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Finally had some time off work last week and had always wanted to try out some music notation software. I always have random phrases running through my head and was able to build this off of one that popped in to my head last week. Now I need to get a midi controller as it turns out this is a lot of fun and a good creative outlet. This was completely composed off of 'what sounds right.' Sent it to a friend and he asked me if I was making a new Castlevania game https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/first-song Now I'm working on a waltz Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 03:46
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Stringent posted:you don't have any musical experience beyond this? I played trumpet through high school so uhh, 18 years ago, which is why I can at least read music. I couldn't tell you what sharps or flats are in a key, but I could start with the first note and very easily figure it out based on how it sounds.
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Aug 27, 2021 04:33
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Stringent posted:if that's the extent of your musical experience then that piece is very impressive. i hate the t-word in general, but if that's really just you banging around in software with whatever sounds right then you've probably got some talent. if piano lessons were a thing you could reasonably do you'd probably get a lot out of them in a pretty short amount of time. Thanks, yeah it's a lot of trial and error of just seeing what sounds good to me. I wouldn't mind taking piano lessons at some point as it's a neat instrument. Maybe some day if covid ever dies down and I'm not working so many hours. Otherwise I'm content to just noodle around and throw down whatever pops in to my head and iterate on it.
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Aug 27, 2021 12:20
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Finished my waltz https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/waltz Because i hate money and this is a lot of fun I ordered a komplete kontrol S49 to make things a bit easier for modulation and playing chords etc. Now I need to figure out where to put it. Time to play around with more drums and whatnot Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 15:50
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And because I had time today I wrote another, this time with some drums and a dizi which was a lot of fun https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/dizi-fun Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 03:14
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echinopsis posted:mate that last one there really sounds like the soundtrack to something. not amateur at all. thanks, that means a lot to me! Zaxxon posted:what are you using for the sounds? Using kontakt. orchestra sounds are spitfire studio orchestra pro, the dizi and drums are from the native instruments east asia spotlight collection.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:13
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A quick one this time https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/through-the-desert Spent maybe 2 hours on it. Started in on another and the intro is uhh, I can only describe it as anxiety in music form Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 04:53
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yeah def listened to a ton of game and movie soundtracks. My dad actually commented that the waltz sounded like it should be in a harry potter movie I think the jurassic park sound track was the first that really had an impact on me. I've had it in my head since I was like 8 or whatever. That's a good idea to do some transcription, thanks. Have a proper controller is really going to help with volume control too so I'm excited for that. now I need to order a bigger ssd for samples..
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Aug 31, 2021 11:35
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Aaaaannddd another one. I was working 60+ hours a week for around a year and a half and it's finally over as of a couple of weeks ago so I guess I just have a lot of creativity to catch up on. https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/tension-and-release This one was around 10-12 hours of work. I could have probably kept going but it's long enough as is. Starting to use more chords as well. Zaxxon posted:Thanks, it sounds quite good! Yeah, we're a long way from midi out of soundblaster, that's for sure. Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 03:25
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echinopsis posted:that’s good in a way music I make never approaches the stuff you posted on the last page (i saw it initially before it was edited in) is pretty cool. the sound on twins is really cool, and strokes after midnight has some pretty cool beats and sounds in it. together they'd be great I think this is what sibelius looked like when that last song was in progress:  it was starting to get a little sluggish
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Sep 1, 2021 15:26
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echinopsis posted:Thankyou for the positivity friend. I have a lot of visions and dreams but when it comes to pen on paper I turn into a pathetic baby yeah I feel that, in my head I can create melodies, harmonies, chords for them, etc at the same time, and hear it progress, but if I hear any other music it's pretty much gone forever, so I have to get it written down asap. record everything you do, cut it down to 4 or 8 measure sections, move it around and see how it sounds and tweak poo poo until you like it. this time I did a choral. fun messing with the chords to get the sound I wanted, and it's not perfect by any stretch, but on to new things! I'm working on a... idk kinda chill underwater type song? https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/hero-enlightened
