Veracohr

Hey, don't knock it just yet! Check this out (fair warning--it's on a porn site: http://www.stileproject.com/flash/winnoise.html )

Listen not to these charlatans and unbelievers. The way has been laid out before you for millennia. You must want to achieve enlightenment, or the path will be dark and untraversable for you. 1. First, you must bathe yourself in seawater. Then, whilst wet, you must roll about in a pile of organic oat flour until at least 75% of your body is covered. 2. Next, you much place upon your head the entrails of a Dermagian Toad. A Dermagian Toad is an amphibian which has an affliction similar to Down's Syndrome. 3. Next, you must face in an Easterly direction and thrice repeat the following phrase: "Flaggellyxtzionharknatlyxos ni aberixs trahllincrapillonztra eg afftra walysnagstra effretis" while performing the sacred Cha-ni-Ixes dance. This may be familiar to you as the "Hokey-Pokey". 4. Squeeze the juice from one lemon, one pomegranate, one plum and one nine-toed human child into a martini glass and stir with a Plexiglass rod of no more than 2mm diameter. 5. Utter a prayer to Hapexamendios. 6. Check your Myspace page for comments and messages. 7. Proceed with the creation of beautiful music. This method has proven true for countless generations before you (with the exception of step 6, which is a recent, yet helpful addition). History does not record Mozart or Stravinsky or Bob Marley having performed these procedures, yet the secret records do not lie. You would do well to walk the path of your forefathers.

The way I see it, which probably isn't a very common point of view, is that for the listener, it really doesn't matter what the author intended. Any importance a piece of art has for someone other than the creator is in the mind of the observer. The emotional responses I get from listening to music may have nothing to do with what the writers intended, but it doesn't matter. What a song means to me is the only thing I care about. If I happen to learn what a song means to its writer, and it is similar to what it means to me, that's cool. But if not, oh well. If someone pours their heart and soul into a song that passes right by me, I don't care. If I don't like a song, I'm not going to try to just because it's a deeply personal song to the person who wrote it. Most of my music is very personal, but I don't go around trying to make people understand what it means to me. There's no point.

I had 150 CDs made of my album, professionally duplicated. I haven't heard of any failing to play, or having any other problems that people associate with home-burnt CDRs. As for the original question: yes I would. I like to support the artists I like. However... I do not believe that I am indicative of any majority of music fans. Most of my close friends are musicians, and it has only been fairly recently in my life that I have met people whom I would consider to be "average-Joe" type music fans. And I've come to realize that average-Joe type music fans not only don't give a fuck about physical vs. soft media, a lot of them also don't give a fuck about supporting the musicians they like. Most people out there would take things for free if they could (not just music.) After all, what's better than free stuff, right? But while I recognize and appreciate the effort people put into creative endeavors, most people just want to get as much free shit as they can.

I think anyone who writes music entirely themselves feels that way about it, but there's also a completely different thing going on when you write or just play with other people. The interpersonal dynamic creates a "the whole is more than the sum of the parts" situation.

Uh...yes, I do. Did you know this somehow? I live in Beaverton.

Those of you who make music, who does it solo? How does that work out for you? I've always been solo, but more and more I think that I need a writing partner. Most of my songs start out with a good burst of inspiration, then I get to a point after which I pretty much drag the song kicking and screaming into finality. I think that if I had a partner, we could work off each other. Unfortunately, I know only one person who likes trance, and he lives 3 hours away, not to mention the fact that he isn't musical at all, and is much more into drum & bass anyway. I've co-written a couple songs with people online before, but it's kind of a pain in the ass. Besides which I don't really think I could know if I was a good match with someone for songwriting if I didn't meet them in person.

I didn't intend to suggest drastic measures so that each instrument is separate in frequency range. You're right, that would sound weird. What I meant is, for instance, you if you had a kick drum, bass sound and a big pad all with a lot of information around 80Hz, you would end up with a big floppy mess. In this case, as I mentioned about the writing and arranging, it would be best to remedy this problem by choosing different sounds so they didn't all fight for the same frequency range. Or you could change your arrangement so that those sounds aren't all going at once. Without such changes, you are then left with EQ to fix it. Maybe that pad doesn't really need all that low end. Most likely either the kick or the bass could have some low end cut--many songs rely on either or for the low end drive, not both. There's always going to be overlap, of course, but every instrument and sound has a dominant frequency range, and it's good not to have too many going at once that all share the same range. It's just an idea, there's no hard and fast rules for engineering. As Otto Matta said, many engineers and producers have said the same. I'm just regurgitating what I learned years ago.

