AngelCityOutlaw

I thought he lost the will to rock and only did techno

Good lord, I'm sure it's educational, but that is the definition of TL;DR. Also, I'm officially calling you "The Necromancer". Haven't seen a SonicTheHedgog thread in years now...damn.

In L.A. around ten years ago. For the "city of angels" it sure has a lot of outlaws. First day I was there they found a dead guy out front of the motel, a standoff in Beverly Hills...sirens everywhere. Turns out the name isn't as cool or original as I thought since I later found out John Corabi had a band called "The Angel City Outlaws" at one point.

Surprised no one made a thread about this game. It's been out for a couple weeks now and everyone is going nuts for it. I'll admit, I hated everything about it except the setting at first (I'm a huge nerd for gothic horror/fantasy stuff) but I gave it another chance and it actually gets really really good making it the first "souls" type game I don't find to be a total snoozefest. Now, I'm over halfway through it and I'd say that my only complaint is that the game is either one extreme or the other. By yourself, the game's bosses are absurdly difficult. With just one other person helping though, it becomes almost too easy. Not that I really mind since I prefer co-op anyway, but the drastic swing in difficulty that results from it is rather jarring. What do you all think of it?

Was never a fan of the whole "beat em' up" genre, but seems like a worthy mention indeed.

To be perfectly honest, it doesn't give me that horror movie type of vibe at all as the title would imply. I was totally expecting some real intense sound design, piercing waterphones, grinding string risers, dissonant choir etc. that was maybe 30 - 40 seconds instead of nearly two minutes. The overall sequencing and especially noticeable on the choir/voice, is really rigid and fake. Now, I'm not one to obsess over realism with samples that much, but in this case, it really hurts the piece as in atmospheric kinds of music like what is present in those shows you mentioned, the production is like 90% of achieving that. Also, the drum kit totally changes up the vibe from what sounds sort of gothic at the start, to what sounds almost like the intro to a rock track with some strings here and there.

LMAO Well, my personal safeguard is I just let people know beforehand that their expectations should be lower than the 9th ring of hell so as not to disappoint anyone. Anyway, I can't really add anything that hasn't already been said, so best of luck with continuing to improve the mix!

Valid as your points may be, you may be going a little crazy here.

I notice games that have "Z" in the title like that are usually terrible. Ninja Gaiden Z certainly being one of them.

K so I kinda recant my statement about Bloodborne. I gave it another whirl and after you beat Father Gascoigne the game actually gets pretty decent.

The Konami "Dracula Battle" Castlevania metal albums in the 90s arranged by the Japanese metal legend Naoto Shibata are honestly my favorite instrumental/guitar albums ever made. Yes, I seriously prefer it to Satch, Vai, Yngwie, MacAlpine and the rest. Masanori Kusakabe's guitar playing is just too legit. Most people know the albums via the remix of "Bloody Tears" which is often wrongly attributed to Cradle of Filth for some reason.

I was literally just going to bring this up lol Not to mention the chopped effect is wicked.

Well, the part of my post that you quoted I was referring to artificially speeding tracks up, not splicing them. Honestly, it'd be a little weird to be against splicing leads and chords together given that's how many people with no notation/tab knowledge, but have recording software compose with their guitar. Hell, even Andy Sneap copies and pastes sections most of the time. Klayton (Celldweller) as he explains in his electronic rock production videos on YouTube, half the time his guitar riffs on the recording aren't the way he actually played them because he chopped them up, switched some of the notes around etc.

Do it!...................

Damn, there are a lot of people with hangups about what's "cheating" in music in the forums today I don't think it's cheating, but it's really not worth it. I tried it on a couple tracks once because I wrote it with MIDI beforehand and came up with this flashy part that sounded awesome, but it was absurdly fast. Yeah, long story short - I regret doing so. It sounds lame. I reminded myself that I never set out to be a great guitar player, I just want to compose cool tunes. So I could A) Spend hours and hours with a metronome building up speed so I can sweep it like a janitor. Waste time editing and speeding it up. Or C) Just play something simpler that sounds great. I'd rather listen to a guitar solo that sounds like a realized melody than a scale exercise. EDIT: Also, doing things in studio that you can't necessarily play live is fairly common. A while back, I heard that on one of Annihilator's songs, Jeff Waters has only ever played the solo perfectly live once - it was all recorded in individual takes spliced together. Blind Guardian doesn't have the massive vocal layering live and Faster Pussycat never performed "Babylon" live for several years after it was written.

