ectogemia

Thank you! It's supposed to be repetitive to some degree, but you're probably right that it may be a little too repetitive. One bassline pattern chopped a few different ways, one drum pattern with a couple of fills, one chord progression, one pad... eh, but it does its job well enough I think. Hopefully the automation and solos vary it up enough.

I burned myself out on guitar I played metal about 6 hours a day for several months. My chops went through the roof, but man... I get joint pain just smelling a guitar these days. I can't even tell you how much I regret that I didn't do a music program. My biology coursework was cool for all of three semesters, then the rest of college was just this weak internal "debate" if such a one-sided self-dialog could be called that where I'd stand at my apartment door and stare at my NES trying to decide if physiology or Jimmy and Bimmy were more important. Seconds later, I'd be kicking ass, and it wasn't in a lecture hall. Most of what I got out of my degree was loose bits of Latin so I could construct pretentious names for things... hence "Ectogemia". Yay!

And again, thanks for the feedback! That's the grand-daddy of all triplets, the triplet 16th note. I listened to entirely too much speed metal back when I used to play guitar, thus I think in triplet 16ths. There's no going back. Glad to hear it sounds like a menu song to other people. Seems like things are coming along for me

There's your problem! You're wanting to play Halo and not Super Mario 3! Start rocking the NES, and you won't mind ignoring your "obligations" (also known as "optional arrangements") to see how fast you can speedrun World 8. These are the things that destroyed my college GPA during my senior year, but I gained more useful skills beating the World 8 gunships over and over than I did going to class. My thumbs are golden.

Zeusaphone? THORAMIN??! Names can't get any more badass than that.

Awesome, glad to hear you think the ambience aspect worked. I was a little worried that the whiny pad that plays throughout might not achieve that goal, but it seems it did. Anyway, I'm finished with it at the moment, I think. I have a couple of more things to add that I played while improving over it, but I really don't feel like sequencing it :/ I'm awful with quantizers, and it has a lot of weird rhythms and pitch bends. It'll probably just remain in improv-land. And since I don't yet know how to mix or master well, I'll have to defer that til later. I think it serves its purpose pretty well as a file select loop. Any other thoughts?

AND YOU'RE SAYING 22 IS OLD?!?! Hah, man, I never realized a 5-year age difference really meant that much in terms of what consoles you grew up with. I pity the fool I'm more of a NES guy than anything, anyway... man, that does make me feel old. And to think of a 64 as a "weekend console" cuts me deep. Me and my friend logged something like 45 DAYS on Super Smash Brothers when we were kids. I'll give you several moments to fathom that. You seem like you're in a feedbacky kind of mood! Feeling smooth?

Hah, it's probably done This was a mix just for fun to work on some skills. It's supposed to sound as though it could be from a SNES cart, so it should sound fairly dry and "uninteresting" unless of course you're in the mindset for listening to some SNES music... and I know I always am. Thanks for the feedback!

It's a pretty heavily processed and EQ'd Angelic Pad (I think?) from Sytrus plus a LP filter LFO on a 3x osc of saw/square/saw if I remember correctly. There's a bass pad under it that's something I made in PoiZone and added some distortion and boosted the mids a bit to make it growl.

I believe this would sunder the planet and end us all. ... that said, it beats the hell out of a rapture. I second this motion.

Oops, sorry about that. I fixed it and went ahead and listened to them a second time because there was a little shred of my mind that hadn't 'sploded yet. Glad that's taken care of now.

My brother DARED to interrupt my mixing to show me something that completely ravaged my mind. So much. And without further ado (and without embedding because I suck), I present to you the themes from Mario and Zelda as performed by two friggin tesla coils. Sample THAT...

I have to get two things out of the way first: (1) Light Crusader is badass, and I think we're the only two who know it; (2) the background for your youtube link made me laugh really, really hard. The arrangment is very nice. I like the chord progression and the harmonies from start to finish, but especially the finish (sucker for square-y arps). The instrumentation gets a little tiresome, although I like that smooth synth that enters around 1:35 and the square synth before that. The whole mix feels pretty unprocessed except for the two synths I mentioned. The circular panning of the organ also gets a bit annoying. The instrumentation and panning issues could probably be remedied with a more fleshed out soundscape. Add some type of percussion and low-end to make things more interesting and to shift the listener's attention away from the persistent organ. Definitely has potential to be a very cool track, and the field is wide open to you to get it there.

Thanks, man, and after another listen-through of the piece, I think I agree with you about the volume. And that "cool synth" is nothing more than a sine on top of a triangle with a little reverb thickening and delay stereo-fying (but I think I did that wrong?). The simplest waveforms often sound the best long live chiptunes.

