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.

Got my codes and finally listened to Remedy and Esuna; they're great! I'm very excited for Reiki.

Oh, my bad - wasn't paying attention to which subforum this thread was in

Try turning up the gain of that channel on your interface, but obviously leave some headroom (I usually leave somewhere between 12 and 18 dB of headroom from the loudest sound I can replicate during sound check, since that can be different from how you play during recording, and plugins/effects can add gain). If that isn't working for you, change the gain with a gain control plugin and/or use a limiter. Does your interface use latency-free direct monitoring? I turned it off on my interface because I like to record with amp/effect-modeling plugins, and having the clean guitar coming in only in my left ear while hearing the final sound gets a bit annoying. It also comes in a few ms before the sound from my DAW, which may be what you're noticing. Record into your DAW as a mono track from input 1 (I'm assuming the left input on your interface is input 1). Usually when you add a new track to record, the option is there either as a popup when you create the channel, or on the channel's options.

Those liquid preamps... so freaking awesome

Hah, I was going to say it sounds a lot more impressionistic than romantic, but you beat me to it. ORTF stereo pair is applicable to just about everything. Gives tracks a sense of space without having to use a stereo imager. Awesome work. This needs to be in my Winamp library yesterday.

Haha it is, in a good way. I found after rereading the bolded parts I understood where you were coming from and what exactly you were asking better. Not in time for my initial reply, but glad it'll help. Best of luck!

VST's are software plugins, so it's something you can download. Some companies that sell VST's do indeed require an external key-storage device like an iLok, but that's usually just for when you start spending upwards of like $100 on a plugin. Even then, most of them don't require any kind of physical device. I guess after rereading your original post, if you're only interested in doing piano work then you probably don't need a sequencer. With sequencers it can become unnecessarily complicated to do simple things like tempo changes, since almost everything done in sequencers is usually locked into time. You can always use Pro Tools as a host for your VST's, which actually isn't so bad. Pro Tools only really falls short when you want to quantize and edit MIDI sequences, but you can still work with it. Edit: Yeah, what Moseph said.

Hmm.... I can't find any with good production. This one has a some clipping for most of it, but you can hear parts where the production is good enough that you can hear that the preamp isn't bad. You could also wait and ask theshaggyfreak about his thoughts on it and see if he's recorded anything with it..

TBH I don't really know anything about the headphones or the mic. Although assumption is usually bad, in the case of spending money on music gear, I assume something is not good until I hear someone say something good about it. That said, if those headphones are your first set of studio headphones, you'll probably notice a difference between your regular speakers or headphones and these ones, but it may not be huge. Can't say anything about the mic - I don't really know. I guess it boils down to this (and this is only recommendation coming from gear-hoarding experience) - if you plan on pursuing this hobby more and more in the future, I'd hold off on the headphones and mic for now and save up for something better. These are some alternatives that I DO know about, have used, and recommend (not saying you shouldn't get the package, since I don't really know about it). - You can find decent large diaphragm condensers for under $100 US (Audio Technica ATH 2020/2035 are the first to come to mind). Large diaphragm condensers are great - they're versatile, and usually the best mic to start your collection with. Some people go with the dynamic Shure SM57 first (also just under $100 US), which is also pretty standard for micing guitars and other applications. I don't own one, but I've used it and it sounds pretty good. - You can use cheap Sony studio headphones for the time being (they're what, like $15 US? and they sound pretty freaking good for $15 - model is something like MDR-XD1000) while you save up for something good down the road (personal favorite is AKG K240, ~$100 US). Even then you should be able to get some mileage out of these headphones, unless you already have pretty good headphones. - As for the DAW, you're already using FL Studio. That leaves you with roughly $210 if you get the Sony headphones, or $125 if you get the AKG (if i'm converting correctly) in your budget for an interface. That is, if you don't get used gear. Used gear is awesome. It's cheap and (usually) still works 100%. Don't get used headphones though... some people have pretty gross heads. Just a note, I know people that use the Sony headphones for their actual work. Not necessarily the headphones of choice, but definitely good enough.

As long as the interface you get has instrument level inputs, you're golden. Pretty much all interfaces with preamps on them (a telltale sign is if it has XLR and 1/4" combi inputs) can act as DI for guitars. The main selling point of the pod is the software it comes bundled with - other than that, it's not really unique as a standalone interface. You can also look at a few M-Audio boxes - M-Audio Fast Track - http://www.zzounds.com/item--MDOFSTRKMK2 M-Audio MobilePre - http://www.zzounds.com/item--MDOMOBILEPREV2 I usually try to stay away from PreSonus, but other people like them so I'll put this here too http://www.zzounds.com/item--PRSAUDIOBOX In this price range, the difference in the electronics isn't going to be that huge, so your best bet is still probably the ART usb interface that theshaggyfreak suggested. If you do have the extra cash though, I'd go for the M-Audio MobilePre. M-Audio makes some decent-sounding preamps, and having 2 XLR inputs goes a really long way (rule of thumb a professor of mine goes by is if you need more than 2 mics and it's not drums, you're doing it wrong).