SnappleMan

It mostly comes down to how you mix it, and the overall instrumentation in your song. If you have 10 distorted guitar tracks, they'll sound like shit together. If you have only ONE distorted guitar, mixed correctly, it'll sound huge and mean just by way of sonic contrast.

I think OCR has enough remixes. It's time they started accepting anime music videos.

The vocal performance is certainly part of the production. And in a pop song, it's the biggest and most important chunk of the production. In this song the vocals are the weakest link, and if they weren't such a focus then it wouldn't matter as much. I've worked with bands who have made "joke" songs, and they succeed where you have failed because while they sing ironically and slightly askew they still keep the basic elements of good singing intact (like pitch and phrasing). You didn't do THAT bad a job on the pitch and phrasing in your vocals but the combination of that being off, as well as the mixing being uneven (uneven compression throughout, EQ needs a little bit of tweaking, reverb needs tweaking etc etc) made it too far gone for me personally.

Don't start a thread asking for feedback if you're unprepared for what you're going to get.

I wouldn't go that far. He just need to practice singing a bit, he's got potential.

5/10 Drums - Nice punchy sounding kit, needs some top end though. Guitars - could to be brightened up a tiny bit. Vocals - singing is bad, tone is bad, pitch is off, vocal production overall is uneven. Keys - nicely layered under the vocals. Overall - mix could be a bit louder without any real loss of the dynamics, the mix is uneven at times in a bad way, things jump out randomly when they're not really supposed to. The backing is well done, but the vocals are just bad.

...what? I mean, you can steal a chord progression but that's not the same as ste

I think it's time we embraced friendship instead of conflict. I love you man.

Tensei you gotta stop being so angry, dude. You're a nice guy usually, I don't like seeing you this way.

Well, let's see. I personally know about 20 people who pirate Cubase. There are 4 audio torrent sites that I know of, each with about 10,000-20,000 members, half of these members are "power seeders" which means they download every single release and seed it till the end of time, so they all have bootleg Cubase. There are countless messageboards all over the internet dedicated to Cubase users, I'd wager that at least half those users are bootleggers. Go to non-audio torrent sites like Demonoid and whatever else, and Cubase will have 200-1000 seeds at any given time. So it's safe to assume that 1,000,000 people worldwide are pirating Cubase. If I can see all this bootlegging around me, being a single human being, I'm sure there are countless more like me who have people that they know, torrent sites that they know which I don't, etc etc etc. I'm sure in your blind German rage you'll dismiss my logical conclusion here, but you're just mad and I don't fault you for it. My point is that you have to think about both sides of the argument, not just whatever makes you feel better about yourself.

You can't reduce it. The only company that had a pirate-proof package was protools. You had to buy their hardware interface for the software to work. And when they realized that they were losing the market because of competitors who released software only packages, they started undoing their business model till protools 9 came out this year and is basically a poor mans logic/cubase. The rest of the companies have been going with hardware dongles and just plain old serial numbers. So unless you want to have to pay a $2000 interface with your $600 software package, there's no way to prevent piracy.

You don't mind it because you're losing $5-10 from a grand total of what, 30 people stealing your music? You're not a corporation that has to deal with 1,000,000+ people stealing $500 a piece. Tensei is Tensei's only employee, you don't have to worry about paying ten thousand people, insuring them, and being liable for them.

I think there is no countermeasure, because people will always want to steal things when they can get away with it. If they don't mind dealing with cracked software, then good for them. I prefer owning my stuff, and you can't own something that's stolen. And most importantly I want a SOLID rig. Cracked software is problematic, in some cases you have to not install certain parts of it, you have to hack your registry, you have to rely on emulated drivers to intercept dongle calls. My rig right now is rock solid, it can take anything I throw at it and not skip a beat. And I'm also a supporter of trying things before you buy them. If a company has a demo you can use, then that's perfect. If not, download a cracked version and install it on a secondary machine that you can test out, like I recently did with a couple of plugins. One I bought because I liked it, the others I deleted and haven't thought about since. I hate hype, and every new sample library or VST that comes out has nothing but hype and demos created by some of the industries most skilled producers. That tells me absolutely nothing about their product so I have to try it myself.

