#the others at least add extra cues and/or change the tempo

[puppys-rhythm-heaven]

lockstep 2 is amusing to me because it's literally just og lockstep but slower and the offbeats are swing instead of being offbeat. everything else is the same. the beat switches are at the same point and everything. it's kinda funny the degree it's to tbh-

[90dayableton]

90 Days of Ableton: Day 0 & 1

I downloaded Ableton in the late evening on May 10th, so I’m going to call May 11th, my first full day with the software, Day 1.

May 10th was Day 0.

I did spend a couple hours on Day 0 trying to get comfortable with the program. I’ve never used a full DAW before - I’ve only noodled around with free web apps like Soundation.

So I had a basic sense of how to add instruments or channels, how to create and edit clips, and how to create notes with the draw mode/pen tool.

I decided to start by making something slow & chill.

I had a basic structure already in mind:

Start with one nice chord pattern with a little texture, a few passing notes, to make it interesting: 2, 4, or 8 measures long, as an introduction. Play it by itself.

Then, after 2-4 measures, layer it with beats.

Then layer it with more filled-out chords.

Then layer it with melodic lines. Make the melody another repeating loop, 2-4 measures long.

After the melody plays a couple times, start to tweak things. Change some of the moving notes, make sequences go up instead of down, or down instead of up.

Then add a few more percussive elements, transitions, and little instrumental call-outs to give it some life.

Every 2-4 measures, add a new instrument or effect without breaking the underlying pattern. Familiar foundation + novelty = brain takes interest.

Once the pattern repeats enough that you get tired of it, it’s time for a B section!

Now start removing instruments. Allow the more recent elements to play, or play with variations, and switch up the basic loops you started with. (i.e. change the bassline, change the chords, change the beats - you want complementary, but different.)

Preserve some elements, change others. Keep it on a 2, 4, or 8 measure cycle. You want new things to happen every 2 measures.

Re-introduce elements you haven’t heard in a while on top of new ones for a satisfying climax.

As for an outro? I basically just let the B section play out, and then I went back to the chords from the intro but I gave them to a different instrument, and I silenced everything else...dropped out the bass, the percussion, everything except a little ambiance. It worked, even though it was abrupt.

By the end of Day 1, I felt I had something cohesive and more-or-less “finished,” though it was very unrefined.

I lowered some of the track volumes (bass, shamisen, soft horn, bottle blower) but not all of them (I’m writing this from the perspective of Day 3 so now I know that the mixer in the red is something to correct), I didn’t do any panning, I didn’t double any instruments. I didn’t do anything with gates or envelopes or pitch shifting.

It’s basically a compilation of sounds and a nice tune but it’s not edited, mastered, or mixed in any significant way.

What I Started With:

Ableton Live 10 Trial (free)

a pretty chord riff: mine was inspired by an old j-rock song ain’t afraid to die by dir en grey

(I figured out the exact notes of the chords (I have a good ear but I do not have perfect pitch, people) with this synthesia video breakdown of the song.)

a few general ideas for how to structure it (listed above)

a few general ideas for organizing my workstation

basic background in music performance/theory (I know that not all aspiring music producers may have this, and I am lucky to; but it’s also likely that many musicians are drawn to this work)

What I Learned:

ONE. I’m not sure why the basic template, when you open a new live set, is two Midi tracks and two Audio tracks. The first habit I started was deleting one Midi and one Audio track, silencing the two remaining, and using them as temporary storage tracks to hold midi & audio samples/clips that I wanted to use but hadn’t assigned to an instrument. Nobody told me to do that. It just made sense to me and maybe in the future I’ll find out that it’s actually a bad idea, but it works right now.

TWO. The basic trial version of Ableton supposedly doesn’t have as much extra content (sounds, samples, instruments) as the full one, but it’s still pretty loaded. [Disclaimer: Nobody is paying me to say this.] A really huge amount of time was just taken up with me sorting through all the stuff that came pre-installed, listening to samples, and selecting what might sound good in the context of my own song. (HOWEVER - I did want more orchestral instrument options. Not enough brass and winds, and the strings could definitely be improved...)

