zircon

Sure thing Jose - you coming to the actual meetup also?

Wes can lead everyone, it's easy enough.. just need to get to Grand Central, really. Then it's one train ride of about 50 mins and you're all set.

I heard this live as an instrumental during MAGfest '05. While it was very cool, the vocal version is excellent and fills things out.

Yeah, still have some room. My parents redid the basement so it's warmer and a bit more inviting. Plus I'm livin' big with a new Wii and Xbox 360.

Finished, available on my MySpace www.myspace.com/zirconst

What radio station was it?

That he does.

I just ordered a 360 Pro from Amazon, w/ Forza & Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I'm excited. Using various internet tricks I managed to pay a total of $25 for it. I also ordered Mass Effect, which should arrive by January. CAN'T WAIT!

Yes, simply playing intervals and chords over and over is the best way to learn, IMO. I took three terms of ear training (1 yr) at school and my skills increased dramatically.

As far as I know, the Core 2 Duos are fairly efficient. To be safe, I use a 500W power supply, but I honestly don't know what the minimum is - and it probably also depends on what other devices you're using.

Hmm, $500 is pretty tough. You definitely want at least an e6600 (2.4ghz dual core, no more than $250) and 2GB of RAM ($100 at most) - a decent mobo that can run that might be $100-130. Asus P5N-E is what I use, works great.

Ideally, you want to be on Windows XP Pro, NOT Vista. An intel e6850 processor (dual core, 3ghz) will be absolutely killer - for the same price, you might also consider a q6600 (quad core, 2.4ghz) but not all applications right now are really optimized for quad core. Either way, a MOBO that can support either of these processors can be upgraded later - but compared to your Pentium 4, either will run about 8x faster (eg. 8x as many plugins can be used.) You should have at LEAST 500gb of storage. I personally recommend one or more 7200RPM storage drives for samples and audio recordings, and then a 10k RPM 30-80gb drive for Windows and your applications. As for RAM, go for 3GB. Any one application won't be able to take advantage of more than 2, but with some system tweaks, all 3 can be used (eg. 2 for your sequencer, 1 for Windows.) 4 is not useful right now unless you're on a 64bit OS, which I don't recommend just yet. You'll want an interface with good drivers and low latency. I use a Presonus Firebox, which is about $300 new. Connects through Firewire, has ROCK-solid drivers, hasn't failed me yet. $99 or so will get you an EMU 0404 which is a nice lower-cost solution. All this will not cost more than $1500.. in fact it might not even cost more than $1000. So if you want to go all-out, I would consider Powercore or UAD products, which allow you to connect cards/devices through PCI or USB/Firewire that add extra processing power to your machine. For example, a UAD-1 card can run a number of special plugins (coded just for the UAD-1) without even touching your normal processor. They sound great, introduce only minimal latency, and work just like normal plugins.

Beardfest? Done.

"Real vampires"??? Hollywood portrayals are "inaccurate"? Vampires don't exist to begin with, so how the hell can you do a study on them? Random comic books and B-movies? Who decides what the 'accurate' portrayal is?

Well, I'm a moderator, so yes, I do get the final say. The reason I 'singled you out' is because no one else responded to me to argue about what I posted. My second post in this thread was addressed to "guys" - eg. everyone who had posted recommending a real guitarist rather than using samples. Had anyone else continued to quibble about it I would have given them the same warning which you've earned. So once again, you are strongly encouraged to stop, unless you have something constructive to add. If you want to make a thread about "Live vs. Sampled Guitar" in this forum you are more than welcome to! So, I'm not going to address the majority of your points here because it would crap up THIS thread even further. If you really want to talk to me personally about it, I'm on irc.enterthegame.com #ocrwip, where - and this may come as a shock - I hang out with guitarists like Sixto, Fishy, Tensei San, and Geoffrey Taucer, three of whom I've collaborated with (repeatedly) and all of whom are awesome. I will address these though I am an expert, actually, as I'm a professional composer and sound designer that gets enough freelance work to have the equivalent of a full-time salary, even though I'm still working on a degree full-time. I've written and composed music (primarily using samples) that has won numerous awards, been placed in movies, broadcast on TV, and licensed all over the world. In fact, a remix I did using all samples (including sampled guitar) is going to be included in an upcoming Street Fighter game. Tell that to Hans Zimmer.

