Hy Bound

This is fucking SICK!!! tefnek's productions skillz are absolutely scrumptious. The rips and guitars make this song feel like there needs to be a minimum bad-ass requirement to listen to this song and the people who don't quite meet it get ripped to shreds. Like, that scene in Event Horizon ripped apart. Awesome stuff once again, dude.

I'm happy for you, I'ma let you finish but Hy-Muthafuckin-Bound needs his own thread for the birthdays and such. Seriously though, thanks for the birthday wishes everybuddy's!

Its pretty awesome. I finished the entire campaign within about 5 hours tho... I havent had a chance to play firefight yet, but i like the idea and the new weapons are pretty cool. Honestly, I found that it was a bit of a rip-off when considering i bought Halo 3 and a map pack. The campaign was fun and ill most likely go on to beat it on harder difficulties, but it didnt last very long and wasnt as epic as i was expecting. If you love Halo though, its worth at least renting. EDIT: oh, and Nathen Fillion is a sexy, sexy man, and i have yet to change my judgment on him with this game. Not to mention Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk do a good job as well. Alan was a little harder to recognize the voice though... EDIT EDIT: The soundtrack is utterly, stupefyingly gorgeous. Just wandering around the hub world and listening to it is worth the price of admission.

I'll just add that if musicians added that same thing to their mixes, when you turned on that sound "enhancer" it would basically be multiplying what the producer put in the mix and it would sound poopy. Its also the same reason musicians don't pad up the bass in the mix even though most everybody likes more bass than what is put into the mix. Producers are supposed to tune in a "flat" mix so that it can be enhanced the way the listener likes with their own equipment.

Honestly, i still enjoy playing through ff7. I've played through it twice in the past 2 or so years and have thoroughly enjoyed it both times. Also, I still love the shit out of all the ps1-era (Insomniac-made) spyro games. I got sick a couple months ago and spent the entire day playing through the trilogy. They are still incredibly fun and the music is the very definition of awesome. However, Syphon Filter, Coolboarders 2 and most other games of the time are horrendously dull. Haven't been able to get very far into Chrono Cross either... but then, im stuck on the frustrating "stealth" part of the early game. I guess when i get passed that it might still be wonderful.

To the people who said Total Annihilation, i dont disagree, but Supreme Commander is a whole lot better imo... More interesting setup and units. But yeah, its just a new version of TA, so you cant go wrong with either.

You can't do proper nouns or copyrighted material. Otherwise though, i saw a video where God fought the Devil and Cthulhu. I also believe there was a titan and druid fight.

I've never understood what the continuum was... I've seen it used with KYMA, but otherwise, wtf is it?

Along with velocity editing, I would suggest automating the volume of the track so that it sounds much more natural. for instance, having a string ramp up in volume a little bit makes it have more impact. I've never had a problem with the plug-ins you mentioned sounding robotic, so honestly i have no idea. My suggestion is to make sure what you are having the instrument play is humanly possible.

That.Was.AMAZING! My hat is off to him once again.

Yoozer has the correct idea. Just put a ton of effects and stuff on the kick and snare and then get into the habit of layering that with another loop and then another. Mainly, most good electric drum samples come from a highly affected drumkit. That being said, StormDrum 1 and 2 have some awesome drumkits and at least SD 1 has a pretty decent electronic drumset and effects.

I actually started trying to listen to FF music yesterday because of this thread and got into this... Oh the wonderful memories based around this wonderful song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_pJ0UsmZXM The absolute best part of FF8. And really the only reason I'm not too keen on FF8 is because it brings out my inner OCD with that goddamn junctioning system. Spending half an hour fighting a goddamn bat in the beginning of the game so that I can junction 100 fires to my health and 100 thunders to strength is not fun, but it sure is the videogame equivalent to crack cocaine. Everything, including the art and world are pretty great otherwise though. And the best part of FFX? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2UjfueRo7g and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlCUIK1rOoA&feature=related and so FFX is roughly 3 times as good as 8.

Well, here is my personal FF ratings: FF7, followed, very closely, by FF9. Then, i guess FF4, though i didnt get very far into it... Then 12, then 10, then 8. So, as far as most people are concerned i have no taste in Final Fantasy. Keep playing though, it gets decent towards the end, but the only real reason to finish is just to say you did.

I honestly think that most people find whatever they use first/what they use now is the best. So i guess the best thing you can do is try the demos for every single DAW you could possibly think of... Yeah... That'll do it.

