ectogemia
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Great! I'm glad there's interest. I'm not expecting miracles. I'm not expecting to get posted. I'm positive we'll make something that will make us proud, at least in some way. Either we'll learn a lot and make something shitty, or we'll learn a lot and make something not quite as shitty as we'd expected. Either way, I think we win, even if we do divide by zero and end up with a musical stillborn.
OK, wow, so what's step 2?
I guess we need to figure out how to coordinate communication between us the most convenient way possible. I have a few ideas. A mIRC channel? Scheduled skype conferences? How do people do these internet collabs anyway?
Deciding on a song and style and the division of labor should follow us deciding on a quick way to communicate.
edit: I'm also not wanting to impose any limits on the size or scope of the collab effort. It could be an album effort (unoffical, of course), different takes on the same single source, several people working on one track, etc. I suppose we'll just see how much interest there is, how capable we are, and where it takes us. I'm excited
If this newb + ... + newb system works well for learning, I think the learning process could be expedited with a newb + expert + ... + newb system. Exploring that avenue is a bit of a ways off the path we're on now, though...
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I've got a lot of experience in music, but not so much in remixing, arranging, or DAWs. I'm sure a lot of us are in the same boat.
I'm looking for anyone who is sort of in a similar position that I am to take the journey with me and try to climb this endless god damn learning curve. Among us, we probably have the knowledge to make something quality, the tricks that the other would lack to really form the sound we're looking for, and the theoretical knowledge to answer questions the other might have. Alone, we're probably just spinning our wheels a lot of the time.
If anyone is interested in doing a "DAW retard" collab just for fun and self-education, let me know! We'll decide on a song and style whenever we form our pooper-group.
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I'm loving that chippy lead synth near the beginning. As a newb myself, could you maybe throw some insider info my way? How'd you make it?
The volume and frequency balance sound fantastic to me. I like the bridge with the choir pad a lot. It builds the tension quite well to the filter swept part at about 2:30, but I think you could build some more tension and tug at the listener a little harder at the transition between these two parts. As it is, you have the chord progression ending on the leading tone -- great, this adds tons of tension. The only other suspenseful element is the crash symbol bridging the two parts. I think you could do a little more here to really shock the listener and make the transition a little more "harsh", but in a good way. Again, though, it's fine as it is, but I think it could use some more juice.
Overall, I like this! I love the source too; god, that song has been stuck in my head for over a decade. I don't think it's quite at OCR acceptance level, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't get there with some lengthening and a bit more pizazz tossed in the mix.
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My algorithm:
Step 1: Realize approaching music systematically will never get you anywhere.
Step 2: Blow brain open to let creativity flow.
Step 3: Make cool stuff.
:twisted:This totally works...
... once you've honed your chops to the point where it isn't hard to translate what's in your mind to the sequencer/staff paper/keyboard/whatever.
A lot of us aren't there yet. I'm at the point where I can hear a melody or chord progression and play it and improvise over it literally for hours on the piano. This took me quite a while to develop, and I can apply those 3 steps to it NOW, but a year or more ago, it was more like superjoe's method. Not surprisingly being that this particular skill is confined to playing a piano, this barely helps at all when arranging or remixing or using a DAW or understanding how in the living fuck all you ReMixers managed to create such awesome synths and soundscapes... and so forth. So I'm back to square one in a sense with music, yet again. Honestly, I'm finding this DAW and arranging business WAY harder to do than learn an instrument and the fundamentals of music.
Anyone else sort of share my experience?
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I think the high-end or volume in general could be brought down a bit on the intro acoustic guitar, but I like the effects on it.
The brass at 1:40 sounds very, very mechanical. The section that begins at 1:40 has, in my opinion, all the melodic and harmonic components it needs, and the lead synth sounds pretty sweet. It's lacking seriously in percussion, though. Add a more complex "metal" or just general fast-rock type rhythm line that really drives this part along. The downbeat kicks aren't doing it for me.
The transition at 2:38 is too harsh, and I suppose the one at 1:40 is, too, but to a much lesser degree. Again, percussion might be the answer here. A tom or crash fill or maybe a brief, measure-long drum solo transition would bring these two parts together.
The percussion is also lacking at 3:52. It almost sounds like a polka here. Again, just make a more sweeping, more driving rhythm line here, and it'll sound fantastic.
