timaeus222   Members

Wait, so are you allowed to use plugins other than the ones available from class? For example, you may want to give TLs-Pocket Limiter a shot. It's free, and has been my mainstay limiter for the past 3 years.

I actually like the setup that 0:00 - 0:30 does. That intro reminds me of something by Dream Theatre. I can say more later, when I actually have my good headphones on and I have a more accurate stereo field. Also, I know you said "mastering", but maybe you meant "mixing". My initial impressions are that: - I'm pretty sure I'm hearing either slight overcompression, or overcrowding plus weak/overly clean drums at 1:12 - 2:00, but I'd probably be more sure later. - The drums are decently mixed, but it's one of those situations where it's "good but not great". They get the job done, but are merely good enough. They aren't that strong/punchy. I can barely notice the kick, the snare is there but not that upfront, and the hi hats/etc could be a bit louder. For example, these drums are quite punchy, because they've had some careful distortion added, as well as some parallel compression (especially the snare). Notice the right-panned toms at 0:51 - 1:06? Yeah, they're pretty quiet, but if you know they're there, you can hear them. The little details like that should be able to be heard in a well-mixed track. - The rhythm guitar is alright. Kind of like the drums, it does its job, but IMO, it's on the borderline of not quite good enough. When 1:12 comes in, the rhythm guitars get a bit buried because of the lack of low end (near 200 Hz). - The lead guitar is not too bad (the playing sounds great); it sounds loud enough before 2:48. At 2:48, it gets a little buried, and if not for the wah pedal adding motion, I might not hear it as well. So from this, I would say to check your midrange frequencies in the rhythm guitar. There seems to be some midrange clutter that obscures the lead guitar in the denser timestamps in the mix.

Well, if you are going to be selling your music, that counts as commercial use, i.e. "not-personal" use. That points to option two: "You are an individual or business using REAPER commercially, and yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000" I know I've used FL for the past 5 years and normally I would recommend it, but if you want good plugins and samples out of the box, you probably won't get that from FL. But, do try its free trial anyways. The only drawback is that you can't save your project file and then open it up again (unless you save it, send it to someone who owns FL, have them save it, and send it back to you. Loophole! ), which isn't much of a drawback! FL Producer Edition gives you a nice beginner's collection of sounds, but you should then look for free plugins like you intended. FL can use VST (which is one of the most popular plugin formats out there), so looking for outside plugins shouldn't be too much of a problem. Some of the mainstay native plugins I use in FL are: Fruity Waveshaper, Fruity Blood Overdrive, Fruity Parametric EQ 2, and Fruity Delay 2. And although I don't use Sytrus that much, many others have found good use in that, so getting in some practice with that might show you why it can be quite useful. Some examples of free mainstay non-native plugins I use in FL are: NastyDLA MKII, Density MKIII, endorphin (digitalfishphones), TLs-Pocket Limiter, s(m)exoscope, and Sonalksis Free-G. Either way, FL gives a free trial for unlimited time; good reason to try it nevertheless!

17 minutes is actually really long for a song (especially one that is atmospheric, slow, and ambient). The fact is, only one ReMix on OCR is more than 15 minutes or so (unless you count the three-part Smash Bros. rap as one track, which is about 23 minutes). One. And it is an energetic genre. Just for some perspective.

My dad loves the Eagles. RIP.

I guess so. I think if you keep working with FL's EQ 2 plugin, that would get you further along EQing well than many other EQ plugins, purely due to the visualization.

No problem! Yeah, if there is any problem with the bitrate, the Judges wouldn't just reject it solely for that reason---they would delay it for while. If it's not the only reason, then they should contact you about it.

