Nabeel Ansari

I don't know, man, watching people struggle to use their own DAW is not a good indicator of how the DAW works best. I find Studio One's MIDI editing superior to FL's in almost every way. MIDI automation and such is much easier, since it's natively supported and doesn't require you to constantly search for parameters and create new clips. The only way it isn't is that the piano roll still has separate tools for pencil and erase; however, you can rebind these however you want (especially with the Nostromo I gave you), and just like FL, you can hold control for select. While you can't get it to behave exactly like FL... I use both DAW interchangeably and don't have an issue adjusting. Getting used to the different mouse tools is the basic entry challenge to any DAW really; but for what it's worth, as a long time FL user, I got used to it pretty quickly. The piano roll started working for me a lot more because ghost notes aren't bound to isolated patterns, they're bound to all tracks in the song. Furthermore, you can select on the side the tracks to view and edit in the piano roll. That means I can edit my violins while viewing my violas, cellos, and double bass. Or if I want, enable them all for simultaneous editing. Or turn everything off and view a part in isolation (which is the default if you go to edit a MIDI clip). Or turn on the whole orchestra for simultaneous editing, or view the whole orchestra as ghost notes while editing all the strings simultaneously, etc. It's just like composing using different note colors in FL, except it's all managed for you and everything is still stored in separate tracks. This offers the power to bring the entire song into one piano roll while still leaving everything separately organized in tracks in the arrangement view, something I think FL should take notes on. I mean, I can't promise you that you'll love it the minute you load it up, but if you give it some time, I think you'd appreciate how down to earth it is compared to other DAW's. (The same way FL is) The mixer is also a standard DAW mixer, so FL still wins in that department. For electronic stuff, I'm not sure it would cut it for you and your fancy processing methods. I'd recommend Live, maybe, or Bitwig. Also, Studio One 32bit can only load 32bit plugins, and 64bit can only load 64bit plugins. That's probably a dealbreaker for you.

You have to use the modwheel.

That about sums it up for me. Especially with how Image-Line basically demolished FL Studio with their latest update, not only creating a worse plug-in system but also making it completely and utterly unstable, I'm switching off for good now, unless they get their shit together. Studio One v3 is getting my purchase as soon as I get some $$$.

I don't understand how it's similar at all. The only similarity is that it starts on the upbeat of 4 instead of the downbeat of 1. The rest of the rhythm isn't even the same. Shocker, there is no musical dibs on starting a phrase an 8th note early.

DJP already said why this isn't necessary, but let's just suppose for a second that the site wasn't undergoing a change and that workshop integration is not going to be a thing... here are some problems with OCReJects: 1. Resubs. What if a person gets rejected but wants to resub their mix? What if they put it on OCReJects but decide to fix it and make it better? Should they be able to remove it from OCReJects or are they locked into being a ReJected? What if I don't WANT to make my remix publicly known as rejected? Is it automatic or manual submission? 2. The concept of dedicating a place for rejected people irks me. I don't know why anyone would want to associate with that label and why people would publicly post their music under a title of "ReJected". 3. Breeding ground for flaming. You're dedicating an entire site's mission (ocrejects) to promoting whatever is contrary to the standards of ocremix. That automatically means that everyone who listens to and has favorite music on ocrejects is aware that ocremix is a place that denies their favorite music and facilitates even more ocremix-hate ("arbitrary standards!" "they only like techno!" "they only like metal!" "they only accept professionally engineered music!") than there already is. It's as if you're taking all of the ocremix-haters scattered about the internet and giving them a focused place and banner to rally behind. I know you mean well, but try to be more sensitive when proposing how a new site/community functions and what it stands for. I certainly recommend not calling it "OCReJects", but since OCReMix is undergoing changes, it won't be necessary to give it any more thought.

They pay for that right by getting a license.

Technically speaking, sound design is copyrighted as well in video games, so yes, it's a problem.

It doesn't matter if it's a main melody or a sub-section of your song. It doesn't matter if it's the focus or if it's in the background. In your song, the melody is clearly presented in a foreground element (the tremolo chip lead thing). We're not talking about an improvisational jazz solo where you accidentally played a few notes from the FF battle theme; you are quoting (not referencing) the FF battle theme in the foreground lead instrument for about 22 whole seconds starting at 1:58. There's no room for error here, it's clear that it's the FF battle theme, so it's copyright infringement. Keep in mind I'm not saying this to be a dick, but I'm giving you a hard time specifically because you need to imagine how you'd explain this in a legal situation were you to get sued. If you understand that mindset, you can avoid doing this kind of thing in the future. It's only because this is for a commercial purpose that it matters so much; if this was just some freeware game, it's still technically infringement, but it's not "wrong" per se, so long as you don't get caught and told to cease and desist. Free fan games use copyrighted game music all the time.

