Arcana
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Posts posted by Arcana
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Guess what day it is today?
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While you're at it, would you consider labelling "track" with the number of the OC ReMix?
So it would be Track 2017, Track 2018, etc? I sometimes wished there was a way to listen to the songs in a "chronologically-posted" order. So for example if I miss out on downloading for a week I can grab a bunch and listen to them in order of posting.
Obviously I wouldn't expect you guys to change the previous entries but it would be pretty sweet for the future.
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I had just re-played Chrono Cross (Best Soundtrack Ever) before grabbing this so maybe I'm being harsh due to Comparison Syndrome...
I dunno, maybe it's a taste thing to me, I'm finding the music too atmospheric and its failing to engross me emotionally.
I find that there's tons of music in FF XIII, and that in fact it's very fitting. The fact that it's atmospheric is appealing. I don't really find that music that sits out and is all like "LISTEN TO ME I'M IN THE BACKGROUND" in a game is awesome.
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- a set of good monitor speakers (as opposed to hi-fi speakers which sweeten and color the sound, making things sound better than it really is). This is the biggest investment and again they'll last a while; but they're your ears.
The reason I say personally is because several people here will say that headphones are just as good. They're not; they're different.
I agree that headphones aren't as good, but the reality is that even the most basic entry-level monitors are still REALLY expensive compared to a solid pair of headphones.
Monitors will START at $300. If you're saavy you might be able to get a pair for $200.
You can get above-average headphones for $150, and you can probably get something decent for $100. The cost difference is pretty large and if music is something you're not sure you want to be doing, it's much easier to justify a headphone purchase than a studio monitor purchase.
That said if you get serious about music, monitors make your life much easier, and more fun, and make your mixes sound better, etc.
Learn how to write and arrange music first IMO. This is much harder to grasp than mixing/mastering. I agree with Yoozer's point about making sure your compositions sound good on a piano/guitar before relying on an expensive synth/sampler.This.
Personally I've experienced much more frustration from composing and arranging than I have through production.
Not only notes, but also song structure and song form, what ranges to cover, and what keys to use, and how to do cool music theory things like modulations and grace notes.
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Is it too late to join ? I'd like to make a rock/metal version of it !
It is kind of late-ish, we weren't going to accept any new people. Do you think you could come up with a high-quality track in two weeks? If you can let me know
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Yeah but
spoiler
There was also a lot "sprung" on you during the ending sequences that had absolutely no appearance before.
The whole "smoke and mirrors" trick turning the party into Cei'th for example.
I was also disappointed in the fact that even though Fang and Vanille's relationship really wasn't covered that well in the game, there was so much time spent on them and their relationship with each other. We really should have seen more of them if they were going to be so prominent to the survival of the world. As it turns out, I realised that they were both turned to crystal again but I didn't even feel shocked or sad. Unfortunately, neither did most of the main characters.
Their death was nothing like, for example, Tidus's disappearance, which had a strong emotional impact even if you didn't really like Tidus because Yuna simply looked so heartbroken about it all. While the scale of the stories is something on a different level (Final Fantasy X is much more about love than FF XIII ever will be) it's really never that good of a thing when two major characters "die" at the end of the game and the player fails to care - and this is coming from someone who ended up using Vanille and Fang almost all the time in the main party.
end spoiler
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Two-week bump! If you haven't started thinking about this it may be a good time to schedule some time to work on it.
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Did anyone else have opinions on the storyline of the game, especially the ending? I had a laundry list of complaints, as well as some confusion and am wondering what others thought.
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Thanks for the Kontact <-> FL Studio 101.
I 100% plan on playing around with FL Studio defaults. I'll probably end up posting "for the lols" mixes all collectively in a thread just so I can hear what people have to say.
What's your music background like? If you have a good understanding of composition and theory you're likely going to get a lot of good advice on the WIP forums.
As for my second question, I wasn't really thinking about "maximizing" OCRemix acceptability rates.
I was more so thinking about, are there certain effects, particularly synths, or articulations(?) that may be much more difficult for a novice to pull off at all?
For example, the oscillations in the first 20 seconds of zircon's ReMix, "Desertion," is something that I get the impression takes being very familiar with your programs in order to pull off.
I stepped in with the notion that some songs may have more difficult technical features in comparison to others, and since being properly conservative to the source is a must here on OCR, I assumed that some songs are more complex than others even before considering a ReMixer's interpretation.
