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@dragonxvi
Did you know that Homestuck Vol. 10 will be the 25th official Homestuck music album to come out? ~destiny~
We've got ourselves into a bit of a Resident Evil school of Naming Things.
I should do something with Showtime, y'know, in celebration of where we began all this nonsense.
Can you expand on the basic setup post & suggest some VSTs/soundfonts/etc? Thanks!
This could go on a while, I think others have done much better collections than I've done, but let's see...
Soundfonts
These're everywhere, with various different states of price, quality, licensing etc. There's a tonne of free ones about. Good ones to start with are general GM collections. Here's a nice starter list (collected by 'darkesword') which has a few I've used before.
Other ones I like using are numerous retro game packs dotted about the place, Papelmedia, SGM, etc.
Other VSTS
Good synths can be quite handy but also pretty expensive. Synth-1's been well recommended to me and a full filler for various kind of sounds from decent pads, acid bass & wubby dubstep noises. Dig around the web for preset packs to build up a good collection.
Other fun choices are emulators for various chips for the more authentic chiptune quality. i.e. '38911 Bytes' is a fun little C64 emulator. Just punch in the chip the console used for music synth followed by' VST' and you can usually find a few like this one for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive
Big fancy collections wot I use
For the more orchestral sounding things I'll often use the EWQL Play VST with various sound libraries I've bought from them. Recently I've also picked up Kontakt 5, which aside from coming with a decent collection of orchestral, synth, percussive & general misc voices, I also use Spitfire Audio's Albion (very 'cinematic' collection of orchestral voices) & Shreddage 2 for my obviously non-live guitarwork.
Vocaloids
If you're into that sort've thing :p
Samples
Always handy to just build up big piles of samples. These're mostly useful for effects, percussions, loops etc.
Stuff FL Studio just comes with
Using the stuff that's shipped with your DAW of choice is a bit like using the Photoshop Lens Flare filter. It's fairly limiting, and anyone familiar with the program will know exactly what you're doing and call it unoriginal, but they can be a decent collection of stuff when getting started and I still occasionally drop an ol' FL Drumloop to enhance the drums a bit. Also has a few generators (though many are demo versions requiring many $$$s to get full versions of) that're pretty good.
Should be enough to get started? Generally you collect stuff and hear about stuff in an eternal unending pursuit of collecting until one day you find yourself buying a collection of Gregorian Chanting and wonder if you've gone too far...
Please become the leader the music team needs. I have the feeling Radiation is too busy to organize/master Vol. 10, and I don't want to wait any longer.
Pffft I am the worst at organising anything :p Trust me y'don't want me runnin' this show.
I can probably say that there *is* movement on Vol 10. No idea when it'll come out but I'd expect to see it before HS ends? I've got 2 tracks being tweaked and a 3rd I'm playing with... We'll see what comes of 'em in time :p
Hey, I had a question- I'm looking into some software for making music, and I've heard a good bit of your stuff from the CQ and it's all great. What program do you use? What specs are required to run it and the like? I hope you didn't have a FAQ somewhere that answered that I can't seem to find it if so :'D
I'm sure I answer this one regularly enough :p
I personally use FL Studio, been usin' it for yonks (back when it was "FruityLoops"), but there's plenty others. Popular ones include Reason, GarageBand... Cubase? Is that still going? Basically anything that calls itself a Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) will do most things y'need to make music. FL Studio isn't perfect, but runs decently enough.
Specs wise depends on what you're doing, but generally CPU power and RAM is important depending on how many VSTs you're throwing at it. Decent hardware will also help too, like decent phones or studio monitors, but that's mostly useful for mixing. In my experience some VSTs utterly devour CPU time (I'm looking at you EWQL!) while other's are basically just playing back samples or simple synths. If you're planning on collecting a vast library of samples 'n such, be prepared to eat up lots of Gigs of Hard drive space too. I pretty much just used my decent-end gaming PC for all my gamedev & music making needs and it doesn't hit any major limits. A MIDI Keyboard t'fit nicely on yer desk also helps, but isn't essential if you're just getting started.