http://www.prominy-ss.com/LPC/LPC_super_p_multi.mov So this sounds "quite terrible"?? Or these? http://www.soundtempest.net/nomuraclip.mp3 http://www.soundtempest.net/agclip2.mp3 ?? Give me a break. There are GREAT guitar samples out there. It seems like you're taking this fact really personally, but get used to the fact that there's a time and a place to find real musicians for projects, and it's not always someone needs (or wants) all the time. Even in the world of high-end film and game composition, sampled instruments are almost always used, even when resources allow for live players. Sometimes it's just preferable to have exact control over your sound, and not have to wait awhile every time you want to revise a note. You can instantly see what would happen if you were to tranpose a riff up a line, or change something from major to minor. Regardless of what YOU PERSONALLY believe, if this guy was asking for guitar samples and tips to get his own samples/synths to sound better, answer the question. If you don't have an answer, don't post. It's like if someone asked about how to do something in Reason, and rather than answer that, someone posted "Pro Tools can do that better, just get Pro Tools!!!" That's ignorant, and it's trolling. Now, back on topic please?

Yes, but if someone's working on a remix at 3AM and you're not up? Or they want to change a note in their recording while you're on vacation? Or you're not fast enough for a passage that they want to play? Or their connection is too slow to receive large WAV files? Or you don't have the webspace to *upload* large WAV files because their direct connection (or yours) isn't working properly? I really could go on and on.

Guys, in all seriousness, I don't think it's really sensible to recommend "real guitar" to someone that wants the best SAMPLED or synth solution. Guitar isn't impossible to recreate with samples, as I (and other people) have shown, repeatedly. It's not always convenient to find a guitarist, and playing ability is highly variable.

Celeron is an old and outdated processor, I would simply go for a new computer with a dual core and new RAM. Clock speed isn't necessarily everything. MOBO = motherboard, the thing that actually mounts the 'brains' of the computer, eg. the processor, RAM, graphics card, and sound card (if it's internal.)

Nah, I use more electronic elements than that. There's no name for this genre really. It's just a hybrid of orchestra, rock, and electronic sounds, which is standard for any action film trailer.

Yeah, that sounds better now. As for my other thoughts on it; the tempo seems a little on the slow side for my taste, and I think the kick could probably be a little tighter (hard to describe - this current one is a bit 'boxy') but it's going in the right direction. Would love to hear some massively phased keys/synths with lots of vibrato

Hmm, I don't really hear any sidechaining going on here. Here's a very simplistic example of what you might aim for in terms of the extremity of the pump effect; www.soundtempest.net/sidechain.mp3 Do you use FL? If so, then you can use the trick GeckoYamori told me about. Assign a peak controller to your kick first, and then unmute it so that the signal can still be heard. Then apply some sort of volume/gain plugin in the FX chain of the stuff you want sidechained (eg. Fruity Balance). Then right click on the Gain/Volume knob/slider of THAT plugin and link it to the peak of the Peak Controller ("Link to Controller") - however for the formula, select INVERT. You may also want to enable some smoothing (knob at the bottom.) End result is that each time the kick hits, that will create a sharp drop in the volume of the sidechained parts. You can use the peak controller settings to edit this effect further.

I used to work at 40-45ms; I switched to 10ms when I got my new dual core DAW, I love it. The issue with working at lower latencies is that you can't do as much fun stuff with plugins. A new dual core computer (eg. an e6750 processor) with 2GB of new RAM should do you fine. Moved to ReMixing.

For learning piano, I would NOT go synth action. He said ES or Pro in his first post.

I had an M-Audio Keystation 88 Pro. It is definitely nice for the price - 88 key weighted controllers are hard to find for $400 - but the feel is not quite realistic. The keys are a little too heavy IMO, which inhibits fast playing, especially on the same note. This will probably not be an issue if you are just learning piano to begin with. Eventually I would recommend getting a digital piano in the $1000 range, which would have a far more realistic feel, for practice purposes. However, until then, this is a solid choice. Just remember, it doesn't have speakers or onboard sound, so you MUST have it linked to a program on your computer to generate any sound!