I guess this still all ties back to the amount of passion I have for a particular source regardless of technicality, but this is also a factor as well, right?
To be quite honest I think that remixing is much more dependent on how well you listen and how good your understanding of music theory, music composition, and composition styles are than on the actual production of the pieces. A lot of the video games here have sources that aren't production-intensive at all (I mean, half of the tunes are from the NES). Particular genres have elements of production that are more difficult than others though.
Electronic music in general benefits heavily from tight production and synth design. I don't find it particularly hard to do but you will discover that over time you'll get better.
Some instruments are hard to sequence well. Violins (especially solo violins) are pretty difficult to make realistic sounding for example. Guitar can sound bad if you don't sequence it well. There are however a ton of people out there who know how to play guitar and you can often get someone to play guitar parts for you if you intend to release a song.
All music benefits from different production elements like filling the sound scape, proper panning, etc. If you want to get a sense of what a lot of people look for, sit down and go through the Judges' reviews as well as the WIP Forum reviews. You'll get a sense of what people comment on, production-wise.
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This isn't technically accurate but it'll illustrate what happens from the user point of view.
Kontakt is a sampler. It is a software plug-in whose job is to load up the right sound files and play them back when you press a note on your keyboard.
In any program, you have a track. The track is set up so that it plays a number of notes in sequence.
Basically, you'd load up program of choice, assign the instrument to "Kontakt", and then you'd double click on the Kontakt interface and load up the instrument that you want. At this stage you could load up, for example, VSL strings, or drums, or Shreddage.
Then, you'll be able to drag and drop the notes on the track.
This goes for almost every software that plays back sounds. If you used a software synthesizer instead of Kontakt, it would play back simulated synthesizer-like stuff (made from oscillators and the like) rather than music sound files.
Shreddage is a library - basically it's a set of files that you would load inside Kontakt once you got the plugin set up and loaded. AFAIK there's no way to run it outside of Kontakt but Zircon would be able to give you the definitive answer.
I highly, highly, highly recommend that you fiddle around with your program of choice before spending money on Kontakt. And, download the Kontakt demos from the NI web site. Doing so will help answer a lot of your questions about how the workflow works.
Second and last question for now, should I be careful with the song that I first choose to mix? Or should I not even start by mixing and instead start by composing random beats?
Are you talking about choosing a song that'll "maximize" the chance you'll get accepted on OCR?
Honestly I'd just do anything you want to do. Your passion is going to drive you for much longer than your "I'm going to be a posted OC ReMixer" will.
It's not like you can't compose more than one song either so don't worry about what you start doing. Heck, you can go ahead and compose many songs at the same time.
Personally I started out with remixing because I was obsessed with Suikoden music at the time but there's no right or wrong way to approach it. -
Anyone else find it odd that, at least from the outside, the system sounds like it pushes a lot of metagame strategy? I mean, sure, we've been working with numeric stats since D&D, but having to focus on perfect timing for ATB bars... it seems a little, well, stretched. Not that it's necessarily a bad mechanic, but it really removes from the concept of how the system could tie to the world itself.
Or am I totally mistaken, here?
What do you mean by perfect timing?
The only thing I really worry about with respect to timing is doing Pparadigm shifts. Time it so the shift focuses only on my main character (good) and not so it goes through the camera shots for each of my three character (bad). I believe it's related to whether your ATB gauge is filling or not but I haven't figured it out precisely.
Other than that, you just queue up your commands (or press Auto-Battle) as soon as your character's executed the actions. On "Normal", given 3 bars, you get a window of about 5 or so seconds to do it I think.
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Yes, it's possible to teach yourself.
And yes, it takes a long time. I don't think anyone would argue if I told you that learning the production side from zero to OCR-quality will probably take "years".
As for which order to learn in - theory/music writing vs. production? It doesn't really matter. You kind of need one before you can do the other (you can't make a good mixdown if you don't have a song to work on after all) but it doesn't actually take that long to get up to a basic level with arrangement (probably a few months). As you might have figured out though, OCR is very production-oriented; a lot of the people who get posted tend to be really good at things like sound design and mixing. When people "talk shop" at OCR they tend to discuss the production aspect of things much more so than the arrangements.