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Sep 3, 2021 02:48
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the cool thing about music is you can always go back and make changes or edit things, so 'finish' something, put it out, then go back to it if you really want to, or do something else. i dont have deadlines and dont have to make stuff for anyone but myself the choral i posted the other day started with me whistling the beginning flute part, then adding more instruments and a chord, then building it up, then going back down to a couple of sounds and being done with it. just adding and removing things and moving them around until i liked the sound of it. i save each 'version' as a new file so i can always go back to what i had before if i don't like what i just added, and then try something else edit: and the chorus part didn't take the dynamics i put on them for some reason so i need to go back and fix that, maybe later rewriting a super metroid song that's one of my favs cause why not Woolwich Bagnet fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Sep 4, 2021 |
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Sep 4, 2021 01:25
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nice, now keep the key and add some sick drums and backing to it and you got yourself a song
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Sep 6, 2021 14:06
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ended up getting a subscription to eastwest's composer cloud. they sound pretty drat good, and having access to everything for $300/yr is tough to beat. also bought a new laptop since my 8 year old air wasn't going to cut it when I don't feel like sitting at my desktop. got some dumb asus ~*gaming laptop*~, but it's 14", has a ryzen 9, and a battery that lasts longer than 2 hours. put a 4 tb ssd in it and upgraded the ram to 40 gb so that should last a decent while. have 4 or 5 ideas sketched out now in piano, going to boston for a week so won't have a lot of time to make stuff, but should be good when I get back. also need to get a bigger desk as there's no real space for my controller I bought. tl;dr 
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Sep 8, 2021 14:34
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echinopsis posted:idk what that is but if its a bargain for three hundy it must be good nice it's just a huge library of high quality instruments. it'd be a few thousand to buy what i downloaded.
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Sep 9, 2021 14:50
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still trying to figure out exactly what programs i want to use long term sibelius works pretty well but has poor midi integration when it comes to expression, dynamics, etc. dorico seems to have better integration but I haven't spent a ton of time with it yet. It also integrates better in to their DAW nuendo, but that poo poo is pretty pricey. with sibelius i end up having to have a ton of hidden control text i put in to change articulations, dynamics, expression, etc. after a certain point it starts to really slow the program down even when they're hidden all those grey smears are control text for the volume and whatnot 
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Sep 12, 2021 21:20
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Penisface posted:i recently got a yamaha qy100 groovebox, i have been having lots of fun trying it out as my babbys first hardware midi sequencer. really good for learning chords and arrangement stuff and the preset phrases are pretty nice too very nice and chill
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Sep 12, 2021 22:15
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Ended up returning the laptop as it was just too drat noisy. On top of that I realized that I will never have a laptop with enough ram for the orchestra stuff I'm doing. I'll just use remote desktop with an air or something. That's from loading 2 drums, 2 violins, 2nd violins, a viola, a cello, a cello section, 2 trumpets, and a french horn. So 11 instrument patches. And I still need to add in pretty much the entire lower end of contrabasses, trombones, euphoniums, and tubas, not to mention woodwinds. So I ended up ordering 128 gb of ram. Additionally, I stumbled across this: https://ddramdisk.store/. It's explained in the link but they're taking cheap and plentiful ddr3 ram and have added a pcie interface. Incredible thing is that because they're using many more lower density memory modules, the random read/write speeds are incredibly fast. As in 10-100x faster than nvme m.2 drives. They say at the bottom that they're working on an 8x pcie version and it's twice as fast. I think I may reach out to them to ask about that as it's pretty awesome. Also gently caress windows. I wanted to clone my 1 tb m.2 to the new 4 tb one I got, and it turns out that windows had managed to create some horrible amalgamation of both GPT and MBR partition tables. Removing either one caused the data to be unreadable. I spent around 5 hours messing with parted magic trying to get it clone-able but ended up having to just reinstall windows. At least I made a backup of all the data. Just finally finished reinstalling everything.