The driving bassline works well with the downbeat kicks well, but only for a phrase or two. Aaaand, once more: add more complex rhythms and some more percussion instruments.
All in all, I like it. I'd let it sneak onto my playlist if it had a more complete and fitting drum track. I'd really like to hear it if you add one.
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According to the Superjoe Method, the way to make the crappy parts not suck is... delete them! Then add a new part. Then take a break. Then delete the crappiest part. Then add a new part. Then take a break. Repeat!
I think we can merge our methods. #1 in yours can be done at the same time as #1 in mine. #2 and #3 can be mapped to Take a Break in mine. #4a maps to the entire Superjoe Method, and #4b is giving up in the Superjoe Method.
Sounds about right. I'm languishing in Modus's #3 right now, but I haven't reached my first plateau yet, which I would define as Modus's #4. Hopefully that's waaaaay the hell down the road, but being that everyone in my family is a musical gimp except for me, I have a feeling I'm not going to get much further. I'm at least to the point where I can impress my friends... cool, I guess?
Mkay, bye. Time to bury myself in this book chapter about limiters. Fuck yeah????
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So THAT'S what happened to my Mega Man 2 tribute!!
I'm glad this got discussed. Time to snatch that project out of the trash.
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Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated!
Yeah i went a bit filter mad with this one, the wah sounds are all done using Cubase's Step filter, set to play through, pretty much, random filter frequencies at a 1/16 (or semi-quaver what have you) rate. Then there's an 80% glide between these frequencies changes to give it that smoother 'wah-wah' sound. Then that all goes through an amp simulator to add a bit of distortion, basically I wanted it to have a bit of an electric guitar feel, without it sounding like it's trying to be an electric guitar too much (if that makes sense). The synth itself is a relatively simple mono synth, so the majority of that sound is coming from the distorted filter changes rather than the synth settings. Hope that explains it!
I did play around with filling up the space a bit more, but things got too muddy too quickly, and i ended up going with the 'less is more' sort of approach.
Yep, that does indeed help, thanks! You ended up with a pretty sweet tone just starting with a single oscillator. And MAN did that sound like a guitar. Clearly a synth, still, but great job getting to that guitar tone. I've really got to work on shaping my sounds
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That wah'ing lead is really sweet. Being new to this whole electronica thing, I'd really like to know what you did to make that particular synth and how you went about applying the filter to it.
Sadly, I don't have a lot to say from my critical eye... er, mouth. Happily, that means you did a great job. It may be a bit sparse for my taste as it sounds like there aren't too terribly many instruments going on at points, but I'm assuming you took a look at your EQ and everything seemed fine, so this may be a non-factor.
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Ages ago, my oldest brother, for shits and gigs, decided to name his file 'POOP' in Zelda II (this is when it first came out, so we were around 9 and 4, and yes we were immature at that age). To our surprise, the file started us out with every spell and max upgrades (8-life, 8-magic, 8-attack). There was a catch, though - if you got hit a single time, you died instantly. We were crapping our pants, there, and it didn't change when we took the game out, either. Unfortunately one of us eventually erased this anomaly, and while we tried to get it up again using the same name it just didn't work the same. Ah, bless the days of random game wack-outs.
Ohhhh, yes. Nothing bonds two brothers closer together than doing silly shit in a game. My brother and I named our first Secret of Evermore character "PENNISDICK" because 1) we couldn't spell penis (totally means we're not gay, dude) and 2)because that's when we first realized that the NPCs will all call you a hilarious name throughout the game if you so desire them. Seeing what silly things the NPCs would say calling us PENNISDICK drove us to finish that game together, and we did it in record-awesome time.
PENNISDICK started us playing games together, and for a long time, that's just about all we did together, mostly because he was a son of a bitch almost all the time, like all older brothers. Thank you, PENNISDICK. You helped spawn more creative RPG character name classics that spice up every NPC conversation, such as " asshole", "Hitler", "you dick", ", bone me,", and the subtly hilarious (really, try it) Canada-ifier, "eh?".
Another awesome time we had was playing SMB3 on the NES, but we jostled the cartridge a bit, and the data was shifted. All the sprites were... not as they should have been. For instance, in world 3, instead of that little canoe you can ferry around to the mushroom huts, there was the warp tornado. EXCEPT IT WAS BROWN AND LOOKED LIKE POO!!!!! And to this day I still think one of the funniest things I've ever done is piloting a poop tornado that makes a cute little "deedle-eedle-eedle-ee" sound around the map.
