SnappleMan

Well just keep in mind that all the time you're spending trying to learn to fake it could be better invested in learning to actually play.

like a baws

Elixir and D'Addario strings, 10-46. Dunlop Jazz III picks. My skin is allergic to nickel so I play Elixirs 99% of the time. I keep one of my guitars strung with D'Addarios for session work and other critical work where the string tone is really important (I just think they sound better). Ernie Ball strings are good but they go dead way too fast.

Sounds forced and blatant. The problem is that the more you try to humanize a piano performance, the worse it gets. Worthwhile pianists are not sloppy, they're articulate. Very subtle and musical changes in velocity and timing is what it takes, not trying to emulate someone being sloppy. Also, solo piano pieces are never strictly stuck to the time grid, there's a tempo but it's not static and it changes based on the feel set by the performer.

The key to a good piano steak is the Chopin'.... cut against the grain so it's tender and let it rest so the juices don't run out....? Cmon!

Kids these days, I swear. Look, just get a midi controller and slowly learn to play some music on it. It's like "Hey I can't cook good food, what kind of steaks would make me cook better?"

Not sure about you, but if I lose my Cubase dongle, they'll send me a new one. Just gotta keep your shit documented with photos and it's all good.

Aint nothing wrong with dongles. The only people who bitch about em are the ones who are pissed off about not being able to download cracked keygen versions.

Yeah but a quad core machine is very good for anything out today, 4gb ram is the standard and someone just starting out is not going to have the money or conviction to spend $500 on a new Windows 7 DAW, $300 on a Win7 geared mega sampler like Kontakt, $1000 worth of random guitar sims, drum libraries, softsynths. Someone just starting out is going to bootleg all that stuff via torrents, and if that's the case then just download Cubase 3 isntead of Cubase 6, Kontakt 2 isntead of Kontakt 5, BFD1 instead of BFD2 etc etc. Either that or they'll be smart and start small on lite versions that are always backwards compatible to XP and require only a fraction of the PC resources (and these days the "lite" versions are more capable than the professional high end versions of 5 years ago, so there's no excuse).

Experience is more important than the number of cores your processor has or which version of windows you're running. There's someone out there who can take a PC from 15 years ago and create music that'll be better than anything you or I can offer. Always remember that all the gear that the users on this site have mostly exists for the purpose of trying to live up to music created by using basic ASM machine code and limited monophonic tracking.

The most fun part of making music for me is the engineering side of it. Setting up the recordings, mixing, and mastering.

It's taking all of my being to not make a mom joke.

I was very much considering the RME hammerfall that sixto posted, but I ended up not going with it for a few reasons. While it has ridiculously clean sound and stupid low latecnies, the limited number of inputs killed it for me. I needed at least 5 audio inputs, so I stayed with my M-Audio Delta 1010LT. The latency is a bit higher (I run at 64 samples/2.4ms) but I get 8 audio ins as well as S/PDIF input and zero latency monitoring. The Hammerfall really comes in handy when you're going purely via digital inputs, you get 10, which is very nice.

I don't think the piece by piece deconstruction method works with FM synthesis that well. Not for me at least... It took me a while of just playing with it to finally understand how to get the sounds I want from it, and I don't even fully understand the math behind it. I just really made it a point to learn the mod matrix inside and out, and everything just started making all kinds of logical sense to me.

I keydrum everything these days. Takes too long to mouse things in and the results don't sound as good.

Also, while we're on the topic of silly tricks to help you learn and hear things, here are a few things I do: For high pitched fast stuff, pitch shift it down an octave. It'll slow it down to half speed making it easier to hear, and the high pitched notes get transposed down so they're in an easier to hear register. For low pitched stuff, pitch shift it up an octave (make sure you use time correction so your pitch shifting doesn't double the speed of the material). This works wonders for learning bass parts, it just brings them out so wonderfully. If the material is slow then you should not use time correction because it adds artifacts that muddy up the sound. Phase inverting: If the song you're trying to learn is really full and busy, re-import it into your daw as a split stereo file (meaning the file gets split into two mono files). Pan them left and right, and reverse the phase of one of them, it'll start to sound just a little odd. Now, start to pan them closer together, the more you pan them both together, the more and more of the stuff going on in the middle will vanish. If you pan them both dead center (or one completely over the other), all you will hear will be whatever frequencies are not shared between the stereo field. This usually makes kick drums, snare drums, basses and vocals disappear. EQ slotting: Insert an EQ band that's extremely narrow (as narrow of a Q as you can make it), grab it with your mouse (or get your hand on the GAIN and FREQUENCY pots if using hardware EQ) and drag it up to increase the gain to max and then move the frequency back and forth to sweep for the stuff you want to get rid of. Once you find where the instrument you want to mute is loudest, draw the gain down and some of that instrument will be turned down. If you're using EQ along with phase reversing you gotta be careful to apply the EQ completely equally to both channels (I'll make a preset of the EQ setting and apply it to both tracks, or send them both to an AUX bus and EQ the bus). If you don't do that, the phase trick will not work because the frequencies will not be equal between the left and right channels.

