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Yoozer

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Posts posted by Yoozer

  1. 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.

  2. 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 :-)

  3. 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.

  4. 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).

  5. Subtractor:

    hisaishipadsub.th.png

    Thor (preferred):

    hisaishipadthor.th.png

    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.

  6. But, sometimes the theory behind it seems like an ancient science, or something blocked by the Chinese government. There is almost no information to be found on this old method of songwriting that has as much to do with composing as it did programming!

    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.

  7. 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.

  8. FF7 = Playstation 1 = nothing 8-bit about it.

    i have the software to do 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. :-)

    get the in game sounds online would it be best if i acquired them personally?

    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.

  9. Exactly. Time to quote myself.

    Basically you can abstract everything in a mix into something that takes up a part of the frequency spectrum. To use the old and tired car analogy:

    See it as a big mover's truck that you load up with household stuff. The height of the truck is the volume; the length of the truck is the frequency range.

    You have a cabinet in your living room. It goes at the left of the truck. It's pretty high, so stacking anything on top of it - well, you can't do that, because you'll reach the ceiling of the truck. If you persist, you punch through the ceiling - not good. So what you stack on top of it should be low, or you should find a way to make it low, or you should find a way to make the cabinet lower.

    That tool is simply volume; by decreasing the volume you squash the cabinet's height. By using a compressor, you squash the height of everything that's stacked on top of eachother. By using a multiband compressor, you squash the height of everything that's stacked on top of eachother at a certain place.

    You have a couch. It's pretty big and hard to move, and since you know you've got too much stuff in your household and can't make it fit otherwise, it actually has to overlap with the cabinet you put there earlier. Since overlapping can't be done physically - you can't push one object through another - you'd have a problem - if this was in real life.

    The solution is an equalizer; instead of squashing, it saws off a part of what you want to put there. You can either saw off the part of the couch that's in the way, saw off the part of the cabinet that's in the way, or saw off a bit of both so they fit properly.

    This is why just throwing a compressor on everything is not going to help.

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