Darangen

What is Jooj-cat's favorite food?

My ears have been owned.

Very nice. Do you know if the pianos are any good?

Mono made a lot of good points. As is, this is still a pretty conservative track and probably wouldn't be up to OCR's standard in that light. Here are a few things that you could do to start liberating yourself from the original feel to get this to be less conservative: 1) Change up the drums. You can still have the same feel, but having the same pattern almost to a tee makes it hard to think of anything but the original. Drums can make or break a great track as they're often what gives the energy to the song, so making sure you have a fitting beat is very important. Change it up a bit, make it less static. Change some notes! This could be approached from many angles including adding an original lead somewhere, changing the chordal progression underneath, or something more daring like going from a minor to a major key (usually very hard to pull of well). The synthy lead around 2:35 is a good start in this direction, but work on it some more still. I like the idea but it could be done much better, try adding some modulation/automation to bring it to life a bit more. Other things that would obviously help out a lot are: - Real guitars (2:35ish) - Better drum sounds (Keeping the feel of the originals kick is fine, but layer it with some other sounds to beef it up) - A better transition from the intro to the first section (:25ish). The stop-and-go thing that is happening now is odd. - A moving bass line. (I'm listening on work speakers, but I don't hear much in the bass department at all) Keep at it and don't give up, it's a good start! This is one of my favorites from FF7

That actually made me go look at the forum rules: http://ocremix.org/info/Forum_Rules_and_Posting_Policy Profanity isn't prohibited, but abusing the report system is a warn-able offense

The bass guitar IS really powerful in that mix down, but worry not, it will be more balanced in later versions. Other things that are going to change include: - The flute is a temporary placeholder for the melody and will be replaced. - An instrumental version will be made, as well as a vocal version. What instruments the vocal will be replaced by in the instrumental version is yet to be determined. - That said, I've been able to get a well-known OCR vocalist to tackle both the lyrics and the vocals, and I'm extremely excited to work with them. I could do them myself, but I'm not yet that confident in my abilities to sing over anything that isn't extremely heavy guitars. - The strings will be replaced by new, hopefully better, samples. Picking up some new sound libraries in the next 2 weeks or so and that should boost the quality at least a bit. To respond to the flute being in half time for the "verse"/intro section, it's highly likely that the part will be modified a bit more. While the "chorus" notes will still be considerably faster, the verse still has a lot of room to change. Keep in mind that the flute is a temporary placeholder and shouldn't really be considered as anything other than "Hey, this is kinda how the melody fits into the song". Thanks everyone for your criticisms and support! I'll try to keep this thread updated as progress is made.

I don't and never have appreciated "like" campaigns of any sort. But while I don't appreciate or agree with it, I can't deny that more likes means more people getting more music posted to their news feed. At the end of the day, you can dislike the method all you want but from there you have two options. Be bitter about it and whine and complain, essentially accomplishing nothing, or get a couple of your friends to like the page and contribute to getting the album released. That said, even though I dislike liking campaigns, I got 4 of my friends to like the page and I'll continue trying to get more to like it as well.

I'd need some killer bbq sauce to go with those chops

djpretzel made it, I just stole it

LASS lite is still $400. Considerably cheaper, yes, but still a bit too high for me right now. My knowledge in mixing these kinds of things right now is extremely limited, so it sounds like EW would be a better option for me. At least for now. What I'm going for isn't really having the strings up front but more for atmosphere and supplemental roles. If they're slightly life-less I don't think that will affect my goals for it. I'll definitely be keeping LASS in mind if I end up needed anything more later down the road. From what dannthr says though, I'd be way out of my league picking up LASS right now as opposed to being faced with a decent learning curve in EW.

Current Version (Version 6) Version 4 Source: http://youtu.be/KKAoSY5bhSw Weird thing happened. I sat down to start on a Terra mix and started playing this instead. Oh well. It's already at version 4 where most of the instrumentation is done. Still some tweaks to be done and I'm waiting on better string sounds to come my way. I really want this to be a vocal/lyrical track but I'm having a hard time finding a female vocalist to jump on. The flute is a placeholder for what I want the vocal line to be. If I can't find a vocalist to do something here I'll just have my friend come by and do some native american flute stuff instead. Anyway, open to suggestions.

The only keyboard sound I use when I'm writing is a regular piano. I have a pretty good idea of what other sounds I already have and can hear them in my head, so that helps.

The demos for LASS do sound amazing, but yeah they're way out of my current budget. I've got a pretty good deal going for EWQLSO Gold, so I'm going to try and go that route. Thanks everyone for your input!

I usually go with the "If you want to and it sounds good, do it" approach.

Somehow I missed this on the first pass. I'm loving it though, I've always been a fan of your stuff!

Oh, when just writing it's usually just a microphone, my acoustic and a bunch of la's, da's, and na's for the melody.

When I used a keyboard I would just go analog, but now that I primarily use a MIDI controller I go all out MIDI. For my guitars I actually quad-track most things but do something similar to what you're describing. I only do 2 takes instead of 4, but duplicate each one and offset it by 15ms or so. Then I process them with guitar rig using 4 different tones.

<insert everything Monobrow said> I think you could benefit a lot from some high-end percussion as well. I can hear the very soft high hat and very soft crashes here and there but nothing really interesting. Even if the high hat kept doing what it's doing but was a bit louder, that'd work. Throw in some reverse cymbals to transition into a new section with a nice crash at the end and it can do wonders for you. As it is, the whole song seems to lack some of the higher treble frequencies imo. Adding that higher end percussion would help with that.

Someone offered me a pretty good deal on a package that includes gold and a few others, I'm gonna try to take them up on that offer.

The second error looks like the directory path is insanely long. I know some programs have problems when the directory path exceeds a certain number of characters, have you tried shortening the path?

I like it. When I read the title I got a little skeptical of speeding up the source, but you pulled it off pretty well!

Yeah, there's going to be lots of loud guitars and drums and whatnot, so the strings are more of an effect than a focal point.

GPO = Garritan?

For a while I though Vega was a girl.