Calum

here's a really quite cinematic track I did recently. The melody is resembles to Zanarkand which a bit. My favourite part is the middle section where we get a little ethnic. Hollywood can go away!

hmm, i see - no thank you!

ah I suspected so! Hmm, well i'll give it a lot of thought.

Is this for an apple desktop? I'd like to stay using logic But it sounds amazing. All of these are a bit far away from me right now but thanks for all the suggestions in a year or two I shall see these through and have wonderfully a powerful system!

Saw this too! Anyone got any suggestions out of the options they have there?

Hmm, yes. I always thought this would be an issue. I see this as a sort of inevitable purchase for what I want to do and although i'm very early in my "career" 20 years young and only working on projects for free as experience, why not get it now? I can see myself being frustrated by limitations but it is a great tool and i've got money saved up for nothing I'd like more than this. I think I'll go for a Macbook Pro with extra RAM for the next purchase which will no doubt be a long way away. Would you suggest a desktop? Perhaps this would be more powerful and cheaper? Or have more customisation options? These are all quite far but not super far future considerations as i'm conscious of not getting my set-up ahead of my needs which right now are probably satisfied.

is there an email address i can send it to?

Hey we discussed my track being lost in its state due to broken laptops. Shall I import the mp3 I have and export it as a wav and send it to you? That sounds counterintuitive, is it my only option? Seems so. That is assuming, it is up to the standard. Is it? As altercations simply can't happen at this stage.

it is, for now, my only option. is it bare-able? Or would you suggest not making the purchase until I have a computer with larger RAM capacity?

Mmm, I will have to adapt! Thanks Moseph, this has been really helpful.

Hmm, you see what i was trying to say is that we are always visually engaged. If you need entertaining - or one might say "distracting" - then perhaps you don't enjoy the music. Music written specifically for a video, probably after the video was made, is different and excusable. By saying that 'some instrumentals need an active story' you suggest that someone has written this boring instrumental music which needs some kind of visual entertainment to make it bare-able! Would the case not be that the composer/or whoever wrote the music because they are aware that images need "room to breathe". Rather than it being the case that boring music needs images to make it acceptable, is it not the case that the images need music that will not distract from their function? If there is any music which has been written to be played on its own but is only "good" when it is accompanied by a video, then perhaps this music is just plain boring! I don't know of many songs which fall into this category and if i do, i quickly forget about them cos they are BORING! As zircon said on another thread, this isn't really the right place for this topic... i would love for someone to move this topic to the relevant place - off-topic or something - if that's possible as i think this is an interesting thread!

thanks for comforting me, maybe someday i'll see the light as you do! ah, i'm jus' kidding. hurry up and respond on your music and video thread, i'm interested to hear your opinion.

oh wait hold up! I meant the first one! haha, nope i don't like that remix very much at all.

here's a quote: "If you're in a room and a record is playing and the window is open and there's some breeze and a curtain is blow- ing, that's sufficient, it seems to me, to produce a theatrical experience.” Do you close your eyes when you go to a concert? If so do you visualise whilst listening? I'm doing an essay right now on how the engagement of both the eye and the ear in music and theatre, so this counts as work. Me personally, I would say it depends on the video. But by stating that music is lonely without a video, you suggest that there is an essential pure ultimate state which all music must strive to which is this audiovisual coupling? Do you believe that music is "made to be" with video? I may be more visually stimulated by the performers on stage, what is behind my eye, my computer screen as I listen on itunes, a music video (though i think it's a seriously untapped and boring as well medium - performance videos or weird vague narratives - the video never really interacts with any of the songs meanings). Any of the listed. Obviously I look for what visually has some kind of critical intent or is in some way attempting to engage with me but staring out of the window with your ipod on may and often is far more visually satisfying/engaging than most music videos. Uh, that could be more succinct or thought out but i'm tired... what are your thoughts?

So by sequenced you mean repetitive? Where someone finds a phrase with whatever instrument and then loops it non-stop - as in the second example. Are there lots of songs like this? In kind of cliche remix fashion, the second song simply has a big ole beat and bass line that keep on repeating but that's because of the genre. I don't know what your problem is or the point you're making? Isn't this what you would expect? I think there is far more music that is like the first "non-sequenced" song - the background piano accompaniment and much of the drums are "looped" and repeated the whole way through though. I agree that the second is more interesting, at least to me. Yeah, film music can be "freeflow", music with an explicit rhythmic pulse may be distracting in certain scenes. And mickey mousing is a technique which is sometimes used. I don't really know how relevant these statements are but sure I accept what you're saying!

ah longer loading times, perhaps I can deal with this. But will USB destroy my CPU? I am having CPU problems right now without mammoth sample libraries to deal with! Is USB merely for accessing the files and loading, not the processing which will be reliant on my RAM? I think things are starting to make sense now...

ha, well I took a little look at the ports, saw their little symbols and thought "hey, i don't know what these mean" but google image gave me their names! Right... it looks like a firewire port simply ain't gonna happen! SO, if i run EWQL from a external via USB 2.0 even with 4GB RAM, will it suffer dramatically more than with firewire? To be honest, i don't really know how you'd know the answer to this specific question, but perhaps you could offer some informed insight.