Spider Tower sounds much, much better in the sequencer than it did before. Good instrumentation on it, but it's very dry. You need to process the sounds a bit more to make them more interesting and less vanilla. I can't help too much more with that since that's what I'm focusing on myself, the mixing side of things, but explore delay, reverb, and chorus effects especially, but don't forget about other mainstays like phasers and flangers. Each effect has limitless uses beyond just "delay" or "reverb". Often, they're used to add or remove stereo depth, thicken timbres, emphasize or attenuate frequencies, etc. Read up on this and see how you can apply it to improve the sonic quality of your tracks. I understand you're inexperienced with drums, but a song like Laser Motorway, bearing closely in mind the connotations of the title, should be absolutely fucking spastic. The down-beat hat sample throughout the song didn't evoke any images of blasting down some crazy, looping future-highway at 23874 mph. The melody would sound great over a sweet, speed-metal kind of drumline commonly found in games like F-Zero... or anything with Japanese metal in it. Listen to the F-Zero soundtracks and feel free to blithely transcribe note-by-note whatever you hear and throw it right into Laser Motorway. Listening to drum tracks and painstakingly (at first) transcribing them may not be terribly fun, but you'll quickly realize how "motif-y" drums are. There are some VERY common ways drum loops are sequenced, and you'll quickly learn these through transcribing and be able to apply and adapt what you've learned. Another source that helped me a lot with this was just loading the drum loops packaged with FL studio into the Fruity Slicer and paying attention to how each was constructed. Same can be done in FPC. Very general advice, I know, but I'm right there with you at the bottom of the learning curve, so hopefully this gives you some direction.

song is here So my friend came over last night and demanded that we make a mix that sounds like "press start" menu music a la FF11 or Mario Kart or Armored Core. Couldn't say no, but he had to head out just after giving me my assignment for the night, so I put this together. This is kind of "part A" of the song. "Part B" is in the works and will be very subdued, double-time DnB-type stuff in all likelihood. Does it sound like menu music? What improvements could be made to the arranging, instrumentation, mixing, processing, etc,? I'm still very new, so even fundamental suggestions would probably be very constructive! Thanks!

Thanks, I just found that slider, and I headed back here to delete the thread, but lo and behold, there you were with the answer. And a sweet diagram! I'll keep the thread around in case anyone else has the same issue.

So there I was writing a facemelting sine-wave solo at 104 bpm when... BAM! Everything sucked. The whole mix went up an octave, and I have no idea what I could have pressed or clicked. I manually shifted everything on all the piano rolls down an octave, but the output is kind of nasty -- distorted in some way. Also, some sliced drum grooves were shifted in pitch. This indicates to me that it isn't a piano roll issue because the sliced drums, if up an octave, would have been silent. Also, the volume increased substantially (now peaks, didn't before), but this might just be an issue of things being up an octave rather than some random leap in gain. I googled the problem, but I couldn't come up with any search terms that returned anything directly relevant to my issue. Any ideas?

Thanks, man! Any feedback is appreciated. I'm inexperienced, too, so even just a "good job!" is really encouraging and makes me feel like I'm on the right track with my skills. If you're feeling like listening to some more budding Ectogemia crap, please head on over here and let me know what you think of my Earthbound medley! Again, any feedback is welcome.

Thanks for the feedback Which VST are you referring to?

So I picked up Katamari Forever the other day, and fell in love with the village music. Throughout the song, there's a harpsichord-sounding instrument that plays a few chords, sustains the last one, then it sounds like the sequence is played in reverse to get a cool, melodic swoopy effect. You'll notice it right away. How is this done? My only guess is they made an audio clip and reversed it and overlaid the original and the reversal 'til it sounded right, kind of like how reverse cymbals can be done. Is there a way to do this in a more streamlined, sequencer-only (i.e. no audio clips) manner? Other ways to do it?

remix is here Ouch... few things stab my nostalgia spot harder than Earthbound. I was screwing with FreeAlpha, and I made Earthbound's LEVEL UP!! instrument... then I decided I'd make a ton more Earthbound instruments.. then I decided to make a remix medley. Since I'm kind of a mixing newb, I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice my arranging, transcribing, and synthesis skills. The mp3 begins with the level-up song which will be a fadeout ending once the song is finished, but for now, I have it at the front of my project file for no particular reason at all, so pay it no mind. Unless you really like the level-up music. I'd really like your feedback on how I did reproducing the Earthbound sounds and how my arranging is. Anything else is appreciated, too! So far, I've packed parts from 12 different Earthbound songs into this medley with a few more in the pipeline. See if you can collect 'em all! It's not too flashy, but I hope it gets your nostalgia going like it does mine ... and if you're not too busy, please listen to and comment on my much higher-fi and first-ever mix recently posted here: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35177. Thanks!

EDIT: Turns out that when I exported this most recent mp3, I had the snares muted... uploading a corrected version now. My first compliments!! Thanks so much! Not my first criticisms, but thanks for those, too! Overcompression -- THAT'S what that problem is at 1:08! I just learned what compression is the day I started this song (thanks, zircon!), and you may be able to intuit that I learned sidechaining right after that (see pads once the kick comes in). I couldn't figure out what was wrong at 1:08, but you gave me the word for it, so now I can google a solution! Sweet. Now that you mention it, maybe I should add a little more to that filtered pad interlude after the bell-ody. I'll definitely give that some thought. I'm not sure how to address the "dry" synths/claps/arps/guitar since, eh, I don't know what all I can do. I'm still pretty inexperienced. Any suggestions for those?

Very cool vibe to this one. It reminds me so much of some Mega Man or Sonic song I can't quite place at the moment. I'm not sure if I like the first synth arpeggio where it is. Kinda feels naked without any other synths going on, just hanging out among the guitar samples. I'm not experienced enough to comment on mastering or anything like that, but that aspect sounded good to me for what it's worth. This definitely has a good foundation, can't wait to hear the rest.

You're twelve kinds of badass, man. That's every kind. Love your old stuff, love your new stuff. Awesome work!!