timaeus222

You might wanna check this out: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/devwt08nbfh82p2/AACSmfuzsM1hq0akrzr0R6mCa?dl=0 This is a set of free piano soundfonts. At one point in late August 2013, I tried each one I had and picked out the ones I thought had tones that were easiest to work with to EQ and still sounded pretty good in the end. Maybe one of those can sound... less hammered/slammed, I guess, is how I could say it. Try Steinway2.sf2. As for working with a sustain pedal, you'd need an actual connectable sustain pedal to let it work with MIDI CC (I think it was #64). Here's an example: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11192?gclid=CIKouPf1lMMCFYWUfgoddkMAKw

I should also mention that most of the time for finalizing, I end up doing a slight dip in the low mids (near 300 Hz-ish, down about 0.4~0.8 dB) and high passing near 20~28 Hz or so, depending on the deepness of the samples I'm using. I wouldn't think many people need to or actually hear or feel anything below 30 Hz, and since so many instruments coincide at the low-mids, the combination of these two EQ edits should add a little extra headroom to the mix before the loudening processing (maybe about 0.8 dB or so, which is fairly helpful IMO) without actually reducing the heaviness of the mix all that much. It especially helps if you can see in a spectral analyzer that you have frequencies going below 20 Hz (which I often have to look for in synthesized sounds using comb filters, for example); in FL Studio, you can look at exactly 20 Hz, and if you see a somewhat bright vertical highlight directly on there, there's something there below 20 Hz that might be 'compressing' the final result enough to squish the waveform in some way. But that doesn't happen often, so hey, maybe nothing much will be different.

From my perspective, it has a LOT to do with the limiter you use and the "mastering" (more like finalizing, rather) you do to the final result. Some people like to do the approach where you mix at, say, -1 dB, and apply a transparent or gluing compression effect to bring it up to 0 dB (I prefer transparent usually). With that method, you can go "above" 0 dB in terms of the peaking dB on average and how it would have been greater than 0 dB had there not been a limiter. The gluing compression would be how I would suggest doing it if the loudness makes sense for the given context, though I personally mix near 0 dB already and don't often use gluing compression to even anything out too majorly. I think that if you try and mix at a peaking dB below -3, you might have to compress quite a bit to get near 0 dB, and that could bring out unwanted compression artifacts. You also never said in what way you compressed the result; maybe it's not that good of a compressor? Maybe you started too loud before compressing? Maybe your Master signal chain has an issue? What you should NOT do is raise the volume of everything WITHOUT using compression until you get it as loud as you want. That will begin to attenuate higher frequencies slightly and squash transients, reducing the crispness of the final result. There's also a greater chance of clipping from the limiter. The two limiters that I would suggest for this loudness approach due to their high tolerances are TLs-Pocket Limiter (free) and FabFilter Pro-L (commercial). This loud remix uses TLs, and this loud piece uses FabFilter, but I wouldn't consider either of these too loud. I would actually consider the loudest piece I would ever listen to, if you want a reference. (Madeon's 'Finale' is rather loud too, but on my system I think it's too loud.)I've gotten Fruity Limiter to act pretty decently tolerant, but I would still favor TLs over it. I think the difference between TLs and FabFilter is more subtle, but I would suggest you try both if you get the chance.

Well, it still sounds fake, and also disjointed. Sorry. The low strings are cutting off in between certain notes. Also, whatever stuff you have playing in the low end is cluttering with each other. It's quite difficult to distinguish their notes. The velocities mainly sounded like things were being hammered and slammed. The plucked harp-like instrument towards the second half sounded odd playing the double notes. It's as if it was a stutter rather than a repluck. Yeah. And I think it would be helpful if you wrote more than [insert link here] or some concise sentence that says nothing more than "Here's a remix".

Depends on the synth, and depends on how much you can stretch its limits. I personally have written some 1:30-ish (but complete) songs with just u-he Zebra2 with some minor percussion additions, so it should be possible to use just Massive or just FM8 to do about the same thing. I think FM8 might be easier though, just because it has more cohesive presets in my opinion (it also has a few percussion patches).

Well, if you read the date, you'd know how recent the post was, and if you scroll through the page, it should be clear what the chronology of the posts are. When you know that, you can get the idea that if you want the first post, you'd want the first chronological post.

I would figure it's just a problem of not looking at the date. Seems like a similar issue to necroposting

zircon and everyone on this album did such a great job! Way to go, guys!

Hey dude, can you fix something? My third source tune is not Proof of Stremf, but Disquieting Quagmire. Thanks!

Oh, I thought he did both. Never mind? I usually associate "scoring" with sheet music. Anyways, I liked Sir J, Joshua Morse, and Will's tracks the most. Totally unexpected takes on the soundtrack but I loved them nonetheless. Not to say that everyone else's tracks weren't all excellent. In particular, I thought Dj Cutman's track had a very transformative direction to the original arrangement (the beginning kinda threw me off a bit but it makes sense after a while!), McVaffe did a great job adapting his piece of choice into a "true" remaster (since it sounded very much like a cavern), and I could tell XPRTNovice had a lot of fun with his voiceovers and jokework (almost sounding like Cyril the Wolf mixed with Brandon Strader IMO).

