lazygecko

Synthwave is awesome. It's just like he says, it's some kind of counterculture in response to the modern climate of dance music. In the 1980's electronic music was made primarily by classically trained musicians hence the refined songwriting and melodic focus. Today electronic music has been completely democratized so anyone with a computer can start making it, and so we have a new generation of musicians who exist in this insular atmosphere where they care more about things like drops, kicks, plucks etc. rather than interesting melodies and harmonies. He is also right about the genre becoming extremly saturated lately so it's becoming harder to find stuff worth listening to. I think it was an underground movement up until the point where the movie Drive really propelled it into the mainstream. And this has been pushed further by games like Blood Dragon and of course Hotline Miami which was directly inspired by Drive and which Pertubator made music for.

Yeah, the interface definitely doesn't work on laptops. Hate it when that isn't taken into consideration. Native Instruments plugins are guilty of this as well. What makes FMDrive different from the others is that it actually emulates the unique distortions from the actual consoles, instead of having a perfect linear signal. It really makes a difference in the lower frequencies.

So it was on his youtube channel a while ago that he might have something that could turn out to be serious. Today it was confirmed on his twitter that it's full blown cancer and he's going to start treatment.A while ago TB started to regularly promote OCR in his videos by featuring an OC ReMix at the end of his vlogs and industry news videos. He's done a lot to help OCR reach a larger audience, and I think it's only fair that we show our support back to him. I watched his videos since way, way back when he just did some quirky World of Warcraft videos. Since then his channel exploded to become more or less the largest personality in PC gaming. I hope the chemo is successful and that he feels well enough to keep making videos.

If you listen to and appreciate a lot of soundtrack music, then prepare to be massively disillusioned if you start delving into things like commercial loop libraries. They're used quite often to meet a deadline. One of the first games I really noticed this in was Command & Conquer Generals. It seems composer Bill Brown put most of his actual time and effort into the USA faction music. The other 2 factions are almost exclusively made out of prefab loops.

Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Haters can go take a ride.

I think generally the bar is set very, very low for retro style sound effects in modern games. Most of them are just really basic and unimaginative. It doesn't take much to rise above the average.

If you want SNES style effects, you do that by using musical instrument samples in creative ways. That's how most effects were done on the SNES, since memory was too precious a resource to waste on dedicated SFX samples. For example snares were often used to make explosions or gunfire. The cannons in Super Mario World are snares played at a fifth interval or something. And the trademark Yoshi sound is in fact a pitch-bent orchestra hit.

I think it was a fun movie. Better than Raimi's Spider-Man in several regards. The biggest issues are the overload of disparate plot threads in the first half, and again the omission of J.K Simmons as J Jonah Jameson (this is still the most perfect casting of any comic book character). I think Garfield is the superior portrayal of both Peter and Spider-Man. I never got any substantial geek or science vibes from Toby's parker. It was just something he studied but was otherwise never shown to be an actual passion in his life. The score was also a complete turnaround from the throwaway dullness of the first ASM's score. It has much more personality, and the main theme actually has the balls to be a classic uplifting superhero theme with brass fanfares and all. I was surprised Zimmer's name was on this. This is what Man of Steel should have sounded like in the first place.

It's finally here. It was meant to be. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=232823090&searchtext=black+knight

If The Stanley Parable is eligible then surely there is room for

It also probably ties neatly into the subject of atonal music. To the uninitiated it will just sound like a cacophony of random notes, when in fact it adheres to some pretty strict principles. It's the knowledge of the structure and ability to discern and predict things that makes people appreciate the craftmanship of the music.

Memory limitations is still a real issue for sure. A lot of games even use 22/32khz sounds still. Since we no longer use dedicated hardware for sound playback, it has compete with everything else for resources. And when developers decide on a resource budget for the different aspects, sound tends to not be very high on the list. Once I started digging around in the innards of Skyrim's sound playback, it really got to me just how gimped everything was. They had to make tons of concessions to fit it within what I presume was the console RAM limits. I don't think these problems are ever going to change in the foreseeable future. When we get more powerful hardware, developers just move the goalposts.

Implementation of sound is a good general skill to have. Download Unity and UDK, and find stuff you can modify sound and music in.

