SnappleMan

I kinda wanted to see this thing make it to 10 years before release.

Also when you think about realism you have to take into account many factors. These days we have samples that are just as "real" as a live performance because they are snippets of live performances. Modern complex legato scripts use performance samples instead of traditional one shot samples, that means that when you play a legato slur from C to E the script plays a sample that's a legato phrase going from C to E that's (badly in most cases) crossfaded and tempo matched to fit the context of the surrounding notes and meter. You have something like Prominy V-Metal which is a completely sampled guitar and can sound close to 90% convincing, but when you hear most people use it, it sounds like fake ass. The fidelity and playability of a sample is just one part of it. Now we have tons of realistic samples that are relatively easy to acquire for anyone (us professionals who can write this stuff off on our taxes and the younger kids who torrent) but the music isn't really getting that much more realistic. Professionals who used gigasamples in 2004 still made more realistic sounding music than amateurs of today with a complete VSL library. It's all down to knowing how to correctly write parts for instruments and performing/recording as much as you can on your own. If you have one live recording among 30 tracks of samples, it'll make your entire performance jump out and sound great. Also keep in mind that there are millions of musicians vs maybe a couple dozen libraries for each instrument. That means that as soon as someone recognizes a sample you're using your entire game falls apart. Think about layering different samples together and filling in the gaps where each library falls short. Match your reverbs as best you can, build competent ensembles that mask each others shortcomings and most importantly learn at least one melodic "lead" instrument (whether it's guitar, violin/viola, trumpet, flute, clarinet etc) so you can put a layer of something live on top to tie things together. Piano doesn't count as it's percussive but everything I'm saying really starts applying to you after you learn the piano to a moderate degree. tl;dr the best quality samples will never make up for poor performance, poor composition, poor musicianship, poor arrangement, poor voice leading, poor harmony, etc. Become a performing musician first (it's not hard at all to spend 3-6 hours a day practicing piano for a year, trust me you'll be awesome at the end of that year) and then you will have a better feel for music as a whole and will be able to use samples more properly.

It's very simple; you will never fool the people you're trying to fool. Most people who hear music don't question the realism of your samples or anything silly like that, they just listen for things they like. The people who you want to fool are the ones who will always notice. Just make things sound good without trying to make them sound "real" and you'll end up making much better music.

Hell yeah

I feel like someone who calls themselves YoungProdigy should not need such assistance.

Oh daaamn, looks to be true. That's just silly. I mean, the FL studio alternative (at least when I was using FLstudio) was to click twice to remove a note, which is just as dumb. This topic has turned to "I think this is better." -"No way man, I think this is better!" -"Whattttt? You're all crazy, I think Saw Studio is the best!"

The S1 piano roll is solid. Very intelligently designed all around. The draw curve selection process can get convoluted but I don't see any logical way around that. I dislike how they have the tab at the end of the note that you click for deletion. It's a cool idea but I don't think it's as effective when you're trying to run around quickly entering notes and resizing whatever needs resizing. Also the batch MIDI editing isn't that strong. In Cubase I have macros that quantize entire sections with different offset values (like if I want my kick drum to be looser than my hihat) with a single command. I can very easily change relatively velocities of the entire sequence with a single easy to reach function, I can transpose the entire sequence to the key of the song or whatever information is in my chord track, set up complex legato rules that automatically create legato transitions of my entire sequence with one click (very useful for orchestral programming). Something else that's really cool is that you can set a MIDI/instrument track to follow the chord track (cubase has a chord track that lets you enter the entire chord progression of your song) and so whatever you play will be locked to the chords that are set (or the relative scales, there are tons of input transforming options). So what you can do is enable QWERTY input (cubase lets you use your typing keyboard to record MIDI input) and just play any random keys and it'll be in key to the music. All this stuff coupled with the completely programmable MIDI function editor makes it really tough for S1 to compete with Cubase right now. But who knows, S1 4 might bring it closer. And to this day there is no piano roll that even comes close to the Cubase Drum Editor. S1 and Reaper try but they fall short in the most simple and frustrating ways...

Cubase's velocity tools are the bestttttttt <3

I thought that's what OCR was about...?

