Jump to content

SJM

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    55

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by SJM

    Does writing music scare you?

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I think my problem may be making too many plans; I seem to enjoy thinking of different ideas and whatnot, rather then spending the time to execute them...

    I also have quite a few ideas written down, that I... want to create once I <have better samples / have a better PC / know more about mixing&mastering / maybe have a bigger audience>...

    99% of what I write comes from pure improvisation.

    I wouldn't say it's like that with me as I do have basic melodies or other elements in my head, but the more interesting and more engaging parts of the things I do are usually the ones where I just play around with a sound and then maybe find a nice meoldy or chord progression - the downside is, quite a few of these parts sound like the simple playing around that they really are...

    On topic, when I got my first few followers on SoundCloud I had this insane fear of releasing tracks - I would ask my family and friends whether this sounded "acceptable" or something, because... what if the people who had followed me there would not like this new track? :S But then again there were some tracks which I personally considered rather bad and others again found amazing, and even though things like these happen rather rarely, I don't want to miss out on an oppurtunity and... well, that defeats the fear for me ;)

    (Hope this all made sense...)

    Orchestral: "Carvahall ~Tales&Trials~

    in Post Your Original Music!

    Posted

    Carvahall ~Tales&Trials~ @ Soundcloud

    A huge orchestral piece - actually the first orchestral track that brought my little laptop to it's limit even though it only uses Sonatina Symphony Orchestra, some other free soundfonts and for the percussion 5$-Garritan-Pocket-Orchestra - so mostly as always, hehe ;)

    The biggest difference is that I tried using seperate instruments for the strings section instead of one big patch this time - but I guess the result makes clear, that I still have a long way to go with orchestrating :)

    The melody at 3:02 (so the third part of this piece) had been spooking around in my head for quite some time and I associated it with the village Carvahall and the tales and trials it goes through in the "Eragon" books, so I kept that name :) The other parts came together while creating the track in a ~7-hour-session.

    Hope you enjoy it and maybe leave me some comments, they really make my day :)

    Soundtrack: "The Artificial Forest"

    in Post Your Original Music!

    Posted

    My second track for Project VGM:

    53 The Artificial Forest

    A forest of artificial trees and plants. The leaves of the trees are blue, the trunks silver and steel, and all plants are covered in veins of pulsating light. These veins run all throughout the forest. The creatures within are mainly robotic versions of animals you expect to see in a forest.

    I started with that basic drone/pad and the drums and enjoyed using nice metallic samples (and the self-recorded ear-wrenching sound of a pump of a boat I was on a few weeks ago) and some other stuff - but listen for yourself :D The track is obviously rather quiet and rather "background-music", but I guess that also kinda fits the game at this point.

    I'm curious to hear what you think now ;)

    Soundtrack: "Crumbling Ruined City of Mur"

    in Post Your Original Music!

    Posted

    After my thread for a WIP of this didn't get any responses, I hope nobody minds if I try once more, but this time with the finished version of the track :D

    http://soundcloud.com/sjmmusic/project-vgm-91-crumbling

    It's a track composed for a fake game soundtrack, and the description I was given is:

    91 Crumbling Ruined City of Mur

    It always seems to raining in this dark, dreary ruin. There are no great structures left in the city to hint at its former greatness. Everything is but a skeletal version of its former self. A hint of evil lingers in the air. Aside from mosses and mushrooms, plants refuse to retake the ruins, and dangerous creatures skulk in the shadows.

    How'd it all start for you?

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I've been growing up in a quite musical family and so I was fascinated by music very soon - I had my first piano lessons at the age of 4 (so about 13 years ago) and until today I love the piano my parents bought for me back then :mrgreen:. Apparently I liked to "compose" back then, too, because I have lot of sheets of paper with hardly recognisable notes on them :smile:

    Well, after maybe 10 years I stopped having regular lessons, although I did have them for a few months a few times ;-)

    One day I found a book in a library entitled "Cubasis für Kids" - it had Cubasis 2.0 Go! on it and I used it to make 30 seconds MIDI files with orchestral ideas I had - all just played back via the standard way... probably something like a simple MIDI wavetable - I don't know :) Either way, here I learned about MIDI/audio and the arranging concept with clips and tracks.

    I don't know what happened earlier, but two events ware important for the final musical phase (=the one I'm currently in): First, I listened to the german ambient electronica artist "Schiller" and I really liked the music, but there was one sound in a piece (

    at 2:20 ) that made my say: "OMG! I need to know about these synthesizers. I wanna make a sound that sounds that amazing, too!". So I started searching the web, found SynthEdit and quickly learned about oscillators, LFOs and envelopes, although I didn't really understand that filter/frequency/compression/etc stuff until I got an reaaaally old book from a library, which was basically teaching you how to use an really old modular synthesizer - but the knowledge about all waves being composited of sine waves and so on still applied, so I learned a lot about all that ;-) I built a "piano" sound and a "string" sound ("the more detuned, the better, right? why not have 32 oscillators?") and since MULAB was the only "free" DAW I found I built two 20 second pieces in it using my great ( ;-) ) synths.

