ectogemia

Yes. We should hang out.

So I just got my M-Audio Axiom 61 Pro controller in the mail today. YES. But!!! The latency is kind of annoying. I'm able to get it down to 43ms on FLStudio 9. I have no idea what a "good" latency is, as I've just recently gotten into MIDI, but I can tell it ain't 43 ms. I'm a pianist, so it's killing me to play sweeping passages and be able to feel the notes coming out well after I hit them ::shudder:: I'd like some input on how to reduce my latency. I'm aware it's either probably a CPU or sound card issue, and given that I have this laptop with a shitter onboard soundcard, I would imagine that's the problem. That being said, I'm only computer literate, not computer brilliant, so my own diagnosis is operating from a not-so-grand working knowledge of things. Anyone have any advice? Thanks!

::SNES:: Earthbound $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10) Chrono Trigger $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10) Final Fantasy III $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10) Breath of Fire II $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10) Secret of Evermore $negotiable [Ectogemia] (10/10)

Although the NES is easily my favorite system, I really grew up with the SNES and N64. About 99.999% of the reason I love video games so much is that I'm a complete nostalgia junkie. Seriously, if I had one wish, it would be to be a kid again. Since I don't have any wishes, I'll just have to be an adult who acts like a kid not enough of those around, that's for damn sure. Hah, you reminded me of this... remember when Ocarina of Time came out, and Nintendo Power had this offer where you could buy your very own REAL!! ocarina for $60? My friend bought one, and he still has it in his room today like 11 goddamn years later. 1990s > 2000s > 2010s (1980s > 1990s!!? dare I say?) I'd hate to be a kid these days, growing up on Halo and CoD and that crap. There's just no charm to anything anymore. Except maybe Minecraft. OK, definitely Minecraft. And totally random aside: Anyone remember that super-fast, arpeggiated, delayed harp song from Secret of Evermore in the ancient Roman place? It's not on the OST!! I played through on a ROM and savestated it while that song was playing just so I could hear it, hah.

Actually, now that I think about it, Nintendo Power sent me some "thanks for reading our shit" thing about a decade ago where I got to pick between like 5 things for free. I picked the Banjo Kazooie OST... which is not the best.. but I guess that goes down as the first OST I ever got.

As a Civ IV fan myself with some pretty serious skills (could hold my own on max difficulty! ), I have to say that I'm not terribly happy with Civ V. My 1st Civ V game was on Immortal. I crushed everyone without effort. It took me a month to get to Immortal on Civ IV. That says something. At some point, it just becomes clear that you're going to win the game, but you have to grind through another 150 turns to do so. This isn't Civ. There are no miraculous CPU victories. They just kind of crumble. And they don't "get" the 1-unit-per-tile combat. Rather than write a nasty diatribe about Civ V, I suppose I could sum up my thoughts that Civ V is like most games that come out these days: pretty, but only inches deep. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, at least in light of previous Civ games, especially Civ IV. And since I've never been one to care too much about graphics -- mostly just gameplay -- Civ V didn't draw me in. Side note: My Axio 61 Pro was delivered as I typed this reply!!!!! :) :)

That's a tough one since just about all of my childhood was spent playing games. I remember loving Mario 3's and Kirby's Adventure's music, but I started to play music around 8 or 9 which is around the time I first tried Lufia II and FF6. I remember just turning on Lufia II and listening to the select a file music for a loooong time. No one has ever or will ever use an SNES harp to better effect than the guy who composed that game's music. Although, I didn't REALLY get interested in VGM until I downloaded some Uematsu sheet music for piano. I still have those 12 year old pieces of paper sitting on my music stand right now, and I play Terra's theme pretty frequently even today. EDIT: Oh wow. I just listened to a random Lufia II youtube song... turns out that's the melody I've found myself whistling but unable to place for about a decade: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAsOyTeOpng&feature=related

Well, you've convinced me. What? Smoke that weed? I don't kn... OK! I love-ve-ve-ve Zelda games (LttP MMMMMmmmm), but yes, they are stupidly easy, hence why I don't really play them anymore. Thanks for reminding me it exists Time to find a copy.

Yay, Arcana has seen the light! The more I read, the more excited I get about it. I've always thought becoming in fluent in audio-ese would be years in the making, but this is expediting the process soooooo much. I'd like to see what other people who have bought it think about it. I have no idea what Ricky Snoman was thinking when he named it Dance Music Manual.

In response to the last 10 posts or so I have only this to say: Yes. And this: I don't recommend that anyone buy this book, read it, and proclaim themselves Earl of Musicton. That's certainly not my plan. Also, I think the title is awful and it misconstrues this book's shining feature: its survey of electronic music theory and how you start with some MIDI signal that gets shaped into something you want (not necessarily something you're emulating) for your purposes. Having gotten through a good chunk of the first part of the book, the electronic music theory part, I can say that I've learned a TON, and it was ALL without emulation or listening to anyone else's music. I now know what pretty much all the knobs do IN DETAIL on all the effects in FL studio. For example, I now know that not just "turn up dis knob make sound go tweEEEeeT!!" but that the Q/resonance amplifies the frequencies near the cutoff frequency of a filter. Another cool bonus: I can make sweet-ass synths now with Synth1, 3xosc, and even the almightmy behemoth, Sytrus (!!?), all from scratch. The author goes into a lot of detail regarding common (and uncommon) parameters seen all over DAWs. The book is structured such that by the time you choose/choose not to read the second part, the stylistic analyses, you should have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of synthesis and electronic music. This way, there will be few "knowledge discrepancies" that will keep people from falling short of emulating a style, should they so choose, or realizing their own. Again, the title is completely misrepresentative of what the book really is, so I think. If I had to give it a more accurate title, I'd call it "Introduction to MIDI, Synthesis, and Production with Stylistic Applications" or something along those lines. I don't mean to sound like a dick at all, I just thought I should make it clearer exactly what people are looking at on that there Amazon link in light of what you said.

