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lol, I'd forgotten about that one. Though going back and listening, it's a pretty conservative arrangement, and we'll have to expand it quite a bit. To be honest, I have a couple other ideas which I would prefer to work on when you have the time to start another collab. ... Well it looked like a cool idea to start with. Even moreso if you could bring your friend pixietricks to do some vocals. That being said, I'm often too ambitious with my projects so shoot any ideas you have as soon as the Tales project is released.

- Zelda mix with Taucer (yeah it's been sleeping for like a year now) - Katamari main theme mix with one of my friend - Tales of Symphonia Fighting of the spirit - Top Gear Track 1 ultra cheesy-rock - Terra theme - Naruto GNT4 rock song (night stage in the sakuras) - Any Ubisoft game (since I've been working for them for like 5 months), probably Beyond Good and Evil - Xenosaga Ep2 Communication Breakdown - Shadow's Theme (FFVI blues version) iIn something like 3-4 years I'll be done

Tell him I can always help, especially if he needs some kind of guitar battle, which would fit the song nicely.

do you really nthe ?

I'm taking care of that. Basically just adjusting levels for tracks that were too quiet or too loud, and compressing and eqing everything JUST a little bit so that it sounds more cohesive.

Having freed myself from one major pain (Law), I am free to work on whatever in this project. If anybody needs help from an arranger/guitarist to make it on the deadline, just PM me.

why isn't this project in Site Projects ?

well for starters, is 'less than 2000$' an exaggeration or are you looking for something in the 1000-1500$ price range ?

It does indeed. Not as much tone as a Les Paul though, but way better than the new Petrucci Music Man. Unfortunately, my setup is a Mesa Boogie Blue Angel with a ToneBone Hot British Distortion, so my tone isn't HALF a heavy as yours with a triple rectumifier. Hopefully, when I got the monies, that will be corrected And Majin, your Blue Strat is AWESOME. Love the color.

Hehehe actually, the guy at the music shop told me I'd got the last JPM available in Quebec before it got discontinued.

going to see it tonight. Seeing as djpretzel is quite the cinephile around here, I'd like to have his input on this movie.

I never tried ProTools, but I'm curious as to why you would say something like that. Could you explain why you hate it so much ?

thanks for your comment In light of what both what you told me here and what Compyfox told me on IRC, I decided to buy an E-MU 1820M with Emulator X (hardware accelerated with GIGA support). So far, what I'm hearing is awesome. I have preamps with that that are a lot beter than me previous Behringer UB-502. I haven't tried Em-X now, I just set up my card, but I can't wait to hear the 2G worth of samples. I just paid that 770 CAN, which would be about 690 USD... What do you guys think ?

I use your mom

indeed. 9/8 can be 'felt' as 3/4 with triplet feel, just like 6/4 can be felt as 4/4 with triplet feel.

While I think this is brilliantly arranged, I can understand some of the judges reticences regarding this mix. The arrangement and sound structure sure is brilliant, but, considering this, this song gains absolutely NOTHING being lo-fi. I do not see the lo-fi charm here, just something brilliantly done with poor samples. Given the style of the song (repetitive, groove oriented), I would have liked a pounding bass line and drum. Panning is pretty good but synths could have been so much more interesting with a little more texture. The biggest gripe here is that I picture this song being very danceable, but the poor quality of the drum make it sound like a ultra hi-fi SNES song; the problem here being that, given the drum fills and all that shit, it could never play in a SNES game. So I like the structure and ideas of this a lot, but I think making it sound chiptunesque (it's obvious it's not an actual chiptune) is a very bad idea.

