Nase

while i generally support this, i have to confess that going through the top 100 made me realise that i've done enough 8 bit appreciation over the last decade. i loved discovering all the great NES OSTs before my time (lacking an older sibling, i'm of the SNES generation). loved trying out tracking on gameboy and famitracker. loved all that. but to be honest, i've grown a bit sick of the 8bit soundscape and its mannerisms. when musicians today are inspired by the old classic soundtracks, i hope they channel less of that into sounding 'retro cool', and rather take that simple 'less is more' concept with them, thinking up their own sets of limitation to push their abilities the hardest. Arcanum is a great example for what i mean. doing string quartet for a game made it completely unique at the time.

maybe all that is true, but Frank Zappa still pwns the shit out of Darksiders II

i probably did waste my time on here. wanted to write music yesterday, but that shit is hard. btw, personally, i don't like production. at all. i like ideas. sometimes production is needed to express ideas better. necessary evil.

i still can't fully accept that people born in '96 are now technically grownups then again, '86 here, and i don't exactly feel like one :3

Paul McCartney and John Lennon combined are definitely better than Koji Kondo. He'd be the first one to agree

well music is sex. i went through several months of depression, with utter lack of libido. music was boring as fuck (pun intended)

oh yes. i find it gets harder to maintain that mindset the further your track progresses. the happier i am with what i already got, the more conservative and stale i get with what i'm adding. i then need to pinch myself to wake up and take risks with the additional writing. once i do manage to add something, it often brings about a wealth of new ideas. sometimes all of them result in a dead end, the tune develops schizophrenia and i can't tie it back together. this is frustrating, and admitting defeat is sometimes the only option (rolling back to a previous version). but it's that wrestling with wildly different parts and ideas that makes for some of the best moments in my music making: the moments where i surprise myself.

LEAVE TIMAEUS ALONEE!!1"!"1 regarding the OCD, i cannot go for one plugin to rule them all because the simplicity of hard wired synths makes me more creative than modular type stuff like zebra. example with my current synth setup: synth 1, the workhorse. charlatan, the super simple subtractive with better oscs and filters. (recommended!) i left sytrus in there mostly for the presets. can't be bothered with advanced FM either. lofi stuff, nostaljia (adlib) and basic65 (c64). now i added an old favorite, oatmeal. it's great and has some unique properties, but also shares a lot of common ground with synth1. this is where the OCD kicks in and i get indecisive. i might be able to integrate it, or i might end up deleting it. i sort of miss the old days where i just juggled around with 30 different mostly redundant synthedit plugins without caring, but my mind works differently now.

timaeus: ectogemia's reply was a bit too snarky, but to consider 'someone's never played a genesis' an ad hominem is pretty funny. game music forums, heh the part of your post i actually found too authoritative wasn't the FM bit, but calling it 'silly' to limit yourself to one synth/synth type. there are good reasons to do just that sometimes, most of them to do with not limiting, but expanding your horizons.

sort of, i guess. however, there's one prime example showing that it's more about technological culture than regional culture: the C64.

haha, was gonna respond in a similar manner, but i let it slide. FM doesn't work that well in an example about limitations. try VA

stuff changes, and with it qualities are lost and gained. the limitations of the chips brought about a unique kind of sound (and composition style, to a lesser degree) that you didn't hear anywhere else. that difference is no more, and as a result game music is less of an 'alternate musical universe'. you can't really argue against game music sounding less unique today. the old unique palette was replaced with a much richer palette, comprised of everything ever used in music (redbook audio). a worthy upgrade, and inevitable. still, less one-of-a-kind. are the compositions better or worse? different story and completely subjective. should game composers study the old limitations to find out how they connect to the quality of past OSTs? definitely.