THREE. It’s really easy to get distracted by other cool sounds. I ended up saving a bunch of specific samples to my user library (or creating a new live set to play around with it a little bit) because hearing certain unrelated sounds inevitably triggered new musical ideas that weren’t appropriate for the current composition.

FOUR. If I didn’t have a specific idea for a song in my head (which I did), it would have been so much harder and taken so much longer to create something cohesive. Going in with 1. a basic chord progression and 2. a couple basic melodic “cues” that I lifted from the lead vocals in the original song made it MUCH easier to fill in everything else around it. I deliberately took inspiration from another song because I wanted to focus on creating something pretty that would teach me how to use the software without getting too bogged down in composition.

FIVE. It was easy to get distracted and to flounder until I “landed” on exactly the sound I needed, or the sound I didn’t know I needed until I heard it. Example: I didn’t plan out a shamisen track, but once I saw the shamisen instrument in my library, I knew I was gonna have a good time with it. Or the chimes. As soon as I heard the chimes, I knew exactly where to put them and I didn’t swerve.

SIX. One of the most time-consuming things was just locking in the actual notes. I was used to the draw tool in another program that streamlined drawing notes, but I felt like it was clunkier and slower-going in Ableton because there were so many more refined options.

As a result, I learned/realized that I could use my computer keyboard in lieu of a Midi keyboard (which I don’t own), so I ended up composing that way. When there were tempo or rhythmic issues, I fixed them by ear, manually re-positioning notes...(I can only assume there’s a shortcut I don’t know about yet because if it’s not clear I’m a total noob) and zooming in closer for more refined adjustments.

SEVEN. Zooming! I learned a few basic keyboard shortcuts which helped SO much. On a PC:

ctrl+alt gives you a grabby hand and if you hold those down while you click with the mouse you can move all around the track without accidentally clicking or highlighting or deleting anything

ctrl + mouse scroll wheel (or + / - buttons) lets you zoom in and out, in the track itself and in the midi note editor.

EIGHT. One of those “learning by doing” things - day 0 & 1 were just immersing myself in the system and figuring out how to actually do the thing I needed. Some of my early questions:

why is my master track mixer red when everything else is green? (answer: you need to lower individual track volumes well below 0, like at least -8 to -12.)

how do I make the display go left-right with a timeline instead of up-down? (answer: tab button to switch between views)

how do I make this note sound less harsh? (answer: probably has something to do with the velocity? and/or the attack?)

how do I make this sound linger instead of clip off suddenly? (answer: hold the note until the end of the phrase, or lengthen the clip to draw it out - yeah I’m not touching reverb yet)

how do I lengthen or shorten clips? (answer: there’s a function with ctrl + E to slice something if you want to chop it up, but otherwise just grabbing it by the edge and dragging left or right will work. note this is for the clip...not the music/notes.)

how do I make the instrument panel come up and how do I hear it and how do I use my keyboard as a midi controller?

answer:

Select your instrument from the library sidebar and drag it to the place under the other tracks where it says “drop files and devices here”

Then, double click on that track

This should create a new “clip” which you can expand or move around to a different place in the timeline.

There’s a little keyboard along the left side of the “midi clip editor” which pops up at the bottom of the screen when you create a new clip. Click the headphone icon above the keyboard (which lets you hear yourself play it) AND press the M button on your keyboard to turn the Computer Midi Keyboard on and off. (You should see it light up in the top right corner, near the CPU load meter.)

Then, you should be able to use your keyboard to play notes - a s d f g h j k as the basic notes of the c major scale (i.e. white keys from C - C; easy to remember since f and g correspond to actual F and G) and W E T Y U as black keys.

To actually record what you’re playing, hit the record button. Personally I recommend setting the metronome (upper left corner) to count off one bar before the recording starts.

I will share my finished “song” from the end of Day One, but before I do, in the next post I’m going to break down what happened on Day Two to show you how I improved even further upon my work.

Then you can hear the two side by side, really proving how much progress one person can make in a single day!

