AngelCityOutlaw

I remixed one of my own tunes from earlier this year that I'm quite fond of: Giving it better sense of depth via multiple reverbs, better levels, and putting it all to this rad visualizer.

Not that he has a personal attachment to SAC or anything But nah, it is easily the best instrument on the market for this kinda stuff. Anyway, nice job on the remake.

It's only taken 20 years to add proper time signatures

Maybe? I'm not sure. Probably. I mean, "Soundcloud Rapper" has become a meme at this point. But I do know a number who got famous via YouTube: Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, that "Karmin" duo. But they did all do covers... You may be on to something.

IMO promoting original music is way more difficult just in general.

Well, July 6th is Ant-Man & The Wasp day, and it's about a 4,000 KM drive to the venue, so I'm gonna have to pass on this one. But all the same, that's completely rad that you're doing this and I hope it goes ridiculously awesome! Knock 'em dead, red!

Anytime

M-Audio, KRK, and Yamaha are pretty popular for near-field monitors, should meet all your specifications, and they're pretty much all "flat-frequency-response" as they can get it. However, you have to be sure that your room isn't going to undo that.

Just as I suspected. The reason you are getting a clash between the strings and the piano is because they both are playing exactly the same notes in most of the places — creating a unison. However, the rhythmic difference (drone vs movement) results in a unison that is the same in pitch only. For example, what looks to be an arpeggio in the piano is occurring on exactly the same frequencies (notes) as the strings, which are constantly droning on those same pitches. Those bottom notes on the piano will stand out in particular since nothing else seems to be happening at the same time that instrument enters those frequencies. Whenever you have two or more instruments playing in unison, they create a doubling and will either sound more like one cohesive unit, or one will have some sort of affect upon the other. In this case, your violins soften the piano's timbre, which is why it always seems like the piano is dominant over the strings no matter how you fiddle with the volume. The only real solution to this problem, is to fix the part writing so that the piano and strings are not playing the same notes on the upper registers. That will allow the ear to hear them as two distinctly separate parts. If you want to maintain that doubling, I would recommend you have the string section double the piano's upper notes in the same rhythm as well as pitch. Perhaps with a shorter articulation like pizzicatos, staccato, or have the violins double that arpeggio played legato and at a quieter dynamic. You can mangle it with audio plugins like equalizers and volume faders all you want, but at best you'll get a slightly-less-worse result. With EQ, you'll not improve its actual clarity but rather make particular overtones and such stand out in one sound vs the other. With volume and dynamics alone, you'll be forced to make one sound to be excessively dominant (piano most likely here). So I'd either double the piano with the strings exactly, or adjust the part-writing to include more contrary or oblique motion among the voices so as to keep everything harmonious, but residing in its own pitch range. Hope that helps!

Can you post a screenshot of the MIDI of your Violins and Piano? Or sheet music if it's live instruments?

IMO, Moseph's advice is best. It's just another line in part-writing. Keep movement to the next chord tone as smooth as possible, and maybe you have to do that with some passing tones and such. But for the bassline specifically, have it play/accent specific beats to create a sense of pulsation. Like, (real simple example) maybe you have the bass play every quarter note. Just make sure every quarter note is a chord tone to the harmony at that moment. If the other voices are resting; have it move, etc.

21 years to get to this moment

The new Avenger's, which I've not yet seen, inspired this classic-hollywood style action tune.

Thanks!

The truth about "production" is that it really is entwined with composition. Except for when it comes to sound quality. Yeah...despite what a lot of people out there will try to say, timbre does matter. It's a key part of arranging/orchestrating any piece of music. Something that samples more articulations and velocity layers, from multiple microphone positions in a great-sounding hall or stage is better than anything that doesn't. Full stop. There's also the matter of what the instrument samples can actually play. Look how many sample libraries just sample nothing but "short note" and "long note" and maybe some fx. That's just garbage. Any good musical phrase is dependent on rhythm as a foundation. Good luck playing the Star Wars theme with Orchestral Essentials. That's why I like stuff like CineSamples; they sampled different note lengths so that you can easily program a realistic phrase.

You can't do it mid song and as I recall, you only get X / 4 time.

Generally speaking, 99% of film, game, and especially TV composers don't have the luxury of composing for real players and they're under very tight deadlines. Being able to produce a full piece, in sometimes a matter of hours, all by yourself, with virtual instruments is pretty much a mandatory skill. I don't personally know anyone in the business who can't. Even I have had indie gigs that needed me to have a brand new tune conceived and finished in a couple days because they had a new level finished and they decided to include it at the last moment in the build of the game they're showing at some trade show or whatever at the end of the week. Not really enough time to get even one live musician on it, let alone a full ensemble, and definitely not when there is no budget to hire them and the gig doesn't pay nearly enough to justify paying them out of pocket and trying to deduct it on your taxes.

