SnappleMan

I don't agree at all. If it feels like work then you're not meant to be together, and eventually those things you 'worked' on that are supposed to be solved and forgotten will come back up and make you realize that you've been breeding resentment for having to compromise things you shouldn't have to. The one and only thing I believe a good relationship needs in order to work is a sense of perspective. You have to teach yourself to look outside your own point of view and accept your partner as a second set of eyes/ears. Keep in mind I do have a skewed perspective on this matter because I've been with my girl for over 12 years, and we've spent almost every day together. We've lived together that whole time, went to the same schools, took the same classes, worked at the same places, so we've had 24/7 contact for 12 years straight. It may be that we were working on our relationship without knowing it simply by evolving together as people, but we've never had to think or talk about any huge issues in terms of compromise or "we need to solve this in order to stay together". I think that if you make it a point to be completely honest about who you are when you first meet someone, and insist that they are completely honest with you, you'll find it much more difficult to find a person you're compatible with. The payoff happens when you finally do find that person, and everything from that point onward is just living naturally without doubting or looking back. Again that's most likely a matter of skewed perspective as I've always been aware of what I was looking for in someone, so if I wanted a fling or one night stand I'd make it so the relationship could end as soon as that need was fulfilled. I wasn't even looking for anyone to be with in any form when I met my lady, we just started as friends but I quickly noticed that it was a deal I couldn't pass up, so I made a business type decision to make her mine based completely on the logical factors like lifestyle and general compatibility. As silly as it sounds, videogames are extremely important to both of us, and that's probably what shaped our personalities into being so similar and compatible. tl:dr - don't compromise who you are, hold out and you'll find someone truly right for you. If you pretend to be someone you're not for any reason, it'll come back at you eventually and start ruining your relationship.

It doesn't matter what you use as long as it fits your workflow and style.

BFD2 is the best one I've used for my tastes. The samples are the most raw sounding I could find, and the recording techniques used give them a much more organic sound than other more pristine libraries (like Superior Drummer). Only reason I got into BFD was because there was a big sale for a lite version of it a year or two back ($30), and I couldn't pass that up. I ended up liking the sounds so much that I bought the full version of the flagship BFD2. Beware though, you really REALLY need to know how to mix a live recorded kit before getting into this. Superior Drummer and Addictive Drums are much more forgiving (but in my opinion offer much less depth and character).

What's there to be worried about? It's just music. It's all about expression, and we had a lot to express. Originally I told Norg the idea of making a full length album within an album, and we loved the idea because it's very easy for us to expand musical ideas into long pretentious concepts. So I told zircon and he gave me a slightly "yeah, riiiiight... SUUUURRREE.... Go for it then!" So we did! But yeah, the end result is a big song that we broke into 4 songs, only one of which is being used for the CD release. All 4 parts are gonna be used on the bonus DVD so people can hear the entire thing. And to give some perspective on the matter: it's a 39 minute song that we spent weeks mixing and recording. You'd think that after all that work I'd be tired of it and never want to hear it again, but that's not the case at all! I can sit down and listen to it start to finish (and have done so dozens of times) without getting bored or tired, and it doesn't really seem as long as it is because of Norg's expert pacing. I also made sure to mix it very dynamically and uncompressed so it doesn't tire people out and can be listened to at high volumes. There are tons of variations on volume levels and you have to choose what you focus on to really get the most out of it. In the end it's just music, listen to it if you like it, skip it if you don't. There are hours of different points of view on this project that I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing, and however long or short some songs are, they'll all be good.

As far as subs go I've used the KRK 10s, I really like it (trying to find one at a good price right now, actually).

I just posted a little teaser clip of some of the FF6 music we made. Here's the link for those who don't get my facebook updates: http://kotsamanidis.com/2013/05/07/balance-ruin/

To clarify, the way I record drum tracks is in multiple parts, all to one track.Here you see the drums in one MIDI track, which is the track I record all the sequences into: And here you see the (zoomed out)piano roll that has all drum map: Each diamond is a hit (naturally), and I make sure to play my drums (via keyboard) to the limits of a real drummer (two hands and two feet). No double bass pedal action while the hihat pedal is going, only two hand hits at a time etc etc. I don't record all that in one run though. Take this sequence for example: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32558357/97_drum_seq_t_FULL.mp3 The first thing I usually record would be the kick, snare and hihat like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32558357/97_drum_seq_t_take1.mp3 And then I go back and record (or mouse in) the more intricate stuff like tom rolls and all the cymbals: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32558357/97_drum_seq_t_take2.mp3 Regardless how and in what order I get the notes in there, they have to be in one single track. With newer libraries like BFD and Superior Drummer you can load additional instruments in the samplers and have all your percussions (woodblocks, taikos etc etc) in the same plugin, so my drum tracks for some songs contain over 30 different drums. This is where drum maps become crucial to help you manage all the hits and know what's going on when you go into the piano roll for detailed editing.

I just record the drum sequence via MIDI to one track. I very rarely copy/paste. For the way I work it's much easier to make sense of drum patterns when they're designated to one track (especially when using drum maps).

I love the how the marketing is so geared towards the user base. Though I guess that's true for all software. Cubase is marketed towards arrogant know-it-all assholes (like me). Reason is marketed towards clueless kids who get bogged down by the "technical" stuff. Pro Tools is marketed towards bitter old men who are stuck in the past and think a 64bit DAW in 2013 is "REVOLUTIONARY". Logic is marketed towards people who are too cool for Garageband. Sonar is marketed towards people who used Sonar 10 years ago when it was good. Reaper is marketed towards Linux-minded nerds who desperately want to believe that it's as good as Windows (another more expensive DAW). Is FLStudio marketed? Either way, I love commercials.