How do you find the time to do this? We groovy! All night! In the dungeon! Laaaaaaaaaaa (falsetto)

Woah, you did a score of it too? Awesome!

Okay, I finished the main compositional part of it, along with dynamics and all that Italian stuff. It's pretty darn close to how you originally intended it, IMO. Gonna keep revising it and making it look better/more presentable for now. It's worth noting that it's 36 pages for the convenience of not turning back pages. I'm also recomposing and re-mixing a demo track of the result if you wanna hear.

Anything I can do to help?

I don't have much to say on this, but last week I tried going around my room clapping loudly a few times. I could hear that in the corners of my room, the reflections were more "sproingy" than in the center of my room (which is surprisingly dry, considering it has nothing that is explicitly suggested that should improve room acoustics, except maybe the bed sheets). Maybe that's a test you could do to check whether your room diffuses sound evenly. If not, it might be worth it to get some acoustic diffusers to even out those reflections (they might be rather expensive though). What's a little more worth doing is just waiting for a moment when you have some decent silence in the house, and just test the reverb in your room. Maybe make a few "t" and "s" sounds to see how the room reverberates the treble, just to get a better idea of your acoustics. You'd be surprised how few people actually do that (or at least, I've only done it a few times). You are going to have to mix your own vocals though. Last time I mixed vocals was two weeks ago, and while I thought my friend recorded some pretty darn dry and clear vocals, I still had to filter out the low end bumps, thumps, etc. below about 80 Hz, tone down the sibilances and fricatives, and automate the volume (not all of it would have fit at a flat volume in that case).

There are still a few small errors in the timing that lean towards the "slop" side of human error (but what you did definitely helped a lot). Here are the timestamps I would look at: 0:29-0:30 - a touch loud (acoustic piano) 0:39-0:40 - very slightly late (acoustic piano) 0:47-0:48 - very slightly early (acoustic piano) 0:56-0:57 - very slightly early and a touch loud (acoustic piano) At 1:13, when you did the piano swap, I think it helped the e. piano line to get swapped for a piano, but the piano line originally playing the chords became too loud after being swapped with the e. piano. I think to help that, you could just lower all the velocities of the swapped-in e. piano in the 1:13 section by a large amount (is there a convenient shortcut for that?) until you can hear it's too quiet, and then slowly raise it back up until it sounds about right. For me personally, I usually hear volume changes more easily when I raise the volume than when I lower the volume. Overall, I think this is a great improvement in the humanization and loudness! I also hear a little bit of that extra reverb on the strings. They fit better now. I think after you check out what I said above, a mod review would be a good idea. I do still have a hunch the acoustic piano tone could still be a small problem though (it's only because of the hardness of the tone that I say this; the velocities definitely sound noticeably varied). You might want to check this out as a piano tone reference (or even bass reference): http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02465

Are you posting a recording of this somewhere later? :3 (I can't be there for the whole thing but I know this'll be awesome)

Would you like something like this? It's 12/8 jazz with vocals

Flip side with respect to MockingQuantum. I quoted you because I agreed with you.

Don't worry about the length of the YouTube description. There's a length limit of over 4000 characters (I wrote some long descriptions back in the day ). Your bottom quote doesn't come close (it's 850 characters), and it's for a video that's apparently about 45 minutes long. At that frequency of song inclusion, I would think that you could technically make 3 hour videos or so (but I would actually suggest 1 hour videos at maximum to keep people from just skipping around in the video out of impatience or boredom).

Haha, alright then. Well, this suggestion is something I sometimes do if my music doesn't quite sound right but is also quite dynamically "clean": something you could try (if you don't already do this) is use light compression to "glue" your instruments together, and use similar settings for each album track. Sometimes I do that and it sounds more cohesive when I do it that way since it's the same compression plugin for each song or piece. I figure, you're the type of person that can hear that type of subtle adjustment to the levels in a mix. This guy talks about this. You already know this, but you should (of course) only use master compression of this sort when you're all done, and not do mixing edits while it's on. You may also want to just listen all the way through the tracklist, but this time, listen for the loudness differences. Depending on the piece/song, different dB's RMS still sound "right", but they might still actually feel the "same" simply because it's fitting for that genre. In your case it sounds especially true since you have that bass heaviness progression going on.

Oh yes, definitely! This sounds like it resembles a recycling mentality, both great. Keep ideas you write out, even if they are not finished; you might like them more later.

I heard this in the workshop. And I survived. This is one eclectic mix in a sea of mangled samples.

On the flip side, you (someone in general, or MockingQuantum) might want to try to NOT plan an arrangement at all for a change. i.e. go with the flow. But that's generally more feasible for further down the road. Sometimes I just write something and it flows out naturally, and if it doesn't quite work, it still connects nicely after I adjust a previous transition. You might still want to try it anyway. See what happens; the best part is that you may never have done it before, so you might not expect anything in particular.

I would arrange the tracks so they flow well first musically. Maybe track 3 starts on the same key track 2 ends on, or it starts quietly like track 2 ends quietly, etc. Try deciding on a nice track order first that clicks musically, and then look more into the mixing. What exactly are you doing on the mixing end to make them more 'consistent'? How diverse are these tracks? If you want you could PM me for more specific feedback. Generally, some things to look for for cohesion/consistency: - dynamics - a story? - matching keys? - other misc 'this flows well somehow' reasons