timaeus222   Members

I think @Gario pretty much shares brains with me at this point. Yes, all this. Having a mentor is good and if you find someone who can help like that, go for it. But don't let that be your only avenue for learning.
Public feedback can be useful too, because
It potentially could provide a greater number of fresh ears. In principle it is probably easier to obtain (if the mentor would be hard to contact, which he/she probably will be because he/she is only one person who has a life). It opens you to potentially inexperienced perspectives that you should digest, which likely provide for you a realistic experience on how your music may sound to a general audience. The main problem with public feedback is of course that sometimes, you have to filter it and figure out who is actually saying what, because more experienced people might either speak with jargon, or less experienced people might say what they think they mean without actually projecting what they meant. That's the chance you take, and I am quite glad I took that chance for 2+ years...
Fortunately, when I got public feedback, the people who came in (Flexstyle, Gario, Phonetic Hero, Chimpazilla, DaMonz, . . . ) knew enough, and I will fully admit that at the time it was I who needed to learn more! And it was because I took that chance and met those people, that I had extra motivation to keep coming back! So, for me personally, public feedback (forum feedback) was more important than mentor feedback. I don't think I had a real mentor (besides the Judges), more like I had some friendly collaborators...

Wait, are we asking if it's better to get one-on-one, personal training from a professional over random public feedback? I'd think that's almost comically obvious - of course it's better to have one-on-one teaching from a professional (assuming the professional is worth their salt). If you can afford personalized training and education, that's the way to go. That's sort of like saying a healthy balanced diet is better for you than McDonalds, because of course it is.
However, the caveat is pretty easy, here - also like a balanced diet vs. McDonalds, it's better if you can afford it, and it's better if you can dedicate the extra time required for it. Many casual artists simply don't have those kind of resources, and unless they push toward making it into a profession it's difficult to justify the time and financial investments required for such one-on-one interaction. Sometimes you can get lucky and get some attention from a willing professional for funsies, but outside of that you've got to put in some real resources in order to get something like the one-on-one mentoring you're talking about. You won't get as much out of something like public feedback, sure, but getting less out of it is certainly different than getting nothing out of it. With online forums and chat servers today it requires much less investment from an artist - dropping a quick link and asking "Thoughts?" is faster and cheaper than sitting with a mentor to discuss your music.
tl;dr of course personal mentoring is better than public feedback, but public feedback is more accessible, and it's better than nothing at all (provided my caveat I presented earlier).

I'll concede that feedback isn't technically necessary in a mentorship (which is extremely strange to read), but I still think you're reeeaaally glossing over the importance of feedback.  A "mentorship" in which the mentor isn't observing the mentee's work and giving feedback more fits the description of a generalized teaching course, where a teacher/professor is going down a list and throwing out advice or covering topics point by point, regardless of whether or not it's pertinent to the student.   At least in my opinion/experience, this isn't the most effective way to help someone learn.
Back on topic (and a slight edit for clarity): the feedback process, to me, is about looking at where someone needs to improve and providing targeted advice to help them learn how to do it.  The source of advice doesn't matter imo - whether it's a forum rando or someone you look up to, you're the ultimate arbitrator of which pieces you decide to listen to and which you don't.  Yes, personal drive/ambition is obviously important to anyone's progress as an artist, but why undercut feedback (even "forum feedback") as a valuable part of the improvement process?

Is an assessment not feedback? In assessing, you are responding to an incoming interaction to provide your thoughts, which, whether opinionated or not, is feedback, no? I don't think feedback is disconnected from mentorship, especially since it should involve communication.
@AngelCityOutlaw So, what @Phonetic Hero seems to be referring to is that the mentor is like a teaching assistant, while you seem to be referring to the mentor being like an actual teacher/professor.

