Villainelle
-
Posts
297 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Articles
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Villainelle
-
-
Wow, awesome arrangement! Can't think of anything to suggest aside from production issues...
I really like this and was bored, so I actually threw your MP3 into FL and messed with it a bit. You have nice clean levels and good dynamics in the mix--I'm just not sure why you limited at -6dB? That's on the quiet side for mixes on this site, esp. rock. The mix sounds pretty good, but a bit muddy overall, and drums are on the flabby side. I tried a moderately wide cut of -3.5dB or so at 500Hz and it did a lot to cut the mud. Any minor cuts there in the low mids would help to give space for the guitars and bring out some general clarity. Also, the drums could stand more compression imo.
But yes. Minor quibbles aside, this is a rockin' track. I'm no judge but I think even if you just raised the volume this would very likely pass. Or pass just like this too! Again, really great arrangement and playing. Kudos.
-
Haha, phew.
Go Alex!This source tune is trickier than it seems...more comments about that after the submission deadline is up.
-
Reminds me a bit of Billy Joel. Very catchy. Nice use of the battle fanfare as outro.
-
Cool, thanks. That song is really sparse, so actually you've done a lot of fleshing out of it already. This is a pretty good start I think, the rearrangement is great, it just sounds like it could use some added touches and FX. Scratching would be wicked on this.
Have you heard Ziwtra's latest mix?
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01540/
I'm thinking stuff similar to that could work here--some string stabs or quick runs, scratching, a little more variation in the beats, maybe some piano comping. Not saying to copy that exactly, but stuff in that vein could fill out your mix more and diminish the repetitiveness of some parts.
Anyway, yeah, nice start, dude.
-
What song is this a remix of? It sounds vaguely familiar, I'm going through the soundtrack trying to figure it out. I like the hip-hop vibe, but it needs some fleshing out.
-
(4/6/07)
Oh hey, my b-day. I would love to try participating in this since switching to FL, but having a wide-open canvas isn't as inspiring as being challenged by limitations like PRC, imo. Any chance you may narrow down the premise like last time?
Also, more serious question - is there an archive of past FLMCs anywhere?
-
Bumping this awesome WIP.
I know it hasn't been too long since your last post, but I'm dying to know what's going on with it. -
Likewise. Too many people on the internet seem likely to get up in arms about stupid BS. I know you're not being antagonistic anyways. You just don't realize that I know what I'm talking about yet. Whether or not you're one of these internet guys that will post ANYTHING to avoid admitting that someone else knows their stuff remains to be seen of course.
Yes, you seem to know what you're talking about and have more knowledge about it than I do. I don't have a problem admitting that. The reason I replied was that your first post in this thread came off as misleading, qualified with meaningless buzzwords--no offense, you admitted that yourself. Now that you've clarified it I understand the conditions of your test and so should anyone else, which is great.
It does seem self-evident however, and I'm not sure why it needed to be said in the first place--the original post in this thread is talking about CPU load and latency, not recording quality. So an audio card records an analog line-level source better than an onboard sound chip? In other words, as stated previously and more simply...you'll get a better live recording of anything with an audio card as opposed to onboard sound? ...duh? Did we need all this to come to that conclusion again? The Ys CD example just seems misleading in this context.
Since you like to speculate about the psychological motivations of people on message boards, let me return the favor--you seem like someone who knows a bit about sound tech and likes to flaunt it, unsolicited, on message boards; who makes provocative yet ambiguous qualitative claims without full disclosure of all relevant data, so that you can respond patronizingly to those who, in their confusion and relative ignorance, take issue with you. You do in fact remind me a lot of an ex-member of this forum, Compyfox.
Anyway, done with this thread. I hope the OP got whatever answer he was looking for.
-
the comparison is purely that of one A/D converter and internal analog routing vs. another under identical load.
Is the CD drive using an analog connection to the audio card? Obviously any analog element introduced into the signal chain is going to introduce imperfections, however pleasant they may be. A purely digital signal chain would not.
