timaeus222

I'm assuming just the amount of purposeful dedication put into it. Even if you wrote something in an hour, if it's something that's relatively good in relation to how well you normally write, then it's usually a strong effort. If it was written in 2 weeks, and it's still relatively good in relation to how well you normally write, then it's about the same strong effort, just spread out throughout those two weeks, assuming the objective quality of those two songs are about the same. He's saying how he thinks it's not about the time spent, but the desire to make something sound as consistently good as your past works that usually take other lengths of time to write.

I do get what you mean. Sometimes I show my friends some OC ReMixes that I think are awesome, and they just say "Hey, this is pretty cool." and don't go any further than that. They actually pause the song sometimes before it's over when they just decide they want to change the song. They aren't really music composers, and they're into the music they hear on youtube, pandora, etc. AKA pop music. Pssh. Non-audiophiles.

That's fair, I think. I personally would make (and am making) an album where every single song is a "labor of love", as people say, and it can reach out to as big of an audience as possible. Clean, flowing arrangements, crisp production, and just maximum effort all across the board in both of those respects. I think filler songs are OK, but I also think that they shouldn't take a backseat in attention from the artist in making a good album; i.e. even if the song is, let's say, a 1 minute "intro" or "segue" or "bridge" or "interlude", it doesn't make much sense to slack off on it, throw on a bunch of pads, put in some drum loops (okay, pretty exaggerated here, but you get the point), and say "oh yeah, it's not even a major portion of the album, so if you don't want to listen to it, just skip ahead to the actual album". I think of albums as an immersion, so you can really experience the effort the artist put into the album to make a set of related songs that make sense together, could be enjoyable, could be memorable, and is something you might recommend to someone else or might pay more than the default price for. So what do you think? If you're writing an album, would you prefer to keep in a track that you don't feel entirely good about but you think still fits the theme? Do you want all the tracks to be the result of similar magnitude and depth of effort? I mean, I'd be happy if someone on Bandcamp picked a song they considered their favorite, but if one single song on an album never shows up as a favorite, then what about it? What happened? Did you need to just put more effort in your "not-favorited" songs to bring them "up to par" with the rest that everyone picked out, or was it just a relatively inaccessible genre/atmosphere/style, or something else? For example, I find it really weird that I'm the only one who picked Memory as my favorite song off of Identity Sequence. Seriously, if you look at the reviews it got, no one else picked it.

He has some OCR album stuff unreleased on the site *yet* (or forever, if we're talking MM25). =p

Maybe you wanna support the artist?

You said it yourself---the point of a single, to you, is to stand out. i.e. in the absence of a cohesive whole. The completion of something with cohesion is generally harder to achieve than the mere completion of something. Writing 5 singles IS easier than writing 5 songs for one album, because you can release any 5 songs that you consider good and call them 5 separate singles, but you can't just release 5 unrelated songs as an EP and still call that an EP with purpose. I agree though that making money on music itself---yeah, pretty hard. Glad to hear that you also think selling sound design patches and mixing/mastering is more practical for rakin' in the cash, 'cause that's pretty much my hobby right now on the side.

Except the explicit rule of Kickstarter is to NOT use money on personal benefits... It's donation to do something for fans, not donation to make yourself richer. I do find this one hilarious though. Apparently someone's done this before:

Additionally, you don't necessarily have to have a style that corresponds to particular genres. My style is complexity and glitch, and those can be applied to any genre if done in certain ways. If there's a feeling of "damn, there's a lot going on here, but it somehow works", then I might have made that. In that sense, I'm free to branch out into pretty much any genre, and a cohesive theme could simply be a medium (EX: Book soundtrack, film-score-style, etc.), location (EX: Mid East, Far East, etc.), etc.

I agree with the heart of this (not necessarily the straightforwardness of this). Do what you feel is worth doing with your music. If you like your music enough that you want to see who likes it enough to buy it, then make a plan, compile a practical album (preferably with a real theme), and see what happens. Obviously, if you don't know what will happen or you're just starting, it's best to distribute the album on a site that doesn't ask for a fee or other upfront payment(s), and Bandcamp is a great place to begin. While OverClocked Records is awesome, I'm sure, I do believe they still hold standards on what they put on there (?), what with djp and Larry working with zircon on it.