Some more electronically inclined music from me. Though I couldn’t resist adding an orchestra either.
*Patiently awaits Drop*
*Is not disappointed*
So there's been no Musicoodle as mentioned because of JAM. Specifically ProcJam where I made:
THE INQUISITOR.
(Although it has a few music tracks so consider that the musical scribble for this update)
It's a sort of procedural clue/cluedo-esque thing where you toddle about a (very simple) random house, talking to (very simple) random people about a (slightly complex) murder that takes place, and y'have to determine who did it, how they did it, and what their motive was.
It plays like a sort of odd Detective Zelda esque thing, and everything's heavily simplified to fit into the week deadline I had to make it. There's a tonne of stuff I'd add if I was going forward with it.
Enough folk have managed to *get* it and solve the murders and enjoy it that I'd consider it a decent avenue for making something properly eventually. 'Till then, give it a go!
Game Fruit Preserves
Music making's going to take a brief hiatus for a while because it's Jam Season again!
First up is #ProcJam wherein the challenge is to use procedural generation in a game or tool. Procedural Generation is one of those greatly powerful things that tends to go head to head against straight-up hand-made, authored game content, and is mega popular with the ol' indy scene who don't have droves of artists & level designers to whip up content to keep things interesting. There's even some keynote speakers from the likes of Tom Coxon (Who's making an entirely procedurally generated Gameboy-era Zelda-esque thing called Lenna's Inception and has a few neat articles on "How to randomly generate a Zelda game overworld complete with dungeons & tools/keys"), Hazel McKendrick (Fellow Scottish games techie & head dinosaur combobulator of Hello Games' "No Man's Sky") and lots of other smart folk talking about how to basically Play God in video game & algorithmic terms.
Current plan is to do some kind of Procedural Procedural, that is, a murder mystery. Think Clue/Cluedo but with skills in blood splatter analysis & other forensic sciences. Although get any images of a highly detailed, Dwarf Fortress Police Department out of your head because I've got whatever time I can assign to it in a week or so.. You'll be lucky if it isn't just a text adventure!
After that it's time for another #LDJam Ludum Dare. I've done this twice now, and my first attempt was *very well* received (The second attempt was borderline impossible to play but sounded great!) so hoping to tone down the difficulty and up the fun this time round.
I quite like doing Games Jams over say, working on a full game project because it lets me spit out the various ideas I end up having with a strict timeline & budget. Plus, I have almost no patience, and can only work on stuff like this for about 48 hours before going NOPE BORED NOW NEXT IDEA and move on to the next thing. Perhaps one day I'll actually finish a full game with a story 'n everything, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Jam on!
Revisiting an old favorite for the old guard/true believers. This one took a bit longer than the average doodle, but was pretty much done entirely from memory.
Find it weird that I can still very clearly remember stuff I made yonks ago.
In any case, this is a rehash of the main theme from a Fangame called Sonic: Time Attacked wot I did a lot of music for. While I was still pretty much learnin' the ropes of how all this music composing stuff worked, some of the stuff I made to this day I occasionally get stuck in my head. And it was all gawdawful sounding MIDI files. Tis not the quality of the voices maketh the track, but thee annoyingly catchy melodies.
Or something.
The bizarre 'swarbling' glissando at the start is made the same way it was made then too - It's just lots of "Guitar Fret" noises played in quick succession.
I wonder if I could do one every day for a month NOPE TOO LAZY DON'T GET USED TO THIS.
I'll admit, I spent most of today's "Hour of Musicoodle" trying to find various missing power & MIDI cables that have long since been gone several house-clearances ago, but eventually wired something together to try something a bit new. Namely actually recording stuff from a keyboard instead of painstakingly entering every note manually. I'm incredibly rusty at this, which is why today's offering might sound a bit less 'tighter' than usual.
