Jump to content

ectogemia

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,984

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

 Content Type 

Posts posted by ectogemia

    Mega Man: The Wily Castle Remix Gauntlet 2013

    in Competitions

    Posted · Edited by ectogemia

    Just thought I'd pop in and agree with those of you who think timaeus needs to think more before he posts, especially when offering critiques. It's not that he doesn't know what he's doing -- his mixes usually sound pretty good -- it's that he comes across as a know-it-all, and that looks baaaaad for him when he's offering overtly wrong advice/criticism at the same time. By all means, keep offering critiques, but do so more tactfully and only do so when you're sure there's actually an error and when you're sure how to fix it. If someone disagrees with one of your critiques, just deal with it.

    OCR family therapy 2013.

    Mega Man: The Wily Castle Remix Gauntlet 2013

    in Competitions

    Posted

    Also I already told Garpocalypse this a couple days ago, but I'm going to release the stems for my entry, so people can practice mixing I guess, or just mess around with them and see how they sound. Maybe make your own mix of the song and compare it to mine, a learning experience. :-P

    Actually, that sounds like fun. DO IT.

    Mega Man: The Wily Castle Remix Gauntlet 2013

    in Competitions

    Posted · Edited by ectogemia

    Mine take between 12-20 hours, usually, but if you've followed my music over time, you've probably noticed, that I almost never write two tunes which sound even remotely alike, so I'm constantly operating outside my comfort zone and constantly experimenting. That adds a lot of time to the creative process.

    Mega Man & Bass (Cold Man) + Mega Man 10 (Enker's Theme) -- ALL IN ONE SNES-y SYNTH METAL PACKAGE!

    in Post Your Game ReMixes!

    Posted

    That being...(no i'm not saying that) so that being... you know, whatever. I am enjoying what ecto did quite a bit now. Just, if you say that something is Metal to Metal enthusiasts do you know what they are going to expect? METAL!!!!!!!

    Saying this isn't metal because it's SNES-y is like saying chiptune jazz isn't jazz because it's chiptunes. This is metal, yo :P

    Fit Club ahoy! Where men are bros and women are also bros!

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by ectogemia

    in one month? Did you stop eating altogether? :-(

    Actually, kinda. The transition into the clinical part of dental school didn't go smoothly for me since I had a bunch of mishaps at the beginning of the process. So my confidence was sorta shot from that, I wasn't able to lift, I was having some marital issues at the time, and yeah... all that stress sorta came together to destroy my appetite and sleep + gobs of bonus cortisol put my body into a VERY catabolic state. It was just the worst timing for all these things to happen at once. And, of course, I'm a moderate hardgainer, so I don't hold onto the muscle quite like some people do; gotta keep up with the training and diet to a T in order to have success in the gym.

    On the bright side, I lost probably 50% or more of the fat I gained while bulking. Huzzah!

    Fit Club ahoy! Where men are bros and women are also bros!

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I bet Ecto can clear this up, but ultimately you should try exactly what soul splint said and cut your grains and complex carbs like sugars. Sounds like your insulin response levels might be causing you to build up excess glycogen stores around the organs around there. That's why, locationally, people tend to build fat on their bellies first when complex carbs are the problem.

    Sounds legit to me except one little pissant correction :P Complex carbs are technically sugars, but in nutritional vernacular, carbs are the real umbrella term, then it goes to complex and simple carbs, and "sugar" falls under simple carbs. Complex carbs include primarily starch and glycogen.

    Basically, for your carb intake, stay completely away from simple sugars except in fruits (which should still be eaten as only a small part of the diet). Eat ~150 g of complex carbs on workout days (should be 3-4 days per week) and < 50 g on rest days, ideally no more than you need to feel and perform well. Eat lots of proteinaceous food like meat to replace the calories from carbs. You'll feel awesome, shed fat effortlessly, and never be hungry again. It's a nice thing.

    Fit Club ahoy! Where men are bros and women are also bros!

