skewered logic

ffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu why couldn't this have happened before i got sick of smash because nobody wants to play melee with me anymore

hahaha awesome review! that song will haunt me now every time i replay ff9 and do hot&cold

haha well i'm not really surprised - i mean, we obviously have no public presence i'm actually pretty amazed that we got to play on the second stage at mag this year

we had some friends record us with one of our phones... but nothing is being done with it yet. other than that i don't know if anyone else took video of us. i'll talk to the guy with the video to see if we can get that moving

ahahaha killer studio chops shirts? how did i not see anyone wearing those

damn, you did good haha it's all good, naturally magfest isn't all about the games and music. it could never be what it is without the people to share it with, so it's great that you got to chill with at least some of the people you wanted to see (plus i made some pretty weird mistakes)

battlecake, i'm the guitar player i basically followed rellik everywhere

well, that was fun saturday night was pretty interesting, but met a few people in all the shenanigans also felt great to play for an audience that knows what the hell is going on

thank god i was pretty sick at mag 8

so umm... i wrote this song back in like 2004 or something like that (idk, it was like my freshman or sophomore year of high school?). i recorded it with what limited knowledge i had a couple years ago, and have since lost all of the session files and such. this is the result of using two microphones to record vocals, tenor sax, guitars, bass, and drums and my mixing capabilities of the time. i'm only really posting this for amusement, since i have no plans of mixing this song again unless i go through the hassle of recording it again. i am aware that there is clipping in the final chorus, there's a lot of weird mixing going on, and much of the performance leaves some to be desired. this isn't for critique - again, just for amusement. all instruments and vocals recorded live by yours truly. http://soundcloud.com/skewered-logic/myspace-romance

so i know this isn't an original, but it definitely doesn't fit into the video game music remix genre. it's a cover of birthday boys by oysterhead. you can ignore the performance aspect - there are mistakes all over the place. i'm more concerned with the mixing - i'm having some issues with the way it sounds right now - particularly with the eq on the lead voice, and the end where there are 5 voices concurrently. i did change a bit of the eq on the last section to eliminate some of the crowding that was going on (since it's all my voice, so the formant frequencies are all the same). i'm a hardware junkie, but when it comes to actually mixing the stuff i record, i'm a total amateur. any suggestions are welcome. http://soundcloud.com/skewered-logic/birthday-boys

DR MT-10 (10-46) on my SG. I used to try a lot of strings, and these just happen to be my preference. I use the green Dunlop Tortex picks (0.88mm) but I just got a package in my university mailbox which I think is my two Red Bear picks. (heavy Big Jazzer Plus, which is a slightly larger version of the Jazz III picks since I can't use small picks for the life of me, and a medium Classic II Plus pick, which is a bit closer to the Tortex picks I'm used to). I guess I'll be finding out how awesome they are. Thanks again to Fishy for the recommendation.

I used to use the green Dunlop Tortex picks (0.88 mm)... they sounded pretty good paired with my favorite strings (DR MT-10), but then I switched to slightly smaller and thicker nylon picks with a sharper edge. I can play a lot faster with a lot more control and the attack and sustain haven't changed in a particularly bad way, but the smaller size did take some getting used to. Personally, I was never able to get used to the Jazz III's - they're just so tiny and my picking style is pretty ungainly. For lead work though... holy crap those picks are freaking fast and the attack is really light and they're just awesome. Now I'm seriously considering buying a one or two of these Red Bear picks; looks like a great sharp edge, there are holes for grip, it looks like good size, and they're made from faux-tortoiseshell (it won't bend!!!!!). I'm very interested in hearing more personal reviews about these new tortis picks - let us know if there are any new developments you discover about it from playing with it.

What Gario and IBBIAZ said are probably the best tips anyone has ever given me. When I (formally) learned solfege in high school, my teacher taught us to listen to intervals and associate them with popular songs and jingles (P4 is "here comes the bride", P5 is star wars, M6 is the first two notes of ABC or NBC chime... I forget which *BC it is, etc.). It also helps if you adapt this to your own methods of learning. Taking myself as an example, I visualize everything in my head as a picture/shape. Being primarily a guitarist, whenever I hear an interval, I associate it with some kind of shape that the interval makes on the neck of the guitar. For the piano, it has helped me greatly to shift my way of viewing notes from strictly notes to seeing them more as intervals from each other, and then seeing each as a kind of line or shape with particular distances. Then just practice while thinking about all this forever. It'll become natural eventually. Again - association, association, association.

Personally not a huge fan of the overall guitar tone, but that's just my opinion. That synth in the beginning is still struggling to be heard - and when it reprises later in the song I barely notice that it's there (and I only notice it because of the filter effect you put on it, which occasionally brings it to harmonic center-stage). I also hear some distortion (hah, not the guitar tone). By all means, feel free to limit to -3, but you have to keep in mind that you can still get distortion in your tracks when you overload the limiter with gain. I would lower everything and then use the limiter on your master to raise the overall volume to an acceptable level. If it's cutting more than like... 0.3 - 0.5 dB, your levels are too high or your threshold is too low, pick one. It's a finesse tool, not a hack and slash tool.