Drum sounds are kind of unfeasible to draw given their nature. You should really just be programming them on a synth. Chiptune drums (that weren't sampled) rely mainly on pitch-bending (usually a very quick one for bassdrums and slower decay for snares). C64 drums also switched waveforms mid-sound, usually starting out with a noise.

Dungeon Keeper is free on GOG (along with some other deals). I was waiting for them to smugly capitalize on the attention surrounding the series after the whole mobile remake controversy. http://www.gog.com/

14 Mind-Blowing Reasons Why VGM Has Lost Its Way. You Won't Believe How Terrible It Sounds!

Here's a real interesting video podcast concerning sound design and library licensing within the games industry: I just started getting into sound design myself last year and I'm largely ignorant on how things work within the industry.

Production and writing (and performing) overlap more than what most people think. In the end you're just manipulating frequencies either way. If you just end up wasting hours on trying to EQ your tracks to make them fit better or whatever, then it likely means you've made some sub-optimal choices in the arrangement and you're effectively trying to sweep the problem under the rug with the production process.

You can accomplish most typical subtractive stuff using FM. At least if you're using a more modern synth which also has a filter built in. In FM8 you can just rout single operators with different waveforms to a filter and effectively treat it as a subtractive synth. I find subtractive to actually be quite limited in itself. It relies a whole lot on effects like distortion, chorus, etc to augment the sound which I technically don't consider a part of the synthesis process since you can just apply those effects on anything else. FM oscillators would lack things like sync and ringmod features but they can still be "faked" to various degrees. The best thing about FM8 is that the filter doesn't even have to be the end of the signal chain (before the fx processing kicks in). You can just as well use the filtered signal itself as a modulator to get even more control and still retain a lot of the FM character while playing around with the cutoff resonance settings on the filter.

Jesper Kyd has spoken out himself on game music emulating Hollywood too much being a bad thing and that it's better to just let the medium find its own identity. He has his own type of orchestral music which has remained consistent over the years although I am not that fond of it personally. Like I said earlier taking inspiration from film scores in itself isn't a bad thing, it's moreso that the modern climate is so fucking vapid and homogenous.

Speak for yourself.

FINALLY a Kingdoms of Amalur sale on Steam. Never happened during the big season sales so I thought it was just left for the scrap heap since it's an EA (ie Origin) game and Big Huge Games is done for anyway. It's 70% off. http://store.steampowered.com/app/102500/

The argument surround console limitations definitely holds a lot of water. I dislike the "catchy" argument because it's such an arbritary term and almost no one asks the question why it is percieved as catchy and how they went about doing that. If you take the time to analyze a lot of the typical Capcom and Konami NES music it will suddenly make a lot of sense. They had 3 tonal channels to work with. And to make a typical modern chord which only serves as a way to harmonize other things, you usually use 3 or more tones from that instrument so it's obviously not going to work out if you have to devote all 3 of your channels to just that one function. So instead you have to emphasize how the movement of the intervals between these 3 tones in a more melodic manner and have them work more independently. There's a lot of modulation going on between the two main pulse channels in the sense that one of them is pretty much constantly switching jobs. Sometimes it will just harmonize the lead or play some arpeggios, sometimes it will be a more complex countermelody, and sometimes it will be a faked echo to help accentuate the lead more. All of this helps create a lot of contrast in the arrangement. It's pretty much just the triangle channel which is used mostly like how a modern bass section is, but even that one will often wander away from the root note for some specific notes on the lead(s) to help create a quick "chord" with them which is what often happens in counterpoint-based music.

The old music was inherently more interesting since the limited amount of polyphony pushed composers into a writing style which is very uncommon in modern western-based music: counterpoint. The people who made the music were generally also music nerds who were into stuff like progressive rock, Tangerine Dream, Vince DiCola etc. The move towards cinematic scores hasn't been helped by the fact that movie music in itself has become much more dull and conformist than it used to be. Everything nowadays is a set of nondescript stacatto strings. This is also tied in to the extreme inferiority complex gaming culture suffers from when comparing itself to movies, which bothers me to no end. There was also much more regional variety in the past, both for the games themselves and their music. You could generally tell if something was Japanese, European or American. In some cases you could even tell if the games came from a specific region in Europe or the US. Now the European and American game development cultures have merged into this single blob which you can't tell apart from eachother. Japan retains its quirks but it is also much more isolated so we don't get as much of it.