I realised i got plugin related OCD and have to keep my setup simple at all costs. currently counting 14 VSTis, and that already seems too much.

hey man! i agree on pretty much all fronts. in fact, i was already planning to make the bass intro less boring, and extend the first guitar part so the 2nd isn't so exposed. the rain will stay but i'm not that happy with the sample either. gotta find something smoother on youtube to sample from the cheese organ... well, it's gonna be in there for sure as that's ZAMN to me, but i might replace it with something more hammondy when it first appears, and crank up the cheese levels later! i was really just throwing in instruments after i did the laborious intro, nothing set in stone. thanks for elaborate feedback, good sensibility! ps: i'm going to need some laughing zombies soon, and i have no mic where i'm at. anyone feel like he can do a decent job on that? oh man, i just realised i gotta sample that laughter at the end of 'tell me people (am i going insane)'! perfect!! but i'll probably need more.

i thought he meant a single chord. example in C: D (II), G (V), C(I) idk if that is correct terminology but it's the only way i see the post making sense. regardless, the circle of fifths stuff is still good info.

apart from III-V-I... II-V-VII, dominant? am i misunderstanding this and you're talking about something more complicated? anyway, i suppose jazz people are attracted to layered fourths because you have a lot of options to move on from there. the more ambiguous the better.

so i started this today...it's basically a long ass intro in Sabbath style, sorta. spent the whole evening getting the guitars right! i stole the rainfall idea from Noppz' old ZAMN mix because it made everything more sabbathy. working title 'Ozzy ate my Neighbors'. ;9 then again, it already looks like the main part will have nothing at all to do with the intro, lol.

listened to a couple.. i like your style. it's pretty recognisable. i thought the frequency spectrum in some of your tunes is a bit heavy in the highs, considering it's game music. vysara's proving grounds is the prime example. that one's fizzy to the point where it becomes overbearing for me. tumbos is nice. so is tak's proposal. all good tunes, all very fizzy. i like fizzy, but consider moderating that a little. anyway, good work, good luck!

thanks! here, another one. bit earthboundy later on. https://soundcloud.com/skoshu/little-freak

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd30vKiWjFU&t=41m50s strangely relevant (and guess who's in there lol)

true, bass can provide counter-melody, and when it harmonizes with the melody it stands out more than with chords because the bass has its own rhythmic movement. relevance? only thing i can come up with: there is no right or wrong thing to tackle first in a tune, everything is interdependent. the melody might be hiding somewhere in that bassline (or beat, even) you just made.

nah, i say that because bass players can often scrape by with less theory and harmonic/melodic knowledge than, say, guitar players. in a band context. they sit right between guitarists and drummers as far as that goes. playing bass is about notes too of course, but the groove is arguably more important. of course, that says nothing about his songwriting capabilities per se. people are usually more than the roles they assume in groups or organisations of any kind. and in wooten's case, that's pretty damn obvious. but anyway, stuff's getting OT

probably true, but it's nice to think you can cheat your way around that as much as possible XD saying that only half-jokingly, cause as much as i know that every so-called genius knows the trials and merits of hard work, i'm convinced that there is also some 'genuine' cheating involved. the cheat codes simply being modes of thought and awareness that are available to anyone if they cared to rewire their brain a bit. we all teach ourselves some theory eventually, even if it just comes from our own trial and error playing stuff. a great way to not keep regurgitating your old stuff without taking a theory lesson is listening to other musicians, of course. even better, playing with them. victor wooten is a good example of a virtuoso that evidently went that route. (ok, bass player, i know, but listen to him. he knows a bit about melody and harmony.)

that's very well observed. though i suppose there is this fabled mode of purely intuitive writing/playing coupled with high awareness of what's happening, where every other mistake becomes a happy accident and you learn from it and take it on board. effectively slowly expanding your repertoire on the go. it's near impossible to keep that flow going forever though, which is why the left brained absorption method is useful.

i recently discovered Caustic 3 being available on iOS. similar to what Gadget seems to do, it works like sort of a mini Reason. it's cheaper, and if you push it hard it's probably more powerful than Gadget at this point of time (Soundfont import!) that video is made with the PC version, which is free. nice demo policy. as for anything replacing your main DAW, uh, no. unless you really dig the limitations. i'm sure there are people that replaced their main DAW with Little Sound DJ for a while because they were bored with VSTland.