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Yoozer

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Posts posted by Yoozer

    Questions about Composing video game music..I'd really appreciate some answers.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Sorta true, and sorta not true.

    Because games are, so long as we can all remember, an interactive art--as such there's more to music and making music for games than simply writing a Top 40 Pop Song.

    Yeah, but there's "interactive" (music abruptly stops at end of level, different tune for the next one) and "interactive" (music fluidly segues into slightly different version when situation changes).

    Wipeout's just playing electronic music that appeared in the charts on repeat, really. Same thing with various other games.

    Questions about Composing video game music..I'd really appreciate some answers.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    1. I'm getting a laptop soon and it's probably gonna be a sony laptop of some sort. What specifications should I look for?

    You know you pay extra for the brand.

    Specifications? The most powerful you can afford without a ridiculous graphics card, and without being ridiculously expensive (since any computer is obsolete within 2 years, it pays more to switch then than to hold on to something for 5 years because it cost an arm and a leg).

    2. ...Also how much memory might I need my laptop to have?

    As much as you can afford.

    3. Do I really need a soundcard? and if so what kind should I get.

    Yes, you do.

    Which one? I don't know.

    See, you buy an audio interface (a soundcard geared towards music production) based on the following criteria:

    - what's your budget?

    - do you want to hook up any real instruments, and if so, how many

    - do you want USB or Firewire (for Firewire it's smart to get something with an approved chipset - see the audio interface manufacturer's site)

    Without answers to those questions it's going to be hard to pick something.

    4. I'm looking for new software to make video game music. My current software (sibelius 5) isn't cutting it. I'm thinking of getting FL Studio. Is this the right choice? If not then what should I get?

    Why would you consider it the right choice? Ever worked with it? Tried the demo? Have a friend who knows it inside out who can help you?

    Broadly speaking, the choice of software is not the issue anymore. Pretty much all higher-end DAW software supports plugins (VST or AU) and has a bunch of included instruments and effects. What matters is whether you feel that the software is "thinking" in the same direction you are when you want to make a song.

    FL Studio is heavily biased towards patterns - dividing your song up in parts that may be repeated and copied. It's not that it's impossible to not use them, it's just that if you don't want to use patterns, FL Studio's forte is not being used by you.

    Also, you're going to benefit from:

    - a controller keyboard

    - a set of good speakers, usually referred to as monitors

    I guess my end goals would basically to continue to learn how to produce professional sounding video game music

    There's actually no such thing.

    Lots of the music you hear in games is simply instrumental music in a certain genre. The fact that there's a video game attached is in a lot of cases completely secondary; it just means the writer wasn't aiming to score some billboard top 10 hit with some chick singing through auto-tune or whatever.

    Watch something like this:

    Now imagine that's not for a film but for an intro for a game. Just the same track. Still works, as long as the intended atmosphere is identical. What matters is the style; this is somewhat classical-sounding stuff.

    In terms of skills, it requires knowledge of orchestral arrangement and music theory. Without those, you can buy until you're blue in the face and evicted from home because you blew all your cash on gear, but it's not going to work. Building up your skills is the most important part - but the beauty is that once you do so it really doesn't matter what you eventually apply that knowledge to, and any education - if it's going to pay the bills, that is - will most likely give you a wide overview of various styles and has assignments for you to compose something in the vein of (artist x) or (historical era y).

    and to be able to make a career out of composing songs for video games...

    Yeah, that's going to be really really tough. Ask anyone else here how long it took and how much of a lucky break they had.

    You want my depressing advice? Get a decent paying job doing something that can't be outsourced, and keep the music as a hobby on the sideline. Because record sales aren't exactly bringing in the money anymore, lots of artists have moved or are moving towards that domain because it actually means a guaranteed paycheck.

    Making Music Less Cookie-Cutter

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    When I am writing a more orchestral influenced piece within FL Studio, I still tend to get stuck into the pattern-based mindset with which you can approach most contemporary music. The end result is that my pieces, whilst sounding decent (that seems to be the general consensus anyways), tend to sound very blocky, divided, or just plain FL Studio-esque. I was wondering how I could go about breaking out of this?

    Most importantly - turn off quantization.

    I don't know if FL allows you to just record for as long as you want at a single stretch, but turn on the metronome (softly) and switch off the monitor. Then start playing. When you're done, switch on the monitor, rewind, set up so you only have to press one button to record, switch the monitor off again and record.

    That way you'll spend more time listening to the piece and memorizing it, and afterwards you can go in there and clean up.

    Watch

    I could use a great synth library

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Zircon, you nailed it for me. Synth1 is fucken awesome!

    Here's a really simple tutorial I wrote that takes you through it step by step, hopefully in a way that doesn't drive you nuts:

    http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2974992&pagenumber=1

    when I discovered that this site had a workshop forum, I felt I hit a gold mine!

