SnappleMan

I pretend I'm masturbating. This makes me completely comfortable and relaxed so I can rock out naturally. Of course this is done in the nude, and I actually masturbate.

hahaha, yeah, that's 2008...

If you already have his consent then why can't you just give him the money for a transcription of the song?

I like the white mage from FF1.

If you want to set up a music studio, you'll need to spend money. Free stuff is all fine and good but it wont cut the mustard when it comes to what really drives the entire workflow. Get yourself a solid DAW like Sonar or Cubase, and a MIDI controller/synth of some kind and you'll be set. As far as actupally creating music goes, knowing music theory is very important. You wont know what you're really doing until you train your ears and your fingers, and basic piano ability is a requisite of any music program you'd take so it all works out. Still that's only one of three broad parts of music production. First you write it, then you have to record/perform/program it. What I suggest you do here is start ABUSING google. Learn everything you can about recording and performing, even if you're just going to be using Reason or FL and mousing in your notes. Having that knowledge is so very important in creating music because every professionally sampled instrument (and GM library) is created for pros who know how an instrument should be played and recorded (MIDI articulations are extremely important). Third thing you need to learn is production. How to mix a song. Google this even more than you would the recording part... It's been 10 years and I'm still trying to get this part right! School will definitely help you not only to learn music, but you'll learn to play music and you'll be interacting with other musicians which is proven to help you understand music better.

The thumb on the back of the neck technique is the proper way to do it, but it must be used with proper guitar positioning. That means you have to keep the guitar at a 45 degree angle up high across your chest.

The aftertouch is a total pain in the ass! Takes way too much pressure. as for the sounds, they're really really great, only thing is that the patches are pretty basic, I've been making my own patches using the sounds and they rival anything I've heard from any VST sample library. What's interesting is that I find myself using the things I didn't think I would be using, like the sampler and sequencer. The effects on it are pretty amazing too.

Newest addition to my studio: Now to get a nice new studio desk to properly house it.

hahahahahaha I'm so gonna use this ridiculous thing

First off, Cubase is affordable. Anyone with a job can get $500 to spend on something they'll be using for a long while. Anyway, Reason and Cubase don't really compare. Cubase is a DAW (digital audio workstation) where as Reason is more a synth\sequencer. Cubase is made for complete music production, meaning, the focus is just as much on recording/processing audio as it is on using MIDI and virtual instruments. Not only that but it's designed for real mixing and mastering (and no, using the "mastering" plugin in FL or Reason doesn't count). If you're used to the Reason interface, you'll be completely lost in Cubase (at least for the first few days), but eventually you'll get used to the workflow (which I think is great). Your absolute BEST bet is going to Steinberg.net and also searching for Cubase on youtube. You can get a demo of Cubase 5 on the Steinberg site (which you'll have to buy a $30 key for, but they refund you if you don't want to buy it after your trial ends). If you don't know what a DAW is, there's no real way to explain it in words, at least no way that'll compare to actually getting your hands and mind around it and working in it. Think of it as a virtual recording studio with unlimited tape and musicians that never get tired or pissed.

Even an "untreated" room can sound great if you know how to position the monitors, again, bullshit.

I call bullshit. The monitors are always more important than the room since any room can be optimized with a basic treatment. Shitty monitors will always give you a poor response. The only time I'll agree is when you're talking about full scale mastering, in that case pretty much everything has to be finely tuned to get good results.

Low volume is something I always test my mix at. That's when you really hear what disappears and what's overpowering in the mix.

You can mix on anything if you learn how those mixes will translate to other systems. My rules of mixing are: 1. Make sure everything is clear. 2. Make sure nothing is fighting for attention. 3. Make everything punchy and dynamic. But depending on my mood or what is asked of me, I'll completely break those rules and do something completely "wrong" for the sake of style and feeling. So there really are no rules, as long as nothing is clipping or giving people headaches, you're good.

Famitracker is very simple to use, and every synth has a slightly different sounding square, triangle and saw wave so the closer you can get, the better. The best way to emulate the pokemon sounds would be to get a gameboy tracker but that's going a bit far just to emulate the sound of one game.

If you're working with orchestral stuff what you should do is create a pitch envelope that reacts to velocity. The harder you play the note the more out of tune it goes, no more than 10-15 cents. If you listen to a live orchestra you'll notice how horrible out of tune it can be.

Honestly, just a little bit more humanization will make the difference. Considering the genre you're working in doesn't have the most dynamic sounding drums out there (and they usually trigger the drums anyway).

First thing I would do is make sure your sources are not causing problems, then I would update the drivers, reinstall and see if you can flash the firmware of the unit. Then if all that fails, I'd declare it broken, and considering USB is a digital connection I don't think changing cables would solve your problem. Possible causes for noise: 1. Input jack is fucked. Something may have happened to the jack to cause a loose connection or something else that would introduce noise into the recordings. 2. Preamp is fucked. If the unit has a preamp, that is. Or if it's made for high-z input like electric guitars, you may have damaged it by plugging in something that was not compatible or too hot and blew out a component inside. 3. Loose cables... seriously... 4. Electrical interference. Make sure the power going to all your music equipment and PC is as clean as you can get it. That means using surge protectors and power conditioners. 5. Faulty unit. It's most likely gonna be 5.

The way that I learned to play on time was with a traditional metronome. The metronome in protools might accent the first beat in a measure with a higher pitched or louder tone, so if you can check the protools metronome settings and make both tones the same, you can just let the metronome run forever over a looped section and just play without having to worry about keeping with the time signature. A couple days of this and you'll definitely get used to it, then you can change the two tones back to normal and start training your ears and hands for working within different time signatures.

The one thing I really hate about EZdrummer is the DFH expansion... Those samples are just so badly pre-processed that making them sound good is ALMOST impossible! Anyway, as to the song. The drums sound pretty fake and robotic, especially the blastbeetz!!!!OMG. You should try playing with the velocity and timing settings within EZD, also, Go in and edit the velocities, right now it just sounds like everything is at 127. Honestly, the drums in this could just be a soundfont and they'd sound the same, the point of EZdrummer and all that is to give you humanization options like more varied velocities and more mic positions so you can try to emulate a human PERFORMANCE more than anything else. The guitars and everything else sound good though, but you really need to work on the drum sounds.

A nice fat 808 snare at about 1/4 the volume of the snare you want to fatten up. Fucking ace. I do it all over.

I am well aware of that. But even then, they're not the best around.

I don't think any of the Kontakt libraries are worth buying Kontakt over. The sampler itself though, is easily the best sampler I've ever used, so yeah.

I use Reason as an "instrument" more than a standalone application. You can't really compare the two because FLstudio is trying to be more of a full on DAW and Reason is pretty much a one trick pony (though it's a pretty nice trick!). Think of Reason kind of like a synthesizer with a built in sequencer where as FLstudio is like a run down studio that still somehow works...

aww u guyz