AngelCityOutlaw

This is taking me back to my years of listening to Dream Theater, Circus Maximus and Anubis Gate. Well done.

Holy shitballs I haven't seen you post in years.

Change and death are two different things. Music has always been "free" to listen to.
 
The average listener doesn't care about production(and lately, neither do I), that is more of taste. I will also add that making a simple, basic idea is really hard for some people to pull off and actually make sound good and creative/fresh, not that i'm saying that all music should be basic. 
Singing I would treat on the same lines as an instrument with more factors like melody, tone, lyrics, and style. Most average mainstream tracks are designed specifically not to be too distracting to give priority to the vocals. Mostly a taste thing.
 
I've actually had a similar question to this and learned that it really depends. Actually It can be plain stupid some times. I know DJ's that make triple of what a instrument playing performers make. I also know sessions artists who need to play a ton of shows just to make ends meet with there day job. I think its down to the goal of why a person is performing, the period of time, and what is trending.
 

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.
 

The simple way of putting it is that men date across and down, while women date across and up. So yes, if you can meet a woman with the same kind of career aspirations, then it's probably a strength. But generally speaking, most people aren't working toward such high-risk careers despite said careers still being saturated.
I'd say that's a fair assessment. I think when you hit a certain extreme of wealth and fame,everybody will only date similar people. Like, Brad Pitt could have any woman he likes right? Except he seems to only ever date other celebs. I assume because he'd have basically nothing in common with a "commoner". 
No, but it is odd lol
It won't let me read that article, but I can say that if you look at it just in general, it's an even split, but areas of interest are disproportionate and depends on geography. In North America, there are far fewer female composers than somewhere like Japan. On the flipside, we tend to have a lot of female pop and country singers. 
Anyway, regarding the OP, I don't think there's much else to be said IMO. Fields that once could be lucrative like albums and touring have becoming unreliable means of pulling in serious cash unless you really kill yourself with it. There is still, and may always be, good money in composing for films or TV at the highest level, but the market is extremely tough to break into, is a pretty elite boy's club, and involves a lot of luck. The amount of teaching positions is also a case of supply exceeding demand and I don't think teaching is a job for everyone to begin with. It takes a specific type of person to make a good teacher. Writing music for trailers and production libraries could also be lucrative, but again largely boils down to luck since you can't MAKE a certain track(s) get tons of syncs in big-time ads.
There's also the possibility of becoming a session musician (though I suspect that's becoming very rare) or playing in orchestras that record film and game music, but no doubt that's also a highly saturated business. 
 
 
 

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

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

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.

Are you okay? @ShadowRaz

Just randomly saw this video on YouTube, and felt compelled to talk about it
 
 
I've mostly cut games out of my life, expect for the odd binge every now and then. Over the last couple, 3 months I've been playing Rome Total War and it's become my most played game on Steam now...at 30 hours.
I feel ashamed of that, but that's absolutely nothing compared to many people. One of my friends, he's married with a kid and has sunk over 2000 hours into one game in less than a year, yet can't understand why his wife is pissed at him! For me, putting hundreds, let alone thousands of hours into a game is unthinkable as an adult; shit, I don't know that I ever pulled that off as a kid and as a teenager, I never played games for most of those years as I was too obsessed with music and playing guitar.
Curious to hear your thoughts on the whole subject. 
 
 

Good stuff! I like that you got a realistic mix. It also reminds me of the National Treasure soundtrack in certain parts like the beginning.

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.

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.

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.