Wow, beautiful!

Not a consideration in copyright law. And it's hardly a solo, it's the verbatim melody. A solo is improvisational and unique. Not a consideration in copyright law. If I write a commercial song about Billie Jean, and use the Billie Jean lyrics in it during a "solo", I'm still going to get sued. If I cover Billie Jean in chiptune form and sell it, it's still copyright infringement. The only circumstances where you can quote other people's music in your own is any time you can invoke Fair Use, and even that varies situation to situation at the whim of the copyright holder. Square Enix? They're real stingy about copyright. However, Fair Use does not cover commercial use regardless, so if this game is being sold, you're violating copyright law and there's nothing that can protect you.

Except that he's been fine with recommending laptops to other people in the thread and has been doing so.

If you ran the normal installer for Battery 4, it will ask you where you want it to install the Library:

Not true, it just depends on your orchestration ability. If you like writing parts by hand (violins do this, violas do this, etc.) then those libraries don't facilitate that for you and make creating organic orchestrations a lot harder. On the other hand, if you don't like it, you may prefer libraries like Lumina, because they're built to do it for you, albeit with a few disadvantages like lack of control and unrealistic voicing (you play one note and you have 15 string players... you play two notes and suddenly you have 30, play 3 and you have 45, etc.). Or you are a good orchestrator and prefer orchestrating, but you're musically inclined enough to say that there's a certain magic to the sound of Lumina and use it anyway. The sky's the limit, really, there's no right or wrong answer except for "do what works for you." For people wanting a library to give them big beautiful orchestral sound for their compositions, it's perfect. For people who have to get it recorded by a real orchestra or prefer the control of manual orchestration, it's not as perfect. For people who need a great sounding scratchpad tool, it's perfect. There's also the factor of a deadline; TV composers will lean on using things like Lumina because it makes getting orchestral sound faster. And TV composers need to write shit fast. There are so many situations to use it, and so many situations not to.

There was never a song that made me want to remix. I got into music out of inspiration from my beloved brother Shariq "DarkeSword" Ansari. When I was little (we're talking like 10 years old), he wrote all kinds of music at home, using Fruity Loops. After I saw him do video game remixes, I basically wanted to copy him and do it too. He and OCR both taught me basic musical concepts (comp and production alike), and then I began college to study music and mathematics, and now I'm here.

I don't think to recommend libraries like that because I personally prefer instrument part-writing by hand (and the ProjectSAM stuff is a lot of multi-patches and tuttis); however, yes, those libraries sound wonderful. Especially Lumina. <3 Can get really beautiful results in minutes if you know what you're doing.

Stepped up on squats YAS

Hey Brad, you got any tips for reseating coolers using that special Arctic Silver thermal remover stuff? I did it a couple weeks ago, because I needed to rotate the Hyper 212 (I put it in facing the graphics card in 2011 for some reason) to unblock the 4th RAM slot (and I was upgrading to 32GB, 4x8GB). I did it, but it was so frustrating that I needed a shower afterwards. Almost spilled the remover into the socket. It kinda dripped off a bit, but with a flashlight and folding some coffee filters, so I was able to dry it. Definitely makes it on the list for most stressful experiences of my life, especially considering that I then had trouble reseating the heatsink with no room to maneuver in the case, and the fact that my RAM slots weren't snapping in the way they were supposed to. I was half convinced I just permanently fucked up my computer and it wouldn't turn on. Imagine my despair when installing CPU-Z made it crash horribly... but then I installed another temp program and it was completely fine (my idle temps were like 28-29, which is about what it was before, so the reseating was a success). I've been bombarding the computer with synths and sample libraries ever since, and so far it's chugging along happily. All's well, but yeah, frustration and lack of AC made that whole upgrade a miserable experience. I had to make sure I wasn't sweat-dripping right into the motherboard... If I ever need to do that again, some advice for making it a smoother process would be welcome.

Thanks Dave! Also excited for Studio One 3.0! (not excited for that lack of lifetime free update policy...)