As far as what tools to use, you do have a lot of options. I'd recommend the following:
- Good monitoring. That is, get a set of headphones or studio monitors that are known for their accuracy. There's a thread for what speakers or headphones to buy. Good monitoring is essential (those are Zircon's words, not mine).
You can get a good pair of headphones that'll suffice for under $200. Generally, I consider them to be the first thing I'd recommend someone who wants to get into music to purchase because you'll start hearing things better. Also, they're something that you'll use even if you quit music (but let's not go there!)
- Some audio program to work in. I think everyone else covered them quite well. However most of these are quite expensive ($400+) so try to get demos or the "basic" versions of the software first.
As mentioned you can also spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on things like Kontakt (see my Kontakt thread also on this forum for info about it), East-West, Spectrasonics, and other things like that. To be very very honest with you I'd suggest not buying them until you're comfortable with the process of making songs and start feeling limited by things like free soundfonts and samples.
Also, look for free versions of stuff. Kontakt has a time-limited demo that contains 600MB of samples. East-West released an unlimited-use package of about 17 instruments not long ago. Reason has a time-limited demo. Those kinds of things, in combination with free VSTs/AUs and default samples, should be able to entertain you for a year or two.
FLStudio is about $150 or so. Garageband of course comes free on your Mac, so I recommend it to people who are interested in music. Logic Express (the version of Logic that comes with fewer plugins) is something like $200.
Kontakt costs about $400, if you get the "bonus pack" with extra plugins then it costs more than that. It's not that bad for beginner to use but quite honestly I'd recommend that you make a few songs in the program of choice with the default (or free) samples before you go and spring for Kontakt. You might want to see the thread (http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=28540) on it as well if you haven't already.
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Ya, The eidolon is easily the toughest fight I've seen yet I've gotten about 90% of the way there however I've done no grinding at all through out the game and I've skipped a few encounters so i think Im pretty low level.. I'll give it another shot at getting past the phalanx before I back track 3 or 4 hours....
The Phalanx gave me a hard time too when I first encountered them. I'd recommend getting Vanille's Eidolon first, then backtracking and doing Missions if you want to "level up".
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Hmmm Im thinking I need to grind out a little and finish the game... Ive got no aerisol things, and Im underleveled for the fang/vanille Eidelon battle... Hell I've got no TP left and I couldn't beat the damn phalanx bot with 3 hoplites without a summon... Im doomed.... oh, and I violated my number one rule of RPG's... keep an extra save about an hour behind me...
To do the Fang/Vanille thing just switch between Saboteur/Sentinel and Medic/Sentinel for the whole time. That should work.
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It sounds fine to me. There's not that much background noise or anything. You might tweak the tone and the EQ later on but the recording itself seems clean.
Have you run your BX5s directly to your computer's line out vs. your Logitech speakers directly to your computer's line out? Have you tried headphones? Have you tried the playback on another computer or an MP3 player to see if the difference is drastic there?
Finally do you have any weird stuff for your computer's speakers, like an EQ running in the background for your computer speakers or EAX or something like that which may color the default output?
If your Logictech system is a 5.1 surround system it might be doing funny background things like "spreading" the stereo out to the different speakers or possibly overdoing the bass since you have a subwoofer, or other things like that.
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Wait wait are you saying that I get the opportunity to sleep in the same room as Stevo? Giggity! Why aren't you all on this one?
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I'm wondering if anyone here has had the opportunity to really play with the Tenori-on.
http://www.global.yamaha.com/design/tenori-on/
I saw one at the store and played with it (for not long, maybe only about 10 minutes) but it seems like it would be extremely fun to experiment with. I've put it on the list of things that I am actually consider buying.
However, it's quite a steep purchase at $999 and there are apparently a few issues with it such as having a bad MIDI Clock, and terrible samples (which you can replace). But, it seems extremely fun and something that I could learn to work with to create some really cool patterns on the fly when hooked up to a computer.
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http://soundfonts.darkesword.com/
You need to extract the sfpack files into sf2 files first. Darkesword's Soundfont page above has a link to the program.
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IMO, getting posted on OCR means that you've made a piece of music that passes the standards of this website. It's certainly exciting, especially for someone who's new to writing music/remixes/etc, but I don't really think you need to read into it anymore than that.
There are a lot of people who just do game mixes as a side hobby. Maybe they're already established and skillful musicians in other areas but only have time to do one or two remixes. The amount of mixes a person has doesn't necessarily have a bearing on their skill. And on the flip side - just because a person has continued to consistently make music for years, it doesn't mean that their newer music is better than their older music, or even that they've over that time (though you'd hope they would).