Inspiration comes this week from Gigidigi's Cucumber Quest which I'm sure you'll all familiar with. Don't think I'm happy with the choice in harpsichord. Wanted something 'Sharp' sounding to go with all the thorns 'n whatnot and for most of the time it was a Dulcimer and a variety of other plucked instruments but nothing really worked the way I wanted it to. Tremolos worked though, even though they might be a bit loud.
I'm keen to do something for Jo the Mage & Tank now... Top note, music composery people - Webcomics are a good source of inspiration to play with due to the abundance of visuals and narrative but without any actual sound.
It shouldn't be that hard to do a Tango/Entangled pun. #NamingTracksIsHard
Another music doodle today. Is there a word for those? A Moodle? Muudle? Y'know what sod it it's a Musicoodle.
Figured I hadn't done any Halloweeny music on 'ere so whipped up another quicky. 45 minutes! Although this one's cheating because it's full of borrowed Homestuck stuff. It was goin' to be some kind of Underwater Level music originally but then I remembered "Oh yeah, Halloween" so here we are.
Also hey! That Terezi track WIP I posted up a while back has had quite a bit of interest. Should have some good news for your guys come the inevitable VOLUME 10 since I've been workin' on it since then, although at this point it's kind've in "Alternate Universe"-ville given the current state of affairs and whatnot.
Right it's the weekend. Expect another Musicoodle over the weekend of some form. Might even hook up a keyboard and actually compose stuff live which is something I almost never do and really should.
Good weekend ya'll!
Felt I've been doin' too many GRIMDARK tunes lately, and want to get back to the school of generally catchy game music, which is why I started all this music making malarkey in the first place.
So, whipped this guy up in less than an hour to blow the dust off.
Hey - I've spent the last few weeks making a string quartet arrangement of Rex Duodecim Angelus. What do you think are the chances of my quartet getting permission to perform it? Is there someone else I should contact? I don't know much about this sort of stuff. Thanks!
Honestly I've never tried to arrange my stuff for any kind of live orchestra or quartet or performance, so you're on your own here :p
RDA's probably one of the harder ones to do for live playing since it's a bit of a multi-instrument medly, but I guess it's down to how you've done the arrangement.
I know a few folk have done these kinds of things before for their local groups, so if anyone can help out here feel free to pitch in the discussion :)
Three games, three generations, and the slow creep of legalese covering the entire back of the box.
Oh you can go even further with Bayonetta 2's special edition box which is hilarious :p
(I know it's technically the box that the two game boxes are kept together in, but found it hilarious when this is what's presented to the customer in the shop as what the game's about)
Hey, I hope you didn't take what I said in response to your "oh well at least John is alive" post as hate. I was trying to be funny and may have come off a bit mean. If it did, then sorry :( But seriously, how much of what was going to happen did you know when you were composing the song?
Pfft don’t worry about that, I’m Scottish :p I was going to point to my summary of Carne Vale but then realised I haven’t done one? So… Let’s do a quick one!
Ultimately? These days pretty much the entire music team has *no* idea where the story’s going and generally it’s been like that for some time. I think occasionally (and more often back when HS started) Andrew asks for something specific, but there’s such a VAST library of HS music that he pretty much just grabs a track that suits whatever plot is happening at the time - frequently utterly changing the context of the track.
Carne Vale, specifically, was obviously created for Cherubim. Cherubim was done a bit differently to past albums in that tracks were created as pairs - one representing Calliope, and the next representing Caliborn, and so on back and forth until finishing up with the power struggle effectively ending with Caliborn assuming control via Eternity Served Cold.
So with this, Carne Vale (Caliborn) is paired with Robert Lake’s Stellarum Salve. (Calliope). Mostly in that there’s a few moments in CV where it lifts partial parts of SS into it, which I parse as Calliope’s lucid moments, but when Caliborn takes over the whole thing turns into this angry, vicious bit of synth metal as his rage basically becomes unfettered (original title was “uNCHAINED”) which helps contrasts against SS. Elements of Eternity Served Cold/English show up as a bit of foreshadowing as well.
