zircon

We had the entire panel (with audience) sing him "Happy Birthday". Was awesome - he did an incredible job with the remix medley video also, a real lifesaver. Happy birthday again, José!

Thanks for all the comments folks. Also, for your listening pleasure, an amusing render that happened when I played the audio file back at a higher pitch... http://www.soundtempest.net/Kawaii_Turtle_Supaa_Water~Surfu_Doujin_Arrange.mp3

The Core 2 Duos are quite powerful. ONE core of my 2.4 ghz Core 2 Duo could run about 3x as many plugins as my entire 3ghz Pentium 4. However, laptop processors are usually underpowered (in my experience) - plus your audio drivers tend to be worse, due to onboard sound, so unless you're using an external interface you should expect diminished performance. However, overall you should see an improvement over your old processor. Just remember to heavily optimize your operating system for music, removing as much extraneous software and as many effects and settings as possible.

I'll mirror.

Haha, zircon isn't entering the contest... I think I already covered that one. He engineered and co-produced the album - wouldn't make much sense. Nice one, cotmm... Yes, you are unfortunately correct that this would not be a valid entry. But I do hope you consider doing something else, too! EDIT: ROOOOFL. Sorry, this IS in fact Jill, but I'm on Andy's laptop (and forgot he was logged in). My MacBook Pro r in need of repairz...

It's also good to try different VBR settings, like ABR (average bit rate). 64-256 is a good range in terms of the VBR itself, but you should tweak the quality setting and the ABR to see if you can get it as close to 6mb as possible. Seconded about RazorLAME.

It's cool, Kizyr. This month was much tougher, for a number of reasons (I'm guessing) - 1. Better songs overall. 2. The songs in popular genres had more mass appeal and tighter hooks. The #1 track was really great. 3. BYI had a long intro, and ROMance was in Comedy, a genre that I'm sure some people looked down on. 4. More people voting overall (eg. more competition - less influence of individual votes.) It's also interesting to note that Daniel Palmer, one of the OurStage staff members, said that honest voting increases influence. In other words, voting just SAME on everything and BY FAR for certain songs means your votes don't count as much. He elaborated more, but basically said you need to thoughtfully listen to all songs, have preferences, and be honest. Perhaps it detects if you are obviously favoring a single song over and over? Anyway, I really appreciate all the support - not just for me, but for all OCR artists this month. Best of luck to everyone this month; the song limit is now three per artist, so it should be interesting to see where this goes.

Count Jill & I in for the Sunday BBQ.

Hahaha, YES. SSH is fantastic, especially Holy Orders. I also love Pendulum for working out.

Whoops, hadn't posted so far since the finals started. Thank you to everyone that has voted at ANY stage, for myself or others. Less than 4 hours to go now, and it's really anyone's game. If you can spare even 5 mins, you can make a difference on here.

Yeah, but in my opinion rockets are pretty easily dodged too. They travel slowly and lose damage over distance. Sure, they're brutal close-range weapons, but lots of classes have brutal close-range weapons so it's not TOO different. Demo is more effective at taking out structures and neither of their weapons lose damage over distance. Also, stickies move faster than rockets AFAIK.

I think the Demoman is pretty powerful, definitely can seem cheap. I don't think the Soldier is though - he's quite slow.

Are you guys aware that Bahamut has never done any kind of recording or music production? You shouldn't be recommending $500+ interfaces. Hell, I don't even use stuff like that. My vote is the Presonus Inspire 1394. http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Inspire1394/ Good drivers, solid build, nice preamps. As for a mic, again, no need to spend hundreds. http://www.audiomidi.com/MXL-V67G-Microphone-P7838.aspx This is a very good microphone that sounds more expensive than it actually is. Better than an SM58 IMO if you're just doing vocals. It's very crisp and clear.

It doesn't really work like that. The difference between stuff I do now and stuff I did years ago is more than plugin settings. I do everything differently now. There's really just not any comparison - my approach to arrangement, my writing ability, my musical ear, my software & hardware setup, my knowledge of synthesis.. you get the idea. Not to mention, I've switched setups/computers enough times that I don't have access to any old project files so it would be very difficult to do any kind of comparison, you know?

