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Holy crap, that Tarkus is a monumental achievement in pro keys charting. It’s the most hard and varied stuff I’ve ever seen outside Hiromi Uehara’s official sheet music book. I just wish there’s somebody in the world, who can actually play it properly. I myself managed to get my third star at the last trills
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_biggrin.gif” />I’m gonna be the first old fashioned rock musician in the thread. My main instrument is the keyboards but I also play bass and drums well enough for basic jam sessions. I’ve played in quite a few bands during the years and the main goal has always been to get together with some others to make and play music, because there really isn’t anything like it. Here are a few things I’m least embarrassed about.
My first song I ever recorded with a guitar playing friend. I also tried to record drums in the school music class but it turned out that a single mic recording by a first timer without a metronome wasn’t a good base for a song so they got replaced by midi. The song has never been named but I like to call it “Summoning Rip-off” http://www.mediafire.com/listen/0f2cqfn … Kaarne.mp3
The tragedy of my music career is that I’ve never learned to play either drums or bass well enough to play thrash metal, which I love. Even more tragically, I’ve never managed to convince anyone else that having a rhythm keyboardist in a thrash band would be a great idea. At least I got to use a piano to write the chorus and middle parts of this song, while hanging around with some old schoolmates as well as played the massively expansive actual keyboard part in studio.
By far my favorite of my bands was Ekstrapyramidaalijärjestelmä, a project with four other musicians, who were “techically bored” in their main bands. The idea was to make stuff thats as fun and challenging to play as possible and not really worry how it sounded (so naturally this is prog rock) and explicitly not try to record or publish anything to keep the compositional pressure to miminum. Fortunately though a certain club in Helsinki had a policy of recording every band that played in there, so I have this (and a few other songs) to remember, now that we’re long broken up. Ekstrapyramidaalijärjestelmä – Santana Saapuu Moskovaan. If you listen until the very end, you can confirm a certain RB1 loading screen fact with your own ears!
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_biggrin.gif” /> The last real band I played in was a local metal band by the name of Vuolla. I participated in writing one ep and played a few gigs with them. The ep can be listened in it’s entirety
and the songs, where I most worked on are conveniently the two first ones. The band still exists but I’m not a part of it anymore for various reasons.
Unfortunately recently I’ve noticed that most of my peers are getting too old, which causes them to have families and other things distracting them from forming bands left and right, so I have gone right back where I started:
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I played your song i thought it was really fun” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_biggrin.gif” /> glad to see some Amorphis on Rock BandThank you, and good to see interest for these melodic death pioneers. Hopefully the song will be even better in the near future.
Here is some notes that I hope might help (also don’t worry about the wall of text, it’s not as bad as it looks, I just tend to go very indepth
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_cheeky.001.gif” />)I don’t mind at all. This is exactly the kind of feedback I hoped to get and it has been a great help. I wanted to looka at all the stuff and implement all the fixes you pointed out before replying but that turned out to be more than I’ve had time for recently, so I’ll have to do this in a copule of parts. After all, I definitely don’t want to seem like I’m ignoring you or ran off to sulk, when somebody dared to point out that my work wasn’t entirely perfect, since I hugely appreciate you taking the time to give me what I’d guess would pretty much be C3 playtesting level of feedback.
A couple of questions/comments about the stuff I had the time to work on.
-I’m slightly struggling with the tempo map especially in the solo, where the keyboardist seems to drift ahead of the drums by a 32th-64th at times. I assume it’s still better to map the tempo by drums and fudge the keyboard a bit in those cases. I don’t remember any of the tutorials talking about using the scrub-tool to find the beginnings of the hits in cases where the waveform isn’t very clear but that’s what I’ve been experimenting with. Is this ok/common practice or does it ie. introduce inaccuracy via looping the sound tens of milliseconds around the selection?
-Beat: The reason I originally started messing around with the beat track was that I thought the animations looked weird using the straight 3/4 at somewhere around 145 bpm. Since the emphasized feel of the song is so slow I felt like the movement of the characters was much too fast at that speed. Changing it back did fix the overdrive situation, though as I expected.
-Guitar note consistency: I agree with everything you said. I did actually learn the melodies on a keyboard and even wrote them as a guitar tablature but somehow I got really sloppy at the actual charting part.
As I understand it, the 5-lane charts should generally follow the tonal progression but I was wondering if it’s accepted practice to let actual finger positioning inform where and how to “cut” the note progression, when needed or should I just try follow the “O-B-Y, B-Y-R, Y-R-G” style suggested in the official docs as closely as possible. An example of what I mean in this song would be 25.1 onwards, where I meant to chart this progression as the upper part in this picture instead of the lower part, which would be closer to my understanding of wrapping just by the tonal progression. Actually, as a more general point raised by this, is it common to try to represent small skips like the minor 3rd in the pictured progression with skips in the gems, or should those be reserved for larger leaps or is it just a case by case basis?-Copy pasted crazy 512th off notes I managed to catch these at a few places myself but essentially had no idea how common those were, and what caused them. Being otherwise familiar with the principles of quantizing, I assume there shouldn’t be any adverse effects from just selecting all the notes in the track and quantizing them to a proper grid, except for any notes on a tuplet grid getting messed up. Didn’t seem to help with my disappearing drum fill, though so I must try to come up with something else for that.
-Speaking of tuplets, I’m not quite sure if I understand/agree with what you are suggesting for the pro keys at 95.1. It seems we agree on the tonal progression of the fast part being b, c#, b, a#, b, a#, g#, in which case you can’t really fit 8th triplets in there without placing the first b at 94.3.75 or making it a grace note for the first triplet 8th, both of which don’t sound right. Furthermore, using the scrub tool iI feel like the straight 16th notes fit better than ie. 16th triplet grid, which I experimented with, althought since the synth patch used here does “automatic slides” between the notes, it’s not quite as clear as it could possibly be, where notes start and end.
-97.1. and 99.1 I actually charted (not to mention played for like 15 years) as triplets at first myself. I changed it, because I hear a slightly longer note at the start of both those progressions, which is why it’s got a more swing feel to me instead of the sharp attack of a triplet but the later notes might actually fall on triplet grid. However as these are parts where the tempo map goes off synch, I need to get that firmly squared until I can be sure of anything.
Vocals: No arguments for these suggestions. This song turned out to have a bit of a problem with the growls being almost the lowest sound in the song, which makes finding the tube lengths with the scrub tool a bit hard but I guess I’ll try to play with the equalizer to hone these further. Also, thanks a lot. Of course, vocals get a pretty in depth treatment in Pksage’s and Nyxyxylyth’s tutorials and I tried to follow those as best as I could. This is indeed my first time charting vocals or almost anything else except a keyboard chart I made recently for an existing song and a Frets on Fire guitar chart back in 2006, which was so terrible to make and play, that it seemingly turned me off from anything authoring-related for almost a decade.
-Venue: Just the correction and confirmation of the commands I used is really helpful since often to my untrained eye, the effects of those are not quite clear. I understand that actually using them to the full effect comes only with experience.
Thanks again for your help and sorry if this got a bit nitpicky at parts.
