SnappleMan

I think in the end there are two equally valid arguments when it comes to sample quality, and the one thing everyone should agree on is that the performance and experience of the artist make the biggest difference.

Everything I do is done withing a day or two. Mainly because the more time I spend on something, the less and less "done" it gets. I get tired of my own music very quickly.

I agree with shreddage in theory (I mean shit it was basically my idea and I was the original guitarist meant to do it with Zircon, I just flaked out on him). What I don't agree with is the notion that rhythm guitar is just a simple and mostly percussively grounded style of playing the instrument. Most non-guitarists get it completely wrong, so regardless of how many multisampled libraries you throw at them, they'll continue to get it wrong. This ties back to my earlier point that it's not the samples that are the problem, but the programming and sequencing abilities of the user. There are so many MIDI CCs tailored to expression and realism that nobody here on OCR uses because they've been taught to just get better samples, which solves nothing. You can argue this all you want, but what I'm saying is completely correct. For the past 30 years professionals have been working with ridiculously small sample sets and have been making amazing sounding music with them, all it comes down to is the programming and the users experience with MIDI controls.

You should try reading my post next time. What I said was that when something is desperately trying to be real (like shreddage) it fails much worse than a very simple sample set that's just made to sound cool. But what do I know, I'm just one of the most prominent and respected guitar players/remixers in the scene.

GM guitar is actually 4 or 5 patches, and you can program great sounding fake guitar if you know which of those articulations to use at what time, then apply some EQ and distortion to it, and it'll sound good enough (though most people will just use DISTORTION GUITAR and not bother with the muted patch, or the harmonics patch). Something like shreddage will sound good half the time, but there's always that fakeness to it, and when you hear it, the entire illusion falls apart and the trick is exposed, making it sound more lame than a GM guitar which was never meant to fool you in the first place, it was just trying to sound cool. Listen to some SNES and arcade soundtracks which use sampled guitars, they always know which articulations are needed, and it always sounds awesome. You know it's just a sample, but it's well done and sounds great within the song.

That's what I thought, that I couldn't do drum parts via keyboard, but it didn't take long for me to get really good at that too. Now all my parts are live. You can record simply too; do one pass with just kick and snare (maybe toms too), go back for a second pass with the hihat, then come back a third time and add in your cymbals. If you really can't get the hang of keydrumming, then go into your quantize settings and see if it has an offset function. This gives you a "fuzzy" slightly misaligned quantize simulating a very slightly off-time performance which sounds much more natural than something that's completely snapped to the grid.

I can't stand it when people say that something is bad because it's not realistic. For the most part, samples are meant to be played via MIDI controller, that's your "humanization". As for that song up there, it's more a matter of the bad production than the samples themselves. I can take those same samples and make a great sounding song out of them, you just have to know what you're doing. There are so many cases of people being incorrectly told that their samples are bad, when it's actually their skill with any samples that's bad. So they get a huge sample set, fill up their hard drives with 500gb of professional samples, and then they think all is well, but they keep turning out awful music.

I prefer the normal one. Your humanizing sounds bad. Also, trying to fake wind instruments is a losing battle. Your best bet is to try and bury them or use them sparingly.

this song captures the :c emotion pretty accurately.

It's all relative. There are many progressions that generally convey certain types of emotions but for the most part it comes down to the listener to take what they will out of it. If you are a REALLY masterful songwriter, then you'll be able to force an emotional response, like here:

Save it for the Gaylord National, big guy.

Ordered the FUCK out of this.

The #1 proven fact is that you absolutely get what you pay for.

It's pretty ignorant and baseless to say that a guitar or an amp or even an amp sim isn't "good for metal". Guitar Rig 4 is perfectly fine for any genre of music, especially metal. It all comes down to the playing and mixing. Some of the most quintessential "metal" tones have been produced by Strats (non-metal guitars, as the inexperienced call them) running through relatively low gain amps.

All my guitars are fake.

Hi everyone! Thanks for the feedback. Most if not all the credit should go to Lastiar for this one. It was all his arrangement, and he even wrote all of my parts, I just took an hour out to record them and that's it. This song was actually completed a few years ago, and for some reason Lastair sat on it till now, so I'm glad it's finally up and done. Good work!

Because in the morning your ears are refreshed and working normally. By the time the night rolls around you've probably been tiring your ears out the whole day by listening to music and everything by then sounds the same.

There's no right or wrong way to do any of this stuff. If people didn't think outside the box and try things that shouldn't have worked we'd still be listening to music in mono with antennas sticking out of our assholes.

Most N64 games use proprietary sequences, which I'm guessing are extremely closely related to GM. Some games stream their music as well. As for the samples used, they vary from game engine to game engine. Most are sampled from popular synths used at the time, lots of Roland and Yamaha samples, as well as samples recorded specifically for the games themselves. But from what I understand you can't expect to rip samples from N64 roms like you can from SPC files because each game has it's own proprietary engine, so creating an SPC type format will take a lot of work when you consider that most of the games do not use a standard sound driver.

The Good: Great source material! The Bad: MIDI rip. Drum samples do not sound good, and are programmed poorly. Synths sound dull. Arrangement is lacking. Mixing is counter-intuitive. Everything gets buried by everything else. Overcompressed. Source isn't correctly represented. Guitar samples are not good.

What the fuck is a Hedgog?

You know I'm just an overly particular asshole. Great work either way.

I don't care for the sound of the samples. I understand that a loop library needs to be generic sounding to fit any mix but with acoustic guitar you really do lose a lot of character if you don't mic and record it with respect to the song. Though I guess for pop applications it wouldn't matter.

Step 1: Get an IM from IBBIAZ "Dude I'm so drunk right now..." Step 2: Laugh at IBBIAZ. Step 3: Listen to some dubstep. Step 4: Taco Bell. Step 5: Write awesome music. Step 6: Repeat step 4.