Ok: FL Studio: Great for beginners and is able to be used by more than beginners. It has a pretty decent assortment of built fx and synths and is expandable through VST instruments and fx. Zircon and a number of other use it. Probably easiest to get help around here for. Reason: My personal favorite "learner's" DAW. Doesnt have VST support, but has a great and diverse number of synths, samplers and fx. However, can basically be used as a VST instrument for other host applications. Cubase: I've personally never used this, but many people seem to either love or hate the work flow. I liken it to FL Studio, but i know the people who use it that wont appreciate it. Its used by more "pro's" than FL Studio, but I havent really been able to see why. Somebody else should probably comment about this one. Ableton Live: My DAW of choice. Its based around more of a DJing/Live electronic music slant, but the Arrangement part of the program is no slouch. Uses VSTs, and has a very respectable amount of onboard FX. The only problem I have is that the MIDI abilities aren't quite as great as other programs and if you don't buy the "suite" version, there arent synths or much in the way of sound-making instruments out-of-the-box. Logic: If you have a mac, I would personally go look into this one. I came pretty close to buying a mac for this DAW. It has a lot of functionality in the way of recording, out-of-the-box instruments and workflow enhancements. The only downside I've found is that its mac-only and I've heard it has some pretty decent bugs... I would personally rank it above the the previous DAWs, but thats a totally subjective opinion. Pro-Tools: The "Industry Standard" DAW. If I had the money, I would buy this in a second: great MIDI workability, great onboard FX, the attached hardware makes it much more reliable and able to use more instruments and fx. The downsides are the high cost of entry, the fact that I've heard some bad things about the customer service and the pompous douche associations... Overall, though, this is objectively the best DAW, if you have the money.

I nude it! I wasnt going to say anything though. But yeah, I definitely heard/saw the reference. By no means a rip-off or anything, but a nice, juicy accompaniment to be heard together.

While i appreciate the fact that cheap-ish headphones are good for listening to music, mixing in it is a completely different story. There is a completely different frequency response between "listening" audio equipment and "monitoring" equipment. The headphones you're talking about give a catered response to music, whereas monitoring speakers/headphones give a flat, accurate response. I'm not saying its impossible to have a good mix using $25 headphones, but it would be much more difficult, time consuming, and less-accurate overall, than actually buying professional equipment. Theres also a decent amount of psycho-acoustics going on with surround sound that is very difficult to emulate with headphones. That, and theres a huge difference (to me) between $25-50 headphones, and $400 headphones. I really don't mean that to be as pompous as it sounds, but theres a huge difference between mixing with high-quality equipment and listening on budget equipment. Not impossible, but very difficult.

The reason is that the software, hardware and various other things are expensive, hard to come by or not supported. I would absolutely love to do an entire album in 5.1, but Ableton doesnt support 5.1, my audio interface doesnt support 5.1, and i dont have 3 other good monitors to mix it. Maybe in the future, but for me thats about a $2000 upgrade... Not to mention most people dont have wonderful 5.1 surround systems, so spending all that time and having maybe 50 people be able to fully appreciate it is somewhat hard to try and swing the extra moolah on that stuff.

It looks like both the kore and kontakt players are made free so that hopefully you'll buy their refills that work in them. Nonetheless this is a great find and i'm totally going to exploit the offer to the fullest extent, since i have no idea when i'll be able to afford Komplete.

Trifonic is awesome at that kinda glitchy, technical programming. Also, for some reason, I hadn't really checked out Skrypnyk's stuff that closely. This is some seriously awesome glitch-beat music. I want to hear a lot more! Also, what programs do you use for that? dBlue Glitch? I have a back-asswards way of doing glitch stuff and kinda want to be able to do it better

I use Xilisoft Audio Converter. Theres a demo that works just fine, but only lets you convert 2 songs per instance. Its a very good encoder though.

I honestly think both aspects of mixing are equally important. Its important to make sure the waveform reflects what you are hearing through your monitors, but its equally important to make sure that the same waveform actually sounds good. There are times when I mix and don't have the sound on and theres times when i mix and turn my monitor off to actually have a listen to whats going on. The latter is especially good to keep your mind off of the structure you know is there and to just hear the music as just music.

Those games are on my remix to-do list; now just to find the time... I agree though, I love all of those OSTs and games quite a bit and would like to see more people remixing them.

Sound drops tend to be used on demos of audio products. Theres a good chance that whatever audio program you're using to listen to the track hasn't been activated or is a demo.