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Sep 17, 2021 07:21
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Yeah I have things I don't care about on two drives, and things I do care about on 3-4. There's a reason I still have every picture I've ever taken since 2003 still.Jonny 290 posted:i was on a page for some ~~~ ddr4 ramdisk on a pci-e card ~~~~ product the other night and they posted brag CrystalDiskMark screenshots showing a read speed of....7 GB/s The advantage of ramdisks isn't the sequential read/write tho, it's the small non sequential stuff, where they drop from 7 GB/s to 700 MB/s to 70 MB/s. I've tried cutting down ram usage to ~half with streaming and I still get pops once I start hitting around 400 active voices, which is 7-8 instruments playing concurrently. and that's streaming off of 2 separate m2 ssds, one for opus and one for kontakt. at a 1024 buffer at 44.1 khz. you can see kontakt bouncing around from 20% disk to 100%. it's already cut that 40 GB of ram useage down from a few hundred GB
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Sep 18, 2021 04:08
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so it gets really complicated really quickly for orchestra instruments, because people know/expect the sound that the instruments make take for instance 2nd violins, which in a modern orchestra is 14. because they do not sit on top of each other, they each need their own sample played for spacial/reverb differences. to accomplish this, there's multiple microphones that are used for recording. the samples i use have 5 position recording. so for a single note with a single attack variation there's 70 samples that are being played. this is reduced a bit during the sustain as not as much audio information is needed to keep it convincing. on the low end a modern orchestra will have around 80 players. so around 400 samples being played if they were all to play a single note. there are also samples for every chromatic pitch, with most instruments having a 3 or so octave range. that means for a single attack type with no variations built in there's ~16,000 samples. then there's the attack velocity, of which there's usually 3 or so sampled, as a note played at ff sounds much different than one played at mp. then there's different articulations. this is especially a source of bloat for string instruments, as they can have 20+ articulations. so you can see how the numbers inflate very rapidly on top of all that there's reverb, which means at any time you could have 5+ notes still reverberating (although that's hard on the cpu, not on memory speed) so it's very easy to have thousands of samples being pulled, since the voices incorporate multiple samples to model the different attacks, sustains, releases, etc, which you switch through constantly even for the same bar of music this all adds up to a huge amount of small packets of data that need to be pulled for every note played pcie 4 ssds are insanely fast. when all of the data is in a sequential order  however, as that order begins to shift around, as you have for something like instrument samples that are pulled from tens of thousands for specific needs, you get in to random territory where the queue depth is much lower. at that point, an ssd can be as much as 100x times slower. so now instead of grabbing data at 6 GB/s, it's pulling it at 60 MB/s. RAM on the other hand, doesn't suffer so greatly from this. it can maintain ~20x more throughput for small random reads than an ssd can. Penisface posted:not sure if it is possible for you to run your sounds in some kind of degraded mode? or even render/flatten your stems? if you are composing by writing notation then you don't really need real-time low latency sound, right? i am currently using asio with a 1024 buffer (max) as correct, I dont need real time latency. i use different plugins for some different instruments so they start to desync with other inputs using larger buffers. https://audiogridder.com/ may be a solution to this as it can adjust for latency of different plugins based on the midi signal itself. i spent way too long writing all this out but it's an interesting problem at least which makes me interested in it. i am however going to need a new cpu at some point as my i7-9700k isn't cutting it, even with all cores running at 5 ghz. i dont want to upgrade until the zen 4s come out hopefully late next year though as ddr5 is going to allow for much larger module capacities.
