Yoozer

What you're looking for is a conversion from plain MIDI files to guitar tabs. http://www.tabledit.com/ should do the job.

Then why not ask "What is GM/GS?" . GM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI GS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI#GS_extensions Here's the list of GM instruments: http://www.midi.org/about-midi/gm/gm1sound.shtml If I choose preset nr. 51 on a GM-mapped device, it means I hear that instrument's version of the GM "Synth Strings" preset.

That's 162 pages of stuff that won't be useful, because 95% of the questions are about "how do I do this in (a working copy of) FL." Oh, come on . Assume innocence until proven otherwise. Then everyone with a warezed version of FL should have that problem. Programs like that are cracked once - twice if the original proved to be unstable. Release groups are proud of their work and don't want their names to be tainted. Since FL has been out for quite a while you can safely assume that cracking has been succesful.Anyway - you might want to check your computer's memory with something like memtest86 - http://www.memtest86.com/ - and see if anything weird pops up.

What . You don't buy stuff to remix. You buy stuff to make music. You don't perform a remix, you compose it in your studio, make an mp3 of it and then spam other people to hell with it. Also, you're new here - do yourself a huuuuuge favor and go read all those stickies you see there. And, read this topic: it's an identical question. http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=84053 You'll learn very fast that it pays to search first, then ask questions .

One way to get original work is to rely on your ears instead of a MIDI file to play the melody, or to pick slightly different chords or notes to play with. For instance, you have a simple A minor chord: A C E You can add notes by making it an m6/9: A C E F# B Suddenly the 'plain' chord got some spice. Theory will help you with that for a bit, but it'll focus on the progressions, more. Check out http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/ - try some chords and their spiced up versions. You did right. You might however need an audio interface too, to replace a regular (onboard?) soundcard - if you didn't already get that. Right, but not always. Electric guitars are also sometimes mic'ed like Geoffrey says. Some folks built their own isolated boxes where they put the amp and the mic in to eliminate background noise. See http://www.asc-studio-acoustics.com/images/iso-box-2.jpg Don't just hook anything up to your computer. You don't want to fry stuff. Console, desk, yeah. http://www.zzounds.com/cat--Mixers--2846 Those are mixers . It's better to look this up in a real music store to avoid possible confusion of terminology. You don't want kitchen utensils . A mixer mixes signals. Why do you have to mix signals? Because otherwise you'd only hear one instrument at a time. Why a mixer? Because it allows you to regulate the volume of every instrument without hoping that the players have the right volume set on their machines. If you have a band, everyone wants to hear themselves. Ergo, everyone cranks the volume up to 11. This sucks if it means you only hear guitars, and no vocals and weak keyboards. Why a mixer, continued : because a mixer with "groups" allows you to work with only a few sliders for the volume. If a drum kit is completely mic'ed you have like 11 faders to work with. If you want to turn up the drum kit's volume on the whole, it means sliding up 11 faders. A group allows you to simply use one or two. Why a mixer, even more continued: a lot of mixers already contain microphone preams. You can plug a microphone in a mixer and put the resulting signal without danger of blowing something up in your computer.

I just ordered it @ Thomann. It seems to be temporarily out of stock of every store, oddly enough. Oh well, 2-5 working days of patience...

Some background: If it wasn't for the fact that you get a symphonic library with it (which is a novelty for me : I have an orchestral expansion card, but that's on a regular sample-based synth) plus a Rhodes straight from Elektrik Piano (I loooveee a good Rhodes and EVP73 misses the bark and bite a bit), I could've done without the library. I can make my own stuff; it's just that my previous gear gave me a hard time doing so, storing, organisation, whatever. So, if I understand it, the browser's going to solve that problem. I'd rather not jump from a Kontakt player to the fullblown version - it means paying twice and Kontakt 2.0 is already 385 euros here (that's USD 495). I have 3 hardware samplers - the venerable E-mu ESI4000, the Yamaha A4000, and the Akai MPC1000. I'm planning on keeping the Akai - it's a lot of fun and has modern storage (e.g. built in laptop drive, USB connection, CF media). It also directly works with .wav files. I downloaded the Kontakt demo and I had a ball with it. Apart from some stuff I'll probably figure out with the manual (e.g. how to build a drumkit from a crapload of .wav files, how to use an LFO to modulate the filter insert effect) things worked incredibly intuitive and just dragging stuff in there works. Even better than NN-19 (which doesn't do the dragging or the browser). Thanks for all the replies; it's 99% certain that I'm going to get this.

Go ahead. I'm already sort-of convinced that I really should get it (using Reason's NN-19 opened my eyes; no more SCSI Zip drive nightmares or tedious menu labyrinths or dual-function push-rotate buttons - which makes me want to kick myself for not investigating the softsampler option earlier) but I want to hear the stuff that I can't read about in the reviews. I'm already trying to read all the magazine reviews I can find, but I want user experiences.

So what couldn't you find here? http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7588 http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=30514 http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=23568 and... http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php

There's no reason to use a tracker when you can just plonk in these VST instruments in any sequencer that can handle 'm... http://www.tweakbench.com/ > Peach, Toad, Triforce.

