ectogemia

I just finished the first book, and now I'm considering supplementing that with the series, AKA want to be entertained while seeing lots of medieval tits. So how do the timelines of the book series and TV series parallel? What episodes would I be safe to watch having only ready the first book??

Again, you are my favorite musician, Shnab. Here, there, everywhere. Make an FM album ;o

BAAL RUNS???????????? You mean Meph runs? Gawd, Meph runs consumed a solid third of my childhood.

All I want to do is spam hammers. Can I spam hammers?

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. The game kinda plays itself. You just point your character in the general direction you want to go and double-tap A whenever you see an enemy. gg, u win. After a childhood full of JRPGs, I got super sick of the stagnant genre and moved on. Several years later, I decided to give this game a try because of the rave reviews. What a piece of crap. Totally agreed.

Oh my god, I remember I got some VHS from Nintendo Power with gameplay footage of Super Mario 64. I must have been 7 years old. First boner. Right there. Haha, YES!!!!!!! A friend of mine was playing this when I stayed the night. I'd actually never really heard of it at the time, and I was really skeptical of the PS2 back then being the graphics Luddite that I am. Within, oh, 30 seconds of watching him play, I dropped my anti-PS2 bias and had one of the most fun gaming experiences of my life. I sold so many old games so that I could afford a PS2, just so I could buy GTA3. Jesus, that game was fun, and it's still by far the best GTA. I haven't played it in years. Did it age well? Oh, and the nostalgia in this thread is fantastic

Probably when I discovered emulation. I was a huge VG nerd starting from birth with the NES (still by far my favorite console and the one I play the most today), but I couldn't have all the games I wanted. I remember setting up a lemonade stand on my driveway so damn many times in an attempt to afford new SNES games one dime at a time, bought from Funcoland, no less... remember that place? Right after Super Mario RPG came out, purchase funded by MinuteMaid lemonade 100% from concentrate, a friend of mine told me about emulators. Shit, I think I must have been 7, maybe 8, years old. I spent SO much time over the next several years playing all the games I could never afford. I turned into a HUGE RPG buff, although I really can't stand the genre at all anymore. That's also kinda what kicked off my interest in music. Nobuo Uematsu's and Keiichi Suzuki's music really stood out as something special, and being that I was taking piano lessons at the time, I started to play some of their sheet music. In any case, yeah, emulation. It opened up a ton of new doors for me 'til outright pirating opened up more

Weeee, I'll do GenCon. I've never been, but I'm kind of a board game nerd, and I've heard they test and debut a lot of games there. I'm down. And it's like 10 minutes from my apartment. When is it anyway? Too lazy to google.

10/10. lol'd for real. I used to troll my friends all the god damn time with that. Uhhh, my picks.. hmm.. well, I'm not a big Sonic buff, so I'm not that familiar with the music. I guess for now I'll do: 1. TBA Zone 2. TBA Act 2 3. TBA Radical! 4. TBA Adventure 2: Battle 5. TBA Pinball Yeah, so if someone drops out, I'll just take their natural pick

Welp, I was thinking that I wouldn't have time to do this, and I probably don't, but fuck time. It ain't shit. So against my better judgment, as long as there's still an opening in the compo, I'm in. ... is there still an opening in the compo?

I bought "Jazz Improvisation 1: Tonal and Rhythmic Principles" by John Mehegan a month or so ago, and it's been insanely helpful in getting me to stop thinking about writing tonal harmonies and start thinking simply about the harmonic quality I'm shooting for. Even if you're not looking to learn jazzy harmony, just going through the first 75 or so pages of the book will teach you a lot of (perhaps) new ways to approach chords outside of using the typical ones in a single scale. Caveat: the book is fairly rare and commensurately expensive.

Agreed. I'd write a ton less music if I forced myself to write only preconceived ideas, and for a few months, this is what I did. It was unpleasant, unproductive,and nothing else. Nowadays, I usually have a tone or mood I aim to set, then I go from there. Occasionally, particularly fun keyboard improvs will serve as the seed bit around which I'll write the rest of the tune, but yeah, it's generally just writing by feel.

Ahhh, gotcha now. Much clearer. Thanks for the clarification. I'll fiddle with stuff and see how it all sounds. Agreed that I need to do something to the percussion.

Damn it, Rozo, I'm never sure if you're being sarcastic In any case... ...No need to stay in a scale as long as the results are aesthetically pleasing, and they are. Plus, if I changed that second note in the bells, it wouldn't be the Song of Time anymore. Drums are a bit heavier than I intended them to be, although I did want them to be strong in the midst of the rest of the mix which is decidedly reserved. I wrote and mixed what I have so far on my headphones. Having just listened to this the first time on speakers, I gotta say that I really didn't intend the kick to be so damn bassy D: What did you mean by: ?Not sure I'm getting what you identified as an issue here. As always, your feedback is appreciated!