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Sep 19, 2021 04:05
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echinopsis posted:woah yeah it does, and like video games or w/e, you can change the quality of them to use less ram or less cpu at the cost of quality. i'm just usually messing with stuff so I want to know what the end product is going to sound like, which means pay to play. sample sets like these are really designed for professional use in movies and poo poo. so its not like they care if they have to buy a few mega servers with TBs of ram or whatever, it's a rounding error in the end speaking of video games, finally finished the remake of my fav super metroid track https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/sm-lb didn't want to be lazy so it was all done from scratch. the drums took by far the longest part to get how i wanted them. used a 6 band eq, bitcrusher, and some fuzz, since it's really a field drum
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Sep 19, 2021 05:39
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echinopsis posted:is it a vst or something different.. oh i meant that i wrote it out in notation instead of just finding a midi file of it, then used sampled instruments. i did about 99% of it from memory and added a few extra things to give it more fullness
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Sep 19, 2021 06:07
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toiletbrush posted:whoa, that's absolutely nuts, and actually a really interesting problem to solve yeah. it's kind of akin to the uncanny valley issue with digital art. because, for instance, the sound that a trumpet makes is generally known, it's jarring when it's off by a bit, but when it's so far removed from what the instrument sounds like it's no longer an issue, like for synths. so to make it convincing you have to get past that gulf, which i think has been very much done. Penisface posted:most classical music has been written without a computer at all, you just had a piano and a pen and some pieces of paper. assistants if you were lucky. iirc the composer only gets to hear the real thing at the rehearsals IF the material is interesting enough to be picked by some orchestra i believe he uses cubase (or more likely nuendo now) and pro tools. as far as samples go spitfire audio has some collaborations with him, but i'm sure he has just about every sampled orchestra under the sun at his disposal (and ofc actual orchestras) since they each have unique qualities, and a ton of synths. but im also sure he has a bazillion assistants that can smooth over any roughness he has with working with them, and is more interested in getting the pitches down until it's actually played. no clue what he uses for comp hardware but i'd imagine it's around 'the best currently available'. it really is a luxury to write a note and immediately hear it as the instrument it was intended to be played by.
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Sep 19, 2021 13:26
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Jonny 290 posted:i appreciate that level of dedication to the craft but i also wonder how much of it aaaaaactually comes through after you get the standard compression, limiting, and oh a shitload of explosions overlaid for the final product yeah for real. i mean i just like making stuff that i want to hear or is stuck in my head. dont think i could ever do it for a living because then it sucks the joy out of it. not that i'd ever be able to anyway. thanks others too for the info about the servers and whatnot. that's uhh, way too extreme for me obv. i did however go out and buy a ryzen 5950x or w/e and new mobo today because it'll prob be a year and a half before i can get a zen 4 or whatever without paying $Texas to scalpers. might just throw the i7-9700k in my server comp since it's using a hilariously outdated i3 from like 5 years ago my ram got here, and half of it didn't work (one package of it). idk if it was a manufacturing defect or something but the edge of the pcb on the bad sticks was a muddy brown compared to light green of the good ones, but maybe just different pcb sources
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Sep 20, 2021 01:12
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Jonny 290 posted:well that's good (on the cpu) and bad (on the bad ram). memory is kinda fucky and weird these days. I got lucky with mine which, thank god, i didnt want to have to be rma'ing a fistful of 32g sticks. 5xxx ryzens are amazing processors yeah, the replacements have already arrived, but i'm too tired to mess with more comp stuff today. hopefully it works on my current mobo and then i get to take that out and put in the new one. should get around 2-2.5x the performance going from 8 core no HT to 16 core HT. it's nice that the main plugins i use both support as many threads as they can throw at a cpu. my cpu is screaming with the current piece ive been working on for the past week or two. it hits ~1300 simultaneous voices at it's peak. still need to really sit down and work with dorico as it has a lot more integration features that sibelius lacks like a play view that had a piano role and midi CC envelopes etc. it's on sale for a couple more days where I can get it for something like $200 as a competitive crossgrade from sibelius. Jim Silly-Balls posted:this is a good approach. it’s easy to fall into the “my music will definitely sound like I want if I just buy this thing” trap where you do it over and over and over. the amount of synths, sounds, etc is just completely overwhelming. more orchestra type music has been really good for me as there's a finite number of ways each instrument can play a note, and i already know what instrument and articulation should be used to achieve that. being able to hear something in your head and write down the pitch and rhythm is imo most of the battle. then you can loop a section you're interested in and just mess with the sounds until you like it, then move on to the next, etc. sometimes I'll spend a decent amount of time getting the pitch and rhythm just right for what i want, then listen to it in context of the rest of the piece and immediately cut it and put it in my future ideas files.
