digitalxero

I have a couple other recommendations I just thought of that might help: 1) If you haven't, you might consider resetting your FL Studio settings: http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_reset.htm 2) You might also see if anything shows up on the FL forums. I found this thread which seems relevant.

You don't really need midi in/out unless you're using a midi keyboard that requires it. Most midi keyboards now (I believe including the two you mentioned in your post) connect via USB, and so don't need the midi ports. VSTi instruments are typically separate from the DAW (although many DAWs will include a few of them), and are made by different developers. There are a number of paid ones, but there are also plenty of free ones you can find online, eg. TAL Noisemaker. Don't worry too much about it yet. I'm still pretty new to this too, and I can say there's definitely a lot of overwhelming information out there. Just start out with the basics, and as you learn more/get better at making music, you'll start to recognize what kinds of things you do/don't need

You're probably want at least want a pair of studio headphones if you don't already have any -- standard headphones or speakers aren't really that great for mixing. I'd recommend either the Sony mdr-v6 or mdr-7506 (I use the mdr-v6) as they sound great and are very cost-effective. Also, depending on what you're doing you might not actually need any extra cables for now. Both the midi controller and audio interface should come with usb cables to plug into your computer, so unless you're going for a microphone or pair of monitors (which would likely put you over your budget), you probably won't need any. It's a great interface, but the driver (for Windows at least) is buggy as all hell. I've blue-screened my computer with it at least 3 (or 4?) times now, and I wasn't even trying that hard! Also, you pretty much need to use asio4all with it. The standard driver I think gives you one control for latency and nothing else, so it's not really that amazingly useful.

Having had very little education on signals/signal processing, I found the video quite interesting (and informative!)

Have you tried updating or reinstalling your video driver? FL Studio might be working fine, but if your video driver is passing it some incorrect settings (eg. resolution) then maybe that might be causing it to look weird. Alternatively, maybe try reinstalling FL Studio, or installing 11 and see if that fixes it?

I've can always see the difference between 30 and 60 fps, but it's never really bothered me much. Sure, I'll notice it at first but once I start getting into the game and getting more comfortable/better at playing it, the difference between 30 and 60 becomes pretty insignificant IMO. If the game plays at a relatively consistent framerate and it doesn't stutter too hard I don't really have that much of a problem with it.

I like your explanation, but when I said FM was black magic I wasn't entirely referring to just the concepts behind it. What I meant was some of the insane sounds you can produce with it, eg. the trumpet preset in Sytrus. These sounds are awesome, and I really want to learn more about how they work. However, I also want to make sure I have a good handle on how subtractive synths work before I start trying to take on more complex ones After having seen a little more of it I totally agree -- wavetable is pretty much standard waveform++ (although that doesn't stop you from being able to do really cool things with it).

If you're going the college route then online might be your best bet. The two decent ones I've found are Berklee and Point Blank (Berklee even has an full online degree), although they are both fairly costly. There are some other alternatives as well, although I haven't looked much into them. There are also some sites that will offer tutorials or smaller classes that you could use, eg. lynda or askvideo. Coursera also has some offerings (albeit non-degree and generally pretty small in scope) that might be helpful as well. Personally I'm thinking of trying one of the Berklee certificates and seeing how that goes.

I have tried making some of my own synthesizer sounds, to varying degrees of success. I guess I'll need to keep at it though until I can really start to understand it. I've read that when first starting out a subtractive synth is the simplest way to go, and after you're comfortable with that then you can move on to other forms like FM or wavetable (I've looked at some FM, and while it looks cool I will say it just looks like black magic to me right now). Something else I've heard, particularly for trying to learn a specific synth, is to listen to some of the presets and try to reproduce them without looking at the parameter settings. It does feel a bit daunting though when starting out. I think I have to agree that real instruments do seem less complicated Never actually thought about this (contextually, at least). I did know that different types of instruments will allow for different articulations, but I hadn't thought of picking an instrument specifically for its dynamics and articulation. I'd like to attempt some orchestral stuff at some point, so that'll definitely be useful to know.

How do you typically pick out your instrumentation for a piece? I'm looking for any advice on this, since I've been struggling a bit trying to figure out what goes well together. When I go through the samples/synth sounds individually they all sound fine on their own, but when I start trying to put them together it'll not always sound that great, and I'm not sure what I can do to adjust it the way I want. I understand that generally speaking you'll want different parts like a lead, rhythm, harmonic, and background(?), and that different genres/styles will usually call for different types of instruments, but beyond that I'm not really sure what to consider. I feel like I've been slowly improving with each attempt, but I'm not at a point where I'm content with the result yet. I realize this is pretty subjective and probably a somewhat vague question, but I figure that any advice is better than nothing

This is pretty amazing! I couldn't stop listening to it

Found this with some quick googling: http://dictionary.onmusic.org/appendix/topics/major-scales If you want to download them, it's fairly straightforward since the audio is embedded directly in the page -- just look through the page source for the mp3 links. Here is one they had for the c major scale: http://d4u3lqifjlxra.cloudfront.net/uploads/appendix/asset/filename/321/Cmajorscale.mp3 Also found a site for playing intervals: http://trainer.thetamusic.com/en/content/melodic-intervals. The samples on this one aren't as easy to download though so if you need to do that then you might be better off looking for a different site or recording your own intervals

I love music for the emotion it delivers, and how it makes me feel while listening to it. To that end, the biggest drivers for me have been chord progression and interesting melody. I also like musical flow -- that is, having continuity in a section or an appropriate transition. Eg. it's hard for me to enjoy stuff like dubstep since the grinding feels like it's just interrupting the rest of the song in my opinion. Of course, technical or more complex stuff can be interesting too, but really my bottom line is what feeling the song evokes in me, and whether I like that feeling or not. I'm still learning about composition and arrangement so I haven't really tried to release anything yet, but that philosophy is certainly one of the primary guides I like to use. I guess that's a bit vague, but then again composition is pretty subjective

Nice! I liked the way you structured the Castlevania video -- full mix to individual parts to build-up. Might go through these later to get a better feel for how the tracks mix together

"Music Recommendation System, what should I play now?" "...Anything. Anything at all." BTW, since all that's needed are the filenames, you really only need the dir or ls commands, like so: dir /S /B > ocrlist.txt (Windows) ls -R > ocrlist.txt (Linux/Mac) Easiest way to set it up: put a makelist.bat (Windows) or makelist.sh (Linux/Mac) in your remix directory, save the command to it, then double-click to run. It's safe, quick, and effective Edit: slightly more effective (the above will grab all files, not just the songs) dir /S /B *.mp3 > ocrlist.txt ls -R *.mp3 > ocrlist.txt