Tricks like slowing it down and looping it till you pick out every note will only get you so far, and they're time consuming and lame. The absolute BEST thing you can do for yourself in terms of music is constantly practice and improve your relative pitch. It's extremely simple to find the root note of an arpeggio, and if you have good relative pitch you just instinctively know the rest of the notes. But it's much easier to use a stupid little shortcut and learn nothing in the process.

Keep in mind that with active monitors you have a built in limiter that stops them from being driven hot enough to damage the cones. If someone is selling low-mid range speakers it most likely means they're upgrading, selling higher mid-high level speakers usually means that the speakers have some kind of issue, in most cases minor enough that it wont be mentioned in the auction and you wont notice it for a long while.

You can't go wrong with a pair of Sony MDR-7506. I mixed on those for about 6 years, and they were great. I traveled a lot with them and didn't take that great care of them so they're pretty damaged now, but they're still great. I also use AKG K240 headphones, they're great too, darker sounding with a better stereo image (for my tastes). But for you I'd recommend the 7506, you can't go wrong with those.

The most important thing I've learned about shopping for gear (non-instrument gear that is) is that you get what you pay for (in terms of overall quality and range of uses). $100 headphones are still cheap headphones when it comes to professional music. Regardless of how flat they are you'll never get a 100% correct mix on headphones, so what you want in a pair of headphones first and foremost is comfort. Then you want to worry about the stereo imaging. The frequency response for most pro headphones is going to be flat or close to flat, so that's not really too important. What's more important is the character that the drivers/construction/materials all give to the sound. One pair of headphones can sound brighter or duller than another pair, and they'd both be rated for the same bias in frequency response. Having said that, you want to make sure that you get the best overall headphones for your money, because while you do get what you pay for, you COULD be wasting your money if you get headphones intended for something other than what you're doing. Most $100 headphones are "studio standard" headphones, like Sony MDR-7506. That doesn't mean that they're THE BEST for mixing, it just means that they're quiet enough to be worn while tracking vocals, they're balanced enough to give a clear idea of the mix going to the singer, and they're cheap enough so that you can replace them easily in a professional environment. Because they're tailored to be a "go-to" all around headphone, you CAN mix relatively well on $100-200 models, but always remember that recording studios don't rely on headphones for mixing, they use speakers because speakers let you feel the bass and the air around your head, giving you a more accurate picture of the sound. You can get a $600 pair of headphones that would be much better for mixing, but not useable for tracking because they might be open back, or too expensive to just throw around a studio between people. By that same logic you can get a $50 pair that are meant mostly for tracking and isolation, so mixing on the will give you bad results. If you're looking for an all around good headphone for mixing, you're looking to spend at least $100-150. Anything less will only cost you more later on.

But there ARE rules in grammar.

What did I tell you guys, OA uses Guitar Rig 2, that's some outdated shit, and he's able to get some nice sounding tones out of it. It's all in how you use what you have.

64bit DAWS still don't run completely efficient on the new wave of intel CPUs, so run whatever you have in 32bit mode for better CPU optimization.

I just upgraded from a core 2 quad and I could run up to 15 amp sim instances without any high CPU usage. What DAW are you using?

Considering I make my living working with music, and part of that living involves session guitar work, I consider myself a professional guitarist. And if you know anything about guitar, bass, keyboards, kazoo, or any instrument at all, you'll realize that there are strong and equally correct opinions on either side of a debate. So for every "pro" and "amateur" who would disagree with me, I can bring forth two that back me up. Just because you're bitter about my opinion in another discussion on here doesn't mean you should come in and try to restart that debate in this thread. If you really want to discuss that topic, send me a PM.