Hy Bound

Hawt and sexy. That crazy bass drum reversed bassdrum thing is pretty tight. The very early wip didnt really go anywhere so i was kinda skeptical at first, but this definately hits the SGX bar of awesomeness. Great job once again!

This is actually pretty awesome. I really like the source and this expands pretty well on the original. It does sound a little bland here and there, nothing a few better samples wouldn't hurt. I'm assuming you haven't mastered this yet, since it is a little muddy. As far as arrangement, harmony and the basic ideas though, its really great. The only problems i'd say you have are in production, which can easily be fixed. Keep going with it and it will be pretty awesome.

Its called practice. You're not going to master music in 7 months. Listening to midi-style music is just annoying and most people wont listen to it other than once... OCRemix is about music people enjoy listening to over and over. If it truly is an amazing arrangement, then its worth the shitty quality just so you can listen to an interesting arrangement. Hell, how else do you expect Amon Tobin to get famous... His early stuff was horribly mastered but the arrangement was great and the ideas were interesting.

I believe EWQL Colossus has that kind of thing. Well, the sampler it comes with does (Kontakt) and Colossus has a ton of guitar samples so i think thats a good bet. The only problem is that its pretty expensive... like $500 at the very cheapest.

Yeah, i agree it does need to get spiced up sonically. Truthfully this song was made in about a day and was just kind of a "see if i can" type of thing. I had listened to Dimmu Borgir's Fear and Wonder and wanted to do a song that evoked that feeling. I'm still on the fence about trying to submit this in the future since there are gonna be some amazing Jenova musiks coming...

Logic Pro is a great host program. If i had or even liked macs i would definitely go for it. You can go for a much cheaper alternative to what Nicholestein posted. Kontact is a pretty expensive sampler that doesn't necessarily have the best cpu usage and options for the money. Don't get me wrong, i use it for a few programs and it serves its purpose well, but there are much better-for-the-money samplers out there. You can also just use headphones for monitors for your music and they work just as well. Just make sure how your mix sounds comparatively to other songs cuz headphones can color the sound since they're trying to recreate a broad range from such a small speaker. But anyway, don't get discouraged by the price of things. I used Reason 2.5 and only Reason 2.5 for a very long time and was able to produce high quality mixes (not as good as others, but my point is that you can do it) with what i got for $150 on sale.

3.2 GHz 2GB RAM, X6000 Compaq Laptop. Its no slouch for what Im doing. EWQLSO Gold is known very well for being heavy on the CPU.

This is pretty interesting actually. I say i would have to agree with everyone else and say that you need better samples and it needs to be a lil less repetitive. I would say its pretty darn well mastered for the samples you're using, but you maybe need to add a bit more of a lower end. Otherwise, i would say the MIDI sounding instruments and repetitive arrangement are your worst enemies. Maybe throw in a solo or something spice it up.

Yeah, i know what you mean...its missing something in both the arrangement section and also in the orchestration department. Im glad you liked the mastering and such. I'm using EW/QL:SO Gold with Ableton Live 6.0 and the Reaktor Flatblaster Plug-in for Mastering. The song rapes my computer pretty hardcore.

Ok, so this isn't meant to be on the FF7 Remix Project or anything, but i was tooling around with a filmscore a while ago and it turned into the Jenova theme from FF7. I guess ive been playing too much FF7... Anywho, I know that there is a couple cut-outs from the main chorus (the cello) and the lead in at the end. This is basically to see if people like it enough for me to get inspired to finish it and submit it sometime later (after the FF7 Remix comp). Thanks in advance for the comments! It is here: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=466433

I don't think so, apparently its the full version. I saw it on another forum: http://cratekings.com/forum/equipment-software-talk/374-almost-too-good-true-waves-mastering-suite-free.html

Ok, so I've been looking for some good mastering vst's for a while and stumbled upon Waves Mercury mastering bundle. It has almost 200 mastering and other kinds of FX and runs about $6,000... Apparently though, you can dowload it from them for free if you have an account there... for free. For free... WTF? I don't want them coming and asking for money if i download this thing thinking its free. Anyone know whats going on? Here's the link: http://www.waves.com/SpecialPage.aspx?id=96

That Pinguin thing looks pretty full-featured. I've been looking into stuff like that for easier mastering and i don't even know what half of that stuff is . Too bad they rip you off hardcore with the shipping and tax... It's like paying twice as much in shipping and tax. Plus a dongle? Lame. Is it really worth it?

Muchas Gracias. I got'd it. I only had to pay 60 for mine... ('only' heh). I haven't gotten to play it yet since ive been extremely busy but it looks pretty awesome from the packaging .

I know this isn't what you guys are talking about but meh. I was wondering if any of you have ninja gaiden sigma. I'm kinda on the fence about buying this game seeing as how i played the original (not black) on the XBox and found it to be too difficult for my taste. I would really like to like the game, but it was just too hard and the camera was a pain in the ass. I've been hearing that sigma is a bit easier and you can even unlock an easier mode if you die too much. Is this true? As lame as it sounds i need the game to be a little bit easier for it to be fun for me. Any thoughts?

