Yoozer

An alternative (but not a good one) is to just use the headphone outputs (stereo jack > 2 mono jacks cable required; alternatively, mini stereo jack > L&R RCA > adapter plugs from RCA to jack); make sure you have the volume low and/or the gain of the mixer low.

Those outputs are meant for the speakers and they've got an impedance of 4 or 8 ohm. Meanwhile, line inputs have impedances around 10/20kOhm. So, no, you're not going to do that, but you're going to look for a pair of RCA outputs that says "AUX", and you'll get a pair of cables that goes from RCA to 1/4" jack .

The ES has several improvements over the original, though, and because of the XS those prices have been pushed down, too. It's really stupid. You have a perfectly good model from 2005 or so, and it suddenly turns obsolete when the new kid in town arrives. It didn't stop working and the difference in instrument quality is - let's be fair - not that big. In fact, the XS (as well as the Fantom G) have dropped several useful functions present in the ES and the Fantom X).

Productivity. 10 songs of which 9 suck give you 1 good song. 1 song of which 90% sucks gives you 1 crappy song. Write. Write again. Keep writing.

Seconding the Komplete Synths package; it's a truly great collection now that Massive's included. Otherwise, http://www.kvraudio.com/news/8865.html looks to be very interesting. It's got some great UI principles going for it. A few pieces of freeware are truly great; however, most of the SynthEdit things are shovelware.

Yeah. Can you define "little spare cash" as a positive integer denoting the amount of dollars?

That's indeed a bit weird. Anyway, I'll clarify: it's not the sound that is fat per se, it's the rest of the track that isn't (and Youtube sound is of a crappy quality). A single synthesizer or sampler only does so much; there's a stack of effects behind it, and there's the rest of the track getting out of the way at the right moment.

No, it doesn't. The rest of the track is just anemic . Try http://refx.com/?lang=en&page=products/nexus/summary

But they're computers. Pretty high-priced ones at that, and the only advantages are that the control surfaces are right in front of you. While it's not portable, a good desk goes a long, long way in the way of ergonomics... But RME is actually pretty good .

Ask yourself first if you really need a workstation. The screen is smaller, it won't run any VST plugins, and you'll need a lot more button pushing to get things done. Sure, you can hook up a mouse. Now you have an older computer with a tiny screen. Yay! The reason people buy those is because they usually have the best piano sounds. Consider an S90ES; yes, it's a little bit older, but the keyboard's just as good, and it'll accept PLG plugin boards; also, it's got all the sounds (it's not just a digital piano).

It's set to the Reverse algorithm because that was the only one that seemed to have a Dry/Wet control. Turning the RV's own Dry/Wet to Dry would also make the Gate ineffective . also, maybe 'knew' is the wrong word - 'managed to figure it out with 5 minutes and no manual' would've been better. Truth is, RV7000 can be abused for a lot more fun stuff than you'd expect, as this shows.

Ahahahaha. You might as well assume that you'll never use 90% of the stuff in Cubase, either. That's because it's made and supported by the same company, and it advises the owners to not upgrade their computers for a while until they've ironed the bugs out.

That's called a (noise) gate. You can abuse RV7000 to do this. Initialize the patch. Switch on Gate Enable. Set Dry/Wet to 100% wet. Open the remote programmer. Go to Reverb - set it to algorithm: reverse. - set Rev Dry/Wet to 0 Then, going to Gate, the RV7000 will function as a regular gate that can be controlled by either MIDI or the audio fed into it, and adjust your settings (Threshold, Attack, Release, Hold) to taste. edit : haha, I don't even own Reason and I knew how to do this in the demo. Woohoo, go Yooz.

Nobody does unless you buy a PAiA kit. What they don't do is make their own presets. Nothing new about that. Also, not everything benefits from the use of samples. If I want a Moog-like sound, samples are rather silly; you're better off with an emulator like Minimonsta or something. I don't think Roland, Korg or Yamaha actually allow this.

You make the claim, you provide the evidence, otherwise it's painfully obvious that you're talking out of your ass. Step away for a moment from the idea that because you can make music with a $99 copy of FL Studio (or even cheaper) you don't have to splurge the big bucks for a PT system.

Point taken. But the confusion for the newcomer remains; for their own good, they need to get rid of those ideas (that either remixing is a genre or remixing requires a certain piece of software or even that other software will make someone sound more professional) as soon as possible as they get in. The fact that this site has great sounding music with what most self-proclaimed "professionals" would consider a toy (FL, Reason) proves this point.