Sure, maybe I can go into the Nuclear Flash project and show a bit of that next. Also, I do sometimes use sidechaining + multiband compression... but it's not always needed. I think the only way I could really address everything the judges evaluate would be to make a remix from scratch, which I do kinda intend on doing at some point, but probably not in the immediate future.

Trust me, the actual work process is incredibly uninteresting. I mean, I could record 30 minutes of me looking through samples if that's what you want, because that's what I spend most of my day doing With me, 95-99% of my time working on music is spent figuring out what I want to write or do, and then the remainder is spent actually doing it. I can work incredibly quickly if I know what I'm going for, the problem is that I hardly ever do. So, it makes more sense for me to explain what I did after the fact... That being said if you want more depth, I can do that. I'm honestly worried about simply being boring though because I seriously could spend 20 minutes talking about any given aspect of the process, eg. synths, mixing, drum samples, and so forth. Any specific requests...? Original, remix?

New video! This is just a quickie (relatively speaking)... sorry for the weird audio quality. The audio wasn't anywhere near maxed out in my export but YouTube's sound compression is just... bad I guess. NOTE: Click the video and add &fmt=18 to the YouTube URL to play a better quality version!!!! You can also download the full resolution, highest quality version (with no sound problems) at: http://www.zirconstudios.com/video/zircon%20-%20DNB%20Track%20WIP.avi I used a different encoder this time so everyone should be able to play it NP.

With less than 6 hours to go, the standings are crazy but votes are definitely still needed. Skrypnyk is #10 (out of 10)!! Help him out and give an up-and-coming ReMixer a shot at $5k.

rotflmao you have NO idea how happy this makes me. The Backburner is (was) the most overpowered weapon in the entire game bar none. Needing three rockets and up to four stickies to kill a single pyro was absolutely retarded, but giving them autocrit from behind when they're already the most brutal close-range class was lunacy.

I don't know if I have a goal except to maybe lose some weight... but I've started taking up jogging. I'm pretty bad at it; I used to be more in shape in high school, when I did martial arts. At my "peak" my best time for a mile was 7:40, and I was able to actually jog for an entire mile without stopping. I can't do that anymore, though, so I'll probably have to work back up to it. I'm going out every morning and jogging until I get too tired (4, 5 minutes tops right now) then I walk for awhile, go back to jogging, etc. I'm usually out for 20-25 minutes.

What's your opinion on Timewarp, Kanthos? I've been curious about it...

AGH I didn't know you're an OCR forum member. I hate Pyros. I hate the Backburner. I hate you. I hate being on fire.

Bump - great job everyone, Skrypnyk, myself and Jill all made it into the semifinals! Unfortunately, Jewbei and OverCoat did not, but you can't win them all... weird voting going on though, I'll tell you that much.

Yeah, that was me. I've had them for years... awhile back I just put together all my samples (at the time), most of which were just found on the 'net in various places. I have WAY more samples now but those folders are unchanged. I suppose I can do some shorter vids just showing off different sounds and more technical information about the mix. I'll work on those tonight.

This is reminiscent of Siamey's style of trance, which is somewhat "harder" than most subs we get. I like the creative soundfield: it has a decent amount of standard trance sounds, but some other interesting tones on the side. Before I forget, the saw wave panned to the right was a little distracting. I would center that or at least pan it back and forth so it's not JUST slightly to one ear. Production is nice overall. The bass sound seemed a little on the muddy side, and some of the synths had too much high end which caused a sort of buzzy treble, but these issues are fairly minor. Overall volume and mastering is ggenerally solid.. but it sounds like there's some distortion overall, which I think could be rectified by using slightly less limiting/maximizing at the end (the kick/bass are what cause it.) I'd like to see that fixed before we post this. I'm liking the arrangement, which has a good balance between original writing & source material. The variations on the simple source arpeggio are well-executed. I was hoping to hear more of the chord progression from the original, but this is not a big issue. Good job, Jewbei! Just fix up the mastering. YES (conditional)