I still love to use Fruity Parametric EQ 2 for its visualization feature, and I'm probably not going to stop using it anytime soon. I do also have FabFilter Pro-Q, which is a more precise EQ plugin that has a standard deviation of 0.01 dB, as compared to Fruity Parametric EQ 2, where its standard deviation is 0.1 dB. I don't use that quite as much, though, for typical EQing, since it is more RAM-heavy and really accomplishes the same thing with negligibly higher precision (plus it doesn't have as good of a visualization feature IMO). Some tips I would give for cleaner EQing (less overboosts, less excessive cuts, etc) are: Pay close attention to how the EQ edit you are doing changes the sound, and try to find middle ground; don't neglect to boost very high, then cut very low, to narrow in on that optimal gain on the EQ band. If you hold Ctrl while dragging the EQ band, it drags more precisely. Check reference mixes if you feel that helps. If you synthesize your own sounds, try making their EQ clean from the get-go, and you don't have to EQ as much to get them to fit in the mix. Generally, cutting more than boosting is a pretty good rule of thumb.

The original bitrate you have is normal for a 16-bit WAV file. I wouldn't worry too much about the 218 kbps MP3. For example, I encoded this ReMix in VBR1, and on OCR, it displays as 232 kbps. VBR1 continuously changes the bit rate (how accurately your song is reproduced bit-by-bit) to accommodate for the minimum bitrate required to give a specific level of fidelity every second in the ReMix. So, having a bit rate displayed on the Properties window of your MP3 that is greater than 192 kbps (which is for constant bit rate) is totally normal.

An odd bitrate like that (as opposed to 224/256/288/320/etc kbps) may have arisen from encoding in variable bit rate; the directions ask for "VBR1", which is an alternative option to 192 kbps.

Nono, resend it as soon as possible, so that there isn't confusion as to when the original email was sent (which could have delayed the evaluation).

Resend the message early; the date given on the email would be the day that you send it, so if you send it, say, several months later, it will seem like the original email was first sent on that later date. Then, if the original email isn't examined to determine the original date, the evaluation may be delayed. I've had this happen to me before, and it took a bit of effort to clear that up, because apparently, some Judges use gmail.

This is some downright unsettling processing. Some very obscure sound design here. Distorted pitch-shifted comb filters (the metallic stuff at 0:33 - 0:42), those glitched drums, short-delay-time metallic delayed vox (2:30), some VERY upfront glitching (1:23, 1:33, 2:58, 3:04, etc), and kind of a phasered backdrop make for a slew of spooky textures.

+1

The album is already done; coming out in around a month.

Seeing as how I'm still in college, I can't really pay out, but I shared the link on Facebook and Twitter; hope it helps!

Nah, it was just that I got what you were going for and was just fine with that vibraphone as a lead (0:06 and 0:23). I was just meaning that I typically imagine mallet instruments in less energetic contexts, but it still makes sense as-is, regardless. Yeah, I'm more on board with that than before. But, what if you fade in the e. piano (say, playing chords) while the lead synth is still fading out? Yeah, I'm getting a more energetic sound at 0:35, 1:23, and 1:54. That background moving chordal synth at 0:35 (comes in off the beat) helps land it in the 80s as well as adding more excitement. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but the overall beefed up sections (0:35, 1:23, and 1:54), to me, currently sound like a mixture between energetic music and atmospheric music because of the sustained acoustic piano (atmospheric) and the drums and syncopated moving synth (energetic). It's somewhat pulling me more towards atmospheric than energetic because of the prominence of the piano, but it's not a big deal IMO. It's something I would personally keep working to kind of "shift that equilibrium", but even if you don't, it doesn't really bother me too much. The extra vibrato expression on the lead at 1:11 definitely helped it draw more attention to itself, which is what a lead ought to do. Great new noise sweeps throughout; improved this loads! The breakdown at 1:23 also seems fuller than before, not just from the pad, but also from the movement of the bass at 1:35 and what I think are more complex chords in the e. piano (could just be that the harmonies are clearer, idk). I'd be pretty happy with it! The transition at 1:39 works for me, and the one at 1:53 was just about right as well. Cool bending guitar-like sound at 1:53 - 2:05. At first, the off-beat e. piano here seemed to stand out a bit, and I wasn't sure if there was supposed to be a lead here. To me that section seems like a bunch of chords and a guitar-like texture coming in and out, but for some reason I feel like there should be a lead here; I'm thinking maybe it's because of that syncopated DX7-like e. piano having that particular rhythm and because its tone has that FM glassiness. Maybe play around with this a bit more to see if you can make it sound more purposeful as a lead-less section. It's not really a significant issue, per se, just something that strikes me as slightly odd. The fast vibe arpeggios at 2:20 and 2:32 sound cleaner to me, and it's really making sense now. The transition at 2:39 has the piano carry on with low chords (dunno if you had it that way earlier), and I'd say that works well like this. ----- Definite improvement over the previous version! It's much more focused, and I'm getting an even clearer vision of what you're going for. It's making lots more sense than V1, for sure. Anyone else have some thoughts?