Hah, weird. I do the same thing. I usually come up with a seed idea, flesh out a phrase of music completely with percussion, pads, melody, harmony, etc., then build ad lib on either side of it. Because I'm a creepy-ass stalker, I thought I remembered reading somewhere that you said you create most of your pieces sequentially; beginning to end. Do you really just kinda wing it all straight from nothing and develop a piece from the intro to the outro all by improv? I can't even imagine doing that... that's pretty impressive. Intros are usually how I finish writing a tune

School has been a tit, so it's been a while since I've worked on anything but originals. I finally had a little time tonight to revisit a remix from a while ago because my fiance fell asleep most fortuitously and unexpectedly. So here's what I have goin' so far for this Fairy Fountain and Zelda's Lullaby remix with a sprinkling of the Song of Time for harmony. Ignore weird sustained note at 0:51. LINKU How u like?

Balance and instrumentation. I have a smallish set of instruments that I've become comfortable with, and I struggle to realize the ideas in my head when I venture beyond them. On the flip side, when I experiment with new sounds, I always produce my best tunes. Level balance, though, is a battle I'll just never win :/

Well, shit. I lusted after a huge Marshall cab back in my guitar days. Second only to Mesa Boogie. A loss, indeed D:

Welp, there's some stickied threads on the forums here that will serve you well. I bought a book called "Dance Music Manual" that was pretty decent, although I haven't relied on it very heavily, perhaps just a bit when I first started, though. Google and Youtube are your greatest assets for taking the plunge. There are a lot of things to learn, and you just have to attack them one by one. After that, talking to better producers than yourself and asking for feedback, tips, and their methods will be most productive. Of course, you have to experiment. Having been involved in science-y shit for so long, I came into composing music thinking that there was some magic method, some repeatable formula that could be applied to produce a tune. Nope. A lot of it is learning about the tools themselves and then applying the tools to your unique piece of music *AS NEEDED* to get the sound you want. And then you have to listen critically to other artists' tracks to really get a feel for what that sound actually is and what they're doing on the mixing side that you aren't. Just as a starter, you need to learn about leveling, EQing, panning, stereo-imaging, single-band compression, multiband compression, and limiting for the basics. Maybe toss a little reverb in there, too, since it's used to ubiquitously and misused almost as much (I'm still learning to rein in my reverb). There are a slew of additional mastering tools that I haven't really cracked into much yet like, say, harmonic exciters. Again, just learn about what I've listed, and you can put out a pretty decent-sounding mix, although it might take several months of experimentation to pin down how to manipulate each aspect of basic mixing effectively. Reading will absolutely help to clarify what tools are available, but experimentation with the tools once you know what they do is ultimately how everyone learns to use them.

Not hard to beat. yeah.

I've never heard that track because I've never gotten to that stage and never will.

Yeah, I've been listening to this guy right around the time he popped up on youtube, and I still listen to him years later. SO. GOOD. He was a huge inspiration for me to learn how to improvise and compose, perhaps the biggest.

Getting a cohesive lead from many layers can require some experimentation with different ways of layering the leads if they're not being very tractable, but I've found that so long as you EQ them judiciously and level the volume as needed, layers tend to come together just fine. A lead with lots of reverb will probably succeed in a more minimal soundscape as verbing the lead in a busy piece will push it far into the mix. Try layering different patches or samples together, perhaps at different octaves or processed differently, to create a unique timbre. If the synth you're using is flexible enough, maybe throw in some oscillators + processing all on the same patch that all have very unique characteristics. I make pads this way. Just throw in some LFOs, filters, envelopes, etc. Twiddle knobs pretty much at random until it sounds good. Nice and simple. And there's nothing wrong with using or adjusting presets for leads. If you think your leads sound "presettish" then fiddle with the preset more. Run the patch through a bitcrusher. Sample the lead and edit the audio (my new favorite technique for just about everything). Put an LFO on the filter. There's a lot of things you can do to take a stock sound and make it interesting.

Cover = your best imitation to reproduce the original piece itself verbatim. ReMix = a word this site uses to describe an arrangement of the original piece; taking ideas from the original piece and reconstructing them into something new that still hearkens strongly to the source. remix = traditionally uses samples (direct source audio clips; e.g. .wav file) + original material to take elements of a source piece and put it into a completely different musical context.