Hm. The E. Piano is substantially louder than the bass. 2:38 seems to lose some focus due to the looseness. Still a cool concept though. This should be turned into something more than just a "fake jam".

I generally try to see if I can just think of a substantial idea first before trying a remix of something. Then I usually start out just picking one sound and seeing if that inspires me to write more and add other sounds to it. So when you get to the point where you can put together a few instruments in your mind and have them play something, it'll be easier to check whether or not the idea will make sense during the actual writing. For the latest thing I started, I actually had an atmosphere in mind and picked out about 6 sounds before I started anything, and it ended up cohesive so far, so it depends on whether or not you have a style in mind that you want to imitate. Picking out a bunch of sounds first like this doesn't happen often for me.

That didgeridoo at 2:50 never gets old.

The drum timbres sound good, but I think the focus is lost when you have a wide bass and an irregular drum beat like that. I think this is 5/4 until 1:41, so maybe embrace that more and write drum rhythms more suited for that time signature. The drums kind of remind me of this (1:04). The lead at 1:43-2:11 is also really loud and piercing. People focus on the center instrument the most, so it'd help to have something centered.

How about mine? MegaMan Zero 4 Hard Mode 100pt Speedrun

Sounds awesome, guys!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI_a7cnmoRM

Hehe, it was the same for me too. Oddly enough, at times it rained for like 20 seconds, and at times it was pouring. Literally, I was passing through a building, and on one side it was raining, and when I got out the other end, it stopped.

If reverb is off in a packed build, it could just mean it's slightly off in all other places where it seems to sound good because it's not so busy, and that how much it was off was more noticeable with a bunch of instruments crammed into a build. So then, if you were thinking of automating down the wet mix in the reverb for just the build, you *could*, but my suggestion is to just try lowering it in general, and listening again on a fresh morning. I don't know how ironic this sounds, but headphones that I've tried out have mostly been pretty soaked in reverb. I literally progressed from "some" to "lots" to "a bit too much" to "just right" amounts of reverb. So then I'd advise comparing reverbs between headphones and seeing which pairs are drier, if you have more than one pair.

It's literally done conceptually the same way in FL Studio, so there's that confirmation. You can set a VST to take a particular MIDI I/O and all the MIDI channel instances can each be routed to individual mixer tracks, each channel allowing MIDI CC like expected. And yeah, I also think that keyswitches just add another factor to doing it conventionally. Yeah. I still haven't actually done a truly full orchestral track yet, but I've been focusing much more on imagining each instrument being played and considering the possibility of highlighting particular parts at times in a piece. I think that makes total sense. It's a subtle difference in polyphony, but most of the time it's a good idea. However, I think it's fine to do it the 'easy' way with ensemble patch + chords if the strings are not very exposed. That's just an excuse though, and not really the convention. It does save you some time though, if you're feeling like you're short on time for something. Kinda depends on the library quality, but yeah. And that would be my approach.

Ironically, I'm pretty set on my strong belief that this wasn't as loud as "mainstream" dubstep (AKA soundcloud dubstep and youtube dubstep), and that's part of why I said the execution wasn't super strong. That said, I liked the arrangement (the rap performance in particular) despite the straightforward approach, and production opinions I had were very minor, actually. Rap and dubstep *can* go together, because guess what? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. It's possible; just takes the right person to tackle it, and my constant nudging towards my sister to go and request the stems from her band. Also kinda funny you liked the first seconds, because those *were* the sampling, and you'd be saying original > this remix. And about the standards... they tapered off in 2007, last I heard, but they were rising before then, so 10 years ago, this really would have passed. Highly probable. Yes, old OC ReMixes *generally* were more captivating for me in terms of the overall package, but hey, maybe the "more likable ones" (MUCH emphasis on these quotes) are still in the queue.

Yeah, I'll take you up on being co-director/assistant director if you'd like.

They advertise the size from uncompressed samples, perhaps to demonstrate how good their compression algorithm is, between WAV and NKI, and taking the time to compress your own WAV samples to NKI for Kontakt actually really helps the load time.

Technically, something from 13 years ago doesn't quite match the standards today, but with the 2~7 minutes in a submission, it really is just a recommendation based on attention spans and filesizes for the sake of bandwidth.

wat is dis i dont even

I technically agree with the heart of this, but I would rather take every interview seriously than take it as mere experience, then nicely decline any extra jobs that I prefer less if more than one happen to go well.