Nice, looks like Reason is finally useable.

If you want to hear true bass response as low as 40hz then you need to be looking at 7-8" woofers. And even then you might not get the "advertised" values.

Every professional vocal room I've ever used has been the size of a closet. And from my own experience, I find that a big room only adds tons of reverb that you don't want in your recording.

You just gotta keep in mind that you'll never fool the people you're trying to fool with samples. Casual listeners (for the most part) don't care if you recorded live strings or not. All that matters in the end is that you use things that sound cool and give character to your song. If your goal is a more generic sounding "orchestral" motif that's meant to be used in a movie, game or something like that, then you can get away with using a sample library, just layer different articulations cleverly to hide the lack of realism in legato and slurring.

Whenever I do any orchestration I always use keyswitches because I play all my parts live, and going in after the fact to change articulations never works well.

I don't record vocals for my music, when I need to record a vocalist for a band I rent studio time and use their vocal booths. Even in a small cramped place you can do something to minimize the amount of noise pollution that'll end up in your recording. I'm not an expert on that though, so I'll do whatever research I can, since I need to know this stuff too.

If you have no idea which interface to buy or anything like that, I assume you really don't know a great deal about recording vocals. The most important thing you can do is make sure that you have a treated acoustic space to record your vocals in. You can buy the best $5000 mic you can find, and it'll sound awful if you don't record it properly in the proper environment. On the other hand, if you buy a cheap $200 mic and record it in a good environment, it'll sound fantastic. Condenser mics are most often used for vocals, that means that they pick up almost anything audible that's in the room. The problem is that most people don't realize they are actually hearing, until they record their room with a condenser mic. Once you record a vocal in an untreated space, you'll hear computer fan noise, hf display hiss, and most importantly of all: reflections from the walls around you. So the resulting recording is noisy and sounds like it was recorded in a tin can, because your ear is very good at focusing on voices and things you want to hear, and your brain filters out the ambient noise. The mic has no brain, so you will hear all the reflections bouncing off the walls. What you can do is: 1. build a dedicated vocal booth out a closet, which you can outfit with acoustic treatments, or buy/build an isolation booth to use in a corner of your room (with acoustic treatment behind it to kill reflections). 2. build a cone of acoustic treatment around your mic (secured on mic stand) placed in a part of the room that minimizes reflections and where the mic is pointed away from your computer. Then, even with a cheaper mic, you will get great sounding recordings. Method 1 is ideal, method 2 is not but you'll still get good results. My point is this: if you're serious about vocal recording (serious enough to where you want to save till you can afford the best mic possible) then you need to do a lot of research on the matter to learn what makes vocal recording work. You can make your own acoustic treatments out of a specific kind of insulation (owens corning 703 is what all the nerds use) and wood you can get from home depot for cheap. You can also buy acoustic material from musicians friend and those types of places, but it's more expensive. Anyway, research this stuff so you can pinpoint what would really work best for your situation.

THIS guys will help you get the boom. You got $8?

Make music.

:3 :3

The "instrument" in the first song is just a GM gunshot sound. (GM patch 128) The second song, I assume you mean the pad that's ascending in timbre at the beginning, which would be just that: a synth pad going up in pitch.

Interesting thing happened to me this week! I ran my music through a bunch of analyzers, and noticed a trend in my own loudness levels. I realized that I not only was mixing louder and louder, but I was up to -5dB RMS on a regular basis, which really is pointless! I broke out the classic Iron Maiden CDs (originals, not remastered) and started listening, and it blew my mind. For the past few years I've been working "professionally" on music on and off, and the mixes I have been sending out have had to come back for added "loudness" so I just mixed louder without thinking about the quality of the music. But I spent this past week listening to CDs from the 80s, and I cant get over how much better the music sounds. So right here, I'm vowing to stop squashing the fuck out of my music. It sounds ugly and adds NOTHING good. So yeah, I've had a revelation.

My girl and I have been living together about 12 years now, been together for a while before then. We're getting married in 2014. Life is good when you're in love

That depends on a whole mess of factors, but generally speaking (and assuming you're using orchestral samples and not recording actual orchestras) your best bet is to learn to spot "mistakes" made in the sampling process of your sample libraries. By that I mean that when people sample instruments and sections and whatever else, they are likely going for a very generic sound that can be tailored to fit in more than one musical context. EQ and compression come into that by letting you contour the sounds to get the most brightness or warmth or whatever quality you want out of them. An example would be if say the viola section was recorded with 12 mics, and two of those mics were positioned in a way that they caught a lot of a certain frequency bouncing back off the floor or the walls of the hall and it gives you a very honky grating quality that you just can't put your finger on. With EQ you can find that frequency by creating a narrow band (the Q value in most EQ plugins) and sweeping it across the spectrum (the Hz value) until you hear that brash sound very clearly, that means you've located the frequency that's out of balance, so you reduce the gain at that frequency and the sound should get a little cleaner and much more pleasing to the ear. With practice you'll eventually be able to hear frequencies by ear.

:3 thnx

I think you should try to stop thinking of EQ as being applied in amounts. You don't really have too much or too little EQ, it's a matter of balance. So the balance of your EQ is very off here, you have put too much of a boost in the midrange frequencies, sounds like maybe 500-2000hz. That gives your song a very boxy sound. You want to use EQ to bring out characteristics that you like in a sound, or bring down characteristics that are not as good or that clash with other sounds too much.