XPRTNovice

Watching youtube videos of people creating music really helped me, as well as watching videos of people explaining the DAW and some neat features. Zircon's youtube channel has at least 2 live mixes, where he walks you through it from start to finish, and he uses FL studio. I know there are more people around here who do that sort of thing (and I love to watch them so if anyone knows any please post) but it's a great way to see masters work for free in the comfort of your own home. You can even replicate what he's doing step by step on FL as you go, learning by osmosis.

On my Martin HD-28, I use medium gauge d'addario acoustic strings. They pair very nicely with the deep boom of the Martin. I use a shingle pick for that, 2.5mm. I grew up as a bluegrass player, so anything not rigid typically doesn't do it for me. If I'm doing strum patterns, I might switch to something floppier. On my Gitane D-300, I use some sort of jazz strings that I've forgotten and a Dunlop Primetone 3mm pick made out of the skulls of my enemies. Mandolin: I use martin mandolin strings, medium gauge, and a David Grisman "Dawg" pick.

Fixed. To MX's point, yes, be careful about saying you do everything unless you can back it up. With my fiction sales, and my voice acting testimonials, and my music testimonials, I can. I would build one at a time. I have a very steady day job that has steady hours and not a whole lot of unpredictability. So, I know for a fact that I can spend my nights and weekends creating. And I'm not pressured to create, because it's not putting food on the table. My wife, who doesn't work, gives me time I need and I make sure I give her the time she deserves. There's balance in that, too, especially with the new kid around. But I make it work. Here are some points of advice from my very limited experience - TIME. FUCKING. MANAGEMENT. If you can't manage your time, you're finished. You'll be up to 3 AM every day and you'll want to die. If you manage your time well, 30 minutes of writing can be monumentally productive. I've been known to write 3,000 words in an hour if I only have one hour. If your writing time consists of you clicking through facebook, you're doing it wrong. - When you're done managing your time, manage your resources. Know your limits. As tempting as it was to play in 2 bands, remix for OCR, be the music director for the FF7 fan movie, actively advertise my skills as a composer, audition for 30-40 voice jobs a day, and write novels and short stories...some things have to give. I've slowed down the number of projects I'm taking on and mentally understanding where I am putting the focus on developing. - When you get bored at work, if you're not being derelict in your duties, write or edit some of your literature. Brandon Sanderson's path to writing a monumental amount of fiction was taking a job as the night-time receptionist at a hotel. He literally had like 10 hours of uninterrupted writing time EVERY DAY. - Network. Reach out and talk to people. Take a couple of jobs for free and then plug that person for other work. Errrmmm...that's all for now.

I'm a triple freelancer with a day job - I write, I do music, and I'm a voice actor. I haven't been doing it for very long, but I can give some ideas on my experiences, maybe. I will caveat this by saying that I'm not trying REALLY HARD in any of the freelance parts. They're side jobs; I do them as they come. I don't need the extra income so bad, but it's nice to have. The common theme I feel about all of these is that the goal of my freelancing is to stop freelancing. In writing, my goal is to sell novels to a Big Six publishing company and get contracted to write more books. Unfortunately, that makes freelance writing difficult. Novels are big projects that take a huge amount of time, and it leaves no room for me to sell short stories to magazines. Even if I devoted all my time to short story writing, the odds of me selling enough fiction every month to support myself is slim. In writing, the only method I've ever known for people to make a living freelancing has been to be the .00001% that hits it big self-publishing (see Amanda Hocking for a case study). In voice acting, my goal is continuous clients on larger projects. I started doing this in February of 2013, and in the last 4 months I've probably made $1k/month freelancing - but that's pouring a LOT of time into auditioning for parts. I've auditioned for OVER A THOUSAND. Now, though I have 2-3 continuous clients who are always sending me work. Not enough to live on, still, but enough for me to start putting money back into the business and building up things like a website, demo reels, etc. My music goals are the same as my voice goals; I want continuous clients and big projects, not little piddly things. I don't see this as the major source of income because things that approach a salary are things like teaching and working for companies. I don't want to do that with music. So you can see my Triad of Naivety. I have a steady day job, but the major goal is to leave it by: supporting myself by winning publishing contracts and supplementing that income with steady projects voice acting and musically. Talk about pipe dream, right? I'm trying to "make it" in not just one but THREE starving artist professions...

Neat stuff, thanks man.