Perhaps I'm biased, but I'd argue that feedback is more often than not helpful when someone is specifically asks for it, no matter the skill level. However, if no one is asking for the help and they're just sharing their music it can be counterproductive to point out all of the track's flaws. It took me a few years to realize this myself, but if you pour your critique of someone's music when they're not asking for it, it can take the fun out of the craft and possibly drive people away. Context is important, so if you want to be helpful pay attention to what the artist wants from you.
It sounds a little counter-intuitive saying even experts can benefit from critique, but given the right circumstances it can help make things go faster. Sometimes, for example, if I'm working on something and I need a fresh set of ears I ask for some feedback (I haven't written anything in months, so you'd likely not notice nowadays). It's harder to accept feedback when you're more seasoned, but you can still get some use out of it if you remains somewhat humble about it. Most seasoned musicians will likely fine tune the track eventually, sure, but it can help make things go faster if you just let more fresh ears listen to something and give some honest feedback.
So yeah, if people are looking for feedback it's quite helpful for them when they receive it no matter the skill level, but it's markedly less so when they're not looking for it.

I think it's very important when someone's starting out.  I had no idea what questions I needed to be asking back when I first started, and having people to point out flaws I wasn't even aware of and explain how to improve them is, in my opinion, absolutely instrumental to anyone's development (whether I wanted to hear it or not at the time ).  Whether someone gets the feedback from a forum, or friends/peers with more experience, or teachers/mentors, I think most people need feedback from those with more experience up to a point.  I know I did.
Once you're familiar with the general concepts of music composition and production (and know where to look to further your knowledge), improvement becomes much easier to pursue on your own.  But it's hard to know what questions you should be asking when you don't know what you need to know, ya know?

I do the bulk of my mixing on headphones, and I've learned that you've got to be careful when judging reverb when on headphones; it's easy to apply too much reverb and it becomes quickly noticeable if you listen back on speakers.
As for collaborations, I seem to be the odd one (in that I do a _lot_ of collaborations) and it's usually me asking and actively recruiting people rather than the other way around. The workshop link in the menu can be a good resource to find people to collaborate with, as you can search by skill/instrument there. As to finding a guitarist, normally you can't throw a stone without hitting at least 3 guitar players, but on OCR they seem to be in hiding or running away from me, since I haven't been that successful in finding a willing guitarist here lately... Maybe they think I smell funny
 

8-15 songs. No time length priority. The only important thing for album is to be "album". Main idea or theme through all the tracks and overall sounding should stay in one mood.
Hope someone can understand, what I'm trying to say with my english.

Am I the only one who thinks of this question primarily in terms of # of songs and not duration?
I'm happier with a 12-song, 40-minute album where each song is unique than I am with an 8-song, 60-minute album, generally speaking... more about the number of ideas than their length

An unusually conservative take for Timaeus, but it works.  The increased emphasis on melody combined with the changes in instrumentation and accompaniment more than make up for the similarity in style.  The use of The Spanish Empire is quite subtle, but it's there.  Solid production, as always.  Not really a lot to say here, except
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This definitely has Timaeus' usual quality in production, and while pretty straight foward the arrangement works well. The orchestration is done well, and while I could nitpick the humanization (sometimes the articulation swells too much for faster string runs), it's certainly well above OCR's bar. Nitpicking even further, I also have to mention an instrument suddenly popping out at 3:31 in the left speaker (sounds like the Didgeridoo), which is pretty distracting for headphone users, especially since there's nothing like it prior or since. Not a big deal at all, but just be careful with mixing artifacts like that in the future is all.
Repeating what I mentioned in the first post, this WAS submit prior to Brandon's issues, and this IS a part of his Assassin's Creed album, so before we post (assuming this passes) we should ask Timaeus whether that affects his choice to have the track posted, but if there's no problems then I'm all for giving this front page lovin'.
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Yeah, pretty nice adaptation to some new instruments and an overall change in the feel of the track. Realy solid work, could easily stand alongside the original tracks.
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Didgeridoo
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oh the rest of the song? it's pretty good, albeit sticking to the original concepts quite a bit.  The more exotic instrumentation does add a bit of identity to it, though the original wasn't short on the exotic instruments department either.  Production is solid as expected, and the fusion of both songs works, helped in no small part from the sources being similar thematically.

Love the touch of glitchy dubs all around this funky track. Not sure intense is the right word, but certainly gives this quite the edge and has a more serious sound than other tracks that have higher energy or funk, but keeps all the fun intact. I always love hearing more Zero ReMixes, and this is a really smooth mix that I enjoyed more than the source itself. Well done!

