Arcana

Happy birthdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay dear Diotrans!!

Forgive my nooby noobness, but what's the difference between a USB portable hard drive and a hard drive enclosure?

I'm not a huge audiophile person but... It doesn't look like you're producing with this setup, so I would question the need of buying two more studio monitors for surround sound (unless you're tight on space or something but then I'd question the need for a multiple point surround sound system!) How are your monitors currently connected to your audio production system? The Mac Pro does not have TRS or XLR outputs so you probably have it connected to a mixer using the 1/8" jack, or use a breakout box/sound card of some kind. That means that the optical out is not in use. It seems to me that an ordinary stereo receiver with a bunch of optical inputs would be a good option. Your Mac Pro and your game consoles will hook up to it just fine.

We got a couple of the remixes from this album featured on the front page! So this album thread deserves a BUMP from me! Ethnic Rush by Brandon Strader - http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02163/ Time Slips Away by Darkesword - http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02164/ Congrats both to Brandon and Darkesword for another set of successful remixes.

I really, really loved the guitar playing. I know you agonized over it but it's excellent. This mix is great, it's so calm, so relaxing, and yet upbeat. Kind of makes you want to dance a little. I love it! It's great to see your talent showcased so well here.

Darkesword was a surprise entry. I basically logged in one day and he was like, "I got a song for you. Here it is." I don't know how long he spent on it. It must've been no more than a day or two. This was a very amazing track. It's universally-liked. It's so clean, so crisp, and immediately invokes emotion in the listener. I hope you guys check out the rest of the album! http://hurryffx.kngi.org/

This thread is huge and messy and has tons of terrible facts, and maybe someone pointed this out already, but I'd just like to point out that in digital distribution, Apple (iTunes) basically plays the role of the publisher. They take 30% of the profits if you release an application on the Apple Mac Store, just like EA would take whatever cut of publishing the game for you, and like how Gamestop takes 20% of the retail sale. Blizzard runs its own online game store, and they love it, because they get to keep their 20% cut. I will also take a moment here to describe a number of factors that you have not taken into account, either. First, many development studios don't have a lot of money because they're making their first few games. If they want to release a AAA title, then they need to bring in money, and this is where the publisher comes in. They say, "We'll give you $3 million dollars, which is currently $2.8 million more than you have, to make this game, as long as we get a 20% cut of your revenues." The publisher, in addition to providing the studio a way to sell, market, and promote the game (without the studio having to hire that talent themselves), also has the supply connections to efficiently distribute the game to every Best Buy, Gamestop, Wal-Mart, and Target in the United States and Canada. They also have the expertise to sell that same game in Europe and Latin America. This is the publisher's end of the deal. This makes it such that the studio doesn't have to deal with things like localization, sales, and all of that stuff that they don't like to do. They can just concentrate on building the game. Second, it takes a lot of money to build an online store, and the existing ones take your money in big ways. I mentioned iTunes already. 30% goes to Apple from the App store. Sure, you could try to build your own, it'll cost a few hundred dollars just for the signed certificate to ensure that transactions are secure, not to mention potential liability if credit cards are leaked, or what-not. You also don't have the business analysis tools to examine the records in a knowledgable fashion. Why not just get that all from the publisher? They're going to provide that to you if you sign away whatever percent of your revenues. Publishers have traditionally served a purpose and they are virtually necessary for large-scale distribution. While you might not believe it, brick-and-mortar distribution is still a large part of game sales.

Post the example anyway. Just because "it's just a MID file" doesn't mean that we can't listen to it and comment on the quality of the composition. I think it'll help everyone.

I was first familiar with the word "Arcana" from the SNES video game. I learned soon after that it was also associated with the occult, of which I had a momentary interest in at the time and decided to adopt the name. However a really well-known band also has 'Arcana' as a band name and they've been around for like, the past 15 years or something. I've been wondering if I should change it to something else recently.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/sony-goes-to-court-to-get-ps3-key-crackers-to-shut-up-already.ars Looks like the PS3 was hacked a few weeks ago, enabling users now to install whatever software they wish on the system. Previously the PS3 was the last of the big systems not to have had their verification keys broken. I'm actually curious about the viability of the system as a customized media centre now (XBMC anyone?) and if anyone here has tried cracking their PS3 to do any homebrew work on it. (Hopefully this topic is within fair use in this forum and isn't considered "piracy", as the legality behind this is still rather touchy.)

Um, what is it that you want to say about chiptune music? What it is? How it's made? A history of it? Its influence on society? If there's nothing, then do your own research! GO GO GO

New guy is clueless but wants a clue at least. Here's a list of programs, go use Google, look them up, grab demos/light editions/watch videos. Feel free to come back with some more specific questions. FL Studio Reason/Record Sonar Cubase Garageband Logic Studio ACID MixCraft Reaper Renoise Audition Live

Echo this advice. It used to take me an hour to lay down 30 seconds of terrible music. Now it takes me only 10 minutes to lay down 30 seconds of terrible music. That's tongue-in-cheek of course, but you really do improve when you have this time pressure on you (in addition to having to produce something in the hour). You'll notice that artists develop their tracks differently. Some like to work more vertically and make only a few seconds, but those seconds are REALLY good and really polished. Others tend to write stuff that's much longer, two or three minutes. It's not as polished, but it is an entire song. I don't do any pro work and I'm definitely not pro-sounding, but as far as personal work, the songs I do for fun usually take 5-15 hours before I declare them done, though I've worked on a song for probably a hundred hours before. Personally if I write a song and finish it in less than 5 hours total time, I consider that quite short.