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Quality guitaring, but I would like to see more melodic bits and fewer thrash-fests. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I did that quite a bit when I still played guitar and it was AwWWwEsOOmmE! Point remains, though: vary up your style and approach to arrangement a bit to make each song sound different rather than a different scale to thrash around, but only if YOU want to. That's the magic of creative license!
The production could be a bit lacking. "Could" being the key word here; I can't tell if the frequency spectrum is just poorly balanced or if the guitar is just so super-duper wet at times that it stops contributing some essential frequencies, and the mix ends up sounding like a wash. Maybe try boosting the guitar EQ/gain at strategic frequencies and points in the song? This isn't the case all the time, but sometimes, I think the guitar could be a little drier, a little more cutting.
All in all, yay for you! It's not my style, at least not these days, but I do appreciate how difficult it can be to play some of those passages. You've got some metal in those fingers, boy. Keep being contrary to the man.
Sorry I couldn't be more specific about which songs and at what times I had my critiques. I have to leave for class in 5 minutes
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I'm pretty new to OCR, so what better way to get to know some of you than by anonymously sending and receiving a gift? That's all the self-convincing I need. I'm in.
I wouldn't mind it if someone sent me some video game piano sheet music -- printed for free or from an official book -- or an OST or two
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Sounds like you're in good shape for maintaining stability in your life after the release date. I'd put off buying a better computer for another 5 years or so if I were you. Got to keep temptation in check.
2 questions:
1. What is qffe?
2. What is GW?
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I actually fear this game's release.
I'll be in dental school when it comes out and... well, I'm just not sure I'll make it out of dental school. If I get into Diablo III like I did Diablo II...
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I love how the utter quirkiness blends seamlessly with the traditional dance music second half. Flawlessly mastered, or so it sounds to my novice ears. Awesome mix.
Just for my own edification, I've got an open question to anyone who knows the answer: At 1:14 when the dance-y stuff comes in, how was that filter swept & gated instrument that made in terms of its waveforms? Is it just a noise wave? I'd love to know how to make one of those.
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I've been using this method I came up with recently, and it's been working well. You can do it anywhere. It helps me get through class every day, yay! It's very abstract, so it may not make much sense to you, and it may not useful to anyone but me.
Anyway...
I tap out a reallllly slow tempo, like maybe 30-45 bpm-ish, and kind of "feel" a kick and snare in my head, whatever comes to mind first. Basically, mental percussion improv. It's usually a fairly simple pattern. Then, I start subdividing the beat. I count sixteenths in my head and try to place exactly where the kick and snare are occurring in my mental beat. I've been doing this for a few weeks, and I'm finding that I can think of a beat now and usually reproduce it in the piano roll with few flaws, but only a few weeks ago, I couldn't do it for the life of me.
If you can't come up with a groove that challenges you to place the hits, just pop in some OCR tunes into your iPod/Zune/whatever and pick a slow song with drums for some material. I've transcribed some OCR beats that way.
Once you get access to your DAW, open up the piano roll and slice a loop or use some hits to try to reproduce your beat. See how accurate you were just using your ear. Give it a shot. It worked for me, at least.
Of course, the next logical step is to use different subdivisions or to tune your ear to pitch and velocity changes. Check out the FL studio Fruity Slicer tutorial for some techniques. Analyze it. It certainly helped me.
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Something that will help even out your frequency spectrum which can often help with mix volume (in addition to compression) is... evening out your frequency spectrum. Here's a link to a basic EQing tutorial that will familiarize you with the concept. Check out the rest of that guy's videos for some awesome material. His "music theory cheating" video is very, very clever.
I'm just getting into this electronic music thing, too, and I have to agree with you that OCR is an awesome place for people like us and for the pros as well. I'll be around here for a long time, that's for damn sure.
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3. You can make loops your own (in an artistic sense, that is) by loading them into the Fruity Slicer and messing with the knobs and envelopes until you isolate each individual instrument in the loops. You can then dump this drum loop to the piano roll using *drum roll* the dump to piano roll command. That was the most redundant sentence ever written. After dumping to the piano roll, you can sequence your own beat using the loop's sample sounds.
4. I made a thread about the Dance Music Manual book by Rick Snoman. I also have a link in that thread to buy the book on Amazon. Yoozer has the link to my thread in the post above.