OK! The ports i have are: charger port, gigabit ethernet, mini DVI, 2 USBs and headphone, according to google images. So just to make sure, neither a "gigabit ethernet" nor a "mini DVI" will allow for any kind of firewire or anything that will make things faster? Even upgrading my RAM from 2GB to 4GB but still connecting via USB 2.0, will my performance suffer? There is a possibility that i may whack everything on my internal drive onto the 1TB external and drive the sounds via the internal, thus getting rid of this problem but that may bring up many other problems for using my laptop in general outside of EWQL performing well!

I do not want 200+GB of piano samples! Your suggestion sounds pretty much what I need. I prefer to play live guitars anyway and don't often use "live sounding" drums or bass - stormdrum 2 covers all that i need on that front and acoustic or electric bass is not something i'm in desperate need of. Yep, i'm pretty sure USB 2.0 is my only option right now unless I seek out some kind of adapter for another format. Thanks for all your help, I was just going to go for the default which, at least relying on your suggestions, seems like a choice i'd rather not make!

Hey, I really enjoy this. It's such great source material. I think the whole thing could just be beefed up a little. It sounds a little empty - if it had an organ playing in the background for instance. I think the arrangement is pretty good - you switch up the style a few times though none of the actual material is changed in terms of harmony and melody, well not explicitly. But that's not a must! I enjoyed this but feel as though it could just do with something to fill it out a bit more.

I can see how the voices of passion may be a little limited - i watched a few tutorials in which some notes trigger phrases rather than the notes you play... I'm not a huge fan of these. Plus ethnic instruments don't make me feel like an ignorant western hypocrit but ethnic voices somehow do. I was under the impression that the wordbuilder was part of voices of passion but it is infact with the choirs bundle, i think that may have swayed it for me. Plus solo singers are a lot easier to come by than choirs!

you might react to those things in a way that makes you unhappy and thus makes those things the agents of this unhappiness. I'm just feeling a bit zen and thinking 'bad' is a bit 'bad'.

@Neblix I have a new macbook (d'oh!) which doesn't have, according to one forum i just looked at a few minutes ago, a firewire or eSATA port! I'm glad to hear about the 1TB hard drive that comes with it. Perhaps this is a silly question but are some USB cables faster than others? Or are they all the same? Yeah I'm defo planning on upgrading to 4GB. How about goliath? I'm going to get stormdrum 2 + symphonic orchestra + probably choirs + ethnic packages but i'm not so sure about how useful pianos gold will be and am slightly tempted by voices of passion... Choirs + voices of passion seems a little excessive... do you know if there's much overlap or is this not a bad choice at all? Thanks for the info. @Moseph I reckon I will give the external drive a go, although as i've said to neblix my macbook does not support either firewire or eSATA, though i'm sure there is some kind of adapter I could get, perhaps i should look into this. But if external is infuriatingly slow/crashy i'll have to make some serious room on my internal! Yeah, i mean short of being a choir director or profesh singer myself, I feel I know quite a bit about how choirs work and so would be able to use them but voices of passion entices me more. I'm the kind of person that doesn't want to miss out on something! So I'd be tempted to get both voices of passion AND the choirs bundle. As I said to neblix, do you know if there's much overlap? I'm interested in orchestral + ethnic sounds really - Okami soundtrack kind of stuff! Stormdrum seems like a must! Thanks

Cats are very popular in Japan!

Hmm, OK! I don't know what a firewire is and i don't have one but I assume from brief googling that they make things go faster - sounds like a plus! I could always transfer other stuff to an external hard-drive to get space for EWQL on my internal - however i think it might nearly take up the whole thing... hmm well it has 250GB i think so perhaps I will be able to get enough stuff that wouldn't mind being run off an external to give me room for EWQL but it might not be ideal. Running off a disc - does this make it faster than off the internal harddrive or does it just mean that you don't have to take up loads of space loading it all onto the harddrive? Thanks for the info. I'll look into the specs of PLAY 3. This will probably be a purchase some time in the near future as I'm quite happy with the stuff I have right now. Got any preferences on the individual packages - symphony orchestra gold/pianos gold/goliath/stormdrum 2/Ra etc. ?