The analog circuitry of a given sound card has nothing to do with digital information. Which again, is why the sound of a software synth will be exactly the same with either sound chip, as it shouldn't pass through any analog routing. But if a CD was ripped from a drive with an analog connection to the sound card, there would certainly be some coloration. Perhaps this explains why your recordings differ?
I hope this doesn't come across as antagonistic. I'm just curious about how you set up this test. If all conditions are identical, a purely digital signal chain will give identical copies of a sound. So something is amiss here.
The MP3/JPEG artifact thing is an analogy. Sorry it was unclear, I was illustrating what happens when inaccuracy is introduced while working with source material. Here's a different example.
Take any sound.
Play that sound through any signal chain that contains some analog component.
Record the sound after it exits the chain.
Do this repeatedly.
The analog inaccuracies introduced will gradually accumulate until the sound becomes noise.
Even if it only happens once, it's no longer the same as the source and can't cancel out with it.
If one person does this while another copies the sound through a wholly digital signal chain, the resultant files will not cancel out upon phase inversion.
If both pass through purely digital signal chains, they will remain identical and cancel out, regardless of the sound chips used.
I hope this is clearer now.
And just some food for thought--I'm not sure what other sites you read or participate in, but I lurk around some like KVR, NorthernSounds, Gearslutz etc. These are frequented by audiophiles and professionals of all sorts. Topics like "DAW X sounds better than DAW Y" pop up all the time, and have been conclusively proven wrong. But I don't see many claims about sound cards sounding better than one another. If there was a real difference in the digital sound processing amongst sound cards, you can be sure these audiophiles and professionals would be all over it, even if it was negligible. Everyone would want the best, hobbyists would do tests, people would recommend Sound Card X's warmer sound over Sound Card Y's colder sound, etc. Product marketing would follow suit. But none of this is the case. There are endless battles over every type of analog component, but digital components are...digital. All that matters is whether they have the range of features you need.
Congrats on your mix being accepted, btw.
-
Mmmk then, I'll go first.
I just switched from Cubase to FL Studio a few days ago, and this is the first mix I've done in FL. Have to say...I absolutely love it. So much more fun/intuitive/FAST to work with, for me at least.
Yes, all of my song titles WILL be tacky puns.
-
Justus...welcome to the forum; let me point out a few things.
1) Yes, a good sound card is very important if you're recording anything that originates from OUTSIDE of your computer, like guitar, voice, a hardware synth, whatever...but is basically irrelevant for VSTs (except for how much latency you can tolerate), for example.
2) Part of what makes a good recording is how ACCURATE it is to the actual sound recorded. While a "warm" quality is usually desireable for a final mix, if it's introduced during the recording process, it's called sound coloration, and it's not supposed to happen. Even if it sounds good, coloration is an alteration of the clean source sound, something that should be done with great care either deliberately during the recording with e.g. an effects box or hardware compressor etc., or added as an effect once the audio is in your DAW, so that you can control it or avoid it altogether if you prefer.
3) Regarding your example WAV...it doesn't sound "warmer" to me; what it does sound like is that the second recording is clearer and has more detail - in fact, very much like it was recorded at a higher sample rate than the first, and then both recordings were sampled down to 44.1khz in your DAW or WAV editor. I noticed you didn't mention the sampling rate, so I suggest you run the test again and make sure both sound cards record at the same rate, volume, etc. Then take both WAVs into your editor, lay one on top of the other, and invert one. They should cancel out.
4) If all sound cards recorded or rendered audio differently with their own special sound coloration, we wouldn't be able to do the above phase inversion test across computers - your card would add a little something whenever you rendered, mine would add something different. Eventually you'd end up with something like what happens to a JPEG or an MP3 that gets compressed over and over - complete noise.
Your specific audio interface can record at up to 192khz - I have an M-Audio Audiophile 192 that can as well. I could do your WAV test again and get you similar results - recording at 192khz will sound amazingly pristine in comparison to murky old 44.1.
