timaeus222

The snare is still slow. I don't think you really did anything with it. It's really lacking the punch it needs. The lead at 0:45 is a bit buried under its reverb and the tremolo bass, which... might be playing in octaves? I'm not really much of a fan of the tremolo bass that goes until 1:14. It just feels weird to have it for that long. The sync lead at 1:14 seems like it's playing on retrigger or poly, which aren't effective voice modes for this particular lead. Try legato with a little bit of glide and vibrato. The lead at 1:46 feels rigidly sequenced, as it doesn't really have any natural phrasing. It's like when a person is breathing in between every note. The distorted bass that comes in at 2:08 is too loud. The lead at 2:52 has the same problem as the sync lead; it would be better off as legato with some vibrato and expressiveness. And you probably know about the lack of an ending. I can see you're making some changes, but maybe you should take a little side trip to sound synthesis for a bit, then come back and try improving the synth leads in here.

The pizzicato is rigidly sequenced. It sounds like one person playing. Try adding offsetted notes to make it sound like 2-3 people playing. Just select all the notes, clone them, lengthen them on the left edge a bit, then shorten them from the right edge until you have the right edge of the cloned notes lining up with the left edge of the original notes. Now you have a slightly better pizzicato. 0:57 - filter-automated detuned square bass is too loud. 2:44 - instrumentation sounds like original to me, just a bit. Also sounds conservative. 3:26 was a bit sudden. I don't think that 'transition' worked. 3:52 might have a few different keys going on at the same time? 4:11 - something muddy or sub-bassy? 4:39 - I'm not hearing anything connecting those two parts. :/ Ideas are there, they just need to flow better for the most part.

AWESOME run at 1:55! =D Sweet mix, loving it like crazy. CLIMAXES EVERYWHERE.

The EP writing on this mix is downright BADASS. Got me hooked the whole time, Blake. Kickin' remix!

I think you turned down the right frequencies on the kick, but it's missing the high frequency thwap it needs, so now it's buried. It'd be great if you can use some sort of band compressor to slightly compress the low frequencies created at the tail of the kick. The sub bass is quite loud, and it's cluttering up the mix quite a bit. Try lowering the volume a little bit on it. I can barely hear anything else. The snare sounds slow. Try choosing a different snare sample with a faster snap. Or, layer on one with a faster snap, and the current snare could be the high end sizzle layer of the two-layered snare. 2:22 - the lead is pretty shrill to me. Can you try to find another synth lead? The song overall is very loud, but I think it's mainly because of the sub bass. After 2:54, it's pretty much over. The remaining 30 seconds don't really do anything, so it would be great if you could work out a quicker ending, or add something more to the remaining 30 seconds. You're getting better, but this still needs some work!

Bump for Mod Review.

Yep, needs some live implementation with the samples you have, especially the EP and organ. The source itself could be too short to really expand on in the way you have now without adding another source, so perhaps that could be a good idea? 2:00-2:15 was a good idea, and that's what I would expect from a source expansion, so keep going with that. 2:40 is a great bass breakdown, but it desperately needs more articulation on the bass, as well as backup strings. I don't think the organ is fighting with the EP at all, the EP just needs to be brought to the back a tiny bit more. Nice, jazzy interpretation. Probably your best to date, good job.

Intro is interesting, but the flute needs to be louder with more articulations. Guitar tone sounds a little too high passed to me, and also needs more tone crafting. There might also be too much reverb or delay on it. Speed up the BPM by about 4-8? 0:36 - lead needs a more aggressive tone with much more vibrato. 0:54 - Flute could work, but still needs more articulations like vibrato. Drums need glue or compression. 1:21 needs a transition. 1:37 might be missing a cymbal. 1:51 needs a transition too. 2:38 - things are sounding really muddy here. You might have too much reverb since things sound really distant. I haven't really heard much bass other than the low mids of a rock bass until 3:07. Good start, lots of polishing needed.

dat syllogism, gotta love it. [/sarcasm] Actually, in all seriousness, that wouldn't be a straw man to call an argument a straw man. You'd be debating the argument itself, so your own statement wouldn't be a straw man, but their argument would be. When you start a new argument, the realm of relevance changes, IIRC.

I hear something really weird in the intro, and it sounds like it's majorly clipping. Intro is really muddy. Some sort of low end drone is cluttering things up like crazy. EP sounds like live or live MIDI, dry and exposed. Pizzicato is dry and exposed. Timpani feels randomly placed, dry, and exposed. Sub bass is too loud. Sax is dry and exposed. Other drums are dry and exposed. Organ is dry and exposed. No transitions. You get the idea. You might be missing a limiter, and your instruments need more time spent on placement in a proper stereo field. Almost all the instruments are fighting for attention up front, and the sub bass gets tiring after a few seconds. Arrangement needs a sense of direction.

It's not wrong, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's better to start off with a mono source (like DI Electric Guitar recordings) and stereo enhance it from there if you wish. If you're starting with a stereo source and you want to make room for other instruments using stereo mods, sure, it's fine to narrow the stereo source a little bit, but try not to do that so much that it becomes a habit, because narrowing the sound sometimes merges specifically oriented sound waves that might worsen the sound quality overall. It's like when you try that trick to isolate vocal tracks and the result worsens the background instrumentation but leaves slight traces of the vocal track (which might be the wet signal obtained from effects like chorus and flanger, I believe); I discovered that Fruity Stereo Enhancer can do almost the same thing and it works pretty well, so I'd imagine that stereo reduction has the possibility of worsening the sound quality excessively. I find it better to just arrange things by stereo enhancing them to different extents to "position them around me" at "different angles".

You can disable them both separately. I would assume that the same people who made those over-the-top comments also disliked the video, and she doesn't want to lose her credibility to trolls that almost solely hate her, barely considering her arguments from a more objective standpoint.