[jessicakmatt]

Remixing Guide: How to Remix a Song in 5 Steps

Remixing Guide: How to Remix a Song in 5 Steps: via LANDR Blog

Over the past few decades remixes have become an essential part of music production.

What started as a DIY practice in early dancehall and DJ culture has become a worldwide phenomenon with its own category in the Grammys.

In this article I’ll go through everything you need to know about remixes and how to get started creating your own remix.

What is a remix?

A remix is a different version of a track created by changing, altering, or expanding its original elements. A remix can be simple as changing the tones and textures or as radical as completely reimagining the harmony and rhythm.

As long as the raw material came from an existing song it can be considered a remix.

What can I remix?

Before we get into how to create your own remixes, there’s a massive issue with remixing that needs to be addressed.

As soon as your track contains audio that isn’t original or properly licensed, your release process gets much more complicated.

As soon as your track contains audio that isn’t original or properly licensed, your release process gets much more complicated.

In most cases, you can’t get around using copyrighted material when you’re making a remix—you need existing songs for raw material after all.

Your only hope is to receive permission from the copyright holder to create an official remix.

But the chances that you’ll get a high profile artist to approve your remix are slim.

And even then you may struggle to find a way to distribute your remix to the major streaming platforms due to copyright issues.

How to find songs to remix

Despite all that, there are still ways to create remixes legally.

One effective option is to choose remix material from an artist that you can feasibly get in contact with.

This could be someone in your community or someone with a similar or slightly larger following online.

For two producers with similar traction, this type of relationship can be mutually beneficial. You’ll expose your audience to their work—and their followers will get to hear your take on it.

To take advantage of this method you’ll have to be active in the communities that deal with your genre online—and in the real world.

Keep an eye out for what artists just above your level of exposure are up to. If you’re serious about taking on a remix, contact them and ask. The worst they can do is say no.

But don’t go forward until you get permission—you wouldn’t want someone to use your tracks unless you agreed would you?

The other easy option is to participate in remix contests.

Remix contests have become popular online because they show how different producers can create radically different results with the same source material.

Contests can sometimes offer access to raw tracks from big name artists for free. This is an amazing opportunity to get to find remix material you shouldn’t pass up.

Fair warning—even once you’ve gone to all that trouble, you still may encounter difficulties with digital distribution when it comes to remixes.

Many distributors don’t offer licensing for remixes, so you could find yourself out of luck for getting your remix on streaming platforms.

How to remix a song

With the basics covered, let’s get into the details. Here’s how to remix a song in 5 steps:

1. Get your source material

I went through how to choose a track to remix above, but once you’ve decided you’ll have to deal with the raw material.

In most cases you’ll be working with stems when you remix a song.

Stems are bounced files of the individual elements of a session.

Stems are bounced files of the individual elements of a session.

In some cases you might receive stems of every single file on the timeline, but more often stems will be exports of instrument groups with several tracks bounced down together.

That means you’ll likely be looking at a folder with individual stereo files for each instrument

2. Find the key and tempo

To make an original remix you’ll have to add your own elements alongside whatever pieces of the song you take from the existing stems.

To keep everything in sync, you’ll have to detect the tempo.

To keep everything in sync, you’ll have to detect the tempo.

There are different ways to accomplish this depending which DAW you use.

Ableton automatically detects the tempo of a clip using the warp feature.

Simply set the master tempo of your session to the detected tempo of your drum stem and unwarp the original clip to get it in sync.

Finding the key of the song requires a little more musical knowledge.

One easy way to do it is by playing along to the song with your instrument or MIDI controller.

You’ll get a clue when you find a note that sounds in tune with the rest of the song.

The next step is to determine which scale degree you’ve found. As you listen to the song, try to identify the chord that feels most stable—the harmonic area that feels like the “home” of the song.

The trick to finding the key is to evaluate the musical interval between your note and the home harmony. You’ll have to experiment here too, but you can always go back to your initial note if you get stuck.

Once you do it a few times you’ll get a handle on the technique and you’ll be able to do it more quickly.

But don’t let the original key hold you back. Some of the best remixes take the source material wildly out of context.

