Nase

eh, i've played around with it again. it's a good synth for what it does, even tho i can't imagine using it for many sounds. wavetable sounds tend to be soo cheesy 90% of the time

i remember getting it from a warez cd in like 2004, right after picking up FL well, now it's free, yay! might be worth checking out as it has a pretty original concept rather than being just a dated VA synth. http://plex.seib.info/

any1 playing tonight? i'll be playing all the time after 3 months of basically no net

there's enough house in there to make it somewhat catchy

I like the sounds. the tunes though? i just can't keep em in my head. i haven't heard a dubstep tune i'd call 'catchy'. not sayin music has to be catchy...but when i listen to hours of stuff and nothing sticks in me ear...meh. might as well be listening to chillout zone. i'm sure it's awesome for just going spastic in a crowd. from a creative perspective, most of it just feels bland. i can't help but think that someone took one single tune from some IDM album he particularily liked and decided to construct a genre around it. it doesn't sound all the same, but it sounds like the same idea mostly.

similar to witch slayer/lion stun in principle. you get more range by risking a missed stun. with the blink, it does seem like a pretty forced attempt of making it more skill based. still, i've always liked how most of the blinks are handled a bit differently in dota/hon. if the dota hero has been around for so long some people probably enjoy him a lot. idk, lots of things sound stupid in theory and you just have to play the hero to see if it makes sense in action or not.

oh youre posted! not much of a surprise either i'll listen when i have dsl again (which should be this afternoon, yay.)

make mixes you fag (have a good one)

yup, that's what makes him such a relaxing hero to play. chilling during charges and looking at the mini map in a kind of trance. then...Ha-haa! you need plenty of apm during fights however. it's not like he's a very demanding hero, but i've seen plenty of people fail monstrously with him.

buddy provided me with a 2nd account for rampage only purposes. if anyone wants to try some lolstomping add me_so_horny

only if you need the 4 gb ram or if your programs for some reason require win7. what are those newer synths you use? there are synths nowadays that can max quadcores with a couple instances. be aware of the alternatives. 1 polyphonic instance of Massive or Alchemy or whatever you use will take as much cpu as maybe 10 Synth1 patches playing at once. no question, the newer shit offers more possibilities, but how often are you going to use these? a lot of times, a 10 year old free vsti will do the same job in a mix. just collect some older vsts that are light on cpu and learn what they can do. i've learned to refrain from filling a project with cpu hogs from the start. 1 minute of song done, cpu sitting at 60% with some annoying spikes...forget about adding more instruments. the only solution at some point is to bounce everything to audio, and that's even more annoying. try maxing out your machine with just synth1...it's not possible unless you do a 60 minute piece with 100 instances or something.

yeah granular is a good cue. someone mentioned paulstretch; if i'm not mistaken extreme time stretching algos and granular synthesis share some similarities. granular is probably THE ambient/soundscape synthesis method if there is any. it's not like other forms of synthesis aren't used widely for the same purpose, but granular synthesis makes it very easy to come up with sounds suitable for ambient.

yeah, ambient is just a blanket term ofc. the first type of music you mention, i'd rather call that chillout or something, but it's not important. OP could link to some soundtracks he considers ambient and good. that might help. one basic definition of ambient is that it's meant to support an already existing ambience instead of creating an entirely new one. dunno how much truth is in that when you apply it to multimedia like games...a single monophonic drone can be either soothing or menacing, so the ambience and visuals can very definitely be twisted a lot. i think what it mainly says is that ambient music isn't meant to be listened to. it's meant to be taken in with the rest of the surrounding. you're trying to make the listener NOT think about the music. doing so ofc requires other sensibilities than making catchy tunes. idk, learning by doing man. you can pick up tricks but it's like speaking a different language, and you need syntax for that. still, it's a pretty easy language. or maybe i just find it easy because my parents used to play ambient stuff at home all the time. i guess i just absorbed it.

making decent ambient muzak is piss easy. easy to mix, easy to compose. it's also potentially boring to make; you need to establish a kind of flow that focuses on finding sounds and gradual evolution rather than complex composition. just play around with mellow sounds...going at ambient from a technical perspective seems stupid. it's a genre invented by deliberately 'amateur' people. explore different soundscapes and shit. you need to learn to be musically unobtrusive without being boring. of course there's a technical perspective to that, but man, i expect you spent a good amount of time learning how to mix as much in your face as possible. that is the hard part, technically. NOT doing that isn't that hard at all. i could never produce a 'commercial' sounding dnb/metal/whatever mix to save my life, but i was able to make decent sounding ambient a couple months after starting out. like, stuff that could be used in games. especially with all those showoff synth presets tending towards the ethereal. i repeat, it's easy. you'll be fine as far as sound sources go, any fucking thing. oldschool ambient mostly featured heavily effected acoustic sounds, drowned in endless delay/reverb tails among countless other fx. any synth with an adsr envelope is going to work for pad sounds. there are synths greatly suited for ambient but in the end it doesn't matter one bit. it's all about slowly evolving sounds. you can get those sounds right from the synth or from the fx chain or from changing parameters on the fly, it doesn't matter.