Would anyone believe I've actually become a composer who's managed to grab a series of worthwhile gigs and absorbed enough commissions to kinda be sick of working on music? I know I don't. A decade and a half of putting in tens of thousands of hours behind a DAW has been yielding some returns and I've reached heights no one should take for granted.
From my vantage point, I thought I would like to share some of the less-talked-about things I see from this elevation that could be useful advice to newer composers or even some older ones. In no particular order, here we go:
1. There is no recipe or gimmick for success. If there was, we'd all know it and use it by now. It's all pretty much random. All you can do is get creative with your ideas and execute them with the best audio quality you can.
2. Only upgrade your sound and studio if you can't produce quality work with what you've got anymore. You don't need 18 orchestral symphony libraries to make a quality orchestral track or soundtrack, you don't need the latest version of this or that for everything, you don't need loads of hardware just to pretend you're staying current. Master what you have before you start thinking you need to spend $$$ on more shit.
3. Synth nerds are the worst people to get hardware advice from. Sorry, but it's true. Nothing is ever as good as the best there was from the 1970s or 1980s, and therefore nothing is ever worthwhile enough. If you have your eye on a keyboard or hardware item, listen to it, think on it for a while, think on it, think on it for a long time and decide if it's really for you or not. No one else can decide that for you, you have to decide that for yourself.
4. Doing a bunch of songs at the same time and in stages is better than trying to knock out one song at a time. This is because you need a break from audio both to give your ears a rest and also to let your judgment become less biased. While doing a song, there are the stages of beginning it, working on it and finalizing it. You get into these stages naturally, and it is surprisingly easier to do these stages with multiple songs than just one.
5. To expand on #4, after a few years of experience in finishing and finalizing tracks, you start learning a skill for a music ear that can hear where your songs are supposed to go, rather than where they go now. It's almost a 6th sense in a way - you start hearing and expecting it to go this way when where you actually have it going is wrong. You can also hear what ISN'T there and what needs to be there. It's kinda freaky, really.
6. Some people try to write and arrange a track starting with the melody and designing everything around it. This is dumb. Building a song is like building a house - you start from the ground up (drums and bass), then the walls and body of the house (chords and arps and accompaniment), and then the roof (usually the melody). Doing it with the melody first is like putting the furniture in a field in a certain way and designing the house around all that.
7. Rely on as few people for your songs and projects at any given time as possible. Other people have lives and crises, too, and you would be better off doing or learning to do things you need yourself than hope their timeframes work out for you.
8. All business success requires risk to fuel it, however not all risk is the same. Being smart and meticulously deciding where your money is best to go and getting clever and resourceful with your situation could still create the concoction that provides success without putting you in danger.
9. "Value" or "reward" for your audio work is not always money. This is a VERY controversial and unpopular opinion, and there are good reasons for that, but the fact remains those who only consider value and reward to be coin or cash will find it much harder to navigate throguh business success here.
10. Even if you hate loops products, many are worth getting anyway for a variety of reasons. One of the best is that they often come with MIDI files that can be an excellent teacher for how to humanize notes in a DAW.
11. No one doing indie games has $300.00 per audio minute. Success from the indie game sector comes more by showcasing artistic achievement through its humble roots, not trying to do what AAA game studios are already doing. Know this, accept this, and use it to your advantage while builsing up a career in game audio.
12. The more artistic a person is, the less skill they have for conventional thinking ideas in audio like how business really works, humility, common sense and even at times common decency to others. This is not a guaranteed exclusion, but the "artist's brain" phenomenon really does seem to be true.
13. You can work on next to no music for years and years and suddenly be chosen for a big project seeming for no reason. Don't question it too much, just give thanks to the god or powers you believe in and do it.
14. Don't count on tempo-sync'd loops and samples to work correctly. Many do, but many also do not for whatever reasons. It's better to just get a BPM that works innately for the samples' speed you want to use.
15. Every composer, sooner or later, does work for free, undercuts a friend/competitor for a job. If they say they don't, they are most likely lying. Also, every composer eventually pirates stuff as well.
16. It doesn't matter what tricks you need to do to get a track done (just don't use illegal samples!), just get it done somehow. Arranging and recording music is supposed to be that difficult.
17. Have a Plan B and Plan C for all music you're working on, as it's incredibly easy for that music to not go used or be cout out somewhere else.
18. Don't worry if you use a loop or phrase or sound that's been used ad nauseum or something. It turns out the niche for LIKING recognizable sounds is bigger than we though.
19. Uploading MIDIs from Valkyrie Profile, Secret of Mana, Star Ocean 2, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy Tactics and some of Tim Follin's work to your DAW and studying them will teach you pretty much everything you need to know about doing game audio.
20. When approaching someone for possible music work, be bright and cheery, but don't be desperate. Act like a seasoned professional, even if you aren't, and use a tone that says "I can do this work, but I don't need this work." Talk in length about the fine details of how you do things and how this works whether they might understand it or not, as it creates for you an air that the client thinks "Hmm, this guy knows his business." and helps keep it so the client respects you enough not to take advantage of you. If they leave soon after you establish this light bit of dominance in the conversation, then it wasn't meant to be.
These things are obviously not objective, and they are subject to much scrutiny and debate themselves, but potentially useful stuff I'd like to impart all the same.

Out of sheer curiosity: How old are you?
Because the stuff you're saying here sounds like things I'd have said when I was a teenage, metal supremacist. 
 
No you don't lol
City Escape is played at 130 BPM double-time. That is the equivalent of 8th notes at 260 BPM. If you don't believe me, put a metronome over it at 130 and then at 260. 
In this thread you have claimed:
• The song's are slow, which we can objectively prove most of them are not.
• You have claimed that the melodies are not memorable. But again, the songs are extremely popular. So they just might not be memorable to YOU
• Stated that Crush 40's songs are just slow strumming of chords...which again, is objectively false as evidenced by songs like Open Your Heart, Live and Learn, and just about all the others. 
So you don't know what you're talking about.
You just don't like the songs and rather than just accept that and move on, you're trying to "prove" that you're somehow right. You don't need to justify it; just say you don't like it.
 
