SnappleMan

I disagree with the concept of mega 5 disc albums in general. The quality always suffers and this is no exception. The level of quality music here is an OCR first for sure, but for my tastes there's still too much filler. It would have been much more cohesive if restricted to a single disc and given a bit more musical direction, but for that to work there would have needed to be a concept or some form of structure to choose which songs are chosen etc etc. In the end it comes down to the scope, and for an album of this size there's no other way to do it than how B&R did it. The ONLY thing I'd change about this would be the mixing. You can't have a cohesive album if you have a different person mixing every song, the volume levels are all over the place and some songs are just painful to listen to.

Yeah, the Dancing Mad on this album is a great rendition, one of my favourite tracks on it. Zircon and Sixto did a great job. Aside from the obvious top tracks like virts and bustatunez' I gotta say that XPRTNovice has blown me away, incredible musicianship and a great ear for arranging. Well done.

hyperion5182 you're the cutest. I'm so happy that you're so happy. :33333333 I've been following your story arc since the old thread in the announcements forum. Your anticipation and excitement was so addictive that I started anticipating your listening of the album.

That doesn't mean more than 3 of them are any good.

What? There have already been 39 of these abominations?

I've also been paid via sample libraries and Pro Tools licenses instead of cash, but at that point it's better than nothing so whatev. The battle for credits is one I've lost about 99% of the time.

ANYTIME Anytime anytime.... OVER HERE Over Here over here.... This is some Chinese pussy caliber shit. (meaning it's fucking TIGHT)

Yeah, having a real job seems crucial. As far as my life as a freelance musician (technically engineer) goes, it comes down to: WHEN YOU HAVE WORK: - Wake up at 4pm. - Mix/record till 11am. - Sleep till 4pm. - Repeat till work is done, send work off. - Equip for the Decisive Battle with Receiving Payment. - Battle for pay. **Client casts "Waiting on direct deposit, should come in Monday" LVL99** WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE WORK: - Wake up at 4pm. - Check email/texts/voicemail. - Send out emails/texts/voicemails till 8pm. - Mix/record your own music till 11am. - Sleep till 4pm. - Battle depression over not having work/income. I've been lucky to have a few dependable music contracts and a few non-music related things that have beefed up my savings to a point where I can live without a job for a while. But it's a very dangerous way to live and I'm constantly on the lookout for a "real" 9-5 job I can do to secure serious income. Choosing to be a professional musician is a very difficult path through life. When you really think about it, it takes a lot more time than going to medical school or law school. Most people who want to become musicians have 10-15 years of starving and struggling ahead of them before they make it, and 80% of them wont make it. I am at the point in my "career" where I'm happy keeping music as a hobby and earning a living via steady job. If I happen to start making a real viable living in music then great, but I ain't gonna hold my breath.

You have to make sure you're using proper technique. Your hands should be shaped almost like claws, so make that shape as comfortably as you can and make sure to never rest your palm on the keybed. Eventually you'll get tired but there should be no real pain when playing the piano. If you're running drills for scales or finger separation then you'll get sore, but again no pain.

I'm not going anywhere near PA~~I mean magfest this year. It's gotten too damn big for me.

Considering what happened last time I'm gonna stay away from this. But if it takes off and gets awesome then great. Best of luck with it.

You have to be aware of what's actually going on. It's not really about imperfect time but more about "swing". When I say swing I don't mean the style of music, but the grooving nature of a natural performance. The swing is about static/permanent syncopation in timing, and not by concrete note values like 16th or 8th notes, but in ticks. You have swing too, when you record MIDI parts and they're offtime, notice how you naturally space the kick and snare. Chances are you give the snare drum a certain relatively even delay. That means that even though you're going for a 1/4 note length between hits, you may actually be spacing the snare 1/4 note and an extra 128th note (or 5, 10 or 20 ticks, or any small value of measurement) on every hit (on top of natural offtime variations). So this gives your drum performance a grooving swing, a feel. You instinctively know how you want the groove to feel so you give it that little bit of syncopated attitude without even knowing it. When you quantize you snap it all to the grid, and even a fuzzy quantize will "randomly" quantize with relation to the grid, not to your swing. So when you quantize you're effectively destroying the feel you created by playing the song. If none of that makes sense then try this: when you're rocking out to a song and moving your body, notice how you drag yourself and then snap to the beat, now stop doing that dragging feel and just simply statically snap yourself to the beat as on time as you can. You should feel the difference between stiff mathematical bobbing and grooving. Your drum performance is the same. The only way around this in your music is to practice your keydrumming till it gets tighter, or record your tracks in shorter sections (couple measures at a time or whatev) so you don't lose your overall sense of timing.

