timaeus222

Good start. The hard thing about this source is the lack of a memorable melody. Try to start off with a conservative arrangement, then vary it up as you go.

Yeah, he's a faggot for being an awesome OCR judge and moderator. Woohoo. Don't get butthurt because someone was being straightforward with you, and people will treat you better.

That I'd whole-heartedly agree with. It's not as much of a grey area as it seems. Opinion and subjectivity are grey areas, while technical comments and objectivity are grey areas. Opinion is purely based on personal preference. Objectivity focuses on technical aspects, like production, arrangement complexity, and arrangement flow. Subjectivity focuses on personal opinion that is slightly based on objective analysis, like arrangement flow, drum programming, and sound selection. As you could see, arrangement flow was something that was inside the grey area of objectivity and subjectivity, but I personally haven't run into very many of those situations.

Maybe it's the vague wording, but putting the producer at fault indefinitely, as it seems, is, in fact, very narrow-minded. I feel like blaming them all the time is just disrespect. If they put hard work into something, the least we could do is commend their effort and reward them by listening to their song further than just 30 seconds before making a solid judgment. If we hadn't done that all this time, few people would feel motivation to get good. It's not the producer's non-incriminating fault that people don't like their music as opinion; it's only their non-incriminating fault if people truly don't like their music objectively---from a technical standpoint. We don't control opinion to a good enough extent very often at all. "Fault" is just a terrible word without saying if it means "a reason" or "your problem". /offtopic

Maybe they should be, but the love for their own music might make them a bit oblivious to outside negative feedback, not to mention it's better to write what you love rather than what people love and to let them like what they want to like. If you don't like what you wrote, where do you get motivation to keep going? Also, five bucks = exaggeration of 2 cents.

The production for me wasn't as tight. I'm not getting as heavy of a sound as you seemed to want to portray. I know this is a sample library, but it's still heavier. Maybe it's because they're riffing on a low A string, but it's still the case that the bass is really refined. If you listen to that and then go back to this, it's much less heavy in your remix. I know sample libraries were made to be perfect, but sometimes live can sound better than sample libraries. Decent production, but it does have room for improvement. Your drums appear to be lacking some treble above 16kHz, the kick is not coming through very well, and neither are the toms. 1:38 is extremely muddy. I can barely hear a kick there, which shows me that you're using a hard knee limiter in digital software, meaning you have the resources to get this fixing going! The piano at 1:50 would be called out for sure on its mechanical velocities and timing, and maybe even on its sample quality if this were to be submitted. As far as I'm concerned, 3:00 is your ending. The rest is nothing more than a repeat, and you wouldn't lose much content as 3:00 is a pretty good length anyways.

I'm not against your view necessarily, but the phrase "full control" might not be entirely accurate, and I just want you to be aware of that. You, specifically, may have full control, maybe, but not everyone does. If the producer doesn't have the skill or knowledge to make anything other than the annoying type of dubstep wobbles (back to that example), and they don't know where to look to improve because it's outside their realm of knowledge (which is the case with many people, in the sense of searching skills), they don't have "full control" of how the patch sounds as a result. Any producer who loves what they do may or may not be completely "aware of the consequences that people might perceive" differently. That's my five bucks. /pun

Just wanted to shed some light on this: There are times when people can't express why they like or dislike something. I did a speech in my speech class in April or so (redundancy is redundant) about music appreciation and I started with a survey comprising of these questions: Who likes music because... 1. It's catchy 2. It's cool 3. You just like it, and you don't have a clue why All of those questions were answered with a hand raise from at least three people. That's why it's so hard to get people to like details that are interesting to the composer or producer. Here's a crude example: Dubstep wobbles. The difference between a good one and a bad one is the amount of resonance and the choice of whether or not to include a large amount of wild pitch bends (you get what I mean). Some people would just say "okay, moving on" if there's excessive resonance. Others would say "Hey, this isn't that bad. Not sure why, but eh, I'll keep listening for a bit" if there isn't. The important thing is that they can't express why. So then if that were the deciding factor of a liked or disliked song, it really would be the audience's non-incriminating fault, because ultimately the producer didn't have a problem with publishing it like that. I've never liked Skrillex and I never will, but it's not because I'm against dubstep, it's because I'm against his style of dubstep.

Yes, but the issue here is that you said the producer or composer is "always, always, always" at fault, even if people hate a great song subjectively because of the genre (that's what I said in my last post, and you said "Yeah. Completely."). In this case, it would be the people's "fault" (though it should not ever be said in such an incriminating way) for being biased against the genre in the first place, because the composer did a great job conveying that genre, and purely on opinion, that's what the people thought. That's how a few dubstep producers feel when they get an OC ReMix passed, for example.

Aside from very minor nitpicks on sound selection (some leads), really well done on this. I almost thought you were going to go Battle Network 3 at 1:58, but it wasn't in the source list.

So then, if the buildup is ultimately awesome objectively in an OC ReMix and the judges fawn over it, but is in a genre hated by many people subjectively, it is then the producer or composer's fault that the people hate the song? Something's wrong...

Absolutely. If you really want to show this compo some love, give the entries a fair chance and listen to them in full! Then I guess your standards are too high for OCR then, because I find zircon, for example, to be a complete and utter genius, and he still does 1 minute buildups sometimes, like in . It could be boring for some people, as it gets DnB at 0:51, but is ambient with rich bass in the intro, still with very interesting sounds. It's not about wanting to listen to them again, in this particular compo. It's about finding enough highlights in the remixer's effort in arrangement, production, and enjoyability to make you want to vote for them. It feels to me like your standards are outside the realm of this compo (whether higher or lower it doesn't matter).

