Yoozer

Possible causes: 1) http://www.flstudio.com/htmlhelp/html/panel_transport.htm - there's a difference between Pattern and Song mode. 2) All sequencers have loop markers. See if that's not switched on anywhere. Like Snapple said, before starting a dozen threads, read the manual and take your time. Write down what you don't know. Look in the on-line help of FL Studio. The most important step in making music all by yourself without help from a band is learning self reliance and the best way to learn it is to dive in and work your way through. "Yeah Yoozer, but you've got it easy, you already know all this stuff." Yes. I figured it out in exactly the way as described above and couldn't ask people on the internet until 1999 or so, and it took until 2001 until there was a forum with enough traffic. I started learning in 1991. Loop/pattern-based is actually not bad; any pop song has something like intro verse verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus outro as a structure, and most electronic music is even worse (in terms of repeating patterns). Why completely rebuild everything from scratch when you need the same thing?

So was the track usable?

The practical boring advice: With the economy right now - pick a job that's of any use and that brings in the money. Take up music as a hobby. You get to enjoy it, and you get to buy any instrument you want to, plus doing something completely different from your day job keeps things fresh. Quite a number of people I know do not want to stare at another computer screen after they've done so all day.

Big sample packs: Garritan Kontakt 3 Vienna Symphonic Spectrasonics Yeah, but which ones? In the hardware world, there's years and years of experience programming samples - often from a limited set of sounds in memory. The Motif's internal memory is much bigger than that of say, an SY35 which was one of the earlier sample-based (well - samples plus FM) synths of Yamaha. A 64 MB piano can sound better than one of 3 gigabytes, simply because of that. Then there's the matter of effects. Once you start using your Motif in the sequencer mode, with 16 separate tracks, you notice effects dropping away - all 16 tracks have to share the effects. When you play sounds in "Voice" mode, they get 3 effects stacked on them. When you play sounds in "Perform" mode, they have to share effects and suddenly don't sound as good anymore. A sampler like Kontakt has built-in effects, but generally the idea is that a company that makes a dedicated reverb plugin does the job better than the programmers of the sample library ever can do - so the sample guys leave the work of the effects to someone else. That may be what you describe as lacking something. Oh yeah, then there's the playing; there are several techniques to let a violin ensemble play (agitato, sforzando, pizzicato, etc.) Not using the same technique for everything helps, too - but this requires quite a bit of study.

What's your deadline? edit: you know, nevermind. Hope you can rap over this. Yoozer - Leaving On A Krunk Plane

To lower your latency back down again, try ASIO4All.

Any time you don't know what it means, throw it in Wikipedia's search function and see what matches it the best. Do this every time and you see your stack of questions melt down to the interesting ones.

Besides, theory is easy. It helps. It removes the "crap, what would fit best after that" lottery of trying to find the right keys. If you want anything cheaper than FL Studio - get yourself a guitar, learn how to make music on that, and then start using a computer. You'll spend less time messing with audio interfaces, settings, sequencing and the rest of the rocket science and more time actually making music.

The same way you do - use your Motif (or any other synthesizer). If you hear orchestral drums, there's a good chance they either came from a big sample-pack or via the old-fashioned way - hire session musicians who can play them. Ditto with pretty much everything else. Your Motif is nothing but a big read-only sampler in a box. If you hear a hip-hop beat, take an old drum loop from a 70's funk record and chop it in pieces. The question you ask is very wide in its scope, but since you use the word samples I can assume you're talking about everything music-related from the Playstation 1 and further (when samples were actually used instead of soundchips). Name some examples of which sounds you're looking for

Another trick to do on any machine with the sampling memory of a goldfish: if you put reverb over it, also put compression over it. The idea was to use an envelope (which only requires DSP power, not memory) to take care of lowering the volume. See also: 80's gated snare, Phil Collins - In the air tonight.

You want to make music. FL Studio is used by several remixers if that's recommendation enough. You probably wouldn't believe it, but they've got a demo version on their site. Download that. edit: wait, you did. Yes, because making music has never been so cheap in the entire history of mankind.

Which one? SNES? N64? Other? (because not everyone knows every single game and Youtube is filled with videos that have their own music). If it's , the effect is mostly in the voice artist himself - if you don't sound impressive, you might try recording your vocals and playing it back at a lower pitch - and in the horrible quality of samples on the SNES - e.g., put a bitcrusher/bitreducer over it.

A better idea would be to pull .wav drum loops through ReCycle (or anything else that can do this). Not only do you get better note information (less quantizing), you also get useful percussion samples.

There are no "good" EQ or reverb settings. While the question is not stupid per se, it's a bit silly since there's just no one-size-fits-all for this . Reverbs and equalizers are not used as regular presets. How to use a frequency analyzer: SPAN is just a VST effect. You put it on a track and it will show you a wobbly line. From left to right is the frequency. From bottom to top is the volume. Put it over your track where you have the pad sound running. You'll see a wobbly line with a hump somewhere in the middle. Now, put an equalizer over your track and put it before SPAN, so the signal chain is like: instrument > reverb > eq > SPAN or even just instrument > eq > SPAN If you use a graphic equalizer (like the Kjaerhus Classic EQ), the sliders represent the frequencies from left to right and their height determines the volume. Start by sliding the lowest frequency slider to the bottom and see if something changes in the SPAN display. Just put a fragment of your song in a loop. Then, pull down the next slider. Observe what happens when you cut or boost, and see what a parametric equalizer does. Basically, those are a bit more practical since you can see what's supposed to happen to the frequencies. Compare the graph with a cookie cutter - you cut away excess volume and frequencies so the rest of your track has room. By putting a SPAN over your other tracks, you can see where they overlap. To cut away the overlap, just put an EQ over the kick or the lead sound, and cut away everything you don't hear.