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by ectogemia

    How is everyone doing on their goals? Hopefully getting all kiinds of gainz~

    I pulled a muscle in my hip playing Ultimate Frisbee (minor injury) and stress fractured both of my forearms because I broke my cardinal rule of only doing compound lifts to prevent injury. Here I am with two technically broken arms now, and I'm a surgeon. Guess if that makes my 9-5 more fun. Go ahead. That's right! It's doesn't!

    So I've been taking time off to heal. It's been almost a month, and the hip is 100%, but my arms still need to heal a bit.

    Ugh. I must have lost 15 lbs by now, maybe more. I look much smaller and feel much weaker. It really sucks to see my effort melt away like that, but it was a hard lesson learned about how NOT to train. Don't push it if you feel pain (not discomfort, but pain), folks, especially during a biomechanically unsound movement like an isolation lift. I had a ton of positive momentum with my gains, and a few unnecessary barbell biceps curls just wasn't worth the risk.

    I was looking forward to being huge for MAGFest and outlifting OA, but that'll have to WEIGHT (lol!) til NextNextMAG, I think :( I've got a lot of ground to make back up soon.

    Mega Man: The Wily Castle Remix Gauntlet 2013

    in Competitions

    Posted · Edited by ectogemia

    What do you mean by kick can come out?

    As for thinness, I'm always afraid of overcrowding my soundscape, so my music ends up being thin, I'm still working on that. I definitely wish I filled things out more though after listening to my mix again, but I didn't have time.

    Also, do you have any time stamps for where the lead is covered up?

    I'm just gonna randomly spill some tips all over the thread here because I'm in a noxiously boring and long class which I have no interest in. Let's begin!

    A quick solution for thinness in some situations is a little reverb. A lot of NES soundtracks were re-released by the parent companies with a little reverb on the master bus to gel things together a bit. If you do it, keep that wet knob conservative and be sure to raise your low cut to at least 400 Hz, if not another 100-150 Hz higher. Remember that reverb is just a synthetic series of sound reflections based on the input sound. That wet reverb sound has a frequency spectrum, and the bounds of that spectrum are defined by the low cut and high cut knobs. The low cut knob is essentially a high pass knob. The high cut knob is essentially a low pass knob. So you have to be SURE you are raising the low cut knob to AT LEAST 400 Hz, but preferably a little higher, because the most muddy frequencies are below about 500 Hz. Adding in a bunch of mud via reverb isn't going to help clarity. Low-cutting out the muddy reverb frequencies and then adding a bit of verb to the master bus can add some glue to the mids and highs. This isn't a terribly common technique, but it's out there for really dry mixes.

    A somewhat more technique-sensitive way to add a little thickness is to add some compression to the master bus on the order of 2-5 db of compression and makeup gain to taste (though I find that adding about 1 db less makeup gain than gain reduction I'm getting from the compression almost always sounds great. Be sure to have conservative attacks and releases. A longer attack of 45 ms+ to allow all the transients through and a shortish release of 100-200 ms to avoid overcompression should get things sounding a little thicker.

    If you don't already have a compressor with a gain reduction meter on it, I'd get a hold of one. It's not necessary, but it's certainly a useful number to have access to, especially if your ears aren't well-trained yet. That seems to be a super common problem with compressors. A lot of people just don't really understand what they do, why they're used, or what compression really sounds like. Being able to tie the sound you're hearing to a number measuring the amount of compression occurring is crucial to forming a solid concept of what you're actually doing when you're compressing, in my opinion.

    Another solution is to add a little delay to instruments which won't cause lots of mud from echoing. So don't add delay (in most cases) to things in the muddy frequency range below ~500 Hz. Usually, delay goes best on leads. It thickens out the spectrum because as your lead plays through the melody, the echoes from previous notes in the melody shine through all over the spectrum of each note played by the lead, so there's a strong saturating effect in the general frequency range played by the melody. Again, be conservative. It's VERY easy to overdo delay. As a starter, the feedback knob controls the number of echoes, whereas the amount knob (the name varies: input, amount, depth, etc.) controls the volume of each echo. Experiment with these two knobs to get the right saturation of echoes. You can even add some stereo width by using the stereo offset knob (read up on the acoustics of stereoization via stereo phase offset to open your mind to the awesome word of how flangers, phasers, chorus, and stereo delay units work) or by adjusting the panning knob and changing the delay type to ping pong delay.

