davidoff

I'd second that. It's like really harsh, electronic acid jazz. Let's call it hydrofluoric electrojazz. Anyway, I love this. It's like a bunch of major seventh/ninth(?) chords punching me in the face (in a good way).

That's mostly Greek to me, but it gives me some stuff to look up and figure out and play around with -- I've been scared to touch compression and EQ because I haven't had a good introduction to using them, but I guess it's about time to grow up and jump in, right? I'm amazed by how quickly you were able to figure all that out -- thanks so much! I should've specified: it's all MIDI; there are no mics involved. I don't know if that makes a difference or not.

I'm not trying to plug anything here, I'm just genuinely curious why this recording came out so quiet: http://soundcloud.com/david-s-conway/the-last-rose-of-summer I have it so that the max volume goes as close as possible to 0.0 dB without going over. If I pump that up any higher, there is extremely noticeable distortion, which is why I'm confused. I also find it curious that it sounds kind of the same volume throughout: the "loud" parts sound fuller and more intense, but not actually louder, if that makes any sense. The piano is the GPO4 Steinway, if that makes any difference. Could it just be that the piano sample itself is very quiet? It also sounds kind of muddy on lower-quality speakers/headphones. If anyone has any ideas how I might approach solving these issues to create a respectable-sounding recording, I'd be extremely grateful.

I'm a pretty serious pianist who's done a fair amount of composing for piano and would be more than happy to review anything you've written and give you feedback, if you'd like. You're probably tired of hearing it at this point, but I'm going to echo everyone else and say you should learn some piano basics -- obviously that won't open up to you the full range of what's possible for two hands to do, but it will teach you what hand positions and basic line shapes and types of movements are comfortable. Plus, it really helps with harmony-building and harmonic recognition.

I know we're a bit past Christmas, but I didn't get around to making a recording of this until this past week. I'm happy with the composition itself but would love some pointers on the recording. It's the first digital recording I've ever made! I did it in REAPER using the GPO4 Steinway piano. Depending on the speakers/headphones I listen to it on, I think it may need less reverb, some compression, or some EQ, but I'm really not sure. Any tips on those would be highly appreciated! Here it is!

Holy shit, this guy can play. Amazing clarity.

I'm such an idiot: I thought I'd been using ASIO, but it turns out that wasn't the default device in REAPER. When I switched to ASIO and reduced the buffer time to 5ms (1ms was glitching, for whatever reason), it became perfect. So I don't need to mute tracks and record them deaf against a metronome anymore (yay)!

Nice, mellow sound that appropriately evokes the intended atmosphere. Nice work!

That second one is so freaking awesome. Listening to some Shadow of the Colossus OST myself.

Chiming in to agree with you two. It's all classical and film/game soundtracks for me...

So if I want a human-sounding orchestral piece, and I record all the parts, what's the best way to get everything to be pretty close to matching up? Just hours of manual editing? A big part of the problem right now is the delay from keyboard to speakers. Makes it really hard to, say, play a violin part on top of a piano part, especially if they're complicated. I've heard Firewire can help (I'm using USB right now), but does the delay ever get small enough to be perceived as instantaneous?

If a DAW has a quantization option, does that mean that when you record in real-time, it automatically "snaps" your note attacks to a certain fraction of the beat? I ask because I think it may save me a ton of time, haha. I always record myself playing a part naturally first, because I get the most realistic velocities that way, but when I check out the piano roll (I use REAPER, for what it's worth), there are these teeny, minute differences in the attacks of the notes. Generally not an issue for a single part, but it's a real hassle when I'm trying to line up a bunch of tracks and have to manually drag hundreds of notes around. Is that what quantization fixes?

On a quick listen with no keyboard verification, I'm hearing: Eb6, EM7, Eb6, EM7, D6, Eb6, D6, Eb6, then it repeats. The sixes don't sound like they're in the pads, but in whatever the plucked instrument is. The pads may also have some 7s or 9s in there. In any case, it's only the three chords. If you don't know what those chords are, here are the individual pitches that make them up: Eb6: Eb, G, Bb, C EM7: E, G#, B, D# (could also be spelled as Fb, Ab, Cb, Eb to keep it more "in the key") D6: D, F#, A, B Not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, but if it gives you a good jumping off point, I'm glad to have helped!

This is fantastic, except for the stupid fade-out ending. If you like this jazz/classical hybrid style (I don't consider it full on jazz, personally), check out the music of Nikolai Kapustin (tons on YouTube). Similar style (on a much higher plane), brilliant stuff. He's still alive and still composing, too!

I love the atmospheric quality you get by having the piano be rhythmically ambiguous, for what it's worth. That's this piece's "thing." My main complaint would be lack of any real climax, or direction. It's 20 seconds of intro and then 3 minutes of pretty much the same exact thing. I think you could do more with the string parts than just sustained tones, too.

Emulate? Why emulate when I can go straight to my spam folder? "Just like millions of other men out there, you desire that your penis is a few more inches longer. Having a bigger weapon can definitely boost one's ego because he knows he can impress any woman he meets. Moreover, a guy with an enlarged penis will enjoy mind-blowing sex! click here to give yourself 2-3 inches start from today"

I remember reading that, actually! And Freema Agyeman, the woman who played Martha Jones, appeared in an earlier episode ("Army of Ghosts" in the second season) as Martha Jones' cousin, a Torchwood scientist.