    The second event was seeing somebody I knew start something with propellersomething on his laptop and that laptop was suddenly making cool music that guy created! So I soon started experimenting with Reason and... that was awesome! So this is more or less the "real" start of making music for me ;-) After some time I switched to REAPER, because although Reasons rack was wonderfully flexible, I mostly inserted hundreds of effect plugins instead of really few plugins properly (= sound is too filtered?....Layer yet another Thor over it!) and soon lost control :-D

    So now with REAPER I'm really making music and it's fun and it's rewarding and I can't imagine this "phase" to end yet ;-)

    tl;dr: classical background - different phases on the way to producing music

    Sorry if I wrote too much useless information :???:

    Soundtrack: "Crumbling Ruined City of Mur" Beta 1

    in Post Your Original Music!

    Posted

    This is the first "Beta" version of a track I made for the soundtrack of an imaginary game ( http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36421 ), the description I have to meet is:

    91 Crumbling Ruined City of Mur

    It always seems to raining in this dark, dreary ruin. There are no great structures left in the city to hint at its former greatness. Everything is but a skeletal version of its former self. A hint of evil lingers in the air. Aside from mosses and mushrooms, plants refuse to retake the ruins, and dangerous creatures skulk in the shadows.

    The structuce is rather final, but the sounds, timing and especially the mixing are very... I guess they'll rather hurt the trained ear icon_wink.gif So I think your feedback is needed to let this become a good track icon_biggrin.gif

    http://soundcloud.com/sjmmusic/crumbling-beta1

    Good headphones (~$70 maybe?)

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    If we already have such a track going I thought I might as well ask three questions now instead of starting a new thread later on ;)

    Until now I worked with some 20$ Sennheiser In-Ears, they boosted the bass a little but that was good for what I used them for, listening to music from my iPod on the train and so on. But now they have a loose contact, so trying to listen and work with them is horrible.

    I have already considered buying (more) professional headphones in the price range of the OP, so this would be the perfect time to replace my old earbuds - but I don't know how well these two models SnappleMan suggested would survive being carried around and worn here and there? I don't want to ruin them that fast, so how robust are they? Can I use them for all purposes or should I rather buy some cheaper earbuds for the "everyday use"?

    My second question is, how well do they isolate noises? Because when I listen to music outside, the earbuds I had were great because the isolated the noise very well and when I work on music on my laptop... cooling 90°C temperature is loud, I guess ;)

    And since many seem to suggest the K240, I wanted to ask, is it the Mk1 you mean or are you also referring to Mk2? Is there a sound difference, is Mk2 better or should I go with the lower price of the Mk1?

    Thanks for answers :)

    Rain Tide (Solo Piano)

    in Post Your Original Music!

    Posted

    Subconsciously connecting a lot of musical motifs I created this while enjoying to play Tonehammers/Soundirons Emotional Piano once more - this is just the pure Master Patch's sound; the only thing I did was playing the notes with their velocities and using my drumpad-under-foot-sending-cc-being-converted-to-hold-pedal-cc-pedal ;)

    Rain Tide @ Soundcloud

    One day I will probably let that piano part be accompanied by some strings and winds, but I definitely want to wait for that until I got some better sounds available for that ;)

    So so far you can see the piano part using one of the best piano sounds there are - I hope you enjoy it :)

    Final Fantasy Type-0 Demo

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I don't know anything about the "real" multiplayer, but in the demo you can enable a "ghosts" mode where ghosts with random level join your party for the mission - your party has 3 slots. But you can simply donwload it and try it out or watch videos on YouTube, there are already quite a few up :D

    Final Fantasy Type-0 Demo

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I don't know if this is the right place for threads like this (although the sticky in OffTopic seems to be very straightforward), but I wonder, how many here downloaded the FF Type-0 (was once called Agito) demo from the japanese PSN or the official website and played a little :D

    I don't know any japanese (except for all the katakana-stuff :D), but with some help from the internet you are able to figure most things out - like how to disable the Guests or how this game generally works.

    So after maybe 2 hours of playing (and if I didn't miss anything, having beaten all 4 missions) I have a very positive impression - Type-0 reminds me a lot of Crisis Core, graphics are improved, battle system is improved (and you have multiple characters at once and you can choose whom to control) and music is very, very similar too ;)

    The way I beat the game was rather stupid (mission 3 Shiva in the second half and mission 4 Shiva all the way :D), so I guess I will still play around with all the characters. And theres still these summer costumes to find, although the non-JP-version of the final game probably won't benefit from collecting them for the JP full version.

    tl;dr: Type-0 demo released today, has anybody played it, too and what is your opinion?

    REAPER 4 is out

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    The title says it :D

    http://reaper.fm

    For a full feature list you better check the site, but the new things I remember are:

    - WALTER -> fully skinnable and customizable GUI

    - Project Bay

    - Mouse Modifiers

    - ReaSurrond

    - More flexible rendering options (wildcards etc.)

    I've been following it since early alpha versions and IMO WALTER really helps Reaper to look (and thus feel) a lot more "professional". Has anybody else been going with the alphas, betas and rc's? And how many happy Reaper users are on this forum anyway? :D

    Problems with multiple SFZ player plug-ins?

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Do you mean sfz or sfz+?

    If you mean sfz, I can't remember any problems with it (I'm also a REAPER user), in this case you might try using sfz+ (free as well) instead.

    And if you meant sfz+, I can't use multiple instances with it either, so you will have to use up all the 16 channels of that single instance - you can route things nicely in REAPER, so other tracks can send their midi into the sfz+-track and recieve their audio from there (although you have to enable "allow feedback routing" in the project settings).

×
×
  • Create New...