yup, learning dota is a bit like those multitasking flash games where the screen splits every few seconds and a new minigame opens up. trying to play all minigames from the start will leave you restless and confused. it's impossible. thus, no fun. once you've played a thousand games though, you'll appreciate all that stuff. it stops being about all those little separate games. you see the game as a whole because your mind isn't distracted by them anymore. denying isn't just this little minigame. it's strategy too if you want. pick plague and parasite in hon and you can deny almost half a creepwave before it even reaches the enemy. lastly, not each and every hero requires every trick in the book to be played decently. while some make a point of forcing you to use certain mechanics (do your stacks with axe), many offer abilities that can balance out possible weaknesses of yours. poor last hitting? get rampage or deadwood or whatever. poor sense of positioning? try some of the blinkers/escape artists. no skills whatsoever? get blacksmith! it's all fun if you take it slowly and accept that some people are going to pwn the shit out of you because they've taken the time to learn how to do it right.

BLECK once you learn denying it won't bother you. muscle memory and all. i hated it just as you and mostly just focused on lasthits. i hated lasthitting too, but gold is nice. seriously i know where you're coming from with this and i would've agreed until about a year ago (when i started getting a clue about hon). this stuff is a bitch to learn, it's fiddly, it doesn't feel rewarding and you'd rather just focus on more important stuff like strategy and ganks and all that. see, once that stuff is in your muscles, the frustration stops. it'll just be a fun mechanic. you might still dislike it in principle then but you'll stop caring because you'll have too much fun snatching the exp from your enemies. it is archaic in some ways, but it also creates a kind of learning curve and multitasking challenges you don't see much in games anymore.

there are directwave users?

man is right. making stuff is imperative. it's good to read up on production and theory and compositional approaches and all that, but if you just make a lot of stuff and enjoy it you should be good. i didn't really use effects for about half a year after picking up FL. all i cared about for a while was the piano roll and the synths. if you keep using the program you inevitably delve deeper at some point. i suppose some people prefer to really know their tools before doing much with it. i think it's more effective to teach yourself from the start how to retain a balance of challenge to yourself. like, make stuff with your limited knowledge of the program. if you just make a lot of stuff, some kind of productive routine will set in after a while. you'll sequence more efficiently. sooner or later you get bored with your usual ways of making a tune, or you hit a barrier. there's this sound you want to achieve but your known tools and tricks aren't up to the task. well, that is the perfect time to open this weird complex vst or read up on formant synthesis or analyse bulgarian wedding music. you know, flow concept and all that.

man, that was one piece of shit software. it was still fun as hell.

awesome. hon kind of missed that opportunity as the spoken bits are pretty much as repetitive as in wcIII. i've been especially annoyed with rhapsody lately... DO RE MI SO LALA LALAL SHUT THE FUCK UP

while that's good advice, it's probably as helpful to remember some 'template' sounds you can quickly patch together, then go on from there. you could try replicating some signature fm sounds first, like typical bell- or brasslike timbres. knowing how to quickly dial up these sounds should be a nice stepping stone to doing more advanced stuff on their basis. FM is great at making sounds that are somewhere in the grey area between harmonic and inharmonic. inharmonic is easy enough to do as you have surely experienced it's worth knowing how to keep your sounds 'clean' when you want to.

so, if you guys are playing again, hook me up for a match sometime. nick is still skoshu.

he sez its funay.

i suppose it's pretty much the same as learning subtractive synthesis, just a bit more complex and counter-intuitive. but you still learn by trying out shit, reverse engineering stuff, and learning from others about effective ways of creating certain types of sound. in the subtractive (pre-wired) world there's usually only so much you can do, and you quickly gain the analytic skills to mentally deconstruct sounds, hearing the different modules at interplay. not having bothered much with FM myself, i'm having trouble hearing what's going on beyond the most basic 2-OP sounds. that'd surely change though if i decided to spend some serious time with an FM synth. you'll just have to get at it yourself and see if it's worth the effort. i've watched most of the links posted here i think, but in the end, they didn't really raise my level of enthusiasm for doing FM synthesis ^^

he's situational. excellent stomper, can wreak havoc in heavily gank based strats, good anticarry, but ultimately, quite counterable through careful play and picks. still my fav hero atm. best thing to play while stoned.