We have a pirate's cove? Then we have to build a pirate ship... wait for it... in a glass bottle.

I'm with you on the tweaking. Electronic music as a product is a wonderful feeling and endlessly entertaining to listen to. Electronic music as a process is fairly often just painful. Sooooo maaaannny knoooobbbss tooooo fiddddlllee wwiiittthh. And none of those knobs write your music for you I've found that I can make some fairly decent beats by focusing on the type of sound I want rather than the rhythm. This way, I'm not thinking so much about rigid beats, but more about an overall sound. Basically, I isolate the instruments I want first, then, if the rhythms will be simple, I start fiddling with the step sequencer and create a few bars of percussion before I ever listen to any of it. If the rhythms are a bit complex, I'll open up the piano roll and write my parts there. More often than not, they sound fairly close to what I actually wanted, and I just kind of tweak the rhythms from there. The "writing by feel" thing works well, again, for simple-ish beats. Things like breakbeat and D'n'b... really, what the hell? I have no idea how people come up with that, although I do know that there is a fair amount of delay involved in some beats to make them sound far more complicated than the notated rhythm actually is. I experimented with this and got some cool results. Give it a try. Thanks for the heads up on those samples. I'll have to check them out.

Yes, it's down. If minecraft.net is inaccessible, so is our beloved server. I've broken into a cold sweat, I'm shaking uncontrollably, and I've started shouting at my furniture. These are signs of serious addiction

OCR Minecraft server (hosted by fireslash!) 206.217.135.90:25565 Handle list (OCR name / MC handle): Capa Langley / scytheful Darklink42 / Darklink42 Deep Thought / howiec92 Ectogemia / nabecker210 HalcyonSpirit / HalcyonSpirit Halt / HaltMusic Mr. Bottle Rocket / FerrousCadaver Necrotic / Sloogs prophetik / prophetikmusic The Mutericator / Mutericator Current projects: Glass highway -Need a creative artist to put designs beneath the highway -Need sand/glass in chest near spawn. Keep it comin'. Massive strip mining -To gather communal materials for larger projects -To stockpile materials with no use as of yet (redstone, carts, tracks) in anticipation of update Obsidian gathering -To satisfy prophetik's craving for a tall, thick, black "monolith"

I'll go ahead and make an "official" Minecraft thread and keep a running list of OCR names and MC handles, assuming someone hasn't done so already.

I'm nabecker210. I live in La Chicken Itza, but the name doesn't make much since because my ziggurat isn't festooned in feathers yet. My addiction became clear when I tried to connect to the server 15 times in a row to no avail... ...

This news definitely calls for bumping: To answer your question, yes, it is bonus stuff. Jeremy and Julian Soule arranged a few of their own songs with modern instruments. Very cool.

This is my kryptonite right now as well. And weird... I took piano lessons from a young age as well. Music twins, I guess. I except that I don't have any samples really at all. I've visited some free sample sites and downloaded a few dozen, but mostly, I'm unimpressed. Where'd you find yours, specifically the drum samples? Wish I could have helped

I've lost most of my guitar skill having not played in over a year, but basically, I just shredded. A lot. This built my dexterity veeeeerrry quickly, but again, I basically just shredded. I rarely played any chords, and in retrospect I'm sure that stunted my development both as a guitarist and a musician. I'm a very proficient pianist and guitarist, but I'm chord-retarded, and it makes composing and improvising difficult and my products are often bland. Also, I quit guitar mostly because I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere anymore. I was also premed at the time, so that may have contributed... but I'm no longer premed, so it's back to music with me! Anyway, don't give up because you aren't progressing at the moment. Plateaus are adaptations to a schedule. In nutrition and exercise, I espouse "confusion" because it prevents the body from reaching a plateau and instead leads to constant progressive adaptation. The same principle can probably be applied to music. Whatever your "routine" is now, forget about it for a while and practice a different way. Confuse your neuromuscular patterns and force your brain to approach your guitar playing differently. Playing the same scales constantly? Try an exotic variation. Playing the same chords/chord progressions? Voice them differently, play them in a different key, etc. Doing things consistently and constantly will invariably land you on a plateau where your brain has formed the necessary neural network to accomplish the same task(s) you keep putting before it. Being creative, devious(?), and spontaneous with your practice will force your brain to commit more of itself and different parts of itself to your music. So I guess my advice is this: To optimize your growth as a guitarist, play what you love (in my case, shredding like hell) because you'll get good at your favorite style and its requisite techniques. You'll have the most fun doing this, and you'll be most likely to stick with it, that is, until you reach the plateu, in which case.... ...to optimize your growth as a musician, play what you love AND what you must because you'll get good at EVERYTHING, even if practicing some things is really a drag (e.g. playing Good Riddance 5000x when you can't stand the song). It will pay off, and doing some of drudge-work is a small price to pay for shortening the distance between your mind and your fingers. I wish I'd done it before I lost my guitar technique. Oh well. Back to the keyboard for me, could be worse.

Agreed. I'm just getting into the community here at OCR and into Minecraft, as well. What better way to bond than fend off zombies and build absurdly detailed and elaborate structures that they have absolutely zero chance of defeating?

Objective Ministries is spoofing evangelism, and they do a damn good job. Soooo straight-faced throughout it all. Also, I'm going to get the full version within the hour and let everyone know what my first impressions are. Maybe then I'll join the campaign for an OCR server. I may be new to the community here, but this forum is an oasis in a desert of stupid. What better way to e-bond than to Craft Mines together?