I'm excited to hear this full thing. First OCR album I actually want to hear all the way through.

Yeah we talked about it months ago, I was just trollin'. <3

At the very least the contributors should get a physical copy. Considering that like, you know, there wouldn't be any project or site or $150k without us... so yeah, I'll just wait for the physical to hear the album, no need to spoil it early.

10s 4 evrrrrr

Most OCR users don't realize that sample "quality" is relative. On here what most people consider to be a "good" sample is a "real sounding" sample. As your ear becomes more tempered and experienced you'll find yourself less and less convinced by the realism in all samples, and when that happens all you have left are the samples that truly sound good for whatever reason. Personally I prefer to use older samples or samples from hardware synths because the developers really do a great job in mixing and programming those patches to be playable and feel good under your fingers. Today's newest samples are returning to that mentality, since for the past 10 or so years we've all been installing 100gb libraries that are terribly programmed and have no musical nature to them whatsoever, so the developers now are focusing on making those massive sample banks usable in a musical setting by creating very smart articulation engines and whatnot. In the end all that matters is what you do with something, and a new sample will not fix your problem since you'll have to take time to learn how to properly use that too. If your goal is realism then you'll fail 100% of the time until you get a real performance recorded, but if your goal is style and character then you can use all the samples and effects you have to create something unique and cool without it trying to trick anyone.

And another thing, when it comes to keys I always stay away from semi-weighted. If I want weighted keys I go will full on hammer action keys (like most digital pianos have), otherwise I go with synth action (no couterweights to them). Synth action keys are very fast and they feel great to play (unless they're cheap shit). A great quality controller I've used and loved is the A-800 pro by Roland: http://www.rolandus.com/products/details/1096 You can probably get one for cheap on ebay. But before you buy anything, try to find a music store near you where you can try some of these out.

In terms of composition I've found that the feel of the keys matters a lot, but to me "composition" means playing the keys and using the pitch/mod wheels (or sticks in my case), so if you have a different definition (like using knobs and controllers, arpeggiators and whatnot) then what you need for your compositions might be different. The Axiom series feels very flimsy and cheap to me, the keys don't have the correct weight or bounce to them, and they feel very low quality under my fingers. Generally speaking you get what you pay for, and if you want a good quality controller you'll be spending around $300.

If feel is important to you (and it should be to everyone) then stay away from any M-Audio products (broken record here, since I always advise people to stay clear of M-Audio controllers). You need to have a slightly more specific set of parameters to make a good choice. Since you're a piano player does that mean you want piano action keys? Also you said: "1. Yamaha Arius Digital Keyboard: Not intended to be a controller, but it happens to have a MIDI output. Nice because the keys feel real (I am a piano player) and I can get really exact velocity out of it. It also has sustain pedals. No mod wheel, no other functions." Why is this not good enough for you? The Arius line are digital pianos, that means you won't really find a better feeling keyboard under the $1000-2000 range.

Mixing all your individual tracks to 0dB is the #1 way to lose all your transients. Never send that much information to your master fader. If your master fader is clipping when at 0dB then turn down all the tracks going into it, that headroom is the key to a clear mix.