    If you feel adventurous: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-electronic-music-production/ and the cherry on top : http://www.gearslutz.com/board/tips-techniques/168409-tips-techniques.html

    Just by reading you'll already have enough material to fill weeks.

    One time I heard this guy playing a sound he made from scratch and I asked him, "Wow! What's making you sound like that?" And I shit you not, his answer was, "Magic!" And he refused to say anything else beyond that.

    Did you see him actually make it from scratch? Because if that's not the case, then "magic" may be an euphemism for "this awesome sample CD or library I've found".

    FM7 and FM8 make programming FM patches really easy with their matrix view, I don't think it's too convoluted for an inexperienced person.

    It's convoluted because everything's hidden away behind a button. I am hoping they'll redo the UI, but chances on that are slim since it's probably more profitable to pump out more soundpacks.

    I could use a great synth library

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    wow this shit is pricey

    It's never been cheaper.

    But getting them to produce the sound that I want is super tedious! Messing with LFO's and envelopes.

    You're not using the knobs on your controllers effectively. Map them. It's only tedious because you have to look at the screen and move your mouse with precision every single time.

    It all hurts my brain and I suffer a great deal from A.D.D. so everything I try to learn is a fierce battle.

    Take your meds, or dump everything entirely and start at the basis with something that only has one single knob per function. You'd be surprised to find out how many other folks have ADD and do music and have to deal with it in one way or another.

    Get a secondhand Roland JP8080 or Nord Rack 2.

    Yes, that is more expensive, yes, that's more crap to buy, but I swear that if you try one of those that lots of things will become ridiculously obvious to you really quickly - and the knowledge you have carries over to other synthesizers as well. DiscoDSP Discovery copied the UI and character 1:1 off the Nord, it even has a red skin making it look like a plugin version of the rack. Those are pretty much the cheapest non-bullshit user interface synths you can have that have usable polyphony specifications.

    That's why I was asking more for like a sound pack that I could jack with a little cause making sounds from near scratch is too much work at the moment. I don't have the time for it right now.

    Of course you have the time for it. You've already started a dozen topics; start spending the time on typing on learning how this stuff works :<

    http://refx.com/?lang=en&page=products/nexus/summary

    See what Nexus 2 costs? That's what you get when you depend a lot on other people doing stuff for you; and to make it worse, the above is nearly without value after a few years because the sound lean so heavily on the genre. Plus, you'll have nothing out of that that you can call your own, since the less ethically inclined will gulp down a giant torrent of this crap and catch up with you left and right.

    Even if you got soundpacks that don't cost you a kidney, you'll still spend most of the time searching for something, and preset names are mostly meaningless. Not even the Kore Player's categorization system works well all of the time.

    For orchestral libraries it makes sense; those are instruments you can't do yourself, and they're the bread and butter. For synth sounds, not so much.

    Audacity and 8-bit Grittiness (?)

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    So I've decided to try my hand at "editing" 8-bit and 16-bit tracks with Audacity (I haven't looked into FruityLoops yet).

    Audacity is a really great wave editor but I wouldn't consider sequencing with it. Give Reaper a try.

    If you mean the effect that you hear on the notes of the lead sound starting at 0:57 - that's not "grit", that's the (in)famous arpeggiator of the SID chip. Since it only has 3 voices of polyphony (plus a 4th channel with some trickery), the really fast arpeggiator is used to fool your ears into thinking that it can play chords, while in reality it switches from one note to another really fast.

    Anyway - obtain your SID files from the High Voltage SID Collection. The first version of SIDPlay has an option to disable certain channels so you can render them separately; perhaps that helps with getting rid of some of the noise?

    For doing SID stuff yourself, consider http://refx.com/?lang=en&page=products/quadraSID/summary or http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2009/09/28/sammichsid-designed-to-be-the-ultimate/

    I think I forgot how to do music

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I feel like I have no direction.

    Get a digital piano and put it in a different room.

    One important part of music is focus; when you're distracted by your options, minimize them. By putting it into another room you alleviate the pressure because you don't associate that room with the dreary task of making music and choices; by getting the computer out of the equation you minimize your options. Plus, if you get a decent digital piano - the keys feel positively delicious compared to most controllers. The interface is really spartan; only a few good sounds.

    Lastly; if your idea doesn't sound good on the piano, you know that you have to fix that with musicianship - not with effects or catchy sounds.

    So, that can be a rather drastic and expensive option, but for me, it was worth it; I've got a Roland FP7 in the living room and my playing has leapt forwards in terms of quality (plus I bought it when the UK pound had parity with the euro, which meant I only paid around 1000 euros for it instead of 1500 euros).

    As for transitioning; make a selection of equivalents of what Reason does. ReDrum is obviously available, so are NN-XT/19.

    Perhaps Poizone can act as a substitute for Subtractor. There's nothing like Thor but U-HE ACE may do the job.