Hope this has been informative.
-
You guys must be smoking something. The original is a beautiful track, and made it to the official FFVIII rearrangement album as a breath-taking orchestrated piece.
This mix is a great take on it, much more daring and jazzy. The slight touches of dissonance and variations in rhythm give it a lot of interest - the original is almost syrupy sweet and modestly paced, while this has some edge. Really dig the changeup and more energetic drums at 1:20, reminds me strongly of acoustic indie/folk rock there.
Thanks for this - I love the original, and this is a nicely creative interpretation of it.
-
What Prasa said.
You can use the ASIO4ALL driver with just about anything, including onboard sound chips, and get very reasonable latency. A nice audio card will be slightly better, but it's not a huge overall performance difference. What would make a big difference is a DSP card, which does some of the processing of plugins and takes that load off your CPU.
If you're recording any live sources, having a good sound card is important. It will affect your latency and quality while recording, and has a lot more inputs/outputs than onboard sound. If you do a lot of MIDI recording and your latency with ASIO4ALL isn't acceptable, then yeah, a nice audio card can cut it down a bit.
If you just want to be able to use more VSTs and effects, the biggest difference you could make would be upgrading your CPU, or adding a DSP card. After that, RAM. After that, sound card, fast hard drives, optimize your OS, etc.
-
Bloody Samus = fucking win. Thanks for the new desktop. Anyone know the origins of that piece? Looks a bit too polished for fanart.
-
Hiya AS. Some quick comments - this is pretty good, best of luck with the resub.
- drums are noticeably in front of the first minute or so of music, I think because of the reverb/delay on everything else, and the sparse sequences playing - it just sounds a little too thin and separated there - maybe another pad or quiet arp sequence could help fill up the space and glue things together
- the crashes that start during the ELP improv and continue to the end are kind of erratic and distracting - esp. with the hard panning to left and right - I would cut out a great deal of them and either do a lot of variation with their velocity (esp. if you have a kit with multiple samples), or run them through some filters - also don't think the hard panning is necessary, a light lean to either side would be enough to suggest space without being so distracting
- the ride that comes in around halfway through gives some good energy at first, but becomes wearying after a while and should switch up its pattern or alternate with another cymbal by 3:00 at most
- piano that comes in around 2:30 is pretty quiet and murky
- overall mix is a bit heavy on the low-end with not much presence in the high end of the spectrum, giving it a kind of murky sound - the piano might sound better brighter, cut some lows/boost highs on various other things to sharpen it all up
- I liked the ending personally
it's fine, nice and mellow like most of the rest of the songHTH!
-
Just wanted to come back to this after listening to it a bunch. It's easy to overlook the bass in a song; we tend to just absorb it subconsciously, and sometimes it's treated the same way by the composer, as just a sort of conveyor belt to move the song along - but going through my OCR playlist, and reading some comments by the elusive Ziwtra, I was struck by how awesome his bass writing is. It's especially evident in this song, with that bass just popping in your face and riffing all over the damn place. So good, and very instructive.
If he lurks around, I'm curious what kind of music Ziwtra listens to that gives him such a keen sensibility for bass. I would guess some influence from jazz, as he doesn't use it as just another rhythmic element, but a voice in its own right.
Anyway, love this stuff.
-
Your server isn't responding, Miszou.
I heard the shorter WIP the other day from the SM64 project thread though, and was blown away. How is it you don't have any remixes on OCR yet? Or do you release them under a different name?
Regarding synths sounding "generic"...I don't think that criticism means much, especially without qualifying it. There's such an incredible amount of VSTs available with so many presets, it's difficult to recognize anything except a really unique one. At worst particular types of sounds may have strong genre associations, like trance and the supersaw. I think when people call synths "generic" they really mean "bland," which could be because of lack of effects, poor EQing/presence in the mix, or just playing a boring sequence of notes. And from the WIP I heard, this wasn't the case at all. So who knows. Some people just like criticizing shit without basis. (I do it too. ><)
-
This owns face.