I know you got the answers from this anyway, but... Similar question: Why does OCR have a crapload of Final Fantasy remixes?

No. I don't think you should buy anything before you have tried out some stuff. Any music stores nearby? Just go there without a fat wallet and demo some things. Not remixing. Making music. As I said, you want to make music. A remix is a re-interpretation/rearrangement done in a similar or different style of the original. It is not a separate genre. One device is not more suited for a remix than the other. Buying a certain device doesn't enable you to make good remixes. How I (or anyone else) make music is not exactly going to be the way you're going to make music, most likely. You could get yourself something like an Alesis Fusion 6HD. It's got various methods of synthesis and a built-in sampler/harddiskrecorder; a lot of bang for the buck. However, you might not enjoy looking at a small blue screen. If you -then- want to move to PC-based production, the sequencer suddenly becomes useless so you'll end up with a heavy paperweight. See my point?

A Remix is not a genre; otherwise everything on the site would sound the same. There's nothing common; all depends on the available budget (usually not that high due to the age groups on this site) and the available space (most people don't have a full studio for themselves). So, compact, inexpensive gear (but this is not the rule). I start up Cubase and play something. It records what I play. I can also start up Reason and do the same. Eventually, the song format can not be really called "MIDI" anymore; MIDI has a number of restrictions. Cubase allows an audio track, for instance; so if I need background noise, I can just drag a complete waveform in the sequencer on a single track. I can also bounce what I played to an audio track; since playing audio is less CPU-intensive than calculating how a plugin sounds, I can use more instruments. There's no recipe. First you figure out how you want to remix an existing track, what instruments you're going to need. Then you start building the basis or maybe focus on the chorus/verse structure to make those complete (e.g. completely compose and play in all the tracks) first. I have a number of hardware synthesizers that are controlled by a remote keyboard. The remote sends MIDI signals to the MIDI-interface which routes 'm through to the actual device. This allows me to sit on my ass and choose what synth I want to play from a single location.

Pray tell, how'd you miss that dozen of stickied threads put there for your convenience? If you would have the same prowess in traffic, you'd turn Route 66 in a desolate, wreck-laden wasteland . MIDI is not audio. Your synthesizer will only tell the receiving party what notes it should play, not how they sound. MIDI is to audio what musical scoresheets are to tape. The difference is crucial. Do you play a real instrument or do you have the patience to learn it? If not, then a purely computer-based approach is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to make songs. Samples alone are usually not enough. Yes. Software synthesizers, for instance. None. This question is meaningless. It can't be answered without an actual budget.Furthermore, in terms of synthesizers you may forget any terms you've learned from computers - synthesizers (except a few which you can count on 2 hands and which have a 4-digit price) aren't there with the uploading/downloading/exporting stuff yet. Read the stickies and this http://www.tweakheadz.com/ Come back when you can answer the above question of budget and after you've read more of the material. Having people shout various brand names or plugins at you isn't going to do you any good; you must understand the underlying concepts better in order to refine your choices. Sure, you can download the FL Studio trial version. This will however cause a load of questions in its own right; a lot of which can be answered by some reading.

You don't use a sample for that, you use a VST plugin for that. See Toad/Peach/Triforce : http://www.tweakbench.com/ You don't have a distortion on the synth, you have one separately: http://www.simulanalog.org/guitarsuite.htm Define "good". There's electronic and acoustic bassdrums. For vintage drum machine bassdrums, check here: http://www.akaipro.com/arc_kotw.html - zipped wavefiles. For acoustic drums, check http://www.naturalstudio.co.uk/sampled.html . See above. A guitar is an instrument that is hard to mimic. It also can't be covered with a single sample. What guitar - do you mean acoustic, electric, steel, etc? If you'd know more about sample theory you'd know what to ask for. A single sample is like a piece of tape. Play it back faster and the pitch changes, but the harmonics change too. This means that a piano sampled at a low note sounds dull when you transpose it up (not to mention awfully short), and that a piano sampled at a high note sounds too bright when it's slowed down (and too long). In other words, you need multiple samples to realistically mimic an instrument. A guitar is very tricky because there's lots of ways to play one, and the distortion effect is usually applied separately (because sampling it makes the sample sound bad when it's sped up or slowed down). You'll have more luck with something like the Slayer VST (or equivalent). Like http://www.kvraudio.com/get/414.html or http://www.kvraudio.com/get/142.html Check out www.kvraudio.com/get.php is your friend.

A Soundblaster or Audigy card is great for gaming or just listening to mp3s. If you want to use it for music production, it falls short. First, the inputs/outputs of an audio interface are of a higher quality, and offer the connections you need. Second, there's latency. Latency is the time it takes between pressing the key and hearing the sound. On a regular soundcard without ASIO-support this takes a while (half a second sometimes). For playing live, this is unacceptable. The problem can be solved sort-of by using other drivers; the kX project drivers if you have an Audigy, or www.asio4all.com for all the others. You could use this as a temporary solution. With my E-mu 1212m I can get 3ms of latency; it makes it feel like you're playing an actual hardware synth. Still, I recommend getting an audio interface. I have the Xboard 49 myself. The keys play nicely, and the unit is light-weight but solid (no wobbly knobs). The display shows what you're doing without the need for a software configuration tool.

