timaeus222

I've been listening to Keyscape demos lately, and they've reminded me just how nicely a clean electric guitar lead can blend with an electric piano or wurlitzer. This ReMix exemplifies that. Slick solos (even your first-timer drum solo!). Also, I'm not at all bothered by the wurlitzer LFO panning. It's common to see that happening for an FM-y tone like that.

It's not the same tones. The first has a shorter decay, and the kick drum rhythm is even different.

Agreed; I would also try cutting down some on the basses' midrange to make room for the lead.

I try to listen to a wide variety of music, but generally what inspires me in terms of sound design is stuff by @big giant circles, @zircon, @Joshua Morse, and other people who have an established 'sound palette', because they have a distinctive set of sounds that emanate their essence, in such a way that you can tell when they've written a particular piece. That is, you listen to a piece by them, and can immediately identify it as theirs, because the sound design is memorable and innovative/unique/distinct. I've also found that as you actually try to make certain sounds, you start to feel more inspired by them more easily. I didn't like dubstep music about 2 years ago, but after designing a bunch of dubstep basses, it's one of my primary musical genres to write. You may find some ideas here in this playlist:

YES, Brent still does metal! While I do like his generally experimental style, what first got me into his music was "Eternal Descent", which I prefer more!

Brandon likely will not want to submit them to OCR, at the so-called "risk" of getting monetized. So those will be put aside, unless Brandon ever decides to sign the consent form anyway.

Well, the pitch envelope on the lead at 1:05 is a little weird, but I get the point; the slight pitch dive toward the end of its sustain adds to the chill blend of textures, so I think it works. Sometimes the tendency for a well-known source is to keep the melody intact, but I like that this isn't all that melody-focused, and actually has an incorporated original melody at 2:52 - 3:05 and the ending. The ending is OK; I think it would have been a bit more effective if there either wasn't a final sonar ping, and the synths right before it were sustained and faded out, or the underlying synths could have been sustained through the sonar's release (since it is a little spiky), but that's just a nitpick.

Very nice, the partwriting sounds well-adapted/natural to the violin + piano, and I'm especially loving the amount of emotion oozing from Chris's violin. The interpretation of Lost Woods' melody is also quite interesting; though it kinda tends to turn away from the playing the highest note in the melody, or occasionally omits a significant note on purpose, it still works as an alternative melody on its own. Totally fresh!

This is exactly the kind of retro game you're referring to. http://overclockedrecords.com/release/dungeonmans-ost/ So yeah.

Some of the OC ReMixes have become "classics" for me, like "Castle of Tears" (DigiE), or "Essence of Lime" (Hylian Lemon). I think this now joins them.

Yeah, I'm using a temporary Win 10 laptop while I'm in grad school, and WinAmp works here, so it's probably not just because its Win 10 that it doesn't work for you.

I think some transitions could be smoothed out, the structure could be revised, and the drums could be more punchy and less "FL-default". 0:25 gets into the high energy a little fast (3 seconds), and there's not much of a buildup. Maybe you could extend the intro and add a buildup. Once we get into the DnB section at 0:25, the drums feel kinda like the default FL drum samples. If you practiced layering drum samples to get punchy layered kicks and snares, that would help with making this sound heavier. The bass is pretty good; just try to match the bass with your drums in heaviness. 0:41 - 1:03 feels fairly static relative to what came before, and could use more expressive synths. Those sustained saws aren't really adding excitement IMO. There's also not that much difference between 0:25 - 0:41 and 1:03 - 1:20 in energy, so you may want to plan out your dynamics some more and rework your mixing choices. The way the arrangement shifts so much kinda feels indecisive. I think it changes too much too often, and as a result, your buildups are short and your breakdowns are brief (such as 2:02 - 2:07), making the high-energy sections sound "too familiar". I'm not sure why you had 2:45 - 3:17 with significantly less bass than 0:25 - 0:41 and 1:03 - 1:20; right now it sounds like a prolonged outtro from 2:24 - 3:45.

I use a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, and I can see the Off-Topic forum when logged in.

I think the rhythm guitars are oddly washy. Compare them with other mixes like these, and you should hear that you have a lot of reverb in comparison: https://soundcloud.com/isworks/shreddage-bass-2-colossal-force-by-tony-dickinson https://soundcloud.com/isworks/shreddage-ibz-ai-wo-torimodose-by-crystal-kings-arr-andrew-aversa https://soundcloud.com/magnus-engdahl/wing-it It makes it hard to hear distinct bass notes. Also, the kick drum is hardly present, besides its click, and the snare is fairly thin. Overall, I'm getting a distant feel that just doesn't sound intentional. I like the cover, but it has room for improvement on the mixing. You have a pretty great guitar tone, which is unfortunately thinned out somehow.

Here's another way it can be said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQAVT6H_umo&t=62m38s So, I would suggest that you don't try to make super advanced stuff until you've further refined the techniques you are capable of doing now.