Hey guys, it's been a long time, but here's an atmospheric Final Fantasy mashup of FF4's Prelude and FF6's Terra with dubstep and light glitch elements! This has been submitted to OCR on March 18, 2018. [EDIT: To show the timeline, this just got approved August 31, 2018 for a direct-post, so about 5 months in this case.]
This was inspired by Stephen Anderson (stephen-anderson on soundcloud); it primarily uses bell and pad textures from Spectrasonics' Omnisphere 2; a Chapman Stick from Trilian; 4Front's TruePianos; and various FM sounds from my Zebra2 soundbank "FM Variations". Glitching was via Illformed's Glitch 2, and some of the remaining stuff was from LA Scoring Strings, Rhapsody Orchestral Percussion, and Serum. The solo violin was Embertone's Friedlander, highly recommend it!

No worries. It's good that you are actually asking, and you seem to be getting it so far. I don't use Audacity that much, but I can give you my thoughts on the rest.
Visually, you would have to inspect the mixer dB meter to see that something went over 0 dB. Sometimes (if the DAW is programmed that way) it'll show red, which should indicate clipping. If you haven't heard it before, it sounds like a crackling, but it might be subtle if you don't exaggerate the volume level. I know I didn't perceive clipping in my first year learning music production without looking at a mixer.
  You can think of hertz (frequency) as the horizontal span of what we can hear, and dB (loudness) as the vertical span of what we can hear.

Hertz is a frequency unit (as opposed to, say, length units of meters, or mass units of kilograms). It just means that for every second that passes, one wave cycle passes by, so 5 Hz means that 5 cycles pass per second. It is also written Hz, or 1/sec.

Some producers might say that higher frequencies "brighten up" a sound, etc. Lower frequencies sound "boomy", "rumbly", sometimes "muddy", etc. Higher frequencies span the treble range (generally around 4000 - 20000 Hz, give or take) via high notes, and low frequencies span the bass range (generally around 20 - 1000 Hz, give or take) via low notes. Lastly, midrange (the rest) is where most sounds lie, like the human voice, lead instruments, guitar, etc. It's where you hear presence, and all listening devices hit some of this range.

On the other hand, dB is basically just loudness. Louder, or softer, at a fixed frequency.
    Yes, the net result is what you should pay attention to. As a general property of audio waves, their amplitudes (loudnesses) will add, and also cancel, at various points, and so, if every channel hits 0 dB, the net result will exceed 0 dB. Therefore, NOT all channels "need" to reach 0 dB by themselves.

Ah I see. In that case, I get what you're saying. Definitely want to never touch the internal volume. Mine's always at 100%, but that's because I have separate volume knobs for my headphones and speakers.
I have 0 consistency in what my (interface physical output) volume is set. The output knob to my monitors will move randomly at least 10 times a day just listening to random stuff (like other music, YT vids, etc.) But when I'm making music, and doing a final loudness check on my stuff wrt perceived loudness, I definitely pull up something professionally done and released on iTunes to reset it back to where I'm comfortable listening to mastered music. At this point, I can just visually see where that knob position should be that I hear "powerful and comfortable" for professionally done music.
It's around 30% on the knob dial for speakers, and 100% for the headphones (with the Sonarworks calibration giving -7.9 dB, and having the 250 ohm DT 880's, my interface really needs to try hard) And then I just take that sort of familiar volume comfort zone and then mix my desired perceived loudness there; this way, I know exactly how my music is going to contrast with other albums people might be streaming alongside me, because I picked that volume level while listening to other stuff. And I know that other stuff is at 0 dB, so I put mine to 0 dB too. If they're both 0 dB, and they both sound just as loud, then they are just as loud, absolutely, on all devices.
Timaeus hit the nail on the head. Before you mix anything you should set your listening volume while listening to a reference track, preferably something professionally done and commercially released.

@timaeus222 I think you're going in a perceived loudness direction which is a little more advanced than the kind of issue BloomingLate has. The issue here is simply that OP doesn't understand the dB scale, which is the "absolute loudness" measurement he's looking for.