3. Decide what to keep

The point of a remix is to put your own stamp on a track—not create something completely unrecognizable.

You’ll need to preserve at least some of the defining features of the original song.

Distinctive instrumental hooks and recognizable lyrics or samples are easy choices for elements to keep.

Distinctive instrumental hooks and recognizable lyrics or samples are easy choices for elements to keep.

You definitely want to put your own spin on them, but these features can help give listeners cues about what they’re hearing.

Try to identify the part of the song you think is most important and integrate it into your remix in a compelling way.

4. Decide what to leave out

The elements you decide to cut say just as much as what you keep.

You can be picky, or make broad sweeping gestures for effect.

Sometimes deleting an important central element can refocus the song in a completely new direction.

Or just calling attention to the best parts by getting rid of the distractions can be the best move.

Creating negative space is an especially interesting choice. Minimal remixes can be extra powerful for how much they reveal.

5. Decide what to add

Here’s where making a remix gets creative.

Adding your own original elements is how you put your own stamp on your remix.

The best thing about remixing a song is that there are no rules—follow your creative impulses and add anything that feels right.

From left field samples to expressive synth patches or new elements you record yourself, anything’s fair game.

Use the opportunity to showcase your creativity.

Remix and mingle

Remixes are here to stay.

It’s easy to see why this fun and popular production exercise has an important place in the scene today.

Whether you’re looking to put your own spin on a fresh tune or pay homage to a classic, creating a remix is a good strategy

Now that you know the basics of how to remix, it’s time to get back to your DAW and start working on one.

The post Remixing Guide: How to Remix a Song in 5 Steps appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/how-to-remix-a-song/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/190497411789

[thelongestdamnreviews]

Another Metroid II Remake

This review covers v1.2.10, and I didn't know 1.3.1 was already out by the time I finished.  I used an Xbox 360 controller and according to the final stats screen, it took me 4h47m44s to finish the game, with 84% item completion.  I got locked out of the extra features because I suck, but more on those later.

I own the original Metroid II and I only beat it once many years ago, with a clear time of 10h07m.  I don't really remember much about it, other than I got lost about constantly.  No, I didn't make maps.  It was okay but I didn't really get into it.  I haven't gone back because I'm honestly spoiled by things like the automap.  I haven't beaten the original Metroid because of that, actually.  But yeah, my poor memory of the original will lead to poor comparisons, so forgive me for that ahead of time. 

Another Metroid 2 Remake looks to try to give this game the Zero Mission treatment.  A bigger view area, actual colors, better spritework, more items, new items that weren't in the original Metroid 2, new bosses...  It sucks that this was DCMA'd by Nintendo, though who would've thought they were remaking this game too after the poor reception of Other M and Federation Force? 

The story's still the same as in original Metroid II.  The Galactic Federation, realizing the threat that the Metroids serve to the galaxy's peace, orders Samus Aran to go exterminate them on their homeworld of SR388.  You land and leave your ship and prepare to start kicking ass all over the planet.  Things are a little bit different now and that extends to more than just the graphics. 

Parts of the original game were changed around to account for new content such as Power Bombs and the Speed Booster.  You still have the hidden tank upgrades that require different powerups to access, but that's typical Metroid for you.  You get items in a different order and because beams actually stack in this game, you don't need to remember where the Ice Beam was before you tackle the final area.  You actually get the Ice Beam near the end of the game, but you get Space Jump relatively early so you're still free to explore without your floating platforms.  I might not've been paying attention in other games, but this was the first time I noticed that destructible blocks could actually regenerate themselves after a moment.  Not all of them do that but it's one of those things that got me to do a double-take. 

Pretty neat puzzle involving you steering an Autoad to drop Super Missiles onto platforms to make a path for Samus. 

Fighting Metroids in this game is between annoying and dangerous.  I remember in the original M2, you just plugged them with missiles as fast as you could when they appeared.  That still largely applies here but this time you need to hit them in their soft undersides or your missiles will just bounce off.  All of the Metroids have new attacks, like the Alphas having a charge attack or a quick move to avoid your shots, and the Zeta and Omega Metroids no longer fly and they're a lot bigger too.  You still have the warning signs of the discarded shells before you encounter one, though be prepared for a sudden SKREE and fight.  The short cutscenes introducing the next evolutionary step were a nice bonus too.