In terms of it being used to accompany the mass slaughter of everyone’s favorite characters? I’m just as surprised as you were :p
How did you get so good at composing? I'm a HUGE fan of your work, and was hoping you could give me some advice to kick off my own career?
The ol' "How did you get so good at X" where X is any creative art thing is a fairly general question for any pastime, and the responses more or less boil down to "Practice lots."
I've always been fairly musical - playin' instruments, some tutored (violin), some just picked up and made noises with it 'till I figured how everything generally works (everything else but mostly piano). The digital composing thing started in earnest around about the time I joined the Sonic Fangames community around high school. Back then the format of choice was glorious MIDI files played through whatever godawful synthesizer your sound-card had at the time. I think I found some free MIDI sequencer and basically used that for several years before I'd eventually move to FL Studio (Then called 'FruityLoops')
Spent a bit of time trying to replicate the greats (I've still a few bizarre midis lurking around VGMusic.com, mostly of classic sega games), remixing them and occasionally trying my hand at original stuff. Did a *lot* of music during this period, I remember trying to count the unique MIDIs I had lying about and it was easily well into triple digits.
Took quite a break from music stuff when I kinda drifted away from the fangame community and hit University. I made some music tracks for a few projects around this time, but didn't get right back into music making until Homestuck started up.
But yeah. Personally? Grab some kind of DAW like Reason or FLStudio or Cubase or GarageBand or whatever. Start messing around - Dig around in the demo tracks, pick some kind of genre and see if you can imitate it. Listen to the music you like and try and dismantle it - See how the different instruments all fit together. Retro Game music is fantastic for this due to the limitations at the time, so it's easy to pick out the bass, the melody & harmonies. Pretty much all my music is *HEAVILY* inspired by a lifetime of listening to everything from Nobuo Uematsu or Yasunori Mitsuda, Karl Jenkins, Tim Follin, Jeremy Soule, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, countless classical composers, various metal bands and a brief phase of incredibly cheesy Europop. I'll likely never be as good as any of them, but just listening and exposing yourself to how pros compose music and how they do what they do is useful experience.
But most of all just don't really stop. Keep picking sensible targets to improve by and keep at it. If you're really keen at making it a career rather than a hobby, investigate various collage/university courses, check out various music mags, websites & forums and heck surf Youtube for anything you'd want a tutorial on. Give yourself a crazy project to work with, like "Make a theoretical soundtrack for a JPRG" or "Celtic-inspired Boss Battle" or even try the ol' "Make a track for a random homestuck land"
If all else fails, check out Toby Fox's tutorial for FL Studio :p
can you actually chug a guitar that fast in carne vale? or is that just some musical magical trickery :) i'm so glad your song was used dude, it's been one of my favourites since i first got cherubim!
I think At The Price Of Oblivion is a fair indication of my actual guitar uh... 'skill'? So I can chug to some reasonable degree, but these days, and for Carne Vale, I use Shreddage and various other libraries for most guitar work.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Pumpkin Cravings for orchestra Original by Seth “Beatfox” Peelle on Homestuck Vol. 5 Happy Halloween everybody! I have emerged from the shadows to bring you a spooky seasonal treat! And what better time to do so than such a monumental Homestuck date, and sharing the release of an incredible [S] page? Truly the moons of Prospit and Derse saw to it that I would finish this arrangement on such a festive Homestuck eve! I’ve been working on it all month hoping to finish it by Halloween, and it has given me an all-new appreciation for the amount of detail and technique in Beatfox’s compositions. I hope hearing this orchestration of his 8-bit masterpiece can get that across to you too! I asked Worthikids to scare up an appropriate track art, so be sure to go knock on his door and give him candy for his beautiful contribution!
Another fantastic bit of work from Mr. Rosetti.
Someone go back in time and invent the awesome saturday morning cartoon series this should be from. :D