BloomingLate, you can raise the master track of your song up to 0 dB FS, which is the digital limit for clipping. You should always mix to 0 dB because that's the standard for mastering. 0 dB is marked at the top of the loudness meter in your DAW software.
The dB number has absolutely no bearing on the perceived sound energy without a consideration of dynamic range (you can still have soft music where its loudest peak is 0 dB). If you don't like a high amount of sound energy, mix to 0 dB but avoid any master compression or limiting so that nothing goes over. In other words, avoiding 0 dB doesn't mean you're avoiding making the music sound too loud, you're just annoyingly making people raise their volume knobs relative to all the other music they listen to.
To explain your own example, trance music isn't loud because it's at 0 dB (the "red" part), it's loud because it's very compressed with little dynamic range, so the sound energy over time is packed and you feel it harder in your ears.

For a practical solution to your problem, you can also render your mix so it never hits 0 dB (to truly avoid the need any master compression and limiting) and then just Normalize it. This will make your music at least hit the same peak that other music does, and shouldn't require the listeners to vastly pump up the volume to hear. However, I would wager that without any compression whatsoever, people will still be raising their volumes. Most music is compressed in some form nowadays, and I can't remember the last album I saw with full dynamic range (besides classical music, which is impossible to listen to in environments like the car because of said dynamic range).

As for the volume levels of your devices (headphones, laptops, stereo), none of that stuff matters at all. If someone's listening device is quiet and they need to dial it to 70% to hear anything, that's their problem. If your music is mixed to the same standards as everyone else, then it will sound the same on their system as any other music they listen to, and that's what you shoot for. This is the 0 dB thing I was talking about before.

How loud it sounds is a matter of handling dynamic range using stuff like compression, and that's what Timaeus is talking about with referencing a track to match the perceived loudness. That stuff is its own rabbithole and takes a lot of learning and experience to understand how to do properly.

tl;dr If you mix it so that you go up to but never cross 0 dB, you will never blow out speakers/headphones and your signal won't distort. This is one of those things that should just be automatic for every piece of music you create.

Well, for one, at least start your mixing on headphones, and not your laptop speakers. They are certainly not designed for mixing, and you know they have no bass, and so they will not sound right anyway...
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There is no exactly correct loudness, but you can get close to what is too loud for you. I probably listen to music about 3 dB louder than other people, but it allows me to hear more detail, it still doesn't hurt my ears, and I still write music with consistent loudnesses. YMMV.
I have a loudness reference that I like to use. This song is about as loud as I would listen to before I don't want to turn it up any higher. Try it when your ears are cleared, on your system when using the headphones specifically, and turn the internal system volume up until you want to turn it down, and find that balance (if you are using "Audio Enhancements" or whatever it is on your OS, turn that off, it messes with you). Establish a consistent perceived loudness for your different listening scenarios for the same song, that ALSO uses the same internal system volume. That is, try to make the same song feel about as loud across the board... but keep the internal system volume the same to make it easier on yourself.
To further adjust volumes on speakers, turn the knob on the hardware, instead of changing the internal system volume. That way you are at least keeping one setting constant across your comparisons.

Just my two cents; I made a small guide a while back on mixing metal:
https://app.box.com/s/ibj5yh5toh2yfc56f4aa
You might also find these two tracks to be useful mixing references.

Hiiii, I did an arrangement of Zelda's Lullaby from the legend of Zelda. I'm thinking of submitting it. Any thoughts on this before I send it in? I'm not so sure about all the mixing, and there's also some minor timing issues that were difficult to solve. But generally I think it sounds cool. 
 
 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfYSyiyf2U&t=62s&frags=pl%2Cwn
 
 
 

So groovy. I don't think it's possible to dislike a track like this!

The arrangement breakdown checked out (THANK YOU, bro!), and that's all there is to it. Direct post quality, but just needed the sanity check. Nice work, Truong-Son! virt's originals were full of infectious energy that translated well from these themes to your own unique fusion of the two!
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For Dave to quote. "This is pretty sweet. And hot. Like a desert."
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Yeah, this is pretty solid stuff.  The breakdown was really helpful, so thanks for that.  Some of those source uses are subtle enough that I'm not sure I'd give them credit, but there's plenty to spare to hit 50%.
If I were to really nitpick, I'd say that the sidechaining is a little over the top, on the verge of being a little distracting, and that the horns from 1:43-1:59 sound fake and are somewhat buried. That's all I got, though.  Nice work, as usual.
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