There shouldn't really be any "rules of thumb" in mixing, but it can help to cut a hole in other low-frequency sounds for the kick drum. Find the 'fundamental' frequency of the kick first, then cut a narrow range from the other sounds around that frequency. But pay attention to how it sounds. It may not sound good. If you having too much low end from various sources, something needs to be done about it, but there are different ways. Your kick may not really need all that much low end if the bass provides most of it. Or you can have the bass duck the kick (compressor on the bass triggered from the sidechain input, which has the kick drum applied to it, so that the compressor reduces the bass level when the kick drum hits). As Otto Matta said, it's good for every instrument to occupy a unique frequency range, so that multiple instruments aren't fighting for the same range. It's best to take this into consideration during the writing and arranging.

That was an interesting jaunt through Discogs. I only have the X-Dream Best of 1991-2001, and it was interesting to see that some of the songs on that comp. came out years before they actually appeared on an album. Like "Eleven" is dated 1994 on the Best of album but wasn't on an album until 1997 or something like that.

Yesterday: Dimension 5 -- Transdimensional :clapping: :clapping: :clapping:

Care to elaborate?

Damnit! I was so quick on clicking that link and ordering it that I didn't even see this note about stickers! Oh well...

Records cut on one of those would only be intended for 2 or 3 plays. They wear out quickly. Commercial vinyl is produced by a stamp using a different type of material.

Hmmm...well I'd say it's not psytrance. I could see this as RPG music. It's not bad for what it is. There's a sound starting at 1:00 with a lot of portamento that I think could do with a lot less portamento. I like the evolution from section to section. Some of the sounds sound much too much like boring General MIDI or preset sounds. I'd say work on making unique sounds.

Damn, I've wanted something like that in the past, too bad neither of those are available for Mac OS.

I'm going to assume you aren't being sarcastic and respond to this. Vinyl records, are, of course, analog. The term 'analog' comes from 'analagous', which means similar or equivalent. The groove in a vinyl record, if you got really deep in and close to it, would look like the waveform of the audio that was originally created. When a record is cut, a laquer disk is cut with a lathe that vibrates in response to the audio signal--low frequencies make the lathe cut long waves out while high frequencies cut short waves out of the laquer. So if you were really tiny and standing in the groove of a record, the really long hills and valleys would be the low freqencies, while the short hills and valleys would be the higher frequencies. The laquer master is then copied a few times on it's way to making a metal stamper that stamps out the record you buy from a bunch of vinyl. When you play the record, it does the opposite of what the cutting lathe does. Instead of an electrical audio signal being converted into mechanical movement, the hills and valleys in the groove make the needle vibrate, which is then converted into an electrical signal, which is then amplified for sweet, sweet music. You know when you play a 33 1/3 record at 45 and the pitch goes up? That's because all the hills and valleys are making the needle vibrate faster than when played 33 1/3. Faster vibration results in higher frequencies. On a related note, the physical characteristics of vinyl records caused problems when the music cut had strong low-frequency content. Equal-loudness (or Fletcher-Munson) curves show how our ears respond to different frequencies, and they show that low frequencies require higher power for the same perceived loudness. On a vinyl record, louder means bigger hills and valleys for a frequency in the groove. When these hills and valleys get too big, the groove has to be very wide, meaning less real estate on the disk (and therefore less time per side), and there is an issue of the needle jumping out of the groove from a big bump. These problems were addressed in the 1950s with the creation of the RIAA curve and its equivalents. The RIAA curve is a specific filter that reduces low frequencies and boosts high frequencies when a laquer is cut, and upon playback, a phono preamp has a compensation filter to return the frequency balance to normal (though it's not perfect).

Do a search for vinyl mastering close to you. Here's some random picks from a quick Google search for "mastering for vinyl": http://www.aardvarkmastering.com/ http://www.customrecords.com/ http://www.vinylmastering.net/ http://www.recordtech.com/default.htm http://www.urpressing.com/

I don't think Reason has a lack of low end to the basslines you can get out of it, it just produces lackluster sounds. Frosty, I'm afraid you probably won't get any sounds that will overly impress you out of Reason. I don't really know what kind of sound you want, but since you want a full on bass sound, I'd say pay attention to the attack. Not the Attack parameter of the envelopes, but the attack of the sound. On both the volume envelope and the filter modulation envelope.

Went to the used record store: CD Iron Maiden - Number of the Beast Sublime - Sublime Vinyl Fleetwood Mac - Rumours Beethoven Symphonies # 1 & 8 by the Vienna Philharmonic

It needs some direction. Some sort of guiding theme. There's ideas there but no real structure. Also, that saw wave thing that is pretty constant throughout--I think that would sound good if you broke it up a bit, created a rhythmic pattern with it instead of a constant sound.

Sounds like a neat idea.

Pretty much every MIDI sequencer will have a step-record option.

Nice! I absolutely love "Cafe Del Mar"!