Hey all, Korg has released an iPad software emulation of its famous MS-20 analog synth. There is a current deal on its software emulation of an MS-20 on sale for iPad until the end of January ($15.99). Anyway for those of you that have it (are there any?) I am wondering if anyone knows how to get more varied sounds out of it using only one pattern. On the Korg DS-10 (which is loosely based on the MS-20) you can route the VCO 1 and VCO 2 independently. Doing so allowed you to patch, for example, VCO 2 to the low-pass filter, and the LFO to control some aspect of VCO 2 (usually the pitch). Set VCO 2 to 0. That ends up allowing you to continually morph the sound on the same pattern, so with one pattern you would be able to end up with a four-bar long "whoosh" or similar. I'm wondering if any Korg MS-20 pros here can suggest some patches that allow me to use only one pattern bank to do multiple bars of a continually-increasing low-pass filter, or some other similar effect. You can currently automate it, but that allows you to use only 1 measure worth of automations in the pattern, and when you only have 16 patterns you don't want to waste them on dumb stuff like another whoosh sound. Anyway, other than that, this is actually a pretty cool app, despite its limitations. It's actually more limited than the DS-10 in some respects (only one synth, no piano roll, not having separate controls for VCO 1 and VCO 2) but other than that it's one of the most solid analog synth programs for the iPad. The synth is monophonic, but you get 6 drum parts (each step can be independently adjusted for pitch and gate) and one synth part. The synth itself is pretty damn hardcore and is extremely complicated, but it's as virtual analog as you can get; the fact that you have multitouch actually makes patching stuff and controlling things in real time a lot of fun and is probably the second best thing to actually having a real MS-20 in front of you. I'm currently noodling around with the app, trying to get a couple of songs composed with it. The patch bay is a real monster still, and I've watched half an hour worth of videos describing how it works and still and learning all kinds of things to do with it. Anyway, if anyone here has any advanced tips and tricks to share regarding this app (or the Korg MS-20 in general) please let me know, I'm super-interested in getting the most out of this program.

Really? Ha ha. Before the Facebook generation and the huge meshing of real life and online life I did a pretty good job of keeping it all separated. I will gladly do more dramatic fanfic readings for people if they wish. That isn't a regular feature on OCAD by now??

Yeah it actually is, I just never filled it into my profile. It's probably on my Facebook page though. Since I'm in Pacific time atm it's still 23:23 and therefore not my actual birthday Thanks OCR peeps!

I probably won't be here on Thursday, it's my birthday and I might be out, but also my computer broke and I probably won't be able to upload a song even if I made one on my iPad. But if I'm lucky and do get a chance, I will make a song on my iPad and try to upload it.

FL Studio is cheaper. It's much easier for a newcomer to music to justify the $150 than it is the $500 for Reason. FL Studio is a very good value, I recommend it to many people. But that doesn't take away from Reason's strengths, of which there are many.

And FL Studio's piano roll drives me nuts and I can't do anything in it. To each his own!

Wouldn't you do this by: 1) Create your drum machine. 2) Create Mixer 1 (small mixer) and Mixer 2 (big mixer). Put your various effects on each mixer. 2) Route Kick to Mixer 1 channel 1. Put your send effects on Mixer 1. Route the output of Mixer 1 to Mixer 2, Channel 1. 3) Route snare to to Mixer 2, Channel 2. That seems to me the way that you'd do this. If you had hardware seems that it would be the only way to do this, IIRC many mixer boards don't have individual outs.

Can you describe what your goal is, rather than what you are trying to do?

I bet you won't.

Don't you use the chaining master and the chaining aux for that, to basically have two mixers that use the same aux chain. Or maybe I'm not understanding correctly and you want to combine two audio signals, if you want that then a Spider will do it. As Gario said, TAB is your friend. Well it's not really "a click of a button" and they're not really real tunes even. You can make some really avant-guarde stuff though, mostly by playing a single long note in the sequencer to drive a synth, and then routing the VCs from that one synth to the VCAs and VCFs of other synths. So it's really less "it makes beats for me" and more of "damn, look at the insane things you can make, not because they sound good, but because they're POSSIBLE!" Part of this control though is why I stopped using Reason. Once you started getting into semi-large projects, actually doing a mixdown started to become very difficult, especially when it came to following an effects chain or remembering exactly where Mixer #2, port #7/8 hooked up to, and if that EQ unit is before or after the compressor. It's possible that the newer versions handle this much more gracefully but it quickly got overwhelming for me.

Volume 1, coming soon? This is exciting.

I have stopped using Reason now for various reasons. However, as a music effects generating station, it was unparalleled bliss. There's almost no other program where you can create a buttload of subtractive synthesizers, wire their LFOs into each other, and then press a button and have the synthesizers generate the song FOR YOU that evolves and changes over time. If you're bored, create a bunch of stuff, hit "TAB" and then route the output LFO and put it into a few input gate controls. Map a Matrix to an MClass Compressor sidechain. Create a gigantic-sounding synth with ten detuned square waves, lots of reverb, and have it all tucked away inside a combinator so you don't have to actually see it. I only wish I could do this in Logic Pro (well, I could with Rewire actually but usually it takes too much effort for my mini music projects). As I said I stopped using Reason now (a big reason is VSTi support actually) but when I started it was a blast and about once a month I wonder if it would be worth it to upgrade my Reason 3 to the modern version just so I can play around with awesome sounds. I would easily suggest Reason to anyone starting music, because the all-in-one makes it incredibly easy to begin with.