To be fair, he didn't present it as universal truth — he said this was his experience and subject to scrutiny.

Did you like, make an account just to necro a 4-years-old thread to plug a piano lesson site?

No. Small disclaimer, it's been several years since I've touched it: It's fantastic for electronic music given its pattern-based system (which is unique to it), its piano roll, and it has some pretty great built-in effects for that kind of music, but I would not say it's a good all-rounder. Why? For starters, you're looking to record as well. I can confirm that recording audio in it is a real pain. You have to choose where you're saving each of your takes, select exactly what track on the mixer will be recording (god help you if you start recording with the wrong one selected), you have to choose a particular option each time you record any take, you can't properly overdub takes. It's a freakin' mess, dude. Next, you cannot change time signatures. A simple, standard feature in every DAW. I hope all your songs from band days are in 4/4 all the way through. If you're looking for a good, affordable all-rounder, look no further than Reaper by Cockos. Suitable for all kinds of music, super-easy to record with and use in general, it handles MIDI very well, has tons of great community made mods and enhancements, is regularly updated, and its "trial version" is fully functional and the trial never ends. However, if you want to get rid of the nag screen and just do the right thing, it costs like 60 bucks to buy a personal/small business license if you make less than six figures on your music. Cheaper than literally everyone else. No bullshit, you can not go wrong with Reaper.

Sorry for the double post, but there is a goldmine of good discussion that can create a thread just from this point alone. You and I discussed a similar topic last year via PM. I've gotten in a number of fights now, with bigwig composers drilling this shit into the heads of n00bs (and I was at one time among them) that charging anything less than a 3-digit figure per minute is "devaluing the industry" even though Danny Elfman — Danny fucking Elfman — lowers his prices to $1 USD in exchange for keeping the rights to his music at least once per year on an indie film. Yet, they expect everyone to believe that a kid scoring a crappy college film or indie game for nothing is undercutting the business. Despite that it's business as usual considering Danny Elfman's tradition. It's like everyone working on this game is doing it out of a labour of love and to get experience. The artists, the programmers, etc. But not the composer! No, the composer is special! On that note, I have actually had one composer, quite successful and used to be married to a famous actress, tell me that composers are "criminally underpaid" even if their paycheck amounts to millions because "actors make more". It's like, holy shit dude...Tom Cruise risks certain death to promote his films as do stunt people (who get no recognition from the industry btw) and you expect me to agree that the composer deserves the same pay rate? Most of these composers don't understand the concept of consumer buying power. You can't expect that a bunch of college students or whatever are going to be able to pay you Hollywood rates. And guess what? It isn't you who gets to decide you're worth the big bucks; it's the people with the big bucks who do. It's actually the hardest pill to swallow in this life: That we don't get to decide our value to other people.

This is the one point I will disagree with you on. Maybe in certain genres starting with something else works, but most music is composed melody first. Actually, starting with a chord is still technically melody first. Great example being that the very basis of part-writing, and how harmony came to be understood today, is by playing multiple melodies at the same time. That's all a chord really is: Different melody lines moving homorhythmically. Pretty much everyone from Bach to John Williams started with a great theme or motif, and harmonized it from there. Not to plug my own shit, but I literally just posted a track for critique over in the Original Music forum before reading this. I started with all the melodies, and built from there. To my ears, it turned out cohesive. So I'd agree that building a piece of music is like building a house, but I'd disagree that the melody shouldn't be the foundation. EDIT: Points 7, 8, 12, and 20 are very, very good points.

The Spyro Reignited trilogy was recently announced, and it inspired me to write a theme that is kinda like those old platformers.

You know what's really strange? I thought you hated that picture, but now it's your avatar. Anyway, I honestly think both are kinda crap now. Soundcloud was great before it got rid of embedded sharing into social media like Facebook, and groups. I cannot, for the life of me figure out why they thought getting rid of groups was a good idea. There is also the fact that it is plagued with bots, or people who feign interest in your tracks and page, only to unfollow and unlike you if they don't get a follow back almost immediately... YouTube is the superior platform in the sense that how you can present your music is a lot better. You can get great After Effects templates and all that jazz. The downside is that YouTube expands more rapidly than our own universe, and it's extremely difficult to bring in much of an audience. Worse still, is that in the last few years, Youtube has become a haven for SJWs and Neck-bearded, fedora-tipping "skeptics"; it's a political cesspool. But YouTube sides with SJWs, and as I've seen videos demonstrating, Youtube will demonetize your videos and make them harder to find even if you associate with someone who is known to disagree with their politics. Not sure if that applies to subscribers, but I doubt it. Back around 2010 - 2013, both Soundcloud and YouTube were absolutely amazing for sharing music. Both have fallen from grace, and nothing has really risen to the challenge of filling the void.

am I the only one who didn't really think this was an argument? More just talking about why I disagreed with his points? lol