Or MySpace. Or Rapidshare. Or Megaupload. Or Putfile. Or just learn how to make an AMV, only with your own pictures instead of bad Naruto rips, and your own music - then put it on Youtube.

That depends on the time you got into it. Hey, the first number can be a 1 and the second can be a 2 without trouble, really. It's just that the dollar isn't really strong and the Virus and Nords come from Yurp. It's even cheaper if you get the rack version - who needs the keyboard? There isn't. The fact that you have dedicated control and the sound are the reasons (and there are hardware analog synths that sound like a wet paper bag). If anything, those are even more ridiculously expensive thanks to the label "Moog" on it. A computer for just audio including the required hardware is a relatively high (actually ridiculously low) initial investment. Things like controller keyboards are always useful. Downloading free software or cheap software - there are basic versions of Sonar, Cubase, and others and you're really not missing out on a lot features) doesn't bump up the cost a lot.

Working shitty jobs at the supermarket (Edah) and callcenter (Medion) paid for most of the stuff I have.

MIDI sends hexadecimal codes and has a maximum speed comparable with a 33k6 modem. USB 1.0 transmits at 12 mbits. Conversion can be really really fast - so fast it can happen at 192khz if it's analog to digital - but since MIDI is not analog in any way (or in that sense, not more analog than the zeroes and ones over the USB cable)... The issue is however that USB is clueless about the nature of timing required by MIDI, and if you're copying anything from an external USB drive or harddisk, going a bit slower one time and going a bit faster the next isn't going to kill anything. With MIDI, even with its glacial speed, timing is essential, therefore the inventions of Linear Time Base and Active MIDI Timing (used and dumped by Steinberg and Emagic, now Apple, respectively). Any keyboard with an USB output has the translation stuff built in. What's sent over the wire are still the same messages.

This question is unrelated to FL Studio as it is a problem with all synthetic guitars. They're just stompboxes in software form, there's nothing 'efficient' about it. If they aren't according to your wishes, try other plugins. Same as your first question - not related to FL Studio, but more to the plugin you're using. Expensive but nice: Prominy LPC. A drum sampling plugin (such as EZDrummer, DFH, Battery 3) is a collection of samples in a matrix. A detailed pack of samples will have a different drum sample per key, and per key, several velocities as the sound of a drum changes when you strike it harder - so you can't just increase volume and be done with it. A soundfont allows for such a structure - however, since most soundfonts aren't made by professionals, you may have only a single drum sample per key instead of 4 or 5 or so. Consult the manual for automation. You're afraid of climbing a mountain. That's it, really. You don't have to get your remix accepted rightaway. It'd be nice if that'd happen, but I imagine quite a number of composers on this site have heard "JUDGES SAY NO". It's a good thing that they add constructive criticism, too - so learn from that, and retry. You'll eventually find out that if you do not know what a particular piece of criticism means, you end up at a technical point. It's good to make mistakes, so make them - it means you're actually doing something. This is personal and related to how you work. The problem is - you have to start with something. Anything. So, what do you start with? In pop songs, what's usually done the first is the drums and the bass. This is an anchor for all the other musicians - it defines tempo and root note melody. It'll instruct the keyboard and guitar players when to play, the singer won't drift from the tempo and won't be distracted by all other sounds and chords when singing. So, make a simple structure with that and build the rest on top of it. In classical, it's trickier - you could start with the simplified chords and then split these up and reharmonize them further, assigning the roles of certain notes to different instruments. Lots of classical pieces have been composed on piano first, so it's quite common.

Is this really the question you want to ask, or do you have some issues with your current MIDI over USB? http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct04/articles/qa1004-7.htm?print=yes answers your question

The JP is not analog (virtual analog - the difference is that it uses a DSP to generate the sound instead of circuitry and chips), and $500 does not get you a real analog synthesizer with a lot of knobs and sliders which sort of ruins the entire fun of things. However, it's a pretty good suggestion, especially since they seem to be rather dirt-cheap in the US. Alternatives: Yamaha AN1x (only a few knobs, but light-weight and nice) Korg R3 (vocoder madness) Korg MS2000 / Korg MicroKorg (the MicroKorg is a smaller version lacking some features) Roland SH-201 (JP8000 knockoff, some say it doesn't sound as good), can act as simple USB audio interface Novation K-Station or KS-4 if you can find one (the KS-4 is superior). There's the Novation Xiosynth which is an audio interface w/ USB, too.

Seems that the piano roll is called the "Matrix Editor" in Logic - and it can be maximized to epic proportions. Live's piano roll is limited to a part of the screen and blocks out other parts, so no advantage of dual screens in that scenario.

I don't think anything has a piano roll as big as FL Studio. There's no reason why EZ Drummer shouldn't work in Live Lite, though - Live can deal with AU and VST plugins.

Compatibility is never the problem. You either have an USB port on the back that acts as a MIDI interface or you have (or should get) a USB MIDI interface. The problem is that those keyboards have onboard sounds (useless if you use plugins only) and no rotary knobs or sliders.