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XPRTNovice

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Posts posted by XPRTNovice

    Not The Taxi You Whistled For

    in Post Your Game ReMixes!

    Posted

    Thanks for the praise guys! I haven't quite understood how to get mic levels, which almost always break up, to get to the levels that are pleasant to hear. The whistling needs to come out. I'm glad you all liked it so much - I was being a little conservative and I think I'm going to spice it up a bit in later versions.

    Looking forward to some expertise thrown my way on how to make this something that the judges will slap their thighs to...

    Using FL and Cubase, drum sequencing, etc.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    EDIT: Ah! Just had a thought! the drum map sometimes doesn't account for the notes lengths, i.e. treats every midi note as a staccato burst (if that makes sense) some of kontact's samples may need their notes to be held for a little bit in order to hear them, i.e. the drum map is playing the notes so sharply/briefly/quickly that it's not giving the samples a chance to play fully, perhaps?

    Nah, I have it set so that even a staccato hit of a sample will force it to play the full thing. Oh well. Piano roll it is.

    And no, Kanthos, I've messed with the channels until the cows come home with no results.

    Using FL and Cubase, drum sequencing, etc.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Personally I love doing my drum tracks in Cubase, but at the end of the daye it's all about personal preference.

    There's no wrong way to create music as long as it works for you, I use Cubase, Ableton and Logic because I find I prefer different features in each of them. Ultimately if you get the results you want it doesn't matter how you went about doing it.

    So I'm playing with the Kontakt5 and some samples I have in Cubase using the drum map. but it seems like whenever the drum map is ON, I don't get anything going through the contact even if the drum map is littered with hits. Then, as soon as I turn off the drum map and switch it back to piano roll, it goes through and I hear all the sounds loaded up in the Kontakt. What's up with that? I'm not changing anything except the way I view the MIDI track..

    I feel like I'm very close to getting what I want out of this. Thanks for your help so far, guys.

    Using FL and Cubase, drum sequencing, etc.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    You are using Cubase SX and not one of the newer versions correct? Here are two things in Cubase that could massively improve your workflow:

    Drum Tracks:

    http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct03/articles/cubasenotes.htm

    .

    Okay, wow, so this has opened up a whole new world of Cubase for me that I never knew existed. It's not quite as user friendly as FL, but it does essentially the same thing.

    I think it'll take some messing around before I can make this do what I want. The other suggestion of opening up the FL VSTi was great too - now I want to be able to integrate the two so that I have all my drums on one midi track that maps to the FLstudio VSTi. Otherwise I am going to have to have a separate midi track for every layer of my drums, which is not what I am going for...

    Edit: Let me clarify.

    Is there a VST that I can open, to which I can point that single drum track, that will allow me to load multiple samples on multiple channels? So, instead of me having to have 5 VST instruments open to load 5 samples, I can load 1 VST instrument to load 5 samples? I tried doing this with FL studio, but then it seemed to be mapping the LOOP and not the samples.

    Using FL and Cubase, drum sequencing, etc.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    So, I'm just learning to use FLstudio to create drum tracks and loops because I like the interface, but I normally use Cubase SX for my audio recording, midi sequencing, and all that stuff.

    Is this a bad method? Should I just stick to one program, learn it really well, and then use that for every part of the remixing process? All of the tutorials I seem to see for people who do remixing stuff seem to exclusively use FL.

    If it's not a bad method, do any of you other guys do it? I'm finding it frustrating having to go back and forth between FLstudio and Cubase trying to see if the beat I've come up with matches the tracks I've already laid down to get the right sound.

    Need a sample, synth, or effect? LOOK HERE!

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Hey guys, I just found a great 100% FREE resource, particularly for drum samples, that I haven't seen anywhere else. It's at www.sampleswap.org. Here's how it works.

    1. Create a free account. Make sure to use a valid email address.

    2. Log back into your account.

    3. Go through the samples and click them to hear demos. You can then pick the ones you like and add them to your basket. Some of them are AIF format and some are wave.

    4. You can have up to 20MB of samples in your basket at any given time.

    5. When you're done, click download. It will email a download link to you, and within 5-10 minutes you'll be able to grab them all tied up nicely in a zip file that's really easy to add to your sample library.