The first question is really: do you need to have built-in sounds or are you going to make music with your computer anyway? If it's the latter, spend the cash on both an E-mu 0404 or similar (cheap) soundcard (M-Audio Audiophile 2496) and get an Xboard 49 as a controller. For $250 you can get a fancy keyboard with speakers on board, but ask yourself: - are you going to use the computer as a sound source anyway? - do you really need the built-in rhythms (chances are that they can not be 'translated' properly to a software sequencer) lowaim: do you really need the compact size? You're going to notice it while playing. Edirol is pretty okay, but it makes no sense to get something like that if you don't have a laptop and travel much.

... Manual? Tutorials?

Value for money. The ability to achieve your goal (composing a song, designing a sound, recording a part) quickly. Stability (e.g. not crapping out on you when you have to perform). It was $300 when you bought it. That wasn't the price for a brand new unit. The XP-10 is not a true XP/JV unit but uses a cheaper synthesis engine based on the Sound Canvas series. It is not expandable. It does not have a sequencer. It does not have a sampler. It does not have alternate synthesis methods or the ability to plug them in. It's got a smaller display. That's great. If it works for you - awesome, and don't let any of this talk hold you back in any way. This is not meant in a patronizing fashion; if it's good, it's good. That's absolutely not a weird thing. On-board speakers are nearly worthless in a studio environment. Live - you're playing on a PA anyway. For practice, sure, why not. But then you pay for something you won't use in the studio, anyway. The first thing you should do is recognize the difference between a "performance" oriented synthesizer like your XP-10 and a "workstation" oriented synthesizer like the Fusion or the Mo8. The latters have sequencers on-board. The reason a lot of people will use them for performance duties anyway is because there are simply no performance synthesizers by Yamaha or Alesis that offer the same soundset -without- the sequencer, and the S90 does not come in a 61-key package. "Higher level" is also a subjective term. For instance, when your XP-10 was produced, there was also the XP-50, with a full XP/JV engine, sequencer, diskdrive, and expandability. After that, there came the XP-60 and 80 which increased the size of the display and features of the sequencer. For Korg, there are now the OASYS, the Triton Extreme, the TR (used to be Triton Le) and the X-50. The OASYS is the flagship model with expandability in methods of synthesis and a touchscreen. The Triton Extreme has a smaller soundset and no Karma features. The TR has a stripped effects section and a smaller soundset. The X-50 has the TR's soundset but is sequencerless.

No . See, all I did was look for "88" in the Zzounds search engine and cross away everything more expensive than $1500.

Workstation: Alesis Fusion 8HD : http://www.zzounds.com/item--ALEFUSION8HD Yamaha Mo8 : http://www.zzounds.com/item--YAMMO8 Synthesizer: Yamaha S90: http://www.zzounds.com/item--YAMS90 Kurzweil PC1x: http://www.zzounds.com/item--KRZPC1X Very much like a digital piano: Yamaha P140 : http://www.zzounds.com/item--YAMP140 Roland RD300SX: http://www.zzounds.com/item--ROLRD300SX

It's not so much "inferior", it's more that - the thing isn't really made for music production regardless of what Creative claims - low latencies need tweaks (ASIO4All, Kx drivers) - the resampling isn't really that awesome. If you're going to get something like that anyway, spend a bit more and get the Proteus X. Comes with a nice sample library, too - so the 'how do you guys afford all that' won't be that much of a question anymore . Having said that, if things aren't really bothering you at the moment, I see little need to switch. Don't let us talk you into buying something new if you personally think what you have works good enough.

Celemony Melodyne can export to MIDI as per version 2 . http://www.audiomidi.com/Melodyne-Cre8-V-2-6-P2455.aspx But it's pretty expensive.

He took a 4th mortgage on his house, with all that price gouging and that.

The next knock on your door is from the RIAA or the BSA and they'll have a nice chat with you. You know that under the new PERFORM act you can get up to 10 years for that? Even for attempted breach of copyright. People who go advertising their use of juarez are incredibly stupid. Anyway, how do I afford stuff? I save up money and look for bargains in the classifieds. Know what you really need and what you don't. And, like Compy said - tons of free good stuff to be had out there. Really, the only money you'll have to spend is on the VST host itself, the controller keyboard and the soundcard. For the rest you can get by with freebies for a long, long time. Haha, what? For $4000 you're looking at symphonic Hollywood strings libraries (and the collections of those). Most hardware synthesizers even don't hit that mark (except for a fully maxed out Kurzweil K2600, or the Korg OASYS). Yes, there's reverb units out there that may cost that much, but investing that money in something like that is a whole other ballgame. A Pro Tools rig will cost you more than that, but the Pro Tools people are talking about here is either not theirs (for academic use) or Pro Tools LE.