timaeus222

Sounding great! The only thing I'd do now is slightly low pass the PWM saws at about 17000~18500Hz with a slope of "2" or "Steep 4" (relative to Steep 6 and Steep . It sounds pretty bright now, especially at 2:42. The tremolo picking guitar is a bit hard to hear behind the backing synths.

I'd like to build on what SnappleMan here has said. I consider sample "quality" to be not only how realistic it is, but also the competency of the timbre. A low quality piano can still fit into a song if it's processed well, like, say, through a little chorus and some hall reverb, then integrated into an 80s retro remix (where's WillRock? ). A synthesized electric sitar (like mine, for example) can be considered good quality if it still evokes the middle-eastern atmosphere every time it's played, whether or not it compares well next to a real electric sitar. The only time when sample competency really matters is when you've established a sound palette for yourself that you like, and your ears find your samples not quite satisfying enough yet. Right then, go find what you believe you need. Once you're satisfied, you're good to go. Just work with what you've found until you know how to use it well, and you've got your sample quality set in soft stone---still time to change your mind. Even if you're satisfied with your sounds, you can always add more to your palette; just depends on whether or not you get good enough to keep wanting more. I wouldn't say the goal for realism is to trick people though. I'd actually call something real if it sounds convincing enough, but whether I'm convinced or not, I haven't been tricked (unless it's something I shouldn't know squat about).

That lead starting at 1:07 is incredibly resonant... not a good thing. 2:01 sweep is way too ear-piercingly bright. 2:03 is sounding overcompressed. Kick has too much bass, likely. 3:02 doesn't make sense. There's nothing to lead into it. 3:54 has way too much treble. 5:08 bass is way too loud. 5:30 was clipping. Even if it's just a "showcase", you do, in fact, have quality issues to worry about. Try not to be too surprised if an OCR Judge says nearly the same thing.

Intro was nice. Not really a fan of the PWM pads at 0:34. Their filters sound pretty cheap and thin, at least until the low pass comes in. 1:16 lead into the drums wasn't all that great. The 808 drums don't really work too well here. Soft acoustic drums might work better. 2:03 bells were OK, but I wasn't really "getting goosebumps", probably because they're a bit dry, thin, and bright. 2:26 drums weren't expected, and are too loud for the background instrumentation. 2:58 synth is low quality to me, especially after the weird pitch drop at 3:02. 3:12~3:33 felt stiff, especially in the drums. Very few humans play a kick drum like that. 3:12~4:16 didn't really have a direction. It was just drums, the PWM pad, and a bass, until 3:59 where there's the same bell from before. I couldn't tell if the bass was leading or the drums were just playing on their own. I think you're missing a lot of instruments that could get you the mood you're going for, but it's getting there.

Solo piano piece had mechanical sequencing. Harmonies and mode shifts were awkward at times, like at 0:26, 0:31, and 0:54. Fast sections emphasize the mechanical feel. Main theme was alright. Again, piano was mechanical in velocities and timing. Some harmonies or intervals were awkward, such as 0:38, 0:43, 0:49, and 0:55. 0:24~0:26 was a nice chord progression, but I barely heard it, as it was split between hands in diads. 0:55 was static with its constant 8th notes in both hands. 1:06 choir felt mechanical with the fast release. Cave song was the best of these three. You got the feel you were going for. Piano is again a bit mechanical, even in a non-solo context. Bells are, too, as well as being low quality. Low end is iffy on the mixing. A tad muddy. 1:05 was nice, but there wasn't any signal into it. Not as majestic as it could be, because of the limited clarity. Choir is a tad buried as a result of little stereo separation or ineffective stereo separation. Strings are unfortunately fake-sounding and sound like a soundfont or some sort of free Kontakt samples. Harmonies are simple (4ths, 5ths, etc.).

That's probably the issue. Step recording, if I'm understanding you correctly, would be defined as recording sections of a remix separately and stopping the recording in between good stopping points. It just so happens I've done that before, but it sounds reasonably realistic (except in some spots that I am actually aware of but don't really want to fix. Yeah, ignore the strings, I know they aren't realistic. ) because I play piano. However, for a person who doesn't play piano, it might not sound as cohesive. In essence, you're playing a different take in every section, so it isn't as natural as you would hope. It would be like you had a different person play each section and then you combined it. Try to treat a combination of separate recording sessions as a cohesive whole. Make each section sound like it's connected to the others, instead of concentrating on getting it to sound right on its own. The most important thing in recording piano is the timing. If you play piano, you can probably figure out the velocities on your own time if you didn't really record velocities well in particular while recording the first time.