Sounds like a slightly distant anvil (metallic pot-like clang). Not sure how to synthesize that, but you could find similar sounds in the Impact Soundworks Reforged library. They give a sampler pack with 42 WAV files (and a bunch of NKI files for Kontakt). Or, maybe you could use a tubular bell sound and detune it / make it more atonal, then layer a very quiet gong. The hit at about 0:08 sounds like a quiet gong was played underneath the metallic clang.

Still pretty unclear what you mean. I think you might be talking about this song. If so, are you referring to the sound at 2:07? I can't hear anything that resembles a "small shrinking bubble" at 2:02. The sound at 2:07 is a reverse kick drum, though, and that might be "bubbly" to some people if the kick drum has a noticeable pitch envelope (a dive downwards in pitch; reversing a sound that dives quickly downwards in pitch can sound somewhat like a bubble, I suppose). Is this what you mean? Can you describe the "high parts" more specifically than instruments "[not in] the bass-drop part"? What you said corresponds to almost anything.

Are you talking about sidechained saw waves? If not, I still don't know what a "popped bubble" implies. What timestamp? Be more specific.

What are you talking about?

The step sequencer still makes pattern clips like you can make in the piano roll, but if you mean "can it be converted into piano-roll notes?", then yes (right click the channel, click "Send to piano roll"). You don't have to do it that way, but you can. If you mean "can I reuse chunks of notes from the step sequencer patterns in a convenient way", then yes. When you place step sequencer patterns in the Playlist/Multitrack/Arranger window, if you left-click the upper-left corner of the pattern, clicking "Make Unique" lets you duplicate the pattern without losing the original, and you can edit the new clone to add variation that way. I do that all the time, and it really helps my workflow. Copying and pasting is also pretty quick; if you want to paste the same pattern clip or entire chunks of piano-roll notes multiple times, try pressing Ctrl+B and holding that. Alternatively, you can highlight multiple pattern clips in the Playlist using Ctrl+Left-click-drag, and then Shift+Left-click-drag to clone a bunch of patterns at once. You could place audio samples on the timeline, but I personally only do that if I want to align transients (like when using vocals, cymbals/reverse cymbals, cinematic risers, etc). It's otherwise quite hard to align something like a reverse cymbal.

FL doesn't have good drum samples for Drumstep, plain and simple. I'd suggest you look for electronic drum samples more suited for that genre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bass#Subgenres I use BHK Rough Connections and Bladerunners Dread.

I layer my drums in FL Studio using the Layer tool, and I write my patterns using the step sequencer. It's by far the easiest method that I've used to write drums for dubstep, electro house, and drum & bass music. I tend to use some distortion/waveshaping to strengthen the fundamentals should I need some real snap to the drums (like for EDM snares), and I use some parallel compression to make them punchier. I like layering stuff from BHK Rough Connections (Drum & Bass), Bladerunners Dread (Drum & Bass), When Alien Drum Robots Attack (general Roland TR-808/909 samples for electro and dubstep music), MPC60 Vol. 1-3 (dubstep, hip hop, etc), and Black Octopus Leviathan (dance/trance). Together that's over 5000 drum samples. This is one track I've written using mainly the WADRA and MPC60 drums: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03225

Because sometimes that kind of thing, depending on the Release of the most prominent sound(s), can bleed through the loop point and clash with the note at the beginning of the loop, even though one might expect it to turn out fine. Depends on context!