Yoozer

You'll need a modular powersupply for it, though. It's one of the many clones that are available.

So um would a more recent polysynth (Tetr4, Prophet '08 ) with a Polymoog Filter not be an option? Or if you just want polyphony, a nice virtual analog?

They're heavy and prone to break down. If you find one that's far away, pray that whoever's shipping it doesn't drop it and that it's insured for enough money. If yours arrives broken, have fun finding a service technician who can fix it up again. Either way, it's going to be an expensive adventure.

Not here, anyway. VSE Classifieds - try http://www.vintagesynth.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9 and http://www.vintagesynth.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=10 Gearslutz classifieds - http://www.gearslutz.com/board/gearslutz-secondhand-gear-classifieds/ Last but not least: eBay. Do you have any idea what kind of mess you're getting yourself into?

Practice a month or so (this doesn't mean 8 hours per day) on listening to various combinations of basic waveforms (sine, saw, pulse, square, modulated pulse) at various tunings - third, fifth, octave, two octaves - all up and down. Then, apply filters to those combinations. Internalize those, because that's going to help you immensely when you want to learn how to mimic sounds. And that's just subtractive; you can do amazing stuff that's hard/impossible with subtractive with lots of other things. Except for orchestral sounds which are sample-based anyway it can save you a huge load of money, because more plugins invariably means more overlap. Lots of free stuff is simply the hundredth incarnation of (classic synthesizer) and doesn't really add anything new; lots of paid stuff is the same. Nightmare mode; pick a sound you like, start up the demo of Reason (quits after 20 minutes) and try to mimic a sound - any sound - before it closes. So, yeah, serious business

Would you hand any 16-year old who's had a single driving lesson the keys of your car?

Alternatively, http://www.samplemagic.com/products/prod_b1_secretshousemusic.html Decent trance is not that easy; since it tries to evoke something big and overwhelming the chance to land in Kraft cheese territory's rather big. As for sounds - don't worry about those. You'd be surprised how they can transcend genres.

Gah, I'm getting old. Anyway, there are no Metroid Prime soundfonts because the music in Prime can not be pulled apart that way. Here, get these: http://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/the-13-best-free-vst-plug-ins-in-the-world-today-277953/ and these http://audionewsroom.blogspot.com/search/label/freeware . It'll give you a neat combination of synthetic sounds and realistic ones; additionally you could throw in E-mu's Proteus VX in there (which is free after signing up with their mailing list; then you can unsubscribe if you want to). Even then, the comments about synthesis still ring true; for the atmospheric sounds, you need to build your own - or cough up the money. The less work you want to do, the more it's going to cost. For instance, Omnisphere has some amazing movie soundtrack pad sounds right out of the box, but it's $479. Besides free, also look at "dirt cheap". http://www.audiomidi.com/String-Studio-VS-1-No-Brainer-Deal-P14511.aspx is pretty good (used to cost $99). Cobalt is pretty great - http://www.lesliesanford.com/Products.shtml . Sample libraries for percussion also don't cost a lot. For a few bucks you have more power at your hands than I had from 1990 to 2005.

If you don't have time to learn synthesis, why do you have time to make music at all? You don't become a musician in 24 hours. It's something you spend a lifetime on. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=synthesizer+boot+camp&aq=f There, go watch that. Basic and byte-sized. Now, synthesis is not that super-useful on a SNES - which is sample-based. On the other hand, when you cut down a sample to a small enough piece, you usually end up with something you can synthesize; and that knowledge is useful for a lot more than plain techno bleeps and bloops or chiptunes. Since the SNES has a soundchip with only a small amount of memory, lots of sounds aren't rendered realistically at all; if you'd given those composers the choice between the SNES and real instruments and synthesizers, they would've chosen the latter. What's in the SNES is a pale imitation; but it says quite a bit that it still sounds good (and it appeals to people) after all that time (and that's mostly thanks to theory and composition, not synthesis).

If only one track of mine can be included it should be Slice & Gneiss (Cutman vs. Stone Man).

