ChrisV's Blog

I would listen to this over most of what i have recieved from the humble bundles. A nice touch.

Very nice Chris. It's so easy to tell when a real musician has composed the music, even when using electronic tools, as opposed to the myriad of 'computer' musicians we get these days! This has soul and feel to it.

 

Great job!

Hey so nice soundtrack !! reminds me of seriouse sam

Nice,I like it, this will go very well with your game .

Really good. Like it lots. Understated, perfect for a game level.

It sounds really good Chris. Nice gameplay music.

Very very good!

 

Suggestion, as always.

 

Cut out first 10 seconds. Drums are not very nice intro. They are too broken(?), not rhythmic. And make scary filling which is not suitable for followed music.

 

If you want an intro, try to replace drums with may be some squeal of the wind (if it matches the picture).

 

As usual, I just suggested the easiest way - to cut out first 10 second. The song sounds very good starting from 11-th second.

Woooow guys, I'm surprised to see all these great comments!

Didn't expect this at all. Thank you soo much!

 

Cut out first 10 seconds. Drums are not very nice intro. They are too broken(?), not rhythmic. And make scary filling which is not suitable for followed music.

 

If you want an intro, try to replace drums with may be some squeal of the wind (if it matches the picture).

I appreciate your suggestions, Daimour!

The drums at the beginning (and end) are mainly there to have a more fluent loop, but I see your point. Thanks.

Will experiment a bit with other sounds (such as the wind) for the intro, and try out a few 'scary' sounds.

 

Not sure about the lenght of the song, though. Should the song be a bit longer?

The length is good enough, but try to make it loopable.

Hey Chris, if I wanted to drive Native Instruments from a midi input what sort of latency am I looking at?

The length is good enough, but try to make it loopable.

I might make it a bit longer, but not too much.

The song should already loop seamless. Played (looped) it in Audacity, and didn't notice any seams.

 

Hey Chris, if I wanted to drive Native Instruments from a midi input what sort of latency am I looking at?

Hum, hard to tell really. It all depends on different factors, such as CPU, memory and hard disk access speed, your operating system, and also your soundcard and drivers. Also on the complexity of your compositions, and usuage of fx/plugins.

If you have a decent machine, up to date drivers, then the latency should be minimal, I think. There's a Latency slider to set the size of the playback buffer, so you'd have to play around with that a bit for optimal performance. And, read the documentation of your soundcard to see whether there's possibility to access the buffer via alternate driver architecture, and have more efficient low-level access to the hardware.

So far, I haven't had any latency at all, and my soundcard is an onboard Realtek HD.

 

You're interested in the software?

Thanks for the feedback Chris. Yes, I've been thinking of adding to my current sound modules. They are all hardware units at the moment, either standard rack mount modules or soundcard based; so no issues with latency there. The last time I seriously tried software emulated sounds I had too much issue with latency for me to concider it viable. If I can't play it live from an instrument, either a keyboard or a midi guitar then I'm not really interested. But that was some time ago and computer performance has improved greatly.

 

The sound quality of modern software synths is superb, I just need them to respond quickly enough to be able to drive them from a real instrument.

 

What are you using as the input device/instrument?

No problem, Pixel!

A lot of the instruments in Native Instruments are samples from authentic instruments with various parameters that can be changed to shape the sound more to your liking. There's a pretty nice symphonic strings section, plus lots more.

Not to forget the endless possibilities you can get from Guitar Rig. The pro version has a lot more. Might buy it some day. ;-)

 

I usually use either my PC keyboard to play, or my old Casio keyboard, but it's getting rather old. Should get me a new one. Heheheh!

Great, so your using a keyboard and there is no noticeable latency even with just your on-board sound card. Might take a look at Native Instruments then.

 

I'm interested in the Abbey Road Drum samples too as I have a Roland Midi Drum Kit which would benefit from some better samples.

 

Cheers Chris