This right here is a ton of completely valid reasoning. - Dongles. I love dongles until I have to move to a mobile rig, or work on two machines simultaneously (which I do often), and I hate dongles until I have to register other pieces of software and run out of auths or am having connection problems etc etc. Reaper fixes the licensing and upgrade model, every other DAW has it wrong. - Multi screen has always worked great with Cubase for users who learned early to use the "always on top" option. For those who never learned that trick it's a huge hassle. Even when you do set things up perfectly some minor things are still problematic (none of which have ever affected me so I lucked out). In Cubase 8 they "tried" to fix those problems (which the OSX versions never had), but they ended up with a very badly designed windows UI that's a huge failure in my eyes. - It is definitely bloated, but only to those of us who have been at this game for a long while. I've been working with DAWs/sequencers since about 1996, almost 20 years now. I have accumulated tons of sample libraries and plugins, I do not need most of what's included in Cubase, but I assume that many users do. - Disappointing point releases for sure. For me this is the single biggest flaw with Cubase. It uses the most outdated, insulting upgrade model. I've already spent over $1000 in Cuabse updates over the years. I see absolutely no way they will be able to compete with the new wave of rapidly rising DAWs unless they fix this. This is the single reason that I am looking at learning every other DAW there is, so when Cubase 7.5 is no longer viable for me I'll have an easier time migrating. (Since I don't see Steinberg ever getting with the times in terms of upgrades). - Usability. I can do incredible things with Cubase in mere hours. Usability is the utmost for me, and the look/workflow of Cubase is second to none. Or at least that would have been my answer till Cubase 8. This latest release is extremely disjointed and does not at all feel like an upgrade to the extremely tight, stable, fast and powerful superdaw that is Cubase 7.5. So yeah, S1 is getting better, Reaper is getting better. I am going to keep using these other DAWs till Cubase 7.5 gets way left behind, or the more unlikely scenario of Steinberg getting their shit together and actually upgrading Cubase instead of breaking it to shoehorn new "features" into a DAW that needs to be rebuilt to 2015 standards. Much like Pro Tools, which Avid had to rebuild with a new audio engine (they've finally caught up with 2008!), I think the really great audio/MIDI/VST engines of Cubase are going to be obsolete in a few years, and then we will see that S1 and Reaper have overtaken it. S1 has a ton fo Cubase influence in the design, so it's the logical choice for me to upgrade to (if that ever is the case), but even then the more open ended nature of Reaper is most appealing. So I'm desperately hoping that Steinberg takes a chance and rebuilds Cubase from the ground up. They could and should keep it the same as it is, just clean up the fucking code. That being said, among all my DAWs that I use regularly (Cubase, Pro Tools, Reaper, S1, Logic) Cubase is by far the most stable and most capable. When Reaper hit version 4 it overtook Cubase in terms of speed, though (at least on my system).

I've been using S1 for a while as a backup DAW. For the way I work it has a long way to go before it can compete with Cubase, but it's getting there. The MIDI editing in S1 is pretty good too, but once you really get to know the Cubase MIDI workflow nothing else comes close. And as far as MIDI routing/sends and MIDI insert effects I don't think anything will ever top Cubase. When it comes to piano rolls though you are going to learn to write music based on the workflow of the DAW that you started on. What I mean is, the nature in which you enter notes and edit notes will evolve differently. I learned on Cakewalk and Cubase, which is tool-based, which is the best way for me to work. FL feels very clunky to me because I like to enter notes first and then go back and edit if I feel like it, so much clicking to do that. Also Cubase is very much a two handed DAW, uses mouse+keyboard to do very powerful things very easily, I feel like S1 is trying to be somewhere in the middle with that (like the middle ground between Cubase and Reaper). For my tastes I think it needs to pick a side and focus on that before it can be something I would consider switching to.

Practice makes perfect. The way you get better is by finishing a song (or calling a song finished), releasing it, starting a new one and repeating this process. The most important aspects of mixing have pretty much already been covered in the replies so far, but it takes a lot of experience to properly hear these things and to properly address them. You can read and understand all you possibly can, but without practice it's just a bunch of logic kicking around in your head without practical application for reference. Just be sure you stay away from common amateur mistakes: 1. confusing perceived loudness for power 2. unmanaged low end 3. using compression as an effect too often 4. overloading your master bus I've gone into ridiculous detail about these things repeatedly, do some forum searching or whatev and you can find a ton of info.

This piano sounds so good. I mean the piano itself, and it's recorded super well and the programming is super playable. Completely replaces my other "fully sampled" piano sounds. Close mic with a little bit of stage mic blend responds perfectly to EQ, making it perfect for rock and pop. Zircon and ISW I love you guys, keep doing great work. For real. Mega impressed with this.

That's a pretty accurate description of my entire life.

My projects are actually very easy to follow, I keep things pretty neat and organized. I'll upload a demo or test song for anyone interested till I can consolidate one of my bigger arrangements.

I'll do it. But like others said, there's very little chance of a project I upload playing back properly in anyone else's DAW. The plugins I use, the DAW I use, all that stuff has to match up.

this is the shit right here

You're probably right. I mean, I am pretty awesome.

sup :3

Protip: Just get more people involved. You can be really foolish when you have others to share the load, and if it flops terribly you have scapegoats.

I'm just chopping off the first minute of an existing remix and submitting that.

You say that now, but after you hear "Black and Tan, Black and Tan!" for the 600th time at 4:45am, you'll be calling hotel security...

I don't remember meeting any OCR people. And if I did and don't remember then I'm sorry. Wait, I remember meeting with Taucer, and maybe Wes in the hall. Either way, magfest was great, I rocked hard, danced hard, drunk'd hard, shat hard. Spent an entire night partying hardcore with Yuu Miyake and Yoshihito Yano, those motherfuckers can DRINK. No joke. Probably the best single night of magfest I've ever had. We all had to be kicked out at like 5:30am cuz some people had to sleep. With magfest getting as big as it's getting, I think it's time that thshizz and OCR need to join forced and start partying together. Now that we've gotten old and have calmed down a lot I think we're more capable of being around non-shizz people. Next mag, let's do it right.

Don't listen to this. Half the fun of Magfest is in piecing together your full weekend by way of stories and pictures/videos that people have of you while you were too shitfaced to remember. I will see you all there today. I love you all*. *I do not love you all.

I'm gonna go ahead and start spamming this until the week before magfest. Honestly if OCRemix of all places doesn't bring a strong game to a VGM Dance Remix competition, I'll be hella disappointed. Do not let DoD beat you guys in a dance music contest!! You have till Janurary 20th. Live elements can be something as simple as keydrums. IF YOU ARE COMING TO MAGFEST YOU SHOULD ENTER THIS DOD! I love you all.