    But these are band-aids for a greater systemic problem. Picking good samples/synths which work well together is the best way to end up with a good final mix. It's harder than it sounds -- much harder. But you can't have a full-sounding piece if you aren't filling out the frequency spectrum properly, so although you're afraid of crowding the mix, you still have to make sure you've got enough going on to make it sound full. Darke's tip about lead, percussion, bass, accompaniment is spot on as the basics you need in most cases to have AT MINIMUM a full-sounding mix. Everything has to be in the right octave as well, so experiment with that, especially when layering pads and leads.

    Another random tip is that a lot of people over-EQ things. I used to be guilty of this. Now, I NEVER make an EQ adjustment unless there's a very specific goal in mind. Some goals include things like notching a bass where the kick/snare fundamental is, notching a pad where the snare fundamental is, boosting the high mids on a lead by a dB or 2 to add some presence, boosting the highs on a snare to add splash, getting rid of a weird partial with a surgical cut, etc. A lot of people boost and cut like madmen. They know that something needs to be done to the sound, but they don't know what. It'll take time to get to the point where you can make really well-informed EQ decisions, but if you're aren't trying to get a grasp on how to EQ properly by struggling through doing it the right way and instead you're just waggling bands around, your ears will never develop. All that band-waggling often ends up cutting essential frequencies across several instruments, so things end up sounding thin.

    And as a last tip, very generally, it's a good idea to boost with smooth eq curve (a wide band width) and cut with a sharper eq curve (a narrow band width). That's not always true, especially with respect to cuts, but in most cases when you're cutting, you're either high/low passing or you're notching something to let the fundamental of something else shine through, usually in the muddy frequency range in the lows and low mids. Boosting with a notch/narrow band width often sounds really artificial and weird, but it does work in some situations, like emphasizing certain narrow partials like snare fundamentals or whatever else.

    Yeah!

    edit:

    tumblr_mmcw8mofwG1r5xzspo1_400.jpg

    Mega Man: The Wily Castle Remix Gauntlet 2013

    in Competitions

    Posted

    codswallop, i was dead regardless of the source reveal so there.

    i sure showed him

    also, I appreciate the reviews @ therex, rnn, KT. I kind of feel like an MMA fighter whose opponent beat me due to superiorx stereo widening skills, and I need to practice stereo stereo stereo (in addition to, you know, all other aspects of production, and arrangement, and life) i'm trying

    Fellow MMA fan?

    I'll teach you all about stereoization if you'll be my MMA buddy. Please do this one thing for me. I'm so obsessed with the sport, but none of my friends have ever been that in to it. I NEED AN OUTLET :o :O :o

    How did you learn to vary compositions, and not be repetitive?

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    ehhh imo you should never really "do genre". in my experience thinking about genre leads to thinking about other people's music which leads to frustration, self-loathing, but most of all a pattern- or characteristic-based approach to writing.

    you want to avoid repetition? be creative. you want to be creative? don't think, do.

    Here's a man who knows what he's talking about.

    Music is about being creative. If something sounds repetitive, then do something creative to make it sound fresh. There are an infinite number of things you could do to keep things sounding interesting, and it's up to you to listen to music which you find to be particularly creative and interesting and dissect the techniques those artists use so you can employ similar methods or novel methods inspired by those you've heard.

    So to answer your basic question, I learned to vary compositions by listening *very* critically to tunes I love and looping interesting bits again and again until I understood what I was hearing. It gets easier and easier to do this as your ear improves and your production and compostional toolboxes expand until you can easily come up with creative flourishes and variations on your own. And as always, I'll plug improv as perhaps the best tool to develop your musical sensibilities. A lot of my ability to be musical comes from playing short-ish phrases on piano I came up with and altering them in any number of ways again and again to keep it sounding fresh. With this technique, like Alex said, don't think; just do.

    And Alex's music just so happens to be something I listen to and analyze to figure out cool techniques ;o so give his stuff a listen if you haven't already.

×
×
  • Create New...