Or five minutes of staring at Karen Gillan's legs.

That was such a great scene.

First of all, you can't just insert an "X" and line breaks into something and magically call it a mathematical proof. There's nothing mathematical about this. Second, I'm not really sure what the issue is here. If every person has the capability to come up with infinitely many creative ideas, why should it matter if the derivative ones can never see the light of day? Let's go with your Mario FPS game example: so I come up with a game that stars Mario and friends in a first-person shooter setting with all of the quirkiness that Mario titles usually entail. But wait: I can't use Mario and friends! So I'll draw upon my infinite creativity pool and create new characters. I'll replace mushrooms and super stars with my own ideas for items that have identical effects. I'll keep the same cartoony graphics and quirky gameplay; it just won't have that "Mario" stamp on it. Sure, it's likely less appealing to those mobs who will buy anything that has "Mario" in the title, but it's ultimately a title that could make hackneyed concepts seem a little bit fresher. I'm almost tempted to argue that copyright restriction increases creativity by forcing creators to come up with something that is entirely their own.

Unfortunately, I can't answer any of your questions, because I pretty much have all the same questions myself, but I do want to agree wholeheartedly with this: And, yeah, I'm sure that most of it is a learn-over-time thing, but finding a good jumping off point on some of this stuff seems to be nearly impossible. I feel like having a structured approach to it would be way better than accidentally stumbling into it one day. I have a book on beginning home audio recording en route from Amazon: if it's actually a pretty comprehensive guide and explains a lot of this stuff, I'll be sure to let you know.

Sure, it's free when I want to breathe it, but if my car's tires are starting to sag a little... You could try to make the argument that you're paying for the air to be compressed, but any way you look at it, the end product there is, well, air.

Definitely. Sounds like my understanding of the academic perception of computer music was way off. I'm definitely looking to create more marketable music. I'll be sure to start looking more for the fields you named, because that's really what I want to be doing. No worries; I didn't really explain my current situation in the first place, and I should have. Pretty much everything you hear people talking about on these forums: becoming proficient in a specific DAW software, understanding not only how to recognize good production values but how to achieve them, synthetic sounds (which to me is the most daunting thing right now): I'm clueless when it comes to DSP or how to create new sounds by taking something basic and running it through filters and applying effects and such. Maybe that's something you learn over time on a mostly trial-and-error basis. I have no idea. That's probably the main detractor for me at this point. Music is definitely the dream, but I do still want to be sure that I approach it as pragmatically as possible. The thought of going to school only to fall back immediately on a software development job afterwards is pretty disconcerting. Then again, if I don't go to school, and several years down the road I'm still doing software development, is that any better? At that point, though, it would probably speak to some combination of poor motivation and/or talent. Fantastic source of extra income. I've played piano at a local church for five years now and, because I'm fairly frugal, it easily comprises my entire spending budget for a year, which means my full-time job can go entirely towards bills and savings. If you play piano, I'd encourage you to look at nearby colleges for accompaniment gigs, too: you can make anywhere from $200 to $600 accompanying a studio recital for (depending on your ability and the difficulty of the music) very little work. Plus, if you do well, most instructors will ask you to come back every semester/year for the next one. That's all under-the-table, too, usually, which is nice. I'll say. Another one of the gems I heard was a kid scraping dry ice against a pan that had a mic attached to it (which makes a God-awful screeching noise) for fifteen minutes while a pianist and bassist played tremolos underneath. 1) I don't. 2) Still no. Gives me a lot to think about, though. I'm just surprised there's not a larger focus on more marketable music, but I guess that kind of music isn't as academic. Thanks, both of you, for responding. I need to really think hard about whether or not a grad program would be the right move for me...

Honestly, since MMORPGs are so time-consuming, I'm willing to guess that most people who play them "seriously," however you want to define that, are less prone to buying higher quantities of other games, and probably spend less money on all games overall. If you play consistently a MMORPG that follows the standard $15 per month pricing scheme and you buy one new console title (say $50) every two months, that's (($15 * 12) + ($50 * 6)) = $480 over the course of one year. For a non-MMORPG player who buys one console title every month, thats $50 * 12 = $600 over one year. Obviously that's based on an assumption and the ratios were just pulled out of my ass, but it seems fairly logical. Honestly, $1,200 over the course of five years, which is a very long time, is all but negligible. Also, has anyone brought up to those who are denouncing game prices as "too high" that that opinion is probably heavily influenced by your income? Someone must have, but I only skimmed the past 21 heated pages. In any case, $60 may seem like a fortune to, say, a college student who's scraping by, but to someone who makes $150,000 a year (definitely not me!), it must seem a perfectly reasonable price.

That would be massively helpful. I'm just getting into all this now and finding information that's accessible to a beginner is quite an endeavor. Maybe it'll change over the years as I familiarize myself with audio production, but right now I see composing as the easy part and everything else as the true challenge.