 

Death metal

My Uncle was actually a firechief and his sons were firefighters, so I have some knowledge of it.
In my opinion, and this just being honest (that's what you want right?)
It doesn't sound like you're the type of person with the mentality for that job.
First off, I wouldn't want someone whose primary motivation for the job is a "Kushy schedule" when people's lives are at stake.
Secondly, are you certain that you are physically capable for the job? I hate to make assumptions, but generally people working long hours in chairs at any sort of call center and a relaxed schedule (which from my knowledge, firefighters don't actually have) is not typically the mark of someone who gets up and runs a mile every day at 5 am. Are you able to sprint for a long period of time? Are you able to lift a grown man or woman with minimal effort? Etc? Could you pass their tests?
and from what my family told me, the tests (which vary by location) are usually a joke compared to what the job actually demands.
Further, and I know that you hear crazy shit as a dispatcher, but actually dealing with the situation in person is dramatically different: Are you going to be able to remain calm when it's you who has to pull the bodies out of the building? Seeing children who are suffering smoke inhalation and might even have horrific injuries? Car accidents leaving people mangled or dead? Are you prepared to die saving a stranger? The list goes on
But in my opinion, if the answer to any of those questions is "no" — then it's not the job for you.
So for you and the sake of your community, I hope that you really take a good look within before deciding to pursue this further.

I only read the title but I already know that yes, you should dump her.

This is something I've actually been putting a bit of thought into in recent months; just regarding music in general.
I don't think Twitch would be a good option given its niche, but there definitely needs to be a video or music streaming service that makes it possible for people to actually have their stuff heard.
Soundcloud USED to be the best, but ever since they removed groups (for SOME fucking reason) it's easily just as tough as getting anything out there on YouTube, which used to be "by creators" and is now "bye creators".
 
 

I can't absorb myself in long gaming sessions anymore because I start to feel guilty and anxious about not doing other things. Even if I've sat at my desk and worked for 12 hours I find it really hard to relax in the evenings. Part of me thinks it's because I don't actually want to play games as much in my free time, but i'm so used to seeing it as the only option that I feel obligated to do it out of habit. Heck, if i'm honest they feel like work now in a lot of ways. I've been wanting to get back into Terraria for months but every time I open it I feel overwhelmed about the amount of work it would take to build something cool. Same with Skyrim. Additionally, with the speed games are released these days I feel more pressure to play often so I can actually feel that sensation of knowing a game inside out like I did when I was younger, because to me that was the difference between just playing a game and loving a game. It was so much easier when I would get a game maybe once every 6 months and completely master it because of the multiple playthroughs I would have to do. Nowadays it feels more like a race to just finish the games that are being spat out every week.
To remedy things I've started only buying games that I believe will offer me a valuable experience and preferably has a start and an end. I'm putting a serious dampener on games like Fallout that could potentially go on forever, and I've pretty much quit Guild Wars 2, Warframe and anything that has a grind factor like that (though I will get Monster Hunter World because I love the series. To scratch the online competitive itch I play Atlas Reactor, because it's a quick 15-20min game I can play in work breaks on my laptop with little commitment. Forcing myself to reduce the gaming scope has opened up some time for things like reading, which is nice.

Not sure if this tidbit of advice will help, but here's how I finished American Pixels. That was a 5+ year project, tons of excitement at the front-end, and then it turned into... work. And here's the problem, I have a family and a full-time job, so I kept hitting the snag where I'd work all day, spend time with the family, have a pocket of free time at night, and then... not have any energy left. That, or there'd be this sense of "yay, I have time to work on music... and oh no, I feel obligated to work on that project and I'm really not in the mood..."
So, that happened over and over, and occasionally I'd have a magic day off (holiday, whatever) where I'd get a wonderful 4 hours in a row to myself... and during those moments, I could tap into the creative juices and get it going again... but man, those little magical windows were rare. Like, once every few months rare. It got really frustrating seeing an album inch to completion in those sporadic bursts.
The answer for me: wake up earlier. I'd set my alarm for 4:30am, be in my studio by 5am, and get in a solid hour, hour and a half every morning. My brain wasn't yet tired from the day job, I was rested and fresh, and the stuff that seemed like work before now seemed fun again. And, it actually helped my happiness level, so even though I was sleepy, I was giddy at work considering the progress I made in the early morning hours. And then I just had to ride and chase that feeling until things were done. It was tough to get started, but then it became strangely addicting.