actually. the question about determining what key something is in is more complicated that it sounds. Check out this dissertation... http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~echew/papers/Di
tation.pdf
basically what a key is, is the percieved Tonal center of a given section of music. The tonal center is the function that all of the other harmonic functions have tension towards.
737 January 24, 2012 10:45 pm
Re: Music theory Q and A (14 replies, posted in General Discussion)
738 January 23, 2012 7:35 pm
Re: WEEK 03 - Is reality sinking in yet?! (46 replies, posted in General Discussion)
My song was OK this week. I always end up waiting until the last minute and rushing. Im sad that more people didnt comment on my track.. it seems like there are a few people that get all the comments because everyone already loves them and then everyone else gets nothing :<. I think my favorite track this week was a not so commented track by 'protman'. it was creative and different and made me physically get out of my bed to comment on it. anyways.. you guys. keep up the good work.
739 January 23, 2012 3:00 pm
Re: Polyphasic sleep patterns (15 replies, posted in General Discussion)
dunno. i sometimes take a nap for lunch at work.. no one has ever said anything to me about it.
740 January 18, 2012 1:07 am
Re: I Had A Dream... (7 replies, posted in General Discussion)
haha awesome.. i look forward to hearing the fønk
741 January 17, 2012 9:44 am
Re: In regards to the music being chiptune or otherwise... (28 replies, posted in General Discussion)
chame?
742 January 16, 2012 9:59 pm
Re: Weekly Beats Torrent Thread (165 replies, posted in General Discussion)
word yo!
743 January 16, 2012 6:07 pm
Re: WEEK 02: How did it go? (33 replies, posted in General Discussion)
yeah.. i didnt put much effort into mine either.. i had a rad track I was working on. but it was too ambitious so i made a quick track with no beats. thusly, no one has commented :<
744 January 10, 2012 8:42 pm
Re: Why is the square for the 51st darker than all the other? (5 replies, posted in Site Help)
The end of the world, of course.
745 January 10, 2012 8:38 pm
Re: Weekly Beats Week 1 Round-Up (5 replies, posted in General Discussion)
hmm interesting selection. I'd be curious as to what you'd have to say about my track
746 January 10, 2012 10:17 am
Re: Calling Postmodern Magicians (25 replies, posted in General Discussion)
i noticed that there was a song that was an ode to Richard Dawkins who is a self proclaimed militant atheist. I wonder if I should send out a call for casting doubt upon believers.
747 January 9, 2012 7:00 am
Re: Zip of weekly files (24 replies, posted in General Discussion)
you could make the zip based on what people set their license to.. also the download ability.
748 January 9, 2012 4:15 am
Re: Week 01 - How did we all fare? (75 replies, posted in General Discussion)
I had like 3 false starts and ended up going with my initial starting track.. I am medium ok with my submission.. wished i would have had more time to master it, but I was exhausted by the time it came time for that. I spent all of like 4 minutes mastering hehe. The track itself turned out rougher than I would have liked. This week I wont wait until the last minute to finish and I will probably go with the first track I start.
749 January 6, 2012 10:24 pm
Re: Mastering/Post-production Tips? (15 replies, posted in General Discussion)
oh. and speaking of izotope ozone. they have a decent PDF on mastering on their site. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/o asp#guides
also. i recommend the book "Mastering Audio - The art and the science" by Bob Katz http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Audio-S 0240808371
750 January 6, 2012 10:16 pm
Re: Mastering/Post-production Tips? (15 replies, posted in General Discussion)
The old MDA-VST plugins have always been free and are now open source http://mda.smartelectronix.com/
They arent necessarily super high quality, being that they are free.. but they will get the job done.
751 January 6, 2012 3:32 am
Re: Mastering/Post-production Tips? (15 replies, posted in General Discussion)
There are lots of good articles online about various mastering techniques. The real important things you need to know about are EQ and Compression. An important rule of thumb is to have good reference material to compare your track to. Always listen to one of your favorite songs that is a similar genre of the song you are mastering first. Go back to it at any time to refresh your ears. The human ear and brain have a strange capacity to compress and equalize by themselves so you need a common frame of reference. There are no rules that are necessarily set in stone, but there are some guidelines that seem to work most of the time. The goal in mastering is to get things to sound reasonably natural in as many different listening situations as possible. The idea is not necessarily to get things as loud as possible, but it seems that a lot of people think that that is important. A good place to start is on EQing the roll-off points on the high and low end. On the low end, rolling off somewhere between 30hz and 60hz seems to allow enough room for you to get your mixes up to a reasonable loudness level. The High mids starting from about 1khz all the way up to 20khz seem to sound best when they smoothly roll off, roughly following the fletcher-munson curve for 85db SPL. For CD and/or internet release, things can be prevented from sounding too tinny on some devices if you have a good round curve starting from 16khz going all the way down to nothing. All of this is a rough guide and is purely subjective. Again, on the low end.. you really just have to use your ears and move the shelf around a bit until it sounds right.. but usually its somewhere between 30hz and 60hz depending on how much energy you have down there. The more you roll off the low end, the louder you will be able to get your track to sound, as low frequencies eat up more energy. Tooling around on the extreme highs is the same kind of thing.. just screw around with your high shelf until it sounds right. For the mids, well. the idea is to get each instrument to sound clear but not unnaturally isolated. Also. if your track sounds muddy. you can usually remove some mud somewhere between 400-800hz. Most of the time you can deal with very small db increments on a parametric EQ that has its q set to about one full octave. .which is 0.30 on most eqs. Ill get back to you on the compression/limiting side of things. Need to go work on my track Hope this helps some.
752 January 4, 2012 10:38 pm
Re: free your mind, musically (36 replies, posted in General Discussion)
oh also.. i strongly recommend using some kind of meter that shows an average level and a peak level simultaneously. If you can get an average that is about 7db less than the peaks most of the time, you are golden. Punch does not have to come from compression. In my opinion, buss compression is more useful as glue rather than to add punch. If you must use a shitload of compression.. use it only on the drum buss or on individual drum tracks. Most of the time, synths do not need any compression or if so.. very little.. low ratio compression. Let the synth's breath