80780

If I may be so bold as to reply, I've been working on quite a bit of oriental soundtrack scores of recent, though they have been focusing more on the middle-east than far east, however there have been a few tracks i've done situated around the 'traditional japanese' sound. For those pieces I mainly used, which have been mentioned before above: Percussion:

I'm not sure about normalising the file, as far as my understanding of it is, normalising bases the whole file on the same peak which can mess up level differences in quiet softer and loud and brash sections. I'd use a program like Goldwave (i'm practically sure it's still free I haven't used it in a good five years). My other experience with normalising compressed audio files like MP3 is that you can gain signal noise or hiss depending on the amount of boosting needed and the compression rate. As for midi I'm sure you could raise the volume of the midi track one by one to your preferred level in a master track or channel mixer, not sure if finale has this as i've never used finale, but in Cubase it's as standard, you could always import your midi into a version of Cubase if you have it and master the track and re export it to mp3.

for someone who's not had any musical training as you say, it's very very good, the pace and techniques of playing (of which i won't bore you with) are very well placed. The timpani roll which draws the two sections together in the middle is a very nice touch and flows, the only thing I wasn't too sure on was the abrupt end? Apart from that well done.

I don't know if you guys have checked out the work of the boffins at Yamaha, but they've produced something similar called Vocaloid. There are three variations at the moment, Leon, Lola and Mirrim at the moment, and for what it is it's quite incredible. As far as I understand it it's based on real session vocalists who have painstakenly recorded all pheonyms and passing pheonym sounds so when you type in the program it matches the pheonyms like text to speech synths but with the added realism of thousands of pitch varied samples. It's not perfect but it's very exciting to see in it's early stages and what it could hold for the future.

I agree with montpellier, though with from what I read from your 'sound more professional' I'm guessing you are looking into improving the sound of your instruments in your composition. Without hearing one of your compositions it's hard to tell whether you're looking to make the instruments more realistic by adding different expressions or styles of playing, or whether you purely mean a better sounding instrument sound, e.g better than an onboard sound cards General Midi wavetable. If it's the latter I'd agree with montpellier again by saying to getting more realistic instruments is costly, plus if your computer is lagging behind on certain performance parts (like RAM and CPU) you'll need to upgrade these too to use efficiently the large sample based libraries like Garritan Personal Orchestra and Eastwest QL Symphonic Orchestra for example. Unfortunately there are no demos that I know of of either for you to try out but you can get a flavor of the sounds by their audio examples on their websites. For prices Garritan GPO certainly wins hands down at around $200 mark (i think?) and you can get the Silver Edition of the EW QL Symphonic Orchestra too for about $200. There are other models in the EW range but range dramatically in price for the more realistic and complete collections (the Platinum edition being the most expensive).

For me it's the laptop route it was bought mainly for gigging and portability but I was surprised how powerful it was so I use it as my main music station now: Intel Centrino Duo 1.6Ghz (Dual Processor) 1GB DDR RAM 70Gb Internal Hard Drive 250Gb Toshiba External USB2 Hard Drive 128Mb Geforce GO 7400 Graphic Card 15.4" Widescreen display The soundcard and keyboard comes in an all in one: M-Audio Ozonic Firewire Keyboard Controller, Audio Interface Software used is: Cubase SX3 EastWest QL Symphonic Orchestra Gold Garritan Jazz & Big Band EastWest QL Colossus ReFX Vanguard Native Instruments Battery 2 Linplug Albino Intackt Kontact Other musical hardware used or owned: Korg X3 Workstation Roland JV1010 Roland E-12 Roland MC-303 a real life trumpet lol There is lots of (and too many to mention) gear and equipment I use at the recording studio.

Hi all, Sorry for my lack of activity on the forum, I forgot the address :P Here's another incidental piece I wrote for the Neo-Manhattan/ Neo-Dubai (the sequel) RPG story soundtrack. This one's to portray the atmosphere of the ship they are travelling on (a big pirate-style ship) where 'curosity not only kills the cat but ties lead weights to it and throws it in the river' to quote mr Pratchett. It was described to me as a numb feeling for the characters after their victory of the last major battle which held as much sadness for the protagonists as happiness due to the loss of loved ones. So without waffling on too long the synth patch i made to kick the tune off was my interpretation of the numbness and the lone cello solo to begin with holds the sadness, it slowly evolves into the bittersweet/melancholy strings which echo one of the characters meeting back up with another who had been separated since the event in the happy to see but battle-weary. Sorry I really shouldn't try and explain things lol Here's the track: http://www.magickalkingdom.com/gavin/theship.mp3

The drums are multi layered samples and individual 'shots' of the drums sequenced in an old package known as Impulse Tracker and then saved as a WAV to be imported into my sequencer. Thanks for the criticism is hugely appreciated. I know what you mean about sounding like it's played on a keyboard, strangely enough it's played on a computer keyboard too! lol. I haven't been able to set my keyboard up midi wise to my new pc yet so I'm having to use the qwerty keyboard to much frustration. The avatar? lol that's an old avatar for one of the characters on that role-playing story that I wrote this piece to. Thanks Mike. Yeah Rob Dougan has been an influence, and I hadn't realised how much so until I had finished this piece. Thanks Serge, you've summed up perfectly what I wanted to acheive. Thanks everyone I'm glad you've enjoyed it, there's tonnes more that I've wrote for this project so I think I'll upload them to see what you think. Gavin aka 080780.

Hi all, I managed to find the site after a long search on yahoo trying to find a music based forum. I've attached my first piece I have been working on for another site as part of a soundtrack to a role-playing story that is going on on it called Neo Manhattan. This piece is the music I wrote for it for the battle between two main protagonists, who are about to enter the 'ultimate' battle type scenario. Any praise or criticism is wildly welcomed. Thanks, 080780. Due to the global space left on the forum (it says 1mb) I've had to post a link to it. http://www.void-within.net/binaries/Chan%2...%20Version).mp3