Legion303

In order from Awesome to Suck: 1. Amplitube 2 and 3 2. ReValver 3 (just about tied with #1) 3. Guitar Rig 4 23. Waves GTR srsly, what the fuck is this garbage doing on the list at all? GTR sounds turrible. -steve

What zircon and snapple said, and also you'll learn a lot more about song construction if you break down the parts by ear. You can check sheet music afterward if you want to check accuracy. -steve

Seymour Duncan SD6, holla. -steve

Ask your brother to show you what he did with your song. There's no substitute for hands on experience. If you're having trouble getting the mix right because you keep concentrating on the loudness, try turning your speakers up so the final level isn't a factor to your brain, then mix the individual levels so everything's balanced the way you want, THEN turn your speakers back down and start adding effects. -steve

Before you even think of putting a compressor or limiter on your master output, get your mix levels sorted. Once you're happy with them, then start adding effects to the output chain. -steve

I sequence in FLS, then do live recording and mixing in Cubase. -steve

I finally picked it up for $25 new (hooray for price wars!), but none of you will be able to kick my ass. * -steve (* until I'm finished with Fallout 3)

The diagnostic tool won't help. There's nothing in that file to recover. If you don't have previous saves, you'll have to start from scratch. Moral: "save new version" often. -steve

How does a Ferrari F50 GT compare to a Yugo? -steve

I don't know what you're getting at. EDIT: let me be more specific about layering guitars. Let's say your rhythm guitars are labeled Rhythm-L and Rhythm-R, separate takes panned hard left and right respectively. Each one should consist not just of a single layer, but something like this: Straight into effects loop/recorder, close-mic'ed amp, far-mic'ed amp or room mic, SFX reverb/delay/whatever layer, mic on guitar for string sounds. This is obviously an extreme example (the string sounds idea in metal comes from CotMM, but it's used all the time for acoustic recording), but if you look at studio multitracks from big name bands, it's just what you see. I don't know of any band who doesn't capture several different layers at once. -steve

There's a point in that song where I hear four guitars (or maybe it's 3 and a distorted synth, but the EQ sounds muddy here)...so either you misunderstood me or I misunderstood you. Your original post made it sound like the only elements in your songs are two rhythm guitars, bass and drums. What I was pointing out was that you want to double-track (at least) other guitars as well, which includes solos for some people and harmonies too. Thanks for the link. I avoid FF songs like the plague because I'm sick of Nobuo, but that was definitely a good remix. -steve

For metal you want more than two rhythm guitars. You want to at least double and maybe triple most of your guitar work. At some points in this song I have at least 6-8 guitars going at once (I'll get you a screenshot of the project file tomorrow night when I can access my music drive): http://neutronstar.org/music/Steve_Pordon-Oblivion_Cursed_Earth_remix.mp3 For electronic music, Beatdrop (I'm not worthy!) once told me that he layers drums the same way I layer guitars. A good tip I read somewhere is to find, say, two kick sounds that you like and combine the best qualities of both. So if you have one kick that has a great booming quality and another with a great attack, you would low-pass the first one and cut off some of its attack, and high-pass the second one and retain just the attack part, then mix them together. I imagine this applies to other kit pieces as well. -steve

QFE. If you don't ground your shit properly and your amp decides to ground through your hands instead, you could die. -steve

It's shit. I downloaded it because it said it was free, but then I found out I couldn't actually play the games. It did give me 20 virtual "tokens" to try games out, but this strikes me as more of a demo model than a free download. XBLA is being very misleading here. As Brandon pointed out, Every one of the games they have could probably fit onto a 64MB mem card under a free emulator. $5 for Centipede is too high for the benefit of seeing a random avatar standing in front of the arcade machine.

Get better pickups? Use a longer guitar cord and play away from the computer? The only time I ever hear hum anymore is when I'm using high gain distortion, the middle (single-coil) pickup, and aiming the guitar at my CRT...

Ah, I guess the thread is more about "cool music stuffs" and less about "what I made with Synthedit." Still neat. Analoq, your stuff is great. Here are my synths: 1. "Eat A Bag of Dicks" (SynthEdit--VST only, sorry) http://neutronstar.org/tmp/dicks.dll 2. "PadMe" (Synth Maker, VST again, very old version but the new one is on a drive at home) http://neutronstar.org/tmp/padme.zip EDIT: looks like the version of PadMe on my site is standalone (exe) only. EDIT2: PadMe evolved into a regular synth when I unhid some of the effects. Here's its current state, which I've been calling "4osc" in a fit of originality: http://neutronstar.org/tmp/4osc.exe -steve

Audio engineering at its finest: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Music-From-a-Stapler/140956 I have two synths "in progress" (for like 3 years) but I wouldn't feel right pimping them here until I at least look at some of the other ones posted in this thread, so I won't. Plus, they both kind of suck. -steve

The best part of that was all the nerdrage about the actual definition of Tamriel in the comments. -steve

Petrucci also has thousands of dollars worth of effects and amp gear, and use of multimillion dollar studios. I don't know about DiMarzios, but I know my Seymour Duncan SD6 puts out one hell of a brutal metal sound given the limitations of my hundreds (in some cases tens) of dollars worth of other gear... -steve

Pretty sure it should be an octave higher than the open string. >_> I'll just grab my coat on the way out. -steve

I just stumbled on this thread and the demo songs. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've been playing guitar for 22 years and I cannot tell that these are multis. I could probably tell if I just heard the raw sounds being played on a MIDI controller, but obviously that's not how anyone will be using this library. Absolutely amazing work, guys. I already have some guitars and shit, but if I ever go on another trip away from home and have the chance to bring my laptop with me, I'm buying this in a heartbeat. EDIT: actually, I think I'll own this by the end of the month anyway. Too good a bargain to pass up and it beats Slayer for laying down skeleton tracks in FLS. What kind of guitar did Sixto use? All I could find on the site was that it has 6 strings and was tuned to Bb. Jesus, that's 1/2 step lower than Carcass and Entombed. -steve

If your problem is random pops, clicks, and CPU spikes when scrolling through menus or the like, you can try changing your hardware graphics acceleration to low or off (somewhere in display > properties > advanced > troubleshooting, or if you have an ATI card change your powerplay settings to low in CCC). Pretty stupid for a powerful system to have this issue, but I've been researching this shit for the past week because it started affecting my laptop. If that's not your issue then I can't personally help. That USB 1.1 speed probably isn't doing you any favors, though.

I've done two collabs so far and am starting another. With the exception of some samplerate shenanigans at the beginning, everything went fairly smoothly. One of us (Matt) was in charge of the sequencing, so all I needed to do was supply raw audio. This kept DAW issues out of the picture entirely. Frankly, I don't even remember what he uses, just that it's not the same thing I use. Setting roles at the outset will save you some grief. Determine who's going to do what part (instrument-wise as well as production-wise) and let it grow from there. Get a rough sketch down and pass it back and forth to let other creative ideas emerge ("what if we did this at this section?"). Tweak and refine, pass back and forth more. Refine again. Don't be satisfied with the first draft. Challenge yourself. Don't be afraid to mention if you think a part isn't working as well as it could or should. Communicate. Most of all, have fun--if you don't enjoy what you're doing, stop and figure out why. If you can't find a way to enjoy it, save yourself the grief and don't do it. Your enthusiasm will show through in your music. It's not necessary to love the source material, but it helps. -steve

Amplitube 2. Or Revalver (v2 was incredible, and now v3 is out but I haven't tried it). I stopped turning on my insanely expensive hardware processor a couple of years ago. I'm probably the first guitarist here to recommend going with software processing exclusively. -steve

OCR is not Image Line.