While we're on the topic of using noise here's a tutorial I wrote on the DoD forums for using test tone generators for drum mixing: http://dwellingofduels.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=73

What you want is a good transient shaper. EQ is great and necessary (200hz and 3500-5000hz are generally your most important frequencies for a good snappy snare) but you want to make sure you have a good solid transient to work with, especially considering how insanely overcompressed our music is these days. Here's my checklist for how I go about mixing my snares (well all drums usually): 1. Making sure snare is dampened properly: Most of the big huge snares you hear are actually pretty well dampened, the size you're hearing is from a well used reverb. What gives a snare huge natural decay are the overtones, so when you compress a snare to make it sound loud, you're boosting all those overtones, many of which will conflict with other elements in your song. Left un-dampened those overtones would dominate the mix. Listen to a huge snare from an album you love, chances are you'll hear a decay that is relatively overtone free and very clean, that means it's a reverb (or well used room recording, which is basically a natural reverb). 2. Proper EQ: Like I said before, 200hz and 3.5-5khz are the places you want to check first. Generally I find that 200hz gives me the punch I need, then a very fine cut at about 500hz to remove excess "ping" (some snares have this problem as high as 1khz) and then boost between 3.5-5khz depending on where the sweet spot of the snap is. After that I play around with the 8-10khz for the high end. 3. Compression/Distortion: I actually don't use straight compressors on my drums that much anymore, I've been moving more towards harmonic distortion and transient shaping+limiting instead of just a standard compressor. With a transient shaper I usually just boost a tiny bit so it doesn't clip and start throwing off what the limiter will be doing later in the chain. The hamonic exciting/distortion is important because I've already "shaped" out some of the overtones with the EQ curve and dampening, and with a good multiband harmonic exciter I can add some distortion to the fundamentals, making them fuller and easier to hear in the mix (if you don't have a multiband exciter you can bus the snare out to a bunch of AUX channels, each with an exciter and EQ so that you can filter out all the frequencies you don't want and the mix that to taste). 4. Limiting: The last step in my chain is a limiter. This varies very much depending on the song and the snare sound, but a general rule I've learned is that the harder you limit the more of the transient is lost. This is where soft vs hard knee becomes critical. A hard knee will "limit" your signal, letting you make it much louder without clipping but you will lose the transient. A soft knee will preserve as much of the transient as you want (using the attack and release settings) but the result can clip easily if you push the gain too high. This last step is the most important for me, because it's a very delicate balance between "loudness" and power. If I compress the master bus too hard, I lose all that power and those transients I worked so hard to get, but if I don't compress then people might think it sounds weak because they don't believe in volume adjustment on their iphones. After I tweak the master compression to the point where I like the volume I'm getting, I can go back to the transient shaper for the snare (or kick etc) and adjust that to try and bring a little more of that attack out. As far as reverb goes, I take care of that after the fact by bussing out the kit pieces to dedicated reverb AUX channels. I almost always use reverb just on the snare and (to a lesser extent) the toms. Overall, nothing will help you more than a good balance within the full mix. Your guitars/bass/keys/kazoo should be mixed well so that everything can be heard as much as it needs to be heard without drowning out the drums. Turn your volume down low and mix the music with the drums until you hear everything the way you like it, then turn it up loud and listen to hear if the power is where you want it. When using master compression or mastering, the drums are usually the first to get lost, so if you make sure you have a good mix with a lot of headroom before you hit that master compression you should have a cleaner/punchier mix at a louder volume in the end.

Love the original of this. Your remix sounds mad bubbly <3. Fuckin FF8 DDR version, I can picture some sweaty Asian kid theatrically dazzling teenage girls with his fancy foot moves at some mall.

My point is that if you meet someone truly right for you, all the compassion and whatever else will come naturally without "effort". Anything less than that means that you've settled for the best you've found at that point and are trying to make the best of the situation. I think another big part of it is the sense of entitlement and playing house. So many people get married or get into long term relationships because they want the romantic vision of what that is, without really knowing if they are ready for that or not. Too many just jump into it and expect it to work, and after they do that a few times they get it into their heads that they have to "work" on things in order for relationships to last, while STILL not putting any thought into what it is they really want out of life.