Step 1: Wake up and go to your real job I'm not a full time freelancer and I don't know that I ever will be, but I recently had a conversation with someone who was, and this is what he told me:

Ha! Very interesting. Though I've met Brandon, it's not him I want to get my stuff in front of. It's his agent; Joshua. Brandon has no say on whether or not anyone publishes my work, but Joshua's job is to get a publisher to buy it. I already have stuff in front of him. Joshua is already asking me for future manuscripts after seeing what I've written so far, so this is good stuff. But next time I see Brandon I'll drop OCR and see what happens

I like this. As an a capella veteran and arranger, I might have varied some of the background vowels, but all in all this is good. It takes balls to try something like this. If you need a beatboxer in future arrangements, you give me a call.

I agree with this completely, and it sort of ties into the point I was making a while ago about why I don't like Anime in its subbed version. That's problematic because you're putting your hands into a translator (who are often not that great) but this is an awesome point about transporting entertainment across cultures. Sometimes it can work A to B but many times it just doesn't. I would argue that the out-of-the-gate sales stats of a game directly correspond almost solely to the hype built up before the game's release, and have nothing to do with the general quality of the game. The complaints - legitimate or not - about FF13 came after people beat the game, which certainly was not the majority of the cases in the first week of sales. Final Fantasy VII still almost doubles all-time gross sales of FF13, though I know we're talking about many years of lag time in availability. As someone else mentioned here, 13 was very divisive and polarizing among the gaming culture, likely for many of the reasons you cited.

I knooooow...but it's fun to hate on.

So, today's my last day on Whole 30 and my 4th day without allergy medication. It's not fun. I've been sneezing and almost-sneezing for most of the last couple of days. The only real couple of changes physiologically I've noticed are: I wake up before my alarm, regardless of how much sleep I've gotten and I generally don't experience the mid-afternoon crash. But I wouldn't call either of those things groundbreaking, as that was happening prior to the Whole30 experience, when I was probably eating 70/30 anyway. Tomorrow I'm going to go drink beer at a BBQ (and buy an oboe, but that's sort of beside the point). And smoke my goddamn hookah. But I'll probably continue being close to 90/10 on most days, I'll try to keep the allergy medication down (or at least greatly reduced) and see if I can't use some of that local honey trick to kick the rest of the allergies. I'll be able to tolerate this for a month or so, but if this is a 6-month repair process it's going to be rough as shit.

This is probably the best summary ever.

Welcome to the forums! Go introduce yourself in the Newbie Introduction thread if you haven't already. Let me caveat this with the fact that I am listening on computer speakers at work, so I can't give you in depth feedback. I really enjoyed the intro, yes, it's very Skyrim. The piano throughout is nice, if maybe a little mechanical at around 0:40 I would like to hear a melody come out a little bit more after the minute mark. It fits very well as a background soundtrack to something, but as a standalone piece it's not very engaging to the ear. I'm not sure what the intent for it is; it would sound good as a soundtrack. Do you plan on going anywhere else with it? Overall I think it sounds quite nice.

Yes. And I'm not really sure why it matters if people think they like a culture but actually don't (?) or what bearing that has on what makes a game good from the player's perspective, regardless of the player's nationality.

Music teachers, in my opinion, have one of the lowest hourly wages in the professional world. They are incredibly undervalued by the educational systems, yet they put in more after-hours support than anyone else in the entire school. One of my best friends went to be a music teacher; after working like a dog in college, taking 25 credits a semester, he now makes just over $30,000 a year and probably works 12-15 hours a day, weekends, summers, and whatever. I almost never see him because he is utterly consumed with what he's doing, AND he has to supplement his income by gigging on the nights. My father in law is almost 60 and is getting paid right at about the poverty line as a music teacher. That being said, music teachers have always, to me, seemed as though they wouldn't trade it for the world. And teaching for a school is much more of a raw deal (financially) than private lessons. I've been teaching private lessons on and off for about 10 years now from whatever place I could find in my home. I would have maybe 3-5 students at any one time, limit it to 1-2 nights a week to not make myself crazy, and charge $40/hour. For me it was an outstanding source of extra income, but there is serious upkeep issues, especially when you teach in a foreign country and your students (as children of military parents) are constantly transferring. I've stopped teaching since I come back to the US mostly because of the opportunity cost. I might make $120 in one evening, but I've now lost 3 hours of composition time. I don't want to be a private lesson instructor forever; I want to quit my day job and be cool and famous Good post, Amy. It's definitely a viable source of income that a lot of people ignore, but it's one that's reserved for instrumentalists like you and I. Someone who is incredibly brilliant at a DAW (UNlike me) doesn't have that option.