  There are new bosses as well, some of which come from come from other Metroid games.  You encounter Serris for example near the end of the game, serving as a nice bonus callback to Fusion since Serris is from SR388 too.  Some of the new bosses are mechanical in nature, owing to the Chozo being a technologically-advanced race, so expect to get shot at with beams and missiles at some points.  There's a Logbook feature somewhat like the Prime series that automatically scans new environments and bosses, and that can give you hints about what you're fighting. 

“WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?” “I didn’t take nuffin’, honest!”

I don't remember the music in Metroid II at all, apart from the main cave theme, the final area theme, and the repetitive Metroid fight theme.  Everything else was ambient.  The music in AM2R takes some cues from the Prime series with the instrumentation, but nothing about it was bad.  The composers deserve credit for making the Metroid fight themes actually high-tempo without sounding like a fast copy of the intro to the Jaws theme.  The sound effects worked fine and there's no voice work except for the very end of the game for a well-known pair of lines. 

Controls were fine and there were several options, such as having the Spider Ball be a hold button or toggle, if aiming was Super Metroid styled with L and R aiming down and up, or like Zero Mission where you stayed diagonal and pressed up or down to switch, and so on.  I think I used the dedicated Morph Ball button more than the usual way of doing it too.  Speed Booster works like in Fusion/ZM with just running until it activates instead of there being a run button like in Super.  There's an option to use the analog stick to have Samus walk, but I never used this and I don't think there's any place it actually is useful, but it's nice to see a rarely-used animation. 

Guess who’s coming to dinner.

I thought the graphics work was great.  They went for sprites and 2D as opposed to Metroid Samus Returns' 3D on a 2D plane, so it has more in line with the GBA games.  The way sprites are rotated in Gamemaker Studio was kinda off but you don't really see it too much (for example, Samus' gunship coming in to land at an angle before leveling off is where it was most obvious for me).  I kinda wish I had a comparison spritesheet but everything in general is just more detailed.  Having an actual background that isn't stark black is a big improvement in any case.  A nice touch was how a couple of areas had entirely different door designs even though they worked the same as normal. 

Speaking of doors...

Difficulty felt about right for Normal, but I hear Hard Mode lives up to its name.  Enemies do a lot more damage and they have some new tactics, but I'm not brave enough to dive into that.  I died to a couple of bosses on Normal just by virtue of taking too much damage without being able to respond in turn.  Omega Metroids had their damage output nerfed in 1.1 but I think the recent fanmade updates put their numbers back where they were, so prepare to lose a few Energy Tanks to each one you fight.  A few bosses at least give you things to shoot to spawn recovery items, so that's some relief. 

Every single one of those dots ignores mercy invincibility.  Every single one of those dots can activate the other bombs.  This is how Metroid can become a bullet hell.  

If you clear the game in under four hours, you unlock New Game+ and Random Game+.  Both set the lava level down low so you're given a lot more freedom to explore and get items in a different order than the linear nature of the game originally allowed, but Random Game+ completely changes the order of items so you might end up getting the Screw Attack very early or Power Bombs instead of regular Bombs, for example.  New Game+ doesn't start you with any previous equipment you had so it's a little bit of a misnomer, but you can always use a save editor to give you some extras before you head out. 

Overall, I enjoyed the game, short as it was.  It's a hell of a lot better than the original Metroid II, not like that's particularly hard to pull off.  I dunno if I want to go back through the game to finish in under four to unlock the extra features, but at least that's something that'll get me to come back, as will future updates.  Part of the DMCA clause said that the original creator of this fangame couldn't work on any more updates, so fans have reverse-engineered what they can and are continuing to bugfix and add small content to the game, like giving the Queen Metroid a new attack and there's plans for a post-credits stinger revealing the X Parasites coming out of dormancy now their predator is long gone... 

Record of Samus