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Sep 20, 2021 02:07
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i should build a box of nothing but knobs to control midi stuff with a little screen for each one to show what they are controlling
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Sep 20, 2021 02:37
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Penisface posted:you ever considered getting a 2nd hand server blade and sticking it where it can make noise and running your heavy audio lifting on that? audio over network is fast these days not quite at that point yet... tho I am going to put the i7 in my old case and prob distribute some load to it because why not
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Sep 20, 2021 19:13
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got the new cpu and mobo installed, cpu useage on the piece im working on dropped from 100% usage with pops and cracks starting to happen to 7%. insane how good they are at multithreaded tasks
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Sep 21, 2021 04:55
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yeah it's pretty insane. i think this beast should last for some time now. also got the new ram in, tested it overnight and it's all good, so i'm done with rebuilding this thing. also made the decision and picked up dorico pro since it's on sale and with the competitive crossgrade I was able to get it for about ~$200. now i need to make a sound set for it which is going to take way too long. probably look at getting nuendo or something at some point but i've spent enough this last 2 months on stuff. still less than a base mac pro would cost for way worse hardware 
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Sep 21, 2021 14:49
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and another track finished  https://soundcloud.com/polterchair/gathering-storm
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Sep 21, 2021 17:20
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echinopsis posted:heh you peeps probably follow this dude anyway but timestamp didn't work but that's cool thinking about making my own midi controller with lots of knobs and a fader for each channel. i also want to put a small screen for each knob that tells you what CC channel it's set to and for the faders that show you which channel it is.
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Sep 25, 2021 15:15
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I really want a few more than that per channel + faders, and making my own stuff is fun Jonny 290 posted:i would suggest one larger screen that mimics the knob/button layout with the labels. the individual tiny oled display idea is super trick, but will be an absolute wiring nightmare and you'll hate the thing before it's even completed plan is to use smd or through-hole displays. i have a ton of experience with pcb layout so that's not a problem, nor is the controller and a windows/mac front end to change settings how I want. friend has a sick wood cutting/engraving setup so I may get him to make a face plate for it for ~aesthetic~ edit: oh yeah I completely reworked my desk last night so I could fit more stuff on it 
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Sep 25, 2021 15:29
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:you could get a streamdeck and have it display all of that on its buttons, but the knobs wouldn’t be by the display not a bad idea, but I think I want to go all out with this, more as a challenge than anything else. and I don't care about doing it on the cheap so I'm looking in to motorized pots and faders... probably use an fpga for control since I've been looking to do something with one for a while and I think I'm going to need a lot of input/outputs for this. yes I am insane
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Sep 25, 2021 15:45
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that's really cool. I like that people just take stuff and throw it together to make unique one-offs
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Sep 25, 2021 17:43
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so i thought I was done with my computer, but with all the upgrades my psu has decided that it won't supply enough power for the cpu and gpu despite being a 750 W which should be more than enough. it's crapping out at around 400-450 w, so i ordered a phantek 1 kW supply that is the same as the seasonic prime ultra platinum but $100 cheaper because it doesn't say seasonic on it. same 12 year warranty and everything. still working on getting dorico set up, it's a bit of a bear, but it can do really cool things. for example, this part below:  is completely automated to use the correct samples for the correct articulations based on the notation. the dynamic markers change the expression and modulation, the note length changes between sustain and shorts, the staccato and staccatissimo change the tonguing technique, accents add the accent attack, marcato as well, the slur in that case switches between short slur and short accent slur, and it correctly slurs between the octaves at the end like a trumpet in this case would (no key change, all embouchure), then plays the vibrato sample. to do this in sibelius I would have had to add a CC command for every single one of those things to happen. that's all controlled through dorico's expression maps  I've finished the strings and am working through the brass now, then woodwinds