Be excited about the music you're making and think about that. Think less about your status or level of respectability in other people's eyes. That's not really something you can control. I say this because I've made this mistake many times before, and I don't want you to get frustrated when things don't end up coming as easy as you hoped they would.
I agree with most of this especially the downplaying of the opinion that people have of you. A lot of people post on these forums and follow the music. A lot of people get posted on OC ReMix and no one ever pays attention to them - it takes more than just getting one mix up, you have to be prolific, productive, and dynamic, as well as involved in the community now.
It's a good end goal, but it takes a long time for music to become intuitive and to recognize what the standards are. It's really easy to deceive yourself into thinking something is awesome just because you made it.
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I really do enjoy the bombastic, aggressive sound of the EWQLSO free stuff I've used so far (yes their strategy is working, using their limited selection of about 15 instruments has gotten me to consider buying their program).
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IMO I agree with zircon and palpable about Komplete and Kore. Although if you are only looking to make OCR mixes I personally don't see the need to spend that massive amount of money. How do your current mixes sound? Got an example? IMO learn to build and mix/master a song properly before upgrading your set-up. For example this mix was mixed and mastered entirely with the default Logic plugins:
At the moment most of my output is spent doing one-hour compos, which pretty much don't demand good sound quality at all. Right now I'm using a lot of the EWQLSO Play! stuff for the orchestral samples and quite simply I have more fun laying down haromines (and spend less time doing humanization) with the expensive libraries vs. something like Squidfont.
But you do bring up a good point, maybe it'll be good to finish a few songs before I go around buying new tools and I thank you for the reality grounding.
Still please feel free to extoll the virtues of Kontakt and Komplete, especially since it appears to be quite popular on OCR and other people may wish to learn about it.
Also please feel free to discuss orchestral libraries since I've been curious about them for a while, one reason I'd get Kontakt is for orchestral stuff. I asked the guy at the store what the differences between Kontakt are and the EWQLSO stuff was and he didn't really give me a great answer, mostly that the Play! engine sucks. He told me that the Vienna String Library stuff is more "classical" and dry compared to East West.
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Hey, I'm thinking of grabbing Kontakt 4. Not only does 78.41% of OC ReMixers seem to recommend Kontakt, but it is also the preferred sampler of famous names like Zircon and Rellik.
What I'm wondering though are the benefits of these bundles - namely Komplete and the Komplete + Kore 2 kits where you add about $100 extra for a bunch of softsynths.
Does anyone have an opinion on how good Komplete is for me? At the moment I use Logic Pro and most of their default plugins - it has a decent guitar amp (Guitar Amp Pro), a good drum machine (Ultrabeat), decent synths (subtractive and FM, along with some cool modeling synths) and a really cool impulse response reverb (Space Designer) and I'm pretty happy with them so far.
What I'm mostly aching for are good orchestral/ethnic/world samples, and possibly Shreddage
How are the synths in Komplete? Anyone got some user reviews? Is it worth the extra $100 or 200?
Also what exactly is Kore? The guy in the store was saying that it's for "managing my instruments" but I'm wondering if anyone has a bit more information. Kore 2 seems like it's meant more for live performance, but I'm wondering if it's been useful for anyone for tweaking parameters.
Thanks guys,
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The instant I saw this I knew it was a joke. I just wanted to ham it up and fake outrage, because you don't want to be that guy who's all like "THIS IS OBVIOUSLY A JOKE GUYS CHECK THE CALENDAR".
I was pretty certain everyone else was hamming it up too (though Emperor actually got banned for it which is kind of funny but sad at the same time).
But after going through this thread I'm not so sure anymore.
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spoilers
I just finished the game. It's 1:30 AM and I supposedly gotta get up in four hours so I'll write back when I get home after the weekend. There's a pretty large laundry list of issues I have with the story in this game but I'll go through a few highlights.
-begin spoilers-
I had a bunch of "general story pacing" issues with Disks 1 and 2, but overall they're not really big issues. I'm going to deal with elements of the story itself.
First, I was extremely annoyed that everything in the game was revealed by Bartandalus. Everything - from the fal'Cie's purpose to the nature of the l'Cie to the reasons why the stormtroopers... I mean PSIComm could never hit Lightning or Snow or any other one of our heroes with their billions of bullets.
