ectogemia

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"!

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...

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.

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 !!

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.

The easiest way to win in Civ games has always been to focus on research and be nice to everyone to prevent them from declaring war on you. You get to future tech first, you build the spaceship way before anyone else, you win. It's not a very exciting way to win, but it works, and again, it's by far the easiest method. A research victory is even easier than it has been in the past, though. Even on Deity, I find myself well ahead of most civs in tech. There are, however, a couple of leaders -- one of the Arabic ones, whose name I can't remember, is coming to mind -- who will always blow you out of the water in tech and necessitate a different approach. Easy solution: build 8 swordsmen swordsman by turn 120 or so. Winner!!! The hardest method has generally been domination victory, eliminating all of your opponents. In Civ V, not only is war so simple that domination has become the easiest (and most tedious -- moving 1 unit at a time every turn is a killer, as is fighting off endless hordes of obsolete enemy units) method of victory, they made it EVEN easier by requiring that you only capture the capital cities rather than wipe out all opponents' cities. The capitals always seem to be right by my borders, too... Despite all my gripes with Civ V, I still think it can be fixed with a patch that rewrites the AI's approach to war, addresses the moronic happiness system, and requires that you capture all enemy cities, not just the capitals. Why wasn't any of this caught in playtesting? I'm just going to ride out the storm for now and wait to see what changes they make in the future before I pick it up again. There's still hope to pull a good game out of the fire, the developers just need to respond to the criticism.

I've not played multiplayer yet, but if it's anything like Civ IV, and I can't imagine it being different, then you have 2 options for game flow: 1) simultaneous turns -- totally unfair, especially in war and VERY tight resource-grabbing races 2) sequential turns -- with as few as 2 people, this can almost double a game's length; imagine this with 6 people. my god. I used to LAN Civ IV with a roommate, and we were soooooo booorrreed with it, especially if one of us were dragged into a war. At that point, one player would take 20 seconds per turn, the other 5 minutes. Player 1 has no choice but to play with himself for the remaining 280 seconds before he gets his next 20 second turn. Civ has been and always will be a game best experienced in single player unless you have endless patience for multiplayer. Being that we're all from Generation Y'ish, patience is probably not something you or I have much of. Therein lies the problem, though. Civ V isn't a particularly memorable single player gaming experience. In fact, I haven't played it in a while because I clowned on the CPU on the 2nd highest difficulty on my 1st game. Any fan of prior Civ games know that just shouldn't happen. So what's left for me to do if it was that easy to begin with? Do something else. 21-year-old grandpa bitching and tl;dr alert: Civ V spoon-feeds you victory like most new games. I'll stick with older games where you can feel the passion and attention the developers applied to their games, where you feel like you're getting a "package" and not a "product", where the developers weren't afraid to challenge you. Planescape: Torment vs. Fable? Chrono Trigger vs. Pokemon Chartreuse? Counterstrike vs. Halo: Reach? Deus-Ex vs. Heavy Rain? Starcraft vs. Starcraft 2? It seems like not more than 10 years ago, the best the industry had to offer was lightyears better than the best put out today. And 20 years ago, the industry was offering games of similar quality to 10 years ago. So why the complete shitslide of quality in the past decade? Gaming is popular now, and I think that's a great thing, but it's pushed a lot of old-schoolios like me to the margin where the only new games that appeal are indie games or small-house games that still exude the developer's honest effort and have gripping charm and impressive depth. Minecraft, anyone? Gaming is focused on a certain type of multiplayer these days such that developers no longer have to care about adding much depth to their games because the experience comes from interactions between players, not between the player and the game. Some have no problem with this, and in some contexts I don't either, but I fell in love with gaming as a single player experience, and this new direction in popular gaming isn't wooing me much at all. It lends itself to milling out shitty games until a "hit" randomly manifests to cover the costs of the failures (see: Hollywood movie industry). I'm starting to think Civ V is just another milled out game trying to be a hit rather than an honest effort just to produce a quality, challenging, mentally-involving experience. If you read to this sentence, bless you, kind sir/madam!

Nooo, I mean that I'm having trouble mapping the knobs and twirlys and faders and so forth to FL Studio. In fact, I have no idea how to do it. I'll probably have to read a guide after I churn out this 12 page paper I'm tired of college! Always getting in the way of my music!! Hah, I remember my mom thinking for the longest time that violent video games would make me murder everything. I wasn't allowed to have Mortal Kombat when it came out... so I just went to my friend's house and played it all the time. Kome to think of it, the first cheat kode I ever looked up on the internet was the blood kode for MKI. Take that, mom.

Hah, trust me, I'm not blaming video games. What kind of sick bastard would EVER blame VIDEO GAMES for ANYTHING!!?!?? That being said, I shirked a lot of piano practice back in the day to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-play Chrono Trigger or just about any other SNES JRPG. Meanwhile, the Chinese kid down the street was practicing piano 4 hours a day and playing Carnegie Hall at age 13 (no joke). Yeeeaah. Having some direction from DarkeSword could help... I'm kind of going it alone here. Anyone else find the learning curve for electronic music stupidly steep? Can't wait to get over it. This MIDI controller I just got that isn't mapping automatically to FL Studio either is just more shit on the shit pile.

Thanks, that seems to have fixed the problem. Also, out of curiosity, how does a 14-year-old know this much about audio and computers? Impressive. Maybe I should have played fewer video games when I was a kid... nah.

I installed the ASIO4ALL driver and switched to the driver from the "Primary Software Device" (which works but has high latency). Upon doing this, I lost output and couldn't hear anything, although the input from my controller was still registering. My roommate, an audio engineer, tried to help and fiddled with the buffer length and increased it. Now, when I switch to ASIO4ALL from the default driver, my computer freezes? Plan B is to uninstall the ASIO driver to bring it back to default settings and see if I can finagle it some. Plan B.5 is whatever anyone else's advice is, maybe some other drivers, settings, or ways to fiddle with the ASIO driver as to prevent freezing and allow output.