Mixing in a 16bit environment is completely different from using 16bit samples. You want to be working in a 24bit environment, that'll give you much greater headroom in terms of dynamic response from plugins and whatever processing you apply to your tracks, but you can use 16bit samples within your 24bit environment just fine. It's all a matter of where the downsampling happens. If your DAW is set to 24bit, all your plugins will be locked to 24bit, if the samples within these plugins are 16bit, then there's no real loss in quality because the processing onto them will be within a 24 bit environment (and the samples are 16 bit to begin with). If your samples were recorded in 24bit, and are being dithered down to 16bit by the samplers engine, then you will lose some of the quality (though you wont be able to hear it unless you're in very expensive and tuned mastering studio, and even then you wont be able to hear it in a mix). The big difference is what your DAW is set to; if it's set to 16bit then you're really going to be pushing too much through that bandwidth and things will get muddy. If you're in 24 bit then it doesn't really matter what the samples are set to because the engine that you're mixing them through has the headroom to reproduce them more clearly when mixed together. Also, you can't increase the quality of a sound. You can only degrade it and modify it. Once a sound is recorded, that recording becomes the master, and anything done to the master is going to be lesser in "quality" as you regard it. You can EQ and compress and all that to make it fit a mix properly, but you can't make it sound any cleaner or more accurate than it is. Changing the bit rate of a sound will only add more bandwidth to it so signal processing will have more room to breathe, it wont magically make the sound clearer. You can try noise removal, which will always degrade the sound a bit, but when you try to compensate for it via high end EQ your sound will only get more and more off.

So this thread has basically turned into a support group for the people desperately trying to justify themselves in pirating software. Nice.

I don't buy it. The MAIN reason to use monitors in a treated room is so your body can feel the music. You can't feel shit using headphones that are going through an IR processor to make you think you're in a room. The only thing that'll improve your mixes is experience.

Yeah, promotional stuff rocks! I get free stuff from time to time just for using certain software.

Part of the reason that most professional sound libraries and plugins cost so much is because they have to account for the massive hit they take from piracy. So a $400 multisampled Kazoo library, KFP (Kazoo From Purgatory, 78gb of the most sought after hand made one of a kind kazoos extensively sampled and running through the revolutionary SPIT engine which authentically emulates the sound and feel of real saliva flying through the kazoo and hitting your face, a microphone or one of many surfaces [further brought to life via extensively recorded impulse responses included in the package], all of which you can blend together to achieve a very unique performance), might only cost $150 if people stopped pirating this stuff.

The music I write for myself is just a hobby of mine. When I go into a studio to work on music that pays my bills, they have their own hardware+software setups that I use. I've invested well over $15,000 into my home studio and it's still primarily used for my hobby.

Because you're a decent human being who feels about about stealing something? People too often use the argument "I wasn't going to buy it anyway so technically the company isn't losing any money". But what if you weren't ever going to buy a luxury car, would stealing one make the company lose nothing? Every single box of software that a company prints costs them money, and if you download it, that's one less box that's being sold. And most of the music software out there is created by small companies or even individuals, who literally take a hit to their finances every time someone pirates their software. Big software packages like Cubase are backed by tons of money (Yamaha owns Steinberg, Roland owns Cakewalk), so pirating their software hurts the people working on it less, but in that case they have the money to implement tons of protection and anti piracy measures, that when cracked makes the software less stable, so in that case you really get a lot more out of buying it. You can justify yourself in whichever way you like, but don't try to tell yourself that you're doing no harm by bootlegging software.

I think that's the best way to go about it. When you're naturally ready to move up to more powerful stuff, you'll know it. Everything out there right now, free or not, is very capable.

You get software that's worth the money. All the free stuff out there is okay, but it's nowhere near as capable, powerful and well rounded as the stuff you pay for, I know, I've used them all. To me, Spectrasonics is a ripoff. I don't like their products at all, but there are countless people who swear by them, so at some level it does come down to preference. As for the noob argument: if you're too much of a noob to pay for music software, then you're definitely too much of a noob to get anything more from the pay software than you would from the free stuff. It's no excuse to be pirating. Get a job, stop buying useless shit for your phone and girlfriend who will break up with you in a few months anyway, and invest in your craft. "But Snappleman I have expenses like books, transportation, food, clothes, life in general, stfu and let me pirate this shit" Fuck off noob, anyone can save $500. What? You're a student? Nice! Then your software is 50% off! Anyone can save $250! What? You're a noob with no need for advanced integration features? Get the 1st step down version, $100 with your student discount! Anyone can save $100. What? You'd rather spend that $100 on useless shit? Fuck off noob, use the free shit, which is most likely still way above your skill level.

Dude Kaufman is a fucking maniac.

1-2 hours is a gross exaggeration. That's only the case when you've been procrastinating the entire day or made the mistake of taking on more work than you should.

I buy everything I use. I'll pirate some of the more overhyped VSTs like Omnisphere and Trilian to try them and see what they're about, but if I plan on using something in my music, I buy it. At the absolute LEAST you should never pirate your DAW. Updates and support can be very very important, and legitimately licensed software always works better for me. A simple registration process with a serial number it makes no difference, but with bootleg dongle emulation drivers you run into many issues. I mean, if your music isn't worth a few hundred dollars to you, then why the hell should I bother listening to it?