Why does this annoy me? Because so much of the game is based on what he says. He's a villain. And villains lie in order to get people to do things. When you're reading a book, it's not really essential to know what the "truth" is, but I think for a story as long as this one, and especially where you have to get motivation to play as a consequence of the story (or, alternatively, as a motivator to get more story), it's important for the player to know what the "truth" is. It's simply not enough for the director of the game to presume that the player is invested enough in the characters to support their quest of "running away for a bit of a vacation", and then to presume that the player will believe the primary villain long enough to think that yes, in fact Orphan dies in order to destroy the world.
I mean, in the end it turns out to be true (phew), but then there's like at least three or four Deus Ex Machina elements that happen at the very end of the game that really make me scratch my head. The whole "hey we turned into Cieth but hey-look-we-decided-not-to-be" was really really cheesy.
Besides the ending, the other issues I had with the story generally amounted to the following:
1) The world wasn't developed enough. It's strange to say of a 50+ hour game, but I think the biggest problem I had with the entire game was that I really didn't give a damn about Cocoon and would have been pretty damn happy to pitch a tent, settle down, and start a farm on Gran Pulse.
The reason is that Cocoon really isn't shown in a flattering light for most of the game. The citizens are sheep. They're all antagonistic toward our heroes. There's maybe six minor characters from Cocoon who are important enough for us to care about, but we really don't learn more about them other than their names. For a couple of foreigners who've barely lived in the society for two weeks (Vanille in particular), they're awfully attached to it - at least Fang had an attitude that I would have seen as more realistic - "I'll follow them because they can help me, not because I really care that much about the world". I suppose it might just be a personality thing but it could have come out better, especially if there were more scenes in the backstory part of the game (which, unfortunately consisted almost primarily of the 13 days leading up to the main events).
2) The "goal" isn't clear, from a global view. As I mentioned, the only antagonist (other than their supposedly-timed fates) is Bartandalus, and the entire story is delivered by the main villain. Maybe I missed a cutscene, or maybe it would be more interesting if I had unlocked all of the "legend" datalogs, but it would have been great to actually learn about the world through what could be considered a less subjective source. This is pretty critical because virtually the entire game is supposed to be based on preconceptions and biases of the population, and this gets turned on its head at the end (the reason why people turn into Cieth for example).
3) The pacing is off for almost the entire game.
Too slow at the beginning, then it gets super-rushed, then it slows to a crawl as it opens up to the exploration-allowed part. Then the last ten hours or so are delivered in another huge rush of events.
I think I had issues with how character interactions pretty much stopped after you got to Gran Pulse. There were two or three cutscenes, but they were pretty much extra fluff and didn't reveal (what I would have thought) to be important information about the character's motivations. Of particular importance, now that I've seen the end of the game, would have been Vanille and Fang's previous relationship before they were turned to crystal especially since it seems like they're pretty damn important in the grand thick of things.
I think the "trial" of the character Fang at the end was interesting, but as I watched it I felt that I should have watched this cutscene 20 hours ago, and that this classic "test of the hero" should have been done earlier. I don't know if this is like some kind of RPG convention, but lately I've been finding that most RPGs tend to have a story structure in which you get a clear "calm before the storm" - that is, where you are very, very clear who the end boss is, where he's located, and how to kill him. Your characters are comfortable, they like each other, and they're ready to kill him. In the meantime, the game quietly also hands you a "go explore these extra bonus areas" card. I really didn't get this from FF XIII - because the main conflict (the fact that the characters are going to turn into Cieth) isn't resolved when you get down to Gran Pulse. In addition, though the characters were supposed to have faced their trial when they got their Eidolon, it was pretty clear that some of them had it easier than others - Lightning got a free card for example, Vanille's was virtually out of nowhere, whereas Sazh's was extremely intriguing.
There's other stuff I'm sure but, well, it's late and I'm going to go to bed. I mean I enjoyed the game and I think the combat system is pretty awesome, but the story progression leaves a bit to be desired. I think that this extremely linear storyline actually works pretty poorly for a game like Final Fantasy. I dunno, I guess I finish the game and I have pretty mixed feelings.
-end spoilers-
okay done
April is Support OCR Month 2010!
in General Discussion
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Can you cash Canadian cheques without ridiculous fees?