timaeus222   Members

Yeah, the latest three were.

lol, those last 5 mixes or so were judged like 2 months ago.

Hey Jordan, Rexy might have been pretty harsh on you, but that's only because she cares. Here's what I would say after listening to this though: First of all, even though it's not immediately obvious, YouTube compresses any and all videos uploaded to their server into FLV, which in turn compresses the audio and makes it sound worse. To what extent depends on the video encoding (240p, 360p, etc.), but anyways... the point is, try using a dedicated sound hosting site, like soundcloud or tindeck. Heck, even box.com can work well. Sounds like you're using FPC from FL Studio and some basic sounds from the FL bank with a MIDI RIP, like Rexy said. Yeah, you would have to start over with a clean slate, and it will certainly help to learn about how each instrument sounds best in terms of how it plays out in the song. However, the first thing I would suggest is that you learn how to use FL Studio more efficiently. Teach yourself the basics for writing melodies and harmonies, and basic EQing, then go from there. soundonsound.com is a great resource for teaching yourself these basics. FL Studio tutorials are all over youtube. Try those.

I finish all my finals at 3PM that day. I THINK I'll make it!

There's gonna be a sale for 25% off everything on Jan. 1, 2014 there. Shameless self-plug: I'm in there somewhere with Zebranautic Revolution.

Those tutorials from zircon are the most curricular I'd recommend for FL Studio specifically, since that's what you use.

This is some top notch stuff dude! Keep it up!

Three big surprises there. Congrats, guys!

Glitch 2 is a no-brainer. Go get it. EWQLCCC is literally the entire $1000 IIRC. lol. Not entirely necessary, but if you really have the money, sure? Stylus RMX isn't a necessary resource, but if you feel like you need it, it's a'ight. Better than most if not all other drum loop libraries/hosts/collections. Shreddage II is win. I used it and Shreddage X in this (X was rhythm, II was lead and rhythm).

It's been a week. Hoping this album will work out.

I shall defer you to these two pages, because I'm no law student. http://www.hrblock.com/tax-answers/services/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=67221 http://www.aztaxpros.org/public/faq.php

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you only have to pay the taxes for it if you make over $5000 a year on average.

I love this way more than I did back then. I hear that jazz fusion vibe for sure. The piano has a narrow but cool unique feel to it, and it works well with the e. piano and that sweet clavinet. Really funky stuff man. This is a style that not many people do, and you should do more of this sometime!

Yeah, the piano is really quiet. Bumping it up by around 8~12 dB should get you close to normal. The panning on the strings seems fine to me. It's 1:02 that seems awkward. Correct me if I'm wrong, but while the percussion is panned left, it's typically panned center. The weird thing is, this picture shows the percussion on the right, this one shows percussion on the left, and this one shows percussion in the center...

Haha, no problem. Actually, I'd be correcting myself too with that remark of mine.

Yeah, you're right. It's an E. Piano. It also explains why 0:25 had such a clean fifth harmony. Regular electric basses don't harmonize quite that well.

This is really nice. I can hear that there's a LOT of reverb, but ultimately it's still a-OK with that treatment!

If it comes to a point where people want their tracks mastered (or mixed down) by someone else, I'd love to volunteer. I still want to make and put up more examples, but here are the ones up so far.

I don't think the high strings (what if you're using viola too, right? Then it wouldn't just be violins) are too dry, but I do think they are too late in the timing (the transient is lining up after the beat). This isn't absolutely necessary, but you could automate the volume on the choir to add some swells and make it more dynamic. It definitely sounds like a soundfont or a bare sample library, and it would really help the realism to do that and to overlap the notes. It's especially a problem at 3:14 - 3:32 since you can most easily hear the detached feel there. This arrangement is actually nicely interpretive. The main issue I'm encountering is that the strings are a bit mechanical. Simply varying velocities won't work; if someone were to visualize a sequenced performance, it should seem natural. 3:32 to the ending is the most noticeable with the strings because they're playing larger/more extended and connected phrases and not just single, separate, distinct staccatos. The piano sounds great as it is. The tone is very clean and full. I also like the mixing on the double basses. Even based on the small problem with the strings and choir, if you were to sub this right now, it has a decent chance of being a borderline pass in my opinion, but it may even be better than that.

I find that grouping things together in a way that you can understand them helps you remember it more easily. For example, I had to memorize a list of 53 pKa's for Organic Chemistry II (40 on a sheet of paper and 13 from a table), so I found relationships between each acid and grouped them together. Maybe you could analyze the song you want to try singing, break it down to what words each section involves, and just think about how many words into each verse you have to know before you can figure out the rest without explicitly remembering them. Find the differences in context between each verse, and find the choruses. Form a general structure to the song in your head. There have been times when I've messed up badly, and honestly, no one really noticed. The first time was my audition for playing the piano at the talent show in my senior year of high school. I knew it was pretty bad, but I just kept going (and made one more mistake), and then finished, and I still got on the talent show. No one even asked about anything remotely related to the mistakes. Now let's go back to sophomore year. I played Mario for the talent show, and I knew I made a mistake live. I randomly forgot what I was playing right in the middle of the performance, and I paused for about a second. I went with it anyways, picked a note to fill in the gap, and continued playing where I left off. I think my mind went blank for a moment, but I don't know if I just got lucky or I improvised my way through (aka BS). I feel like that would help. Of course, it may just have been easier because I was shorter than the piano when I sat down, and the piano was facing perpendicular to the audience, not to mention the stage lights made it impossible to see the audience.

Yeah, that's exactly it. The better you can describe the sound you're looking for, the more easily you can find it. Often though, you'll need to tweak the sound more than a few changes here and there. The timbre might be really close, but the number of changes made will vary with the sound. You kind of have to be willing to just go for it and have a clear direction as to how to go about it. For example: "I want a saw wave synth lead sound with heavy delayed vibrato, a little bit of delay/echo, room-ambience reverb, and a long filter envelope that decreases the cutoff frequency from a high value to a low value." (You can do the heavy vibrato by linking an LFO to the pitch and linking the amplitude of the LFO to the modwheel)

I think you either mean a refined EQ in the sound by default, or the sound is easily fitting; well, no sound is more fitting than another. It's really case-by-case. What would be really useful is a hoarde of many sounds that you can pick and choose, or synthesize.

True; I think that typically the drum loops are used as extra filler material though. I've never heard of a collection of loops that have several rhythmic variations of each kind. If you listen to , I think you can hear it.

Hey dude! Hm... not sure if you had any distortion on the pads, but it sounds like you had a little bit much overload, causing the frequencies to slightly break up at 0:08. It's very slight though. I like the kick, and the snare fits in this context. The bassy e. piano at 0:20 seems to work well playing that fifth at 0:25 (Maybe it's not a bass). Perhaps the ambient bell-like arp at 0:20 - 0:40 can be a little bit louder to make it more apparent that something new was introduced. The square arp at 0:40 works IMO, and it would really only need a little bit of taming of very minor resonances to make it a tiny bit less dominant. Awesome hammered dulcimer at 1:02! Omnisphere? You might find inspiration from this.