I just thought i'd put in my 2 cents... I got an XBox 360 about october of last year and definitely thought that I had become an extreme 360 fanboy. I thought that the ps3 was way too expensive and not enough of an upgrade to warrant the price of admission. However, I have been looking around at the ps3 recently after i came into a bit of extra money from working all last semester and this summer. I decided to take the $500 dollar plunge after the price drop. (if you buy it at circuit city, you can get a free second controller as well as the 5 free shitty blu-ray movies). I have to say; wow, the ps3 is awesome. It looks great! I have it set up to a 62" DLP HDTV at 1080i, (i cant wait for my own tv for 1080p). The people who bash on the ps3 and blu-ray format really need to eat the shit they're throwing; when the fidelity is good enough that you can easily see the pores on characters in a movie during an action sequence, i think that's about as good as you really need. The sixaxis is a pretty damn cool feature. I know the Wii has an even better version of the accelerometers, but that really got quite annoying after a while; i don't want to be sitting in an awkward stance for 3 hours trying to keep a ball from rolling off a wooden plank in that Zelda mini-game. The games use it as sort of an immersion-type feature (some better than others) instead of using it as the only gimmick in a game, like the wii. The on-line part of the package is actually quite good, especially considering its free. It works about the same as the 360 shop and on-line gaming feature but makes it so that you can look at any of the games and movies no matter how deep you are in the shopping options. There's also virtually no lag in any of the games ive played online, which is pretty cool. All in all, I realize that many of you in this forum have probably looked around at all the features and know more about this stuff than me, but for those of you still on the fence about the ps3, i would say that you won't be disappointed in the system. You may be a bit disappointed in the games at the moment, but once killzone 2, MGS4 and Final Fantasy 13 come out its going to be a different story. I would have to say, that as soon as the ps3 has a good library of games and once they get the rumble-enabled controllers out on the market, (i hear they may be having you send in your controllers now and they'll give you the new ones for free, but i think its just a rumor) its going to be the best console to buy.

So what's the deal with the circuit city discount, there has got to be a catch. Is it that you get 100 off of it after you buy a bunch of cheaper stuff, or what? THERE'S GOTTA BE A CATCH I TELL YA!

I don't know if I've replied to this, but ive gotten a few more things recently. Compy: 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Compaq X6000 with 2GB RAM and slightly upgraded audio card. a cheap second monitor. Softwarez: Ableton Live 6 Reason 3 ACID 5.0 (Rarely used now) EWQLSO Gold Reaktor 5 StormDrum Guitar Rig 2 Variety of free vsts i rarely use Hardwarez/Intruments: Fender Squier w/ shitty amp Rig Control 2 (Having troubles with connecting the guitar, if anyone knows how to fix it, please pm me!) Novation X-Station M-Audio MobilePre USB Preamp 250 GB external hard drive Shure SM57 Mic Older Pioneer Amp/CD/Tuner massive stereo rack with 5' tower speakers. and Some cheap monitors.

well, if you used your own samples then im sure its fine, but if its just sampled from the game(s), it isnt. OCR promotes reinterpretation in both arrangement and sonic qualities... Sorry.

I'm pretty positive they'll let you update it from an older version for less. Thats how pretty much all of these things go. However, I don't know how much you've been tweaking stuff and stuff... but it kinda sounds like you're in the mindset of using it as a sampler. But you can create a sound from scratch on that thar synthesizer. And if BT's music is any indication (mucho mucho indication) you can create some absurdly wonderful sounds from Absynth. If you haven't already, I would try to create a synth patch from scratch. It may take awhile, but its extremely rewarding to have your own synth sound in a song that no one else has. Besides, Absynth is known as one of the best tweaker synths to have ever been made. Just my 2 cents...

The problem you might also have is that trials very rarely let you save what you do in them. This could be a problem if you actually want to do a song. Absynth could be different, but thats the case with 99% of trials/demos. Also, the VST thing that overcoat said is also probably a problem to resolve in order to play in a host program... (btw, it wont work in reason since reason is a stand-alone program)

This is pretty awesome! Despite you not worrying about mixing it, it already sounds pretty pro. Yeah, the drums sound pretty bleh, but I like the pattern. The only thing that i didnt really catch was the bass; i couldn't figure out whether it was a synth or a cello/bass... You might want to make it a little more synthy-ish if it IS a synth (which im pretty sure it is since the rest of your strings sound pretty good). Although, I AM listening to it on earbuds... But anywho, keep it up!

Like he said. The only way you would see an improvement in your sound is from your monitoring equipment. However, it could also be Reason. Don't get me wrong; I'm a giant Reason fanboy, but I noticed a huge step up in sound quality once i started using Ableton and Reaktor's plug-ins (along with EWQL:SO). Reason is an amazing program, but the samples used in the samplers are heavily compressed to save disk-space and therefore are a little easier on the RAM. The synth technology is also pretty old, not that its bad by any means, but its hard to get a shiny, new sound from older technology. I don't know what all you're using in your songs, but odds are, if you want a HUGE upgrade in sound quality, you're gonna have to add some high quality equipment. However, thats just what i've noticed; I've heard some pretty amazingly high quality stuff from just Reason (apparently those Scion commercials, the non-vocal one especially, is done in reason pretty much exclusively. I think it was exported to pro tools for a final mastering, which could explain a wee bit of an improvement in sound quality.) I know you're not looking to buy a new setup or anything, but I figured i'd let you know what all contributes to it not sounding like the next BT track.

I wouldn't mind doin' it. I have a ton of .rsn files that i'd be willing to share, the problem is i have no place to host them.

It was one of the most top-of-the-line cards two years ago, so it should be able to have a good amount of juice. The thing that i don't get is that it doesn't even ask about an output... wtf?