    Exam Help Anyone? Comparing DAWs.

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    All DAWs suck.

    There are competing standards for plugin formats. RTAS (PT), AU (Logic won't do VST) and VST - that's horribly stupid. Pick one, deal with it, though VST dropped the ball on things like sidechaining, AU can't properly deal with MIDI only stuff, and RTAS plugins are RTAS only a lot of times.

    If you own MIDI gear, Cubase punched you in the nuts - no Midex 8 anymore, sorry. Logic punched you in the nuts, though with more OS X gloss and somewhat gentler (AMT8s and USB Unitor 8s still work, apparently, but aren't supported or made anymore).

    None of 'm seem to give a damn about people with more than 3 synths that don't have USB. Even USB is bad, because even though its throughput speeds may be high, its latency and jitter may suck pretty badly. The only 8-port MIDI interface left is MOTU, which only supports improved timing in Digital Performer. Yay. None of the manufacturers have picked up on that.

    All GUIs suck. Like zircon mentions, the number of steps in Cubase is well, pretty much stupid. A particularly grating example for myself was Cubase SX3, which didn't allow you to change the order of the effects in the chain - you had to save the settings you were working on, delete the plugin, reload it in another unoccupied slot (lots of fun if you already had several of 'm filled, because that means deleting every single one of 'm), and load the preset again. To add insult to injury, you were limited to 6 effects in a chain at most. Also, a dozen steps to get a plugin going in the first place.

    High-bandwidth connectivity for audio interfaces can still be improved. USB is too slow. Firewire is phased out. Alternatives are horribly expensive. Also, writing good drivers is hard.

    We still have a long way to go :(.

    OCR Cribs (the "Post Pics of your Studio Area" thread!)

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    This doesn't help if you don't tell us what kind of interface you have.

    Generally speaking, stereo systems have RCA connectors (cinch plugs) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_connector

    Your audio interface will have a 1/4" jack outputs like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS_connector

    All you need are either a pair of RCA - RCA cables with an RCA-jack converter on one end (like http://www.audiogear.com/cgi-bin/shopper.cgi?key=Adpt-RCFQMM&preadd=action ) or two mono jack cables with RCA converters on the other end.

    Don't waste your money on expensive gold-plated crap.

    Mega Man: The Grand Robot Master Remix Battle 2010

    in Competitions

    Posted

    I will crush all of you.

    All you gotta do is make them piss their pants so hard that they give up on beforehand.

    I've burned the themes on CD so I can listen to it non-stop tomorrow on my car stereo.

    DarkeSword : the mixes will be anonymized, right? As in, when they're put up for the public to vote on there's going to be no names and no matching numbers, just a meaningless identifier, correct?

    90s Pop\Hip Hop Drums?

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    Layer, compress, layer, compress. Learn about New York compression and experiment with two compressors in a row, with different settings. Layer synthetic drums with real and sampled ones. Percussion in hiphop is a treasure hoard: build your collection like a miser and polish it. New jack swing also used a layered method where you EQ the part you want out of the original and reconstruct the rest differently.

    Also, even though I hate to mention it: Korg Triton drumkits. You'll be surprised about what's taken nearly straight from those. Of course, that's late 90s but still.

    Software to compose Genesis-style chiptune music?! HELP!

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    1. The best piece of software in order to compose chiptune music (I usually use Reason as I find it the easiest to actually compose with)

    Trackers. They allow for some tricks you'd usually not come up with.

    To take the NES tunes as an example:

    - delay can be faked by repeating the same note in the track at a lower volume. Okay - so this isn't rocket science in most DAWs nowadays, but trackers make it really easy to copy the required control codes.

    - reverb can be somewhat faked by suddenly switching the volume of the note down to 1/5th or so. This is harder, as most pure MIDI sequencers couldn't do this properly (velocity was an initial value)

    - chorus is faked by using 2 tracks, where one track is slightly detuned

    If you have Reason 4, Thor makes FM sounds; when emulating the Genesis, you need to know your FM synthesis well.

    Impact Steel problem

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I get what you're saying. I just wish you could be less irritating about it.

    This is pure text. 3/4ths of the nuance is lost. The irritation bits are filled in by yourself, because I've already told you once to search instead of ask.

    "Hey! Just so you know, it might be easier if you googled everything first before asking on the forums. That way your questions may be answered faster."

    See, there's nuance again. To me this sentence is read in a chirpy Sirius Cybernetics tone of voice, which would infuriate the listener even more and would possibly involve scenarios with blunt force trauma and a blood-smeared baseball bat. :-)

    Impact Steel problem

    in Music Composition & Production

    Posted

    I'm not kidding at all, really, or lording it over you that my Google-fu is better. At least attempt in the future to do that first.

    "What have you already tried yourself" is not an unreasonable request at all, and if you can answer it on beforehand when you ask your next question, you'll have everyone here far more inclined to help you.

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