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Sep 26, 2021 15:26
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ive been using reaper and it's really powerful, but it definitely feels sometimes like it was made by engineers and can be somewhat unfriendly. thankfully they have an insane amount of videos that walk you through every single aspect of it. i may make the leap to nuendo next time it comes around on sale since it's an easier integration with dorico, but for now reaper has been very needs suiting ableton live very much feels to me first and foremost focused on, well, live performances speaking of dorico, yesterday i finally finished implementing the expression maps for every symphony instrument. it's taken me around 3 weeks to do this working a couple of hours a day on it. for whatever reason kontakt gets weird sometimes with keyswitches where it won't release them properly, so i'm using CC commands to change articulations, and program changes to switch between articulation banks. opus is perfectly happy with keyswitches i've been really happy with the sound of the opus hollywood orchestra instruments so far, but their solo instruments are far weaker than others. of course this is comparing one of their solo instruments with something like a sampled stradivari violin/cello, although i prefer the timbre of guarneri violin. little surprise i guess that the four instrument sample sets are $400. i really wish that some of these companies would offer 'hobbiest' discounts because the barrier to entry is an insane amount of money. but i also understand that it's a very limited appeal product that's staggeringly expensive to produce. also it's a strange feeling seeing that you're using 110 of 128 gb of ram and being worried that you only have as much left as the vast majority of computers out there. depending on how my job search goes and if/where i end up moving i might put together a small server cluster with decent amounts of ram on each so i can just keep things loaded at all times. something like ~100 gb of ram on each 16ish thread processor, 2 per mobo. and 2 of those. then put them in a custom enclosure where i can liquid cool the entire thing to keep it quiet. no video card needed so power needs won't be as extreme, and the tallest part will be the ram so I can pack them in closer. oh and my parts started arriving yesterday for my midi controller. once i have all of them in i'll start making cutouts in cardboard to work on physical layout before settling on BOM and then build the schematics/pcbs for them. I am thinking that I will use rosewood for the enclosure sides/bottom, and then brushed steel or aluminum for the top to cut down on fingerprint notice ability. last thing I'm figuring out is what I want to use for buttons. ideally they'll be soft touch, but at the very least quiet, and i want programmable rgb for each of them for customization. anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk hope you learned something
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Oct 2, 2021 15:50
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echinopsis posted:i’d probably pirate it if it was just for my own fun you wouldn't download an orchestra echinopsis posted:https://gfycat.com/criminalseverehoneyeater nice
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Oct 4, 2021 00:06
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almost done now with 3 pieces, and im going to put together a server to run kontakt at the very least going to build one using 7401P epyc processors since you can get them for $250-300 each. two of those, a dual socket mobo ($700-800), 256 gb of ram ($800-900). 96 threads, ~50% faster than a single 5950X ryzen, with upgradability to 512 gb of ram. probably put together some custom enclosure for it with liquid cooling to keep it nice and quiet and running well forever. edit: oh yeah at suggestion of friends changed my name https://soundcloud.com/poltzart
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Oct 18, 2021 12:41
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Jonny 290 posted:ooh this is some nice beef. are you gonna gently caress with water cooling or just big air? probably water cool it just because. or just throw it in my basement and never think about it again. idk
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Oct 18, 2021 22:54
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I've been getting a bit distracted lately what with searching for a new job and whatnot, but I did mess with some synths last night https://soundcloud.com/poltzart/wip-synth kinda hilarious that that all comes from 4 written pitches.
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Oct 25, 2021 02:17
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