My first guess is that you were using the same sample repitched for each note. That would give you a very unrealistic sound, because all it does is create audio artifacts which make the sample sound unnaturally darker at lower pitches or unnaturally thinner at higher pitches. It's noticeably not the same thing as a professionally-recorded sample library with optimized scripting, per-key samples ("chromatic sampling") with round robins (multiple rotating or randomized recordings of each note), etc. It might actually be better to use a soundfont instead of literal audio samples of an organic instrument, because at least those have... I guess two or three samples per octave? It's not 3-8 samples per key, but at least it's not one sample over 8 octaves.

Let's be honest. You sound like you are too new at this to attempt something you're not familiar with. I would advise you to get to know your DAW better before trying to emulate something that you're asking so many questions about (and in a scattered manner as well). If I tried to truly explain how to do it, I would have to use too much jargon that you'd have to filter through anyway. I can give less general comments, though they basically are under the assumption that you are comfortable with your DAW, or at least kind of know what EQ, compression, and samples are in a basic sense. There's no genre change at 0:57. Metal is not easy, and basically requires that you use commercial samples or get a real guitar and a real amp if you want to get that particular sound. Guitar soundfonts and other free guitar stuff are pretty unconvincing IMO. The general sound of this remix is compressed electronic dance music. It uses very typical glitch hop or dubstep drums with a basic drum pattern that you could probably do, just with different samples. The hard part of mixing this is getting the bass to sit right, because it's easy to add clutter in the 200~400 Hz range without realizing it. Many instruments overlap there, so taking a few years to learn how to mix is what would be most beneficial to writing this kind of music. Even now I'm using jargon, so you should see my point when I say that you should take the time to learn it yourself as well, instead of just asking 50 questions in a row and hoping that you can pick it up right away from reading about it. You have to put into practice what you take in.

I tried FL Mobile and I'm just not impressed. It totally ruins my workflow. So you may want to wait until FL Mobile 3 comes out, and check that out before deciding, because it's much more like the desktop version.

Maybe short segments of finished tracks? Not sure I'd actually show album WIPs to the public.

Well, it's not like Komplete 11 Select is an orchestra and nothing else. There are definitely synths in there. I don't remember which ones, but surely at least one of them has enough features for you to make synth pads (which are pretty essential for atmosphere or, well, textural padding that fills in the soundscape). Massive and Prism, amongst other synths, are included, and those can definitely make synth pads. Prism actually sounds like it could be really good for physical modeling (synthesizing physical instruments), which can make for some really interesting acoustic atmospheres (bells, plucked instruments, etc).

No one's asking you to achieve 100% real. We're more so asking for realistic, as in, convincing to the general audience. So that means you should at least work on the feedback that I gave you, because that was bare minimum. I could have been more picky, and told you to try recording event edits instead of mousing them in, but I would have waited until you understood the point of doing the CC11 in the first place. I could have also said to layer similar articulations together to thicken up your sound, which is entirely possible on EWQLSO, but the wash of the baked-in reverb might not offset the benefit of a thicker sound. It's not to achieve perfect realism, it's to approximate it. If you have EQWLSO Platinum, then I'm sure that a capable person can follow the advice without reaching a barrier that the library itself has created.

So in other words you want a support orchestra. String beds, flute leads, etc., but not the whole thing.

Listening to something and understanding something are two completely different things. I don't believe you processed them fully enough to train your brain. If you did, your music would be more refined. Just calling it like it is. You say it's "easier said than done", which is true, but it's not an excuse to spend less time on it and assume you'll never get it. Assuming you'll never get it is a great way to not get it. So you have to put more of your time into learning how to write for orchestra if you're going to want to write something more realistic. I do hear the similar styles, but you're still missing the expression present in the SMG example, real or not. Your orchestra is a little distant, which means the close / room / hall mic mix is skewed towards the hall mic (or away from the close mic) or you don't have the flexibility to mix all three together (you wouldn't beneath Platinum version of EWQLSO I believe). Or your samples are pre-baked in reverb. Your brass in particular is noticeably lacking dynamic crossfade automation, so the high-dynamic "blatty" tone to the brass is constantly there, without an emulated decrease in incoming breath via a lower dynamic (often done with CC1 or CC11). Even if you don't have dynamic crossfade, you could at least record volume event edits. It's not the same thing, but it approximates it. You haven't fully accounted for the slow attacks of certain articulations (particularly in the non-staccato brass and non-staccato strings), so the slow articulations are late. Therefore, it would help to shift those slow articulations back in time a little to make sure they are more on-rhythm. As Slimy mentioned, a lot of your notes sound quantized. One way to help that is to write bigger chords, and offset the notes in your chords. This at once gives you a bigger sound and a bit more flexibility when it comes to aligning the note transients.

As I mentioned earlier, on this page, the albums are listed; underneath the titles are the labels OCRX-00YY. That tells you what album number it is. If it's OCRC, then it's commercial, but OCRA is free. So the TMNT album would be listed as OCRA-0047.

Are you talking about the albums? They're right here: http://ocremix.org/albums/