AngelCityOutlaw

1. Learn as much about theory and composition as you can and never stop learning it. A well composed piece is always well composed, but a piece with shitty composition and great production is still a shitty track. 2. Do every genre of music. By that I don't mean "I used to do trance, but now I do dubstep!" I mean music that uses completely different ensembles. 3. Learn how to write for specific ensembles/genres. Something that I struggled with and still do from time to time is that you can't treat an orchestra like a rock band and you can't treat synth dominated EDM like it's an orchestra. While the same theory applies, the genres all handle melody, harmony, and rhythm in their own way and that is what truly makes the genres different. 4. Learn to write modal and atonal music as well and learn what kind of style is useful to achieve the sound you want. If you have to make a really dark, evil-sounding piece, your I IV Vs and pentatonic melodies aren't going to get the job done. In that case, writing something based purely on the phrygian mode might work better Those are some thoughts that immediately come to mind.

Great atmosphere here - solid track all around. It sort of has a SFIII Third Strike vibe to it. You have a new soundcloud follower

I've been trying to talk myself out of buying one. I'm told that some must play games are Fire Emblem: Awakening, Link Between Worlds, Pokemon X/Y, and Luigi's Mansion 2.

Awesome! Thanks! I'm gonna change up some things and try to improve the WIP up some more before I send it. I've got some new ideas I want to try out now. Yay inspiration! Basically, I'm trying to shoot for a sound that would have stylistic elements of Yoko Kanno's Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex soundtrack, the Blade Runner Score and obviously the game itself. It shall not be easy...

Yeah, I recently tried out Ridge Racer: Unbounded (badass game!) on a friend's laptop and the built-in graphics card was enough, but the processor was slower I'm guessing since there were frame-rate slowdowns here and there. Runs smooth as a Brazilian wax on this new computer though.

So I did get that computer. So far it's great! The graphics seems to run the games I have on Steam so that's good. I'll get a dedicated card later. and thanks for posting that chart, Flex!

Oh okay, that's good. Thanks a lot everyone!

I've been down the "we'll pay you a percentage" route before and I personally will never do it again. This is always a tactic that people use to say "if the project fails, I'm not out any more money than I've already spent and you'll get precisely jack and shit out of the deal. Then, I will run away and you'll never hear of me again." and the terms of what exactly you're getting are often vague at best. "A percentage of sales"...yeah, but does that mean just flat-out "sales" or actual "profit" as the two are completely different. If you get a percentage of anything, I'd recommend getting a percentage of a budget if there was one. Actually, I'd always recommend trying to get 5 - 10% of the project's budget regardless. It's a more than fair asking price to create music that is essential to film or games.

I'm kind of confused as to why that means I can't swap it out if you say it isn't dedicated.

Okay so Best Buy is having a pretty good Black Friday sale. For 449, they have an Asus AMD Quad-Core, 12 gigs of ram, 1tb of disk space, USB 3, and an AMD Radeon HD 8670D Graphics card. The graphics card is not integrated, so that means I could swap it out later right? Is that card any good? Is this a good buy? I'm thinking even if all the components aren't totally killer right out of the box I can always upgrade it later.

So I'm getting a new PC soon here, I want to use it for music and I figure why not throw in a good graphics card to play games on PC too? My problem is this. How in the hell do I know if whatever video card I buy will actually run games I want to play? Whenever you look at system requirements on steam it's like "GeForce X9900 or Radeon 245000" or something. Like, damn...I don't speak nerd; put this shit in English. Worse yet, it's like two games that are equally new will list entirely different video cards. But I KNOW for a fact that you don't need those specific cards to run the games; you need one that's just as good, right? Basically, how do I know if my graphics card will run a particular video game?

I love this soundtrack! I actually have an arrangement of "One Night In Neo Kobe City" sitting around for the past year. If you think I'm good enough (soundcloud link in my sig) I'd love to claim the track and send you the WIP.

A few thoughts on this track: The intro leaves a lot to be desired. You have that melody and a pad, then it stops and begins again with a drum beat. The piece would be better off to start at around 1:44. The melody you have in that section starting at about 50 seconds and especially around 1:14 is really bad. A lot of very dissonant intervals, the phrasing is weak and it doesn't work together with your harmony. I also think your choice of synth tones isn't quite up to par with the original. The main thing that needs work here in my opinion, is the composition

What is love? You mean where is love. There is no link, but I'd love to listen to it.

Thanks for listening, I guess.

Happy Birthday to one of my favorite Russians!

So yesterday I was messing around on the keyboard and I came up with this pluck-synth melody based around the Dorian mode. Hours later, I have this trance track I'm rather satisfied with. https://soundcloud.com/angelcityoutlaw/digital-destiny Any feedback you can give me is much appreciated as always!

The way I look at it is if we do this boss theme, it turns out good but someone else beat us to the official claim, it's really not a huge deal because we can still submit it to OCR and it will (theoretically) wind up on the front page one day in the distant future anyway.

Works for me.

Just throwing it out there that if you guys needed any scratching funk guitars (or guitars in general) I'd love to help work on a hip hop or rap track as I never have before.

I'm actually surprised that it hasn't already been done.

This is a very good point.

The answer to that is honestly just knowing your chords, scales, modes and intervals. You've heard it so often that you'll recognize it when you see it on paper. For example, if you've memorized the whole and half steps of the harmonic minor scale and you see a melody written that you recognize as the harmonic minor, and beneath it are the usual chords created from that scale, it eventually becomes second nature to hear in your head exactly how it will sound.

The part where you may struggle is the fact that most victory themes are incredibly short.

So Argle says he's down for doing the Middle Eastern instruments on this Prince of Persia track I want to do. Haven't had much time to work on it sadly...however, in the next couple weeks I'm upgrading my PC entirely (yay for awesome black friday sales!) and have some days off that I can dedicate to nothing but music and trying to win the heart of this sweet European girl who works in the same building as me. I'm thinking instead of doing WIPs, since most of this will be done with virtual instruments and my guitar, I'll just send you guys a totally finished track and then we can tweak the details as need be from there. I think it would be more reliable and probably faster than me sending you all a wip and then work or something gets in the way and I leave ya hanging for a while and possibly miss a deadline. It would also prevent my habit of remaking things and changing my WIP a million times before I finally have an arrangement I'm satisfied with.