Nase

Being a good composer/arranger probably is about making that groupthink come alive in your head, treating every instrument as sort of a sentient player, or character. What style of sequencing is closest to a live jam? I'm not sure, but it probably has to do with the aforementioned initial broader brush strokes, as well as an ability to work a bit here and a bit there. I sometimes notice how i like to get lost in sequencing and extending very specific bits of a track. That may result in something unexpectedly cool or in a complete dead end. Sometimes you just come up with a bit you fall in love with, but the more you work on it in a vacuum, the more it loses touch with the rest of the track. The bass player in my head is like that. He's really obsessed with poseresque slapbass stunts, much to the dismay of the rest of the band.

I'd buy the audiobook version and listen on headphones while falling asleep. Spoken japanese always makes me relax.

I just wouldn't buy a boring chart-ridden book on the subject. If there was a book titled "Hiroki Kikuta: My 101 Secrets of Midi Orchestration", i'd buy that. Either make it exciting or trial & error all the way. I just wouldn't read it. YMMV, peace out XD

Entropy is a great word in that context. I really enjoy using the MPC style pads that a lot of ipad apps feature. One way to come up with patterns on them is to put on 16th or 1/32 quantising and just go apeshit with the hihats or whatever. If your rhythm is very off, you'll simply get something more syncopated. It might sound awesome right away, or i might want to change a few notes or record again, but it beats clicking everything into the piano roll. With rhythm, you don't have to consider parameters like dissonance. It's either straight or more out there, or barely recognisable. Just give any variation a try. Let entropy creep into the process and then filtrate the whole mess to your liking. I always found harmonies way more daunting as far as experimentation goes. Rhythmic development comes relatively easy to me once i have something i can build it around.

That's cool. Let's just say some subjects will never get the awesome manual they possibly deserve. Making an instructional book on midi and mixing/orchestration and making that truly exciting would be such an amazing feat that it'd probably bend space and time as well. Eye of the beholder. Get your excitement from wherever it might come...

Couldn't agree more. Even if your timing sucks, you can hard quantise everything if all else fails. It just helps so much to quickly lay down a basic beat with some fills and variations, then edit that. Sequencing everything is more tedious, no matter if you make the world's most delicious copy pasta. I really have to wonder why i did it for so long.

Godspeed then! Don't be surprised though if the book bores the fuck out of you.

No it isn't. I answered your question, the problem is you don't want the answer. Go do what your idols did. Don't wait until one of them writes a book about it. The one thing you have to do with samples is be able to register their individual strengths and weaknesses, timbre and freq spectrum, and use them in an intelligent blend. No book can teach you that ability, it can just give pointers. It is way more effective to get down and dirty with samples and just understand waveforms better, then understand how to make them work via midi in the most musical way. If your sample libraries kept you from ever viewing a sampler from the inside, they've done you no good. Shit ain't rocket science. Don't be worried about coming off as frustrated, i know i'm coming off as arrogant by now

Uh, doesn't sound like you're looking for a book. Sounds to me like you want to learn how to throw samples into a sampler and construct instruments out of them. Do what these VGM guys were doing back then. The tools have become more powerful and easier since. Why read a book when you can create your own imaginary VGM sample set, use it in test tunes and tweak it to perfection accordingly? I learned loads about smart sample use when i ripped a couple wave sets from SNES ROMs and reconstructed the instruments in Kontakt. If you want to learn about samples, go lower level on all these sample banks you already got, tweak and mix up stuff, and maybe record your own material. Not only will you learn a lot, you'll also be mighty proud once you can use your own sampled instruments in your music

If you can do midi "glitch" in a sequencer, it's a good one

Depends. There are a load of options really. The connector/adapter BS threw me off at the start because i was basically looking at a bunch of outdated products, like you said. Little did i realise i had a perfectly compatible device on my desk already. Before i learned that i could just use the x-station's line in, i was set on getting Jamup Plug from amazon for $20. If you combine that with the CCK and any usb midi keyboard, you got your basic recording setup. Someone recommended the m-audio venom. Similar to the X-Station, you're getting a keyboard, mic/line ins, an onboard synth and an audio interface. They're selling the venoms for really cheap now. In other news, i think i found my sequencer. First tune with beatmaker 2! Best 18 bucks spent! http://soundcloud.com/shlonz/ha-ha-ha

True. And the official apple adapters are just too damn expensive. As i said though, USB devices tend to be very compatible. Get a powered USB hub (cheap) and the lightning CCK from apple (pricey). Or wait until a 3rd party hub comes out that connects via lightning connector and powers the ipad as well. Cause that's the one thing i can't do with this setup. The ipad mini (which i have) has excellent battery life tho, and with the hub powering the other devices it can last for quite a while. I think the mini is a great choice for musicians based on form factor, but if i was considering an ipad right now, i'd wait until the mini comes with the new CPU they built into the ipad 4. which should happen within half a year. ....what have i become! I enjoy technobabbling about apple products. Please kill me now

Touch device music making is still in its infancy, but that's part of why it's so fun. The number of really comprehensive music tools is limited, but you can witness a lot of creative designs emerging from the touchscreen paradigm. Any DAW on PC/Mac is more powerful. But powerful doesn't always mean effective, or fun. I mean, i can sequence lying on my bed now. In case i want to record midi or audio, i just stand up, plug the ipad into the hub and play my guitar or midi controller. Touch devices are fun. It wouldn't have to be apple, but that's where most of the audio devs end up at, heh. If you look at the ipad like a console (which it is by all means), i'd say the software lineup justifies the overpriced hardware.