Yeah, I'm a little confused as to why you think kids have no concept of Zelda or Star Fox... Both franchises have had multiple releases on Nintendo 3DS and Wii, and more coming for Wii U. "Teens react" videos are also stupid as a concept, and you should note that even though 19-year-old "Madison" has never seen an NES in real life, 19-year-old me definitely was familiar with cartridge blowing intricacies. I've also beaten Star Fox 64 at least 50 times.

Use FL Peak Controller to create tighter gates, if you want. If you want to learn how to get a sidechained pad with ghost kick properly, look at the intro of FL 9 demo song "Just Hold On". The flp file should be in "Cool Stuff". He uses a sidechain limiter as well. Take note of how loud the kick is relative to the pad, how "long" the kick sample is, and the attack, release, and threshold/ratio. Right now, I'm not really getting the ghost kick pad vibe from your intro; it simply sounds like a pad with a tremolo effect on it. When it ducks down, it should be near to completely silent, and then rise back up timed to the offbeat (so if you count "1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and", the pad should only be heard during the "and").

Romantic, Impressionist, Anime/Film/Game Scores, Jazz Fusion, Prog Metal To name names, I take a lot of influence from Gundam Build Fighters (Yuuki Hayashi) and Gundam Unicorn (Hiroyuki Sawano) these days. For my softer stuff, I kinda try aspire to people like Howard Shore and Jeremy Soule's compositional mastery. Pretty soon I want to try my hand at the kind of stuff Animals as Leaders makes. All of my electro stuff comes from a mixture of bLiNd and zircon.

They should make a Star Fox ride like the Star Wars Star Tours ride from Disney! Star Tours is probably the best ride I've ever been on in my life. I think I would go on it three times in a row when I was little. Invading Venom tagging along the Star Fox team, getting sucked into a Star Wolf battle, doing Barrel Rolls? That would be the best.

Seems as though there's a sharpness in the side chain compression, giving the duck its own sort of reverse transient. Have you tried playing with attack and release knobs a bit?

Yeah, lack of mod wheel support in FL is not a dealbreaker for me, but it is a huge pain in the ass. I use Studio One if I'm doing orchestral stuff or scoring stuff; it's so much better in terms of MIDI functionality. Automation is freely moveable, cut-able, paste-able, scalable, etc. You can also control multiple MIDI channels at the same time by simply highlighting them. Additionally, you can pull up a small checklist on the side in the piano roll where you can simultaneously view and/or edit multiple tracks at the same time, while still keeping everything in separate tracks in the arrangement view. So yeah, it's completely selective editable ghost notes available for the entire project tracklist. So if I'm writing 4-part string counterpoint, I can just enable the four string tracks and edit away easily being able to plainly spot counterpoint or voicing errors or whatever, without having to switch patterns or collapse all the data into one pattern (I can also just view them, I don't have to have them toggled to be editable). Studio One completely annihilates FL in this one little feature that ends up being a huge workflow advantage. In FL, to pull this off, I have to put all the stuff in one pattern, write my stuff, then expand it back out to separate patterns. Annoying. I use FL for everything else, though, electronic, band genres (metal/rock etc.), jazz, or even sound-oriented ("epic") cinematic stuff because I need better note control (I'm a mouse clicker) control and mixing (S1 is a standard style DAW, so I'm not a big fan of the mixer console design), and FL's piano roll is king (except for the inferior ghost notes). So if you like a powerful mixer and a good piano roll, go FL and don't mind learning the pattern system. It's great for electronic or any other contemporary genre stuff, which is based on repeating sections/clips and standard # measure forms. If you want better audio and MIDI recording/editing functionality, skip FL and go something linear like Studio One, or since you pose Logic as your other option, go Logic.

Careful, that had the potential to be incredibly rude. Moseph hit it on the head; writing string parts and creating string performances are different things. Being a computer composer is about being able to do both, not just the former. Professionally, it's referred to as creating a "mock-up", meaning a computer performance intended to mimic what the real orchestra should sound like. Mock-up creation is all about... well, all the stuff Moseph said. Most if not all the orchestral stuff on OCR is "mock-ups"; I don't think anyone here records their stuff on orchestra (expect a few submissions from video game orchestras? maybe?) Spitfire doesn't have a huge online presence, but it is a very elite sample library company. They even do custom private libraries for professional composers. Of course, everything is top dollar (or top pound, I should say, since they're british).