crap, I derailed the thread again!
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Ultima VII (PC) (also Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle) - lots of memorable tracks
Ultima IX (PC) - this was recorded by a 50-piece orchestra
Solstice (NES) - opening theme
Warcraft II (PC)
Myst (PC) - but a lot of it might be too ambient for your radio show, I don't know what you're going for
GUYS! OCR IS INCORRECT!! (or: NeoGAF stupidity)
in General Discussion
Posted
Just to widen the perspective on the issue, I do think key can be important in some cases. I think when re-arranging it's good to know what the original key was, and to consider what effect changing the key may have (playing a tune people are familiar with half-a-step up may give it an 'edge', for instance). It can also be especially important to consider with acoustic instruments - both for difficulty issues when dealing with amateur musicians, and for instrument-specific tricks that may only be available on certain notes, even to a professional player (for instance, playing a drone on an open string while playing a melody on an adjacent string on a bowed string instrument, or taking advantage of the unique sound of a certain fingering pattern on a wind instrument). I'll also admit that there are certain tunes that I'm very used to hearing in certain keys and that may even seem to change character when transposed.
Obviously, though, none of that means that you "aren't allowed" to play a tune in a different key, and in some cases there may be a very good reason to do so. The guy in the other forum was clearly just being an idiot. I also can't think of any explanation aside from trolling for trying to argue 'remixes vs covers', as though they're some sort of opposing ideologies.