    I went crazy looking for good free drum samples for a long time before I found this site. There are also instrument samples, but I haven't tested them for quality yet since I was just looking for drums. I'll probably investigate them soon and let you know what I found.

    I hope you guys find this useful.

    City Of Funk (City of Ancients, Chocobo Theme)

    in Post Your Game ReMixes!

    Posted

    Okay, so I've been spending some time trying to expand my knowledge and I'm not sure it's working.

    I tried to take your advice and start creating my own drum tracks. Right now I've been scouring the internet looking for drum samples. I have Kontakt, but I don't have the cash to be spending on .NKI files that are $100 for good quality samples. I know there have to be free samples out there that aren't crap. I've been browsing the forums, but there are over 35 pages of links and people talking about links...many of them are broken or 3 years old.

    Here's what I'm gathering - please let me know if I'm stupid. I can use my synth as the "in" MIDI, then force the "out" midi to be something like Kontakt. In the Kontakt, I can then load a .nki file that is mapped to certain samples. But I can also use a lot of other programs, like SFZ, to map to samples as well, right? So, in essence, I can sample my own saxophone by recording a single note, then load it as a sample into SFZ and play my keyboard like a sax.

    The advantage of the internet, then, is the ability to get samples of instruments I don't own or play. But that's so incredibly time consuming if you don't know where to go. I've been searching for 3 hours now for a drum kit that sounds the same quality as the loop I previously had in this track and I've come up with nothing.

    So that's where I am now on this project. If anyone has any words of wisdom, that might prevent me from just stopping and going back to playing Chopin. :P

    Getting Started...I mean REALLY getting started

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Hey guys,

    That's some really solid basic advice, yes. Thanks, it helps clear up some of the fuzzy edges of my knowledge. Maybe I should elaborate a bit on what I've got, since both of you asked questions.

    DAW:

    Windows XP w/4GB RAM and 1TB external HDD

    Sennheiser HD280 headphones

    Cubase SX

    Fruityloops Studio (both of these programs severely outperform my knowledge of how to use them)

    TC electronic Konnekt 8 (2x mic/.25" jacks, additional aux jacks in the back) Not my favorite, and i kind of wanted to upgrade to a firebox, but we'll see

    A pair of low-end MXL condenser microphones, an SM-58, and an SM-57

    Instruments:

    Various acoustic/electric stringed instruments (guitar, oud, mandolin)

    Piano, alto sax, clarinet

    Moog LittlePhatty tribute synth

    The Phatty, from what I can tell, doesn't have USB out. All it has is the regular .25" jack and midi, both of which I have plugged into my konnekt. So far I've done some samples that combine putting the synth directly into the audio track, and also using soundfonts/midi combinations using the phatty as the input device.

    What I think I am having the most trouble wrapping my head around is the concept of VSTs, and how to combine them with "patches" or "samples" or whatever it is they're called to create realistic sound that is inputted via MIDI. As it stands right now, I think maybe I'm going the wrong direction by using soundfonts, since that doesn't seem to get me an audio track - it outputs as a MIDI. Most of my knowledge has come through experimentation, so I can safely assume that a lot of it is based on misconceptions.

    Anyway, thanks guys. If, based on what I've written here, you get a bit of a better idea of where I am the dumbest, some enlightenment would be much appreciated.

    City Of Funk (City of Ancients, Chocobo Theme)

    in Post Your Game ReMixes!

    Posted

    Thanks for the drumming tip, but I was talking more about the mechanics of putting a drum patch into Cubase and making it sound real. I know how to construct a beat (I actually can drum a bit myself) but I'm already getting kind of tired of scouring the net for hours on end trying to find patches. And the plugins I'm using are really cumbersome...I have to open a new VST channel every time I want to change an instrument, and all that. I guess it will just take some time to figure out how to do all of this.

    I'd be happy to roll in with some sax on any track you want, anytime.

    City Of Funk (City of Ancients, Chocobo Theme)

    in Post Your Game ReMixes!

    Posted

    Thanks guys. That's great feedback and encouragement.

    Oh - organ breaks are coming. The balance is an issue, but an organ break is imminent.

    The beat is a sample from a random website that I looped. I'm not even really sure how to begin forming my own beats. Yes, I'm that new.

    Most of the tracks are live, via either my synth or MIDI. The drums are the only thing sampled. The sax - my first love - is live.

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