It's not immediately obvious (sine waves are sneaky), but mine did. And at the 32 second mark a more obvious cameo of my Robot Master theme comes. If that's your criteria---production primarily, and if everyone were to use the same criteria, then no amateur would ever get voted for, no matter how amazing their arrangement is. Is that what you want? A completely badass arrangement undermined by production to lose to a downright terrible arrangement highlighted by good production and sound design?

Okay, now that I never realized I could do.

That's true, but with automation you can also evolve the timbre over time, rather than having a rigid tone the whole time. Automation helps a lot with progression, and it's independent of the synth phase/position. I believe you're talking about Multi-Stage Envelope Generators, which are still just a form of shrunken automation.

Ah, okay. Thanks. I was never in a real music theory class, I was just asked to apply it during my years in choir.

Weird, that actually sounds like a different definition to me. The way you said it, it sounds like your context of "Parallel" is multiple usages in a row, whereas I'm thinking of the interval. I don't think I was ever clearly taught what "parallel" really meant and just heard examples from my teacher, so I assumed it was "parallel thirds", "perfect fourths", and "perfect fifths". I've always thought parallel meant "played at the same time" 'til now.

Just needed to say that it's a "perfect fifth" though. "Perfect" applies to fourths and fifths, and "Parallel" applies to thirds. I just worked on my entry on my own, and sent to my team members for feedback once.

It depends. Are you looking to need a full piano range? Any serious hopes for accurate velocity recordings?

In that case, you could automate the volume multiplier knob and clone some automation clips (MISC tab in the plugin wrapper). It has the smoothest automation curve of all the volume options, from what I've tested. The mixer sliders, knobs, and the volume knobs in the Pattern window have somewhat of a "1/x" slope rather than a "-x" slope.

Wait, you have Fruity Soundfont Player and you didn't know? Yeah, you can just drag soundfonts into FL from the browser as they are. I mean that this bass is the instrument that muds up the frequencies the most. I also edited that post I made earlier about the reverb.

It's fine if you're using a soundfont like that. You just gotta polish your production skills, and that can justify your usage of free low quality material. I'd say the stereo image issues are solved now. At this point, it's down to meticulous attention to detail to polish up the song, so here are my thoughts. I recorded what played onscreen and so I have timestamps, too: The main issue right now is the muddiness of the low mids and bass frequencies and the secondary issue is the dryness of the instruments. Something that would benefit this would be to reflect the ADSR envelope you would expect or want from what you have. For example, what I had called the pad seems like it would work well in the role of a pad sound, so you could, since you're using a soundfont player in FL, just take the time to adjust that. Something else you could do is EQ a little more carefully. This is especially an issue at 0:24. For the most part I can hear instruments rather well, but the bass is the main offender. Since you have FL Studio, you can actually see the frequencies, unlike non-FL users. Use that to your advantage and dip down on the frequencies that you feel are too obtrusive. Think about what you're hearing, what's bothering you, and as you create a notching filter, sweep through the frequency spectrum until you hear the problem fixed, and track down the precise range. One of the easiest things you can do to enhance free samples is the usage of reverb. There's an idea where you use reverb to reflect the "atmosphere" of a real sample when recorded on a professional mic (also called the "air"), and that could be the primary reverb representing the airiness of an actual room. Depending on the role of the instrument, that might be all you need. If the instrument is meant to be backup, think about how far away you want it. The farther away, the longer the reverb decay should be. For example, a typical decay for a snare is 0.4~1.0 seconds (depending on the style of music), a typical decay for a church is ~3 seconds, and for a cathedral it is ~8 seconds (yep, 8!). The longer the decay, the more muddy the mix can get, which can be remedied with how high the Low Cut is. The most common practice is to cut out low end ambience from the reverb as much as you can, and use only as low of a Low Cut as you feel you need to achieve the right sound. If the instrument doesn't ever reach as low a frequency as the low cut currently is, raise it up. For example, if the lowest frequency achieved is 400Hz, it doesn't make sense to have a Low Cut at 20Hz. Bump it up to 320~360Hz or so. The rest of the reverb idea focuses on tonality, accomplished with Damping techniques. There's three main ideas I've drawn from it: low end ambience, midrange early reflections, and high end hiss. The low end ambience is a good way to mud up the mix if it's used on an already low end instrument, but it's primarily applicable to extremely large spaces like churches and cathedrals. The early reflections are the result of too much midrange ambience, which may or may not be a knob in your reverb. The high end hiss is not a huge issue most of the time, but it can create or ruin a "perfect" reverb. Too much and it sounds washy. Too little, and it sounds low quality. If you can't hear it, it's because you have too much treble on your other instruments, or your reverb isn't doing the trick. The High Damping knob is what does this.

Same here. The only thing I really do on the master is a very mild high pass at 30Hz to get a little bit of headroom, some lightly applied parallel compression just to tame any wild waveforms a little, and a simple limiter. You shouldn't need to do more on the master to get your mix to sound good if the mix already sounds good.

A little over two years, but I'm just a fast, super dedicated learner, and people can learn at completely different speeds, of course. Unpanning the brass could be a good idea if it was supposed to be leading, but a brass section type of sound generally is panned so that the higher frequency brass is left and the lower frequency brass is right (trumpets and trombones go left, french horns go right, tuba goes somewhat center but slightly right). In a sense it should be wide in the traditional situation, but with what you have, where it is right now is fine. What you could do to help that is to have something else on the right speaker to balance things out, since it feels awkward to play on only one speaker for too long.

I don't know if this is much help, but have you tried opening Live 8 and then opening a project file from there? Your MAC might recall what folder you viewed latest with Live 8, or is it just the default folder directory which happens to be shared with the update's default folder directory (hopefully not)?