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Haha, well, the first puzzle I got stuck on was the one in Wendell's dream (which is like the 4th puzzle in the game...) because there was a block that slid away from a chest when you hit a certain lever. It was apparent that you would have to get this chest later in the maze, and the "only" way to do so was to plan ahead and make sure that block wasn't in the way when you got there.
... turns out that the lever that moves that block also moves one WAY off screen that was blocking my path.
My gamer logic defeated me as I kept hitting all the levers in the level EXCEPT THAT ONE to try to figure out how to move the one block in my way because I didn't want to cover up the path to that chest later in the dungeon.
Looks like I'll have to think outside the box some more.
Also, I found that the first boss in Wendell's dream was harder than any Zelda boss. This game is going to be awesome.
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An hour and a half into the game, and I'm loving it! Thanks for recommending it. It'll make writing my term paper due this Friday an even more impossible task.
The music for the first town kicks ass, too. I love the "HUHH"!
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Actually my preferred method of playing Civ is PBEM mode, which I was extremely happy that they included in Civ IV. Dunno if play by e-mail made it into Civ V or not, but the idea is that you play one game over the course of many weeks with 6-person multiplayer...it's not a LAN friendly game. Also, with grad school taking up more and more of my time recently, I really enjoy playing a game where I only have to spend 10 minutes every couple of days to be at maximum efficiency.
Yeaaah, I saw that option, but it scared me. It reminded me of old men playing a game of chess for 40 years through ground mail. I just felt like I was too young to do a "move A-7 to B-5" kind of thing.
That being said, dental school is coming up for me this summer, so it sounds like I'd better get used to that if you had to in grad school...
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Awesome!
Worth it!
Not only is a rare game just sitting at your local shop but it's also cheap?! Where the heck do you live? I wanna go there.
Question to those who have played the game:
If you watch the entire demo before starting the game, you'll see a ton of in-game scenes. During some of those scenes Alundra is dashing all over the place. If you don't remember what I mean, check out the scene at 2:54 in Dual Dragons' Youtube video. My question is how do you change directions during a run. I've always thought that you could only run in one direction at a time.
The store is called Game World. There's a carwash place across town called Wash World with the same logo and font as Game World... I do not understand this decision.
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I've only just gotten into Civ at the end of 4, so I don't know for sure, but apparently Civ 4 was in a similar "rough" state to Civ 5 when it first came out.
Seeing how awesome Civ 4 has turned out, I'm hoping for the same with this. Haven't bought 5 yet so I'll wait a bit to see how things turn out. Still havin a lot of fun with 4 so its not that big a deal to be honest. Plus I won't have to spend money which is always good.
I took a big break between Civ II and IV, so I wasn't around for Civ IV's rough spot. I came back into the series a little over a year ago. Good to know that it started off weak and turned out strong. That definitely gives me some hope for Civ V. My advice to you would be to steer clear of Civ V for now until you hear about some patches sometime down the line.
Random side note:
All this talk about Civ makes me lament the closing of Ensemble Studios. I want AoE 4
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When I said I'd pick it up, I thought it'd be easy.
Well, fuck me.
I went all starry-eyed on to eBay and found a copy for $6 with only an hour left. I popped in the highest bid at $6.50 and thought I'd ride the wave til the last 10 seconds and raise my bid to $10 at 1 second left. That way I'd win for sure!
Some jackass put in a bid at like $40 at 1 second left and squashed my meager $10 raise.
Looks like eBay is out of the picture. As it turns out, though, my locally-owned game store down the street is selling it on the cheap because it's run by business-retarded people (mind you, that's fine with me!). I'll be playing it within the hour, I hope.
Newb looking for newb to share in newbiness with the intention of graduating from said newbiness
in Recruit & Collaborate!
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No, I'd really like to have you along, Modus. I don't really care where you stand. I've been a musician for twelve years, since I was 9, but only by hobby. I know a fair amount of theory, I can play piano very well, and I used to be a scary guitar shredder. That said, I know shit-all about DAWs. I listened to some of your remixes in your sig, and you're ahead of me in terms of using DAWs, or so it seems. We've both got strengths it seems where the other has weaknesses. Sounds like a recipe for growth, if you ask me...
Thanks for the input, Rozovian. I've never really done this before, so any advice is much appreciated.
Oh, and skype ID: Ectogemia