I liked the Cinematic one better than the Atmospheric, so I got that. (together with Alchemy itself)

An alternative would be a sample-based string pad from NN-XT. If you have one but it's too bright, you could try turning down the cutoff frequency of the filter. It's far in the background and rather soft, so it's not easy to determine exactly how it's made.

Subtractor: Thor (preferred): All you have to do is right-click on the Device, choose "Initialize patch", and then copy the settings above. Since I only have a demo version, all I can give are screenshots - but they're good for exercise. Just add reverb (preferably RV7000) and play gently.

Get a teacher. Books or DVDs don't slap you on the wrist when you're doing it wrong.

And there you have the reason; composers had to build their own authoring tools. As for "merely changing a few notes here or there" - nope. Even when you set out to create a cover version, you have to completely re-engineer the whole thing; when you create original work, you're already bound to the constraints. Get yourself the old version of SIDPlay (not v2) - http://www.gsldata.se/c64/spw/sidplayw.html . Then, get the C64 High Voltage SID Collection. Try to find a SID file that's relatively recent (e.g. 1996 and onwards) - those are most likely to contain some of the advanced tricks. In View -> Mixer you can mute individual channels (just make sure the emulation is set to Original, not reSID) - then you hear all the things going on. An example; http://www.theheartcore.com/music/sid_mute.mp3 The original track is "Mito" by Sebastian Kuehn (Rio). First everything at the same time, then the first channel, then the second, then the third, then the first again. You can hear some peculiar effects when the arpeggiator isn't used - it sounds very metallic. This goes way beyond the regular bleeps; it's audio-rate modulation of waveforms. If you can't properly hear what's going on - slow it down. Play it back at half speed - you can use Audacity to tranpose wave files down.

http://www.lennardigital.com/modules/sylenth1/ Mirrored for your pleasure: http://www.theheartcore.com/music/bpmyb.psd Right-click, save as, rename the file from .psd to .mp3.

Any wimpy snare gets awesome with D16 Devastor. The drums aren't that hard - just cycle/blend through several stacked breakbeats. Loopmasters has all your sample needs pretty much covered. See http://www.loopmasters.com/genre/show/15/Drum_and_Bass

I'd rather have my wisdom teeth pulled than use Audition ever again, and Cubase is as exciting as Excel on a Friday night. Go try Reaper. No dongles, no bovine excrement.

Not all distortions are created the same. Not all sound sources are created the same. Sometimes, EQ is used before or after the distortion to get the desired effect. Tried anything tube-like? Synths have a different frequency range than guitars.

Industry standard only means something if you plan to bring your stuff to other people who use the same. As for PTLE, you're forced to buy particular hardware with it - either M-Powered M-Audio interfaces or the PTLE interfaces themselves.

Hammered dulcimer.

So, all your guitars have this color. Most important to me is the ability to play and to know theory; master your instrument so you don't need to think when playing. All the rest is secondary to that, because it's something you have to do yourself; all the rest can be outsourced if necessary.

What's not so simple however is the slew of tricks the programmers used to create certain effects - all kinds of really interesting audio modulation going on. You'll mostly hear that on the Commodore 64 games though, not so much the NES or Master System.

FF7 = Playstation 1 = nothing 8-bit about it. What software? We can't read your mind, we can't help you when you don't tell us what you use. There's no "the" software. The way to do this would be to study the structure of the contents of the game disk and figure out where all these sounds are stored. Someone might've done this already. But again; they've got nothing to do with 8-bit sounds or chiptunes or whatever it's called. Get this jumble of incorrect ideas out of your mind and start with a clean slate. You want beeps? This does beeps. You don't want beeps but the sounds in FF7 (which ones? It helps if you have a Youtube video where you could say "listen at 2 minutes, 32 seconds - that's the kind of sound I'm talking about"). Any sequencer with audio tracks or any kind of sequencer with a sampler built in (trackers) will do the job for you.

Exactly. Time to quote myself. This is why just throwing a compressor on everything is not going to help.