Happy le birthday, halc, and may no one spell your name with a capital H.

In my opinion, that view seems narrow-minded. If you know how an instrument should sound, regardless of whether or not you play it, it's not wrong to use it. Sometimes, a person just has the intuition and the instrument really is that easy to think up. I've never played a duduk, nor do I know what it even looks like, but I know how I want it to sound, and I've written a short song that uses a duduk before that I rather like. Synths do also have that phrasing aspect, not just organic instruments. A synth can definitely feel unnatural if its tone begs for expressiveness, like a waveshaped detuned saw wave or something non-generic, and it doesn't have to be a complex tone to warrant attention to detail. Also, even if someone did record a piano song on their MIDI keyboard or even a real piano, if it sounds mechanical, it's either stiffly sequenced or stiffly played.

Oddly enough, I just mix by ear, ignore everything about transients that pertain to the gain, and then turn everything down at the end before it reaches the limiter, until it looks (smexoscope) and sounds right. A bit unorthodox, but it works for me. In most cases I can just look at a song's waveform and tell if the whole thing is too loud or something specific is too loud. In short, once you get good you can just trust your ears, and check later with a waveform viewer.

Having the hi hat on the fourth beat is a very short leadin, and makes the first note pretty jarring. The piano is stepping all over the chorused guitar, and the timpani is sitting on both of them. You need more stereo separation on the guitar and the timpani should be a bit quieter. The piano sequencing is mechanical in the consistent velocities and the timing. It's most evident at 0:04. The backup guitar is much too loud at 0:08. The lead and snare are just buried. As a result, there's a whole bunch of crowding in the midrange. It makes me question what instrument exactly the lead actually is, because it sure isn't a guitar. It's violin-ish, but not a violin. The piano at 0:22 just complicates things. Overall things are pushed way too loudly. Turn it down, and you should be able to tell better what's too loud. I think it's the backing parts, especially the bass, that are louder than the lead guitar.

I don't believe you actually play piano; this arrangement sounds mechanically sequenced, both in velocity and timing. I do hear the reverb though.

I'm not particularly a fan of that kick, but everything else was great. I noticed the strings were a bit plainly sequenced, but assuming you didn't have a thousand-dollar sample library, it was a good way of handling that. I didn't mind the length. I listened through the whole thing without fast forwarding or rewinding.

Sounds like more work than necessary. You shouldn't need to sidechain the snare to the bass or anything else. It just adds a weird pumping effect to the entire song if done badly, and it hurts the transients of other stuff. Just max out the snare volume, control the transient with a transient shaper or a compressor (or both). Then lower the volume, and raise it back up until it barely hits 0dB or so (your preference). Do that while everything else is playing at the same time---it stacks.

Aw yeah. EPICNESS STRIKES AGAIN.

I wanna show you some fun stuff I did using dBlue Glitch v2.0.2. I also just made a very cool sample pack consisting of glitchy drum samples I essentially synthesized in this video, as well as chiptune-y effects, reverses, and more! There are the raw glitched samples as well as some samples that were further processed through external VSTs. 55 samples total. It's free, by the way. REALLY Quick Audio Demo http://mediafire.com/?t2uhbmhrhjbp2sk - Mirror 1 http://4shared.com/zip/MIB3xZG_/timae - Mirror 2

Alright then. Yeah, it was a bit unclear at first. My mistake.

Not bad for your first. The orchestra and choir are very fake though, and the arrangement doesn't stray very far from the original other than 1:24 or areas like that, which is pretty minimalistic. The intro takes too long to lead into the main sections. I would have halved the length of the intro and put more of a progressive instrumentation, as well as reverb on the glock.

0:32 - The bass isn't very aggressive, and there could be a tiny bit more distortion in the rhythm guitars. 0:39 is plain-sounding, and needs more than just a generic chiptune tribute section. Maybe some detuned saws could work better, like .0:57 - The kick and snare aren't coming through very well. Did you try EQing yet? There doesn't seem to be a notch at the kick in the bass and guitars, nor any accommodation for the snare. The kick and snare are also a bit quiet. The guitars sound especially hollow here without a strong bass. The piano is kind of buried at 1:42 by the guitars. Piano needs to be louder. Pretty good first remix. I know it was better than my first.