Admittedly, I'm one of the nerds who was listening to the teaser that zircon posted in the WIP forum, eagerly waiting for the finished version - and it completely delivers. Love the trademark Elfman-esque bells during the break. The synth guitar gives me goosebumps.
Please make music forever.
-
!
Nice call, Rexy.
-
Great, thanks zircon. Good to know that you find it easy to handle, your stuff is lightyears beyond me so it shouldn't be a prob then.
By collapsing I mean minimizing the size, like the zip function in the step sequencer, making it easier to focus on other stuff etc.
-
Hi. First off, I'm coming from Cubase SX3, which I love for the most part except for two major things - its poor drum editing capabilities (the drum map doesn't cut it for me), and the stupid fact that you can't reorder effects inserts. (And while it's a minor thing comparitively, SX3 takes ages to load, doing a full plugin scan each cold startup. ><) I'm pretty pissed about Steinberg dropping the SX3.2 update and not really motivated to upgrade to C4, so ultimately I'm looking to switch hosts. FLStudio7 is my top candidate (esp. for price/free lifetime upgrades), but what's holding me back is its non-traditional approach to linear sequencing.
Okay, so in FL7 I see that you can send patterns to the clip sequencer, great. Is there any way to collapse or hide clips of a certain type? For example, collapse/hide all automation, or collapse all automation for X plugin only? Cubase is great at this, you can drop any kind of track - MIDI, automation, audio etc. - into a folder and show/hide it, nest folders within one another, etc. With FL I think I'd be working primarily with pattern and automation clips so being able to organize them is important.
Also, how close can you get to actual linear sequencing with clips? I've tried out the Make Unique action, which creates a new pattern in the pattern sequencer pane, but keeps the clip on the same horizontal axis in the clip sequencer. So if I have a ton of clips with different contents arranged linearly on the clip sequencer, I'm going to have a zillion patterns up in the pattern sequencer? And is there some way to record MIDI directly to a new pattern clip on a linear sequence of clips, instead of needing to go through the pattern sequencer first?
TIA for any advice.
-
This is just ear-piercingly loud. You already got good commentary about the other aspects of it, but here's something to keep in mind in the future: before you post, compare the loudness of your track against other OCRemixes of similar type, the more recent the better (as production techniques have been improving over the life of this site). When yours is so jarringly loud compared to them, something is wrong.
Anyway, I want to point out something not related to the mix...
The more annoying the host you're using for your file is, the less likely people are to listen to it. For example, Rapidshare has been falling out of popularity because of the ridiculous lengths it makes you go through to get a file. Putfile and its sibling sites are also pretty horrid, and they like to crash Firefox anyway. Clicking 20 pages to get to a file? Give me a fucking break. This host you're using is pretty silly as well. I have to input a password and THEN wait some arbitrary period of time so I can download at 20k/sec on cable? Nothx.
I don't know why you guys insist on using annoying hosts like this when Soundclick has been around for ages and is pretty hassle-free. Failing that, there's Googlepages. And members here with their own servers are constantly offering to host files too.
Sorry to rant, I just get so tired of this crap. If you want people to listen, make it easy for them! It's not like you have no alternatives here.
-
-
Isn't this like the second or third time it's happened to him?
Can't say I care. The guy is filthy rich and can replace virtually anything. The stuff he couldn't, e.g. project files, should have been backed up. And you'd think after multiple robberies, you'd spend a little on better security or something.
PRC89: How many barrel rolls have YOU done today? [Results]
in Competitions
Posted
Okay, since submissions are over...what was with the modulation in this source tune? I'm pretty sure most of it was in F minor except that middle verse, so that's what I went with and just threw out the rest...actually didn't even look at the MIDI beyond that part and just winged it. Is that what you did too Xela?
Also, this song basically having no bass aside from the timpani was...interesting. >.>