Ok, this is kind of exciting: I got a USB hub to connect stuff to my ipad via the camera connection kit, and tried hooking up my old x-station which is a portable audio interface/preamp/synthesizer/midi controller type thing. Everything just worked right away! The ipad instantly switched to the x-station's interface, i could record midi and audio, record the synth, use the insert fx...basically do everything i could do with it on a PC. Pretty awesome. Off to garageband

MORE LIKE TRIGGER CHEEZE The finest cheese available, directly from the moon. <3 Do you still hate Thorazine? (pretzel mentioned it)

Yup, vst in appworld. Anyone tried tabletop? It's like a mini reason, sort of. Basic version is free, but the free instruments aren't so hot. I got the 303 and the impc for it. Good fun for jamming, very basic sequencing. Would be cool for live if it didn't crash every other while...

Oh that looks delicious. Maybe this can help me to become friends with notation again (not sure how much of a friendship we had so far :/ ) Cubasis got a definite "meh" response. Solid foundation, but nothing special and lacking some key features (automation, apparently). Just summing up other's impressions, i was interested myself. When i see major functionality updates happen, i might be interested again. Right now, VFM seems off when you compare it to other offerings in the appworld. Check out Auria if you haven't, same price as cubasis, but probably the only daw you'd ever need if you like to work with audio. It's really good supposedly. I'm more on the midi side though. If only nanostudio had basic audio channel functionality as well....all you can do is sample audio onto the drum pads and trigger those.

Nanostudio is still the best midi sequencer for iOS period. It isn't gimmicky at all. It sounds good and handles supremely well on an ipad. Figure is fun but very much on the toy side. Give wejaam a try, it's a samplebased groovebox for free with a lot more power. Audiobus is the current hype; it enables you to chain supported apps together in an in - fx - out manner. Cool shit, but only worth it on an ipad 4. running apps in parallel requires loads of cpu. The one thing i think that everyone should have is Impaktor. It turns your desk into any kind of drum, basically. It's a drum synth that utilises the microphone in a contact mic manner. Quite unique.

Sure you did, but you left something out; style transcends genres. When an artist feels at home in many different genres, figuring out his overall style might be a slightly more abstract deal. No matter what genre, It's still the same person though, speaking with modified syntax, and maybe another set of vocal chords. The language analogy really works best. Additional languages open you up to new registers of expression. Each language has its little rules, quirks and limitations. Few venture to bend the rules dramatically, except street slang i guess. And that's where the crossover usually happens. So...genre isn't style, but playing around with many genres can make for a very interesting style.

It's like, back in the heyday of classical, everyone was fine with stealing. There were so few composers around compared to today, and i don't think they worried about being "progressive" or original enough as much. Every composer was more 'avantgarde' in his own little way because there weren't as many compositions around for reference. These days, it's a tad more crowded. And humans like to compare. Sad story. With an infinite amount of stuff to compare your own stuff with, you might arrive at a point where you doubt if you have anything original in you. It's a psychological road to hell. I think the art lies in somehow tricking your comparative system and just keep doing shit. Think of it in terms of this site: When you join it and want to get a mix posted, you're joining a sub-community of the larger community that is music makers. Duh. If said wish of a posted mix overrides your Ego's previous wish of reinventing music, you're narrowing your comparative scale. It might still be a petty wish compared to the actual awesomeness of making music, but at least it might get you somewhere. Originality for the sake of originality = lethargy

Way late answer, but anyway: The first 3 minutes or so came down real easy, in a day or two. I got a bit tired of it then and left it with a rather lame ending. The rest i added 2 weeks later or so. Really glad i kept working on it. I rarely do much with files that have been lying around for a while, but it was so worth it in this case. If you wanna do long remixes with a short attention span, you have to break up stuff sometimes

Ditto on the Secret of Mana + vibe. Though SoM+ has a bit more of that artsy jap pop style going on, sort of like ryuichi sakamoto. This is really chill though. I thought the second half couldve easily included more source stuff, i was hearing it in my head even. But i guess you were going for more of a reductionist type thing, which is cool too. Just a pleasant tune with a lot of SoM to it...but on many other levels than notation. As far as that goes, it's pretty liberal indeed. I'm glad though that stuff like this can get a spotlight here.

That's weird...I bought it with FL back then, but i distinctly remember an image line update news bit declaring it part of the free suite.

IMO, think about including one free workhorse like Synth1. 3xosc is capable of enough, but ehhh, that multi mini page GUI... Isn't WASP free now though? That one is quite underrated. Try the different filter types, great for acid...

Hm, can I make a mix in lsdj? Also L99, which track from tmnt2 are you doing!! Omg that OST is so kickazzsz! Skateboard stage!!!