Basically I'm asking for a way, as I play my MIDI keyboard while FL Studio is currently open, to show the keys being pressed on some sort of isolated virtual keyboard display that I can crop down to overlay on videos. It looks like LoopBe1 is a tool I might be missing. It's like what's on this video, on the bottom right at 1:31:

Exactly. The way you said it, when you said "...because of that gut-punch (but what would it be without it!)", it sure demonstrated the idea of the "central focus" being the damsel, at least in that case. However, thankfully it's progressively gotten better in the later editions of series such as Zelda and Mario, like you said. These days, the idea of the woman being kidnapped and all those "save me!" moments is fading into the background a tad, allowing more interesting plot twists to develop, which is great. EC isn't trolling, by the way. It's more like he's getting information (or debating), if you will, through arguments that promote more extensive explanations.

Let me clarify a few things. From what I read on this topic, it looks like she's been getting harassment comments that are beyond trolling to the point of her taking the reins and stopping the nonsense. Critiques are typically meaningful, and obviously, harassment isn't meaningful. Yes, critiques can be harsh, but not to the point where it's quite literally an ad hominem. Critiques can bring across the person's point, but attacking the person doesn't prove any point at all; it only shows that you can't at all be credible. She didn't want to be a person that attracted highly critical trolls who insist on badgering her. Mature self-defense, that's what it is. Actually, if a story is about a hero, that's what zircon was saying---it's supposed to be about the hero, but instead, the focus is placed on the damsel. Without a damsel, what would the "hero" really be? The "hero" develops his/her (let's say his) character throughout the game, and when he rescues the damsel, he can then be called a "hero". Without a damsel, the structural content of the game is essentially nothing; Anita was emphasizing that the damsel is the meat of the plot in many of the older games and is still continuing on in certain series. Developers of those series try to make the game about the hero, but really, the backbone of the story revolves around saving the damsel in cases such as Zelda, Mario, etc.You're right, fairy tales aren't disrespectful or sexist, but fairy tales and video games are under completely different contexts, so that's actually a false analogy. Fairy tales were typically meant to entertain children and the general audience in the context of books, worldwide TV, and movies, whereas usually, video games entertain those that enjoy the relaxation time away from more stressful activities in the context of electronic graphics generators and personal TV use (XBox, PS2, DVDs, etc.). However, the fact that developers were continuing the trend found in those video games instead of deviating from that demonstrates an inherent laziness (which zircon did say) on forming a more creative plot structure. It's like how people used to sample other artists' music and lots of songs had copyright issues because of non-originality; with video games like those mentioned above, the problem doesn't extend to copyright issues, it lies within the raw originality of the structural content. I don't believe zircon said it was harmful, necessarily, to leave women as damsels, but rather, I believe he was just clarifying or explaining your misconception with some hypotheticals without connecting the proposed consequence with the proposed antecedents, which would then not be any sort of argument.

Is there a way to take that and have it react to MIDI notes I play in FL Studio, or does it automatically respond to a MIDI keyboard while it plays, no matter where the output is? For example, if I have FL open and Bome's mouse keyboard open at the same time, and I go into FL, open up a VST, and play that, is that reflected in Bome's mouse keyboard too? I might make tutorial videos in the future, so it'd be great to have a virtual keyboard overlay on the videos that accurately shows what I just played. I do see that it has MIDI In and MIDI Out, so I hope so.

13:38 - If she didn't make that graphic, it's an official typo. I actually kinda like this series so far. Although I do like english analysis.

Well, it seems like the chords you were playing matched the sound of an EP in my head. An EP, or just a different piano sound would work before 1:26, whichever you want to go with. 1:11 - I just realized how mechanical the slap bass sounded there. Do you have round robins? You could just find a synth VST that you're comfortable with and make a pad with that. It usually isn't that hard to make a pad. Multi-voice saw wave with some detuning, a slow attack, and maybe an envelope on the cutoff to give a sort of evolving sound. It's basically like a supersaw with a mild low pass that's turned into a pad. 2:43 had a synth run that was a little off-rhythm.

I think there's an EP or harp in the beginning? Well, whatever it is, there's a bit too much feedback, and sometimes it resonates really heavily, like some sort of inharmonic metallic vibrations. It could be because of EQ, or something with the mic I think you're using. I can hear a little keypressing or plucking. The acoustic bass that comes in the middle was a bit sudden. I just heard it and rewinded a little to see why it came in. I have no idea why it came in. The rimshot is a bit dry, and actually a little weak. An 808 rim shot doesn't seem to work for this. Maybe an acoustic rim shot instead, with a little bit of reverb?

Wubs sound better, but actually still too loud, and overpowering the lead. The wubs are also a tiny bit busy in terms of the rhythm. The 1:39 lead is still very shrill. Just try copying the MIDI data to a new lead and see if you can come up with a better one than that.

The cello is a bit loud in the beginning, and it's clashing with the lower frequencies where the guitar plucks lie. You'll probably need to automate the mid-frequency EQ bands down while her voice is singing to bring it out, but still add some reverb to the voice and soften it a little bit more to compensate.

Does anyone know of something similar to this, besides Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard 0.5.1, that works for Windows? http://www.manyetas.com/creed/midikeys.html If not, I'll just settle for Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard 0.5.1.

That went by too quickly. Interesting arp there with the slow attack. The chiptune breakdown was pretty cool.

Yeah, triangle waves do tend to sound like saw waves. Good to know you recognize those details. I really like TruePianos as a piano VST. It's $190 though. I think some stuff on soundfonts.darkesword.com has some decent pianos in the soundfonts, particularly the one that starts with t and ends with x and possibly a number.