Writing odd time signatures is actually easier (at least for me, and, I've heard, for John Petrucci, not that I compare with him ) if you have terrible rhythm and imagine weird melodies without even realizing it. The only real suggestion I could make is to listen to a lot of music in odd times (Dream Theater and Symphony X spring to mind) and try to emulate them before venturing into that area yourself. Since I'm a sucker for odd times, there are a couple of methods I've developed to handle them: 1) if you're writing in a time signatures that otherwise disrupts the flow of the song, you can have a pulse on the drums accentuating the beats of an even time signature. Say you're playing in 13/16 and it feels really odd compared to the rest of the song, you can have the high hat play on every 8th note (that way it will play the upbeats on every 2 measures) to prevent listener's fatigue. 2) if you're writing only a part of your song in odd times to make it sound progressive, don't hesitate to alternate time signatures. Dream Theater's Hell Kitchen and Dance of Eternity are good examples of this. 3) A good way to have an odd time feel and keep a groove on is to play different time signatures on different instruments. For example, have your drum play in 4/4 and your guitar/bass play the same thing in 7/8. At each fourth bar of your groove, you'll be at 32/8 for the drum and 28/8 for the guitar/bass, so just do a four 8th notes fill to keep the instruments together. 4) Another good way to handle odd times is to think geometrically with your guitar. Say you are playing in 9/8, you want to find a cool lick, think of a 9 notes pattern. For example, in 9/8 in Em, you could do: E-F#-G-A-F#-G-A-B-C and repeat one octave higher after. The lick I've done in my solo on my Xenosaga mix was originally thought out in 9/8, but was adapted to /4 because the song would have sucked in 9/8. It's a really cool lick I often do, and I could transcribe it if you want to. anyways, good songs to listen to/analyze if you wanna get a gasp of odd times: Dream Theater: Hell's Kitchen Dream Theater: A Change of Seasons Dream Theater: Octavarium Dream Theater: Metropolis part I Dream Theater: Dance of Eternity (technical massacre) Symphony X: Communion of the Oracle (see tip #3) Symphony X: Fallen (see tip #3) Andromeda: Parasite Andromeda: Reaching Deep within (see tip #3) Andromeda: One in My Head (best odd time shit I've heard in all my life at the end, no the tempo doesn't slow down ) Steve Vai: silkiest smooth odd times I've heard (11/8) Joe Satriani: Echo (also, silk smooth 5/4) Yuji Kajiura, Xenosaga Ep2 soundtrack, Communication breakdown: parts in 4/4, others in 5/4 and, if I remember well, other in 6/4 yet extremely smooth.

Yo. So I recently bought a new computer and audio monitors but I couldn't decide on an audio interface. I browsed a bit and asked some people around here in IRC but I'd like to maximize the input I have to make the right decision. I'm not looking for ultra-pro sound, but I'd like to make my guitar and vocal recordings decent and reduce the load on my poor CPU to process as many DXi/VST or whatever I choose to use later as possible. What I recently acquired is a Pentium D 940 (dual core 3.2GHz, usually slower than AMD but with faster disk access) with 2GBs Kingston DDR2 (533MHz) RAM. I have a Behringer UB802 with SM57 mic. Here's what I found: RME Multiface 2 (PCI): way too many I/O for what I need, a bit pricey (735 USD on ebay) but guarantees pro quality and reduces CPU load. It should be extremely awesome considering sound quality and all, but will I really hear it with my 300$ monitors ? And will the reduced CPU load be necessary or is my system fast enough as is to process anything ? E-MU 1212M: only one stereo in/out without headphone out, which is kind of a pain. Reviews say sound quality is pretty good but it does not support GSIF2 drivers so if I decide to take the Gigastudio plunge, I might be fucked (slower playback). Echo Gina 3G: This is what I think I should buy. There's a deal on ebay right and I could it for 200USD or less. Has mic preamps (are they better than the ones on my Behringer ?), 2 inputs (which is enough for me), headphone output, supports GSIF2.0 drivers and sound quality is supposed to be pretty good too. I don't really know if the chipset will help e with my VSTs but it should be better than my crappy former laptop anyways. your input is much appreciated, thanks.

I think 'charming' is the most appropriate word here. Nothing groundbreaking or fantastic, but it does put a smile on your face. My only problem is that production and playing issues would have been pretty easily fixed. Oh well...

Sorry... you can always check www.kylejcrb.com for public works in progress, but the full versions will be made available only when the project is completed.

guitar is for sissies

mind if I sig this ?

I work from 8h00 to 7h00 pm every day of the week Prophet: I've tried a couple of things for rhythm guitar, but nothing worthy of a song yet, that's probably why you haven't heard from me yet. spc1st: I haven't touched your intro since then, but I should be able to work something out during the week. Sorry about the delay

Heh pretty cool. If you want your progressions to sound 'jazzier' you can try substitutions too. The most common one I can think of is substitute IV to ii7 In C: IV = F A C ii7 = D F A C So you get the picture... you can always try substitutions yourself, as long as they remain diatonic to the scale you're in (there are some times when non-diatonic chords work well too, but let's not elaborate too much on that). Some very basic chord progression that are useful to build riffs on: viii - VII - VI - V7 (used very often in popular music and can be given any kind of fell. I think Portishead's Roads is a little variant of that progression) viii - viii - VI - VII (used in old electronica and power metal pretty often too) I - I - IV - V7 or i - i - IV - V7 (used to give a bluesy feel to your riff) Of course this is pretty generic, you can always expand on this on do a riff with, say: viii - viii - VII - VII - viii - VI - VII - V7 NB: I notated viii or VIII just to say that the other chords should be lower.