The balance is completely off; the bass is way too loud, and as a result, the guitars are buried, as well as the drums unfortunately. The only drums I can hear are hi hats, cymbals (barely for some reason), kicks (very barely), and toms (barely but a tiny bit better than the kicks). For now, turn off the bass and make sure other things are balanced, and then put the bass back, mute it, then turn up the volume slowly until it's enough. It's good that the shakuhachi is realistic, but it's hard to hear.

It sounds a little muddy in the low end. Try high passing your EP-like instrument up to where the bass instrument's frequencies stop. The bass instrument is also really loud. 0:15 - The portamento saw has a weird LFO depth. Try decreasing the depth a little bit, and increasing the cutoff a little bit. Sometimes the cutoff gets too low. 0:35 - I suggest the kick be layered with something that has more high end to it. It's gotta feel like it's sorta glued to the limiter. The snare needs a little more treble. 0:39 and 0:47 - cymbals feel awkward. Why are they there? 1:04's lead is pretty flimsy, especially after that drum fill to what I would expect to be great. Honestly sounds like a simple sine wave with no vibrato. Everything after 1:34 is a repeat. Add something new. Lead sequencing needs more attention to detail. Came out alright, but it's not quite OCR material at the moment.

That's funny, I've always thought my low end was bad. I'll take another look at the treble. I do have trouble with that sometimes. I'm also going to further inspect the bass+pad combo in the breakdown. I think the bass has too much midrange. Just curious, do you hear a very soft but weird crackling noise every time the kick hits starting at 0:16 and 0:32? I can confirm that it's definitely from the kick. EDIT: Never mind, I got it. For some reason, my headphones were doing that... I adjusted them a little and it's fine now. I think it's from the bass rumbling my earpads while a hair was on them. As for that 11-source track, lol, I remember that one. (oh, and for the record, Rozo, Gario randomly came. :V) EDIT: Adjusted treble and uploaded a new version (not in OP). Will submit later, probably Saturday. EDIT: Submitted to OCR on 6/8/2013

Haha, I would have expected Doulofée then, but I guess you changed the o to an i because it looked better.

That was actually a statement regarding room for a reasonable doubt, rather than a suggesting a real decision was hoped to be made. In a case like this, the negative is easier to be sure about than the affirmative (and no, I'm not actually doing any special pleading. ). You were making that point; that's a given. However, in order for your assertion to work, you needed a good connection between violence for literary arts and real-world violence. Otherwise, these sentences you wrote would be useless: If you want to use literary art as something to be compared safely and reasonably with real-world violence, it could be a case-by-case basis. Obviously you can't compare the murder of a person by poison on a TV show with the murder of a person by a gunshot shared on the news. Poison is much slower than a gunshot, so it's not a close enough comparison to be a strong analogy/comparison.Also, by writing this paragraph: you implicitly compared two different definitions (or measurements, using your word) of violence by accident: fictional/literary/scripted violence and real-world violence. I believe that those are different enough in their severity to warrant that an equivocation was made. You may not have meant to say that, but that's how it came across from what I read. You're right, depictions of violence are not necessarily and unequivocally bad. The encouragement of them for two contradictory reasons is what confused me. In the same post, you had written this sentence: and this one: and finally this one: Line those up, and you'll find that contradiction you made, probably by accident somehow. You were at first hoping to see any sort of real concrete evidence proving that depictions of violence would actually cause an increase in instances of actual violence. Then you said it would be great to spread the awareness of issues regarding violence by use of the depictions of violence, and followed that up with a hope that seeing violence will help us to not do it. It's your hope that was contradictory though, and not the content you were talking about. You see, your hope for evidence of an increase was direct hope. Your hope for a decrease was a conditional hope, so if either of those are accurate, only one, or neither, would happen, and obviously not both. If you were meaning to say "if it's really the case that depictions of violence cause an increase in violence, then here's how we might be able to work towards fixing it little by little, and it involves bringing in more depictions of violence---albeit harsher than the previous ones---as an experiment to see if harsher unconventional violence might be enough to steer people away from committing them", then yes, I agree, at the extent to which it works well enough. Yep, that's the issue with a lot more than just violence (the ACA, for example, but let's not go offtopic), as a lot of legal terms are ambiguous too (like in Regulating vs. Mandating by Howard Schweber). I agree that it can be vaguely described with examples, but the varying degrees of violence is what makes it so hard to compare versions. That's why it's important to use as recent evidence as possible.

Yu-Gi-Oh dragon from my favorite season plus three twos.

Sometimes you just need to layer some samples together. There are times when the EQ AND the tonal character are what give the snare that pop, and not just the EQ. Bad samples and good EQ, mediocre result. Bad samples and bad EQ, bad result.