Instead of "compose", the term" arrange" is perhaps better. Anyway, there's still no difference in the applications used. Also, the "which program" question has been asked so many times that it's painfully obvious that nobody ever reads the sticky topics, or they're not phrased in a newbie-understandable way. I suggest one on top titled WHICH PROGRAMS TO REMIX WITH (with the caps included) explaining the question. It's already hard enough to get people to just try stuff, not to mention the idea that if they spend more money on the package it'll automagically sound better. I mean, there's this thread, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one so it's probably a good idea.

There's beatmatching and there's beatmatching. Beatmatching as a DJ (like Mixmeister) means that it'll automagically speed up (or slow down) track B to the tempo of track A. Beatmatching as in Ableton means that you need to tell the program where the beats actually are (it can do a reasonable guess of its own, but don't expect miracles or dealing properly with acapellas; like everything, beats are detected on the basis of repeating peaks). You can do this with so-called Warp Markers, and Logic and Cubase have something like it. You're the first one I shall hit with the cluestick: THERE IS NO SOFTWARE FOR REMIXING. THERE IS ONLY SOFTWARE YOU USE TO MAKE MUSIC. additionally, not aimed towards you but I've seen it enough times here, too: "REMIX" IS NOT A GENRE; IF IT WAS, EVERYTHING HERE WOULD SOUND THE SAME. CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL. Logic Express would give you quite a bit more power than Ableton Lite, but if you mainly want to glue tracks together, Ableton's probably faster in terms of workflow. Also, Ableton (full) has a demo version; take the time to test-drive it and see how it handles your mp3 collection (it can scan and attempt to beatmatch, which in Ableton's case means that if you set the tempo to 130 bpm and you have a 135 bpm song, it'll try to match it to the 130 bpm you've set it to).

How is remixing in the way it happens on OCR not making music? But there's no difference between the applications that are being used. Okay, maybe that needs to be written on a baseball bat which will henceforth be called "cluestick" .

Special Edition. (and LE is Lite Edition). Generally, these mean the same thing (albeit that "Lite" is more honest) - a cheaper, stripped down version that usually allows an upgrade for a discount.

Check out http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=SFLogicNinja Logic's got something called an automation lane where you can do this; you simply draw the volume over time. This goes for all programs . That's pretty much the difference, and of course the set of available plugins and the platform.

It's what you do when you make music with a sequencer, e.g. play the notes in such a sense that they're not recorded as plain sound to tape. There used to be a difference, and a sequencer used to be a box with 8 or 16 steps linked to a modular synthesizer, and each step could have a different pitch, volume or other factor to control. Both Logic and FL sequence, it's just that Logic is linear (there's one long sequence, if you need anything to repeat you have to copy & paste it) and FL is pattern based. E.g., it expects you to compose your music in similar blocks (for instance, you could re-use the "chorus" and "verse" block). As Snappleman said, the kind of music and the software you use aren't related. However, the pattern based nature of FL is an advantage for most electronic music; on the other hand, a lot of electronic music has been made with Logic already. If you want notation, Logic (or Cubase) has the advantage, but Logic's at a pretty unbeatable price point.

I've asked the designer you see in my video here: about the "scary" part.Me: I'd like to ask you a few questions. First of all, a lot of people were absolutely blown away - as you have noticed, of course. Some however have called it scary - of course, that's maybe because it's impressive - but they said something about no longer requiring talent or creativity. Like you'd do a single take with a session musician, and then send him home because you'd fix his errors afterwards anyway. Him: Well, I don't think that fear is warranted. See, the thing is; if you look at the history of music, you see that it started with an original composition which then resulted in a performance, and people got the idea that music should be those two things. With the option to record music, it has been turned into a third form - a product - and we've gotten used to that idea, too. If there's anything that DNA allows you to do, it's to get away from the "product" and to get back to what music is - the composition. Besides, how would changing a note be scary - it's not like anyone has the same complaint when you change a note in the composition itself! So, no, it's not scary. Like anything in music, it's a tool - and it's the result that counts.

5 minutes is God's way of telling you "no, Reason does not do audio tracks." Another option: Load the file in Ableton and use Reason with Rewire.

You don't have to be familiar with each to come to the conclusion that it's apples and oranges you're comparing, and not even because they're on different platforms . One drawback: due to being on the Mac, you won't have as many freeware plugins available.