I noticed this in one of the other threads about what people liked about different FFs, and I think it's really interesting to see what different people value in different games. I could ask a dozen people that question and there not be a single modicum of commonality in all of them. I wouldn't have ever thought to even bring up what Brandon just said. I just think it's interesting

Seconded. Not to continually draw parallels to writing, but I got one of my manuscripts in front of Brandon Sanderson's agent through participation in a conference, not by him noticing stuff I'd already published. Now he's looking at me as a potential client, even though he didn't take that manuscript. Going to one writing conference last August was probably the biggest boost to my writing career - but it was also a big boost because I had already done the aforementioned ladder-climbing by publishing for low pay.

good job bro, thanx Anyway, that's kind of like saying that a game that reflects Jersey Shore isn't bad because it reflects a microcosm of American culture. Plenty of shit comes out of Japan that isn't all kawaii or whatever.

I could have said this instead.

My only hope is that they'll stop driving the series into the ground with their J-Pop crap, ridiculous storylines, awful voice actors, and anything that looks, sounds, or smells anything like Snow from XIII. I want my old FF back.

Oh, absolutely; maybe I wasn't clear. I will always switch the midi cable out for the Arius when I need very sensitive and realistic touch, if I am sequencing piano, for example. If it had a mod wheel, I might even just keep the Arius. But the features aren't meant for composition, you know? Feel is not as important to me when I'm doing one-hand composition that I intend to quantize and clean up later, which is why I'm seeking a controller. If I'm thinking about this the wrong way, I'd love some course correction.

It does, and that's why I'm considering it, though I like the 49 key version for space's sake, and it brings down the cost. I'm really irritated by the fact that I have to buy a separate pedal for it though. Like I was irritated when I opened my N64 and found that I had to buy an extra cable because my old-ass TV didn't have RCA.

I remember that job, and I remember thinking "Man, I'm not working for $2.00 an hour!" But I also think that people put too much stock in bottom-line price. I'm a budding author on the side, and my first sales to magazines were in the realm of $5-$20 per story - and that story took me a long time to write. I was writing for pennies on the hour, but now when I talk to agents and they ask me where I've been published, I can list over 15 magazines - some of which paid me over $100 per story, now that I built up my cred - and that lets them know you're a professional who is working hard to climb the ladder. So, I'd do a high-profile job for free if I knew it was going to get me more business, you know?

So, here's what I'm using right now: 1. Yamaha Arius Digital Keyboard: Not intended to be a controller, but it happens to have a MIDI output. Nice because the keys feel real (I am a piano player) and I can get really exact velocity out of it. It also has sustain pedals. No mod wheel, no other functions. 2. Moog little phatty: Using a little phatty as a MIDI controller is like using a Ferrari as a taxi. Also, it has no pedal, is awkward on my desk, and I prefer 4-5 octaves to 3. I've been browsing the older threads on MIDI controllers and found the Axiom 49 and the Emu Xboard 49 as recommendations, but those threads are a couple of years old. I basically need something simple with a mod wheel and a pedal...but I also am still knew at controlling and sequencing, so I'm not 100% sure what other features I'm missing out on that are really nice to have. I don't do a lot of techno/electronica/chiptune stuff so I'm mostly looking for something that is a composing aid.

After some somewhat heated discussions that have occurred in the Recruit and Collaborate thread, I thought this would be an appropriate place to launch a discussion and repository of information, anecdotes, and advice regarding music (in any form) as a money-making venture. When someone posts a job offer in the R&C thread, I think we look kind of bad as a community when idiots like me post uninformed opinions, or when people start to make personal attacks on each other. Music + Money + OCR = Arguments, it seems. The solution is to get informed, start a discussion, and learn from each other as well as provide more professional resources from elsewhere. I'd love to hear the success stories and failure stories from the pros we have here as well as the struggles of newbs like me. I also think this is a place where we can expect potential business partners to NOT look and see us muddling through, whereas if we make a big stink talking about stuff INSIDE their thread, they obviously know where our experience is. I am definitely not against people jumping in the R&C thread and calling out a bad deal, though. That's protecting each other. So let's hear it. And please keep it civil and respect each other. This thread is about being stronger as musicians through smart business choices, not tearing each other down for having different opinions.