ectogemia

get ready for full circle

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. We can make a team name whenever. I suggest The Hard Men. The competition is boned.

So like... you're going to tell the audience at a performance to chill out for a minute while you sequence your solo and humanize it? I'll grant you that you can do a pretty serviceable job humanizing a sequenced passage by hand, but there's still plenty of utility to be had from a MIDI controller of some sort...

I sent neko a PM yesterday afternoon. No response yet :/

ZING-O. Some days, I don't feel like writing music. BOOM, piano. That's why it's "worth it" to play an instrument.

I think Ben and I nabbed neko? I think??????

The cross-panning on that phasing synth in the opening 0:40 was pretty dizzying on headphones. I'm not sure if that's what you were going for, but it made me feel a little sick, hah. I'm not a huge fan of the dirty bass percussion in the opening, but that's just personal preference. The transition around 0:48 was very cool, good build. What came after was awesomely energetic. There were some slightly harsh highs (so I thought) in the final section of the song. It was either the snare or that chiffing percussive instrument that accompanies the snare. Overall, I liked it

Ah, well, they really aren't all that ambient in my opinion. They're definitely chill-out ish, though. Ambient? Try Treasure (AKA David Helpling & John Jenkins). Each of those guys also has solo work that's pretty badass. That's my go-to ambient project. Actually, now that I think about it, you should check out Hammock if you're looking for something like God Is An Astronaut. Hammock is ambient + some guitars & the occasional washed out, unintelligible vocals. Beautiful stuff.

Theophany's "Avien" is a recently posted one that is VERY good. It isn't at all like God Is An Astronaut. It's much more somber and abstract. And dude... doesn't God Is An Astronaut have a lot of instruments besides synths going on?

Here's the project file for this particular wip. Sorry I didn't load Sagescape in there. Perhaps I'll do that later today or tomorrow. You can see some little nuances in the chip lead sequencing later in the mix and how I glitched the guitar and such. edit: and here's Sagescape

You and me both. The internet turns people into feral children. I agree with this so much. After learning a lot of music simply from improvising, I STILL found I was useless with FL Studio. Only after both honing my musical chops AND analyzing other projects files to learn how a piece of electronic music comes together within the program used to create was I able to create my own. Having so many musicians I look up to here on OCR has been sooooo helpful in developing my musicianship and production. I can't even tell you how many project files I've gotten from awesome people here (ok, I can... like 30-40). And real-time help from pros like zircon on IRC can't be beaten.

... right... that was my point. My music sounded good, but its presentation was poor. Rather, someone could be an excellent producer and a poor musician yet still produce impressive mixes by riding on their production capabilities. In most cases unless quite extreme, the music will be the first to impress both others and yourself which is why I pursued it in the first place. As for OP, if he is as lost as he says he is, he should focus more on, um, not really focusing at all. He should experiment with all sorts of things more to become familiar with the tools at hand both musically and digitally to be able to know exactly where he should direct his efforts.

That all depends upon your goals. I focused on composition at first, and I found that I lacked in production, and that ate away at me. Had I focused on production at first, I would have lamented the lack of progress in my compositional chops. Fact: if you're going to write music in a sequencer, you need to wear the hats of both an audio engineer and a composer. It doesn't matter in what order you learn the roles, but whatever your natural propensities for each happen to be should dictate which you pursue first.

You made this in a day? Oh, wait, LESS than a day? Amazing. Really, when this popped up on my shuffle, I thought I was listening to some awesome fusion group I didn't know I had. I took a look at my iPod and saw it was zircon and I pooped my pants a little. This is for sure in my top 10 mixes.

I thought I was doing it right... regardless, this guy enabled video games, so I respect him in life and in death.

Well, there are a couple of ways. One is that I use the magical8bit vst and tweakbench's triforce vst. Another one I commonly use is the Peach SOUNDFONT, not the vst. As such, it's treated as a native instrument by FL Studio, so I can use all the piano roll tricks to manipulate the sound. The other way is to use a synth like 3xOsc (again, nice because it is native to FL & allows for fun piano roll madness) and just make a nice, simple waveform and EQ it and process it a bit to make it mix well. 3xOsc doesn't allow for pulse wave modulation, so you'll have to use some other synth to make pulse leads. You can, however, make simple square leads, and you can even do NES chorusing by generating two square waves and slightly detuning each. This should sound like the intro to Zelda. For maximum purity, don't use stereo detune, but because it's 2011... go ahead and use stereo detune if it's available Anyway, the EQing just about always requires removing some of the highs to get rid of the buzzy sound & make it more smooth. It's usually good to add a LITTLE distortion/overdrive for leads. A small about of reverb and delay in that order never hurts either to add some width & circumvent that thinness you were talking about. In some of my mixes, Sagescape for instance, the chippiness comes from a lot of careful sequencing to get the chippy feel. I can't really explain how to do that, but there are some common little rhythmic and melodic motifs you can utilize in a sequencer to accomplish a glitchy, chippy sound. I could send you a project file or two if you're interested so you can get a feel for how I sequenced these things.

Sweet, can't wait to check out those soundtracks. Actually, I'm sort of a pianist. I don't fudge most of my compositions; I actually kind of know what I'm doing! And truth be told, 90% of my musicality comes from all the improvisation and playing by ear (getting damn good at that...) that I've done over the past year and a half, so I'm with you there on just playing what you like til you get something out of it. Truth be told, I didn't know how to do any of the glitching in that Katamari-inspired song until I wrote it. Experimentation is awesome My production, semi-amateurish as it may be, comes from experimentation, hanging out with Benjamin Briggs and halc (champions, the both of them), and a little bit of technical nonsense I've learned from Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman. Very good read, very concise.

Hmmm, Shenmue and Okami soundtracks, eh? Looks like I'll need to procure those ASAP. Never played either. Sorry, I suck with terminology. By saying the guitars were "line in," you meant that they were recorded, correct? And Debussy is my faaaaaaaaaaavorite classical dude He pretty much wrote the book on the chords I use. Any theory books/resources you could recommend? I'd really like to ramp up my self study in that area.

too-shay.

Well, I tried at least. Last time I programmed was like 14 years ago QBASIC text adventures are the zenith of creativity.

10 Print "HA" GOTO 10 My god, are we all nerds here on OCR or what?

Aspiring video game composer? Shit, you've got the job. Just when I think I'm starting to get pretty alright, someone like you comes along and puts everything in perspective VERY eclectic. Those piano samples are incredible, especially the ones in Advert 2. What are you using? Same goes for the distorted guitar samples in Visual Novel Teaser. And last question: what kind of training do you have? I hear some VERY strong classical music influences throughout. edit: Eh, I should probably add some critiques in anyway. Praise is nice, but it's not so constructive The problem is that I was enjoying what I was hearing so much, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the details. In general, however, I did notice that most tracks tended to sound synthetic. Obviously, that's no biggie in electronic music, but in sequencing orchestral or acoustic parts, it's critical. You've nailed composition; now, focus on production. Also, the piano pieces were all somewhat robotic, although well put-together.

Bumped because it's updated and no one critiqued it, waaaaaaahh.

Fall break --> sweet, sweet free time --> write music Enoy & critique, please! **inspired by Katamari + Anamanaguchi... now you get the name.

Sorry again, guys. I kinda feel like a dbag ditching you like that! Just kick my ass in the compo, and all karma will be realized