I find the "you have to use your own tones exclusively" mentality among electronic musicians absolutely hilarious. The reasoning usually is "you'll sound like everyone else!" Well, even if you make your own dubstep sounds, trance plucks, etc....you're still making the same tones as everyone else and I doubt the average listener is going to be able to tell your supersaw apart from any other. The elitism, as far as I can tell, stems from the belief that "I'll sound different if I use different sounds" instead of "I'll sound different if I composed different sounding music." I'm not saying conventions of the genre(s) are a bad thing, but it is pretty funny to think that making your own synth patches is going to set you apart from the pack when you're using the same types of chord progressions, off-beat bass and four on the floor kick patterns. It's the logical equivalent to thinking that building your own guitar and amp, but playing the same drop-tuned metal as everyone else is going to result in you sounding different from every other metal band. So no, I think tinkering with an existing sound that is maybe close, but not quite how you want it to sound or just coming up with a serendipitous sound based off that preset is totally valid.

Thanks! Hey, I like my music like I like my pizza and one-liners - extra cheesy.

I voted for Duke Nukem

Glad you dig it! It was fun, yet tedious, to create!

Thanks, Tim! I feel all hip and like one of the cool kids because I can do dubstep wobbles now.

I never understood people's hard-ons for the souls games. The world looks like Tolkien as imagined by an emo kid circa 2007 and I've yet to meet one person who can explain what the game is even about. I'm not convinced there is a story. I recently gave Bloodborne a shot, because it looked faster and the world is way more inspired. It's definitely taken more than a few pages from Dracula. That being said, it's still the epitome of over-rated. I'm convinced that if I slapped two colors of paint on a piece of plywood, I'd have more fun waiting to see which one dried first than the skull-numbing monotony of Bloodborne and the Souls games. By the 20th time of re-spawning in Central Yharnam I could actually feel myself age.

Man...I know a guy who really needs to see this video. I know this makes me sound like a pretentious douche, but it's been my experience that generally (and I've been one of these people) guitar players who are so obsessed with "tone" are generally not very good guitarists. Well, maybe that's going too far - "inexperienced" might be a better term? It's like this other guitarist I jam with sometimes. It's hard as hell to write music with him because he is so obsessed with the "tone" of everything that he doesn't even stop to consider whether or not what he's composed is actually good. He has tons of great gear, more than I could ever afford, but he doesn't really know how to use it. Last time I saw him, he was spinning the dial on this expensive amp-modeling unit he has. He complained about just about every sound and I'm sitting there like "They all sounded pretty good and usable to me..." I know plenty of n00bs (and some non-n00bz even) who swear by tube amps, but their own recordings with said amps are garbage. What most guitar players who are convinced that you have to have X kind of guitar and amp don't realize, is that the promotional recordings companies like Mesa, Engl, etc. make sound as good as they do because they were expertly composed, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered. You don't just plug in and get that kind of professional, double-tracked sound. However, companies of course don't market it that way. It sounds good because "it's all tube!!!"

My attempt at making one of these crazy modern eletronica tunes. https://soundcloud.com/angelcityoutlaw/shakin-all-the-rules I'm pretty happy with it personally, but feel free to tell me it sucks anyway.

or we could just find out where these people live and crowdfund Larry traveling around the world punching them in the face for justice and McRibs.

I freakin' love this! You especially nailed the drums! Like my hair seriously turned itself into a mullet and I involuntarily started saying action movie one-liners listening to this. That is how much 80s just punched me in the face listening to this!