IsildursBane

Cool. Well I can't wait to make a trip to some music stores to check out some nice speakers! Unfortunately it's a good 2 hour drive to any place that stocks this stuff That's what the internet is for. You'll have to pay for shipping for the things you return, but you'll get a wider selection and a greater length of time to check them out. -Dan.

If he can't even make edits w/o pops & clicks, chances are most of his other edits are lousy, too. Get the original audio project/OMF and do it right. Drawing a new fade takes 2 seconds. Trying to find a click can be a PITA. -Dan.

At the risk of offending, that is such a frustrating cop out of an answer. :/ A good ear (with good monitoring) should be able to hear which differences exist due to performance, and which exist due to sound quality differences. For example, if a low pass filter were applied to one clip at 5 kHz, the lack of top end in just one clip would obviously not be caused by the fact that one is a different performance. That's because you can't play it in such a manner as to sound like it's got a 5kHz LPF. You can play it differently enough to achieve the difference in tones you've gotten. Are those differences going to make one clip's overall spectral balance and clarity noticeably different than the other? Hell no. Don't kid yourself. Actually listen to these things, the way they differ could never come down to performance... I disagree completely. Hitting the cymbal in a slightly different place could account for those differences. The guitar player shifting in his seat a bit or playing a little harder or differently could definitely account for that difference. I don't disagree with your overall assessment that the second clips sounded more dull, and there may actually be something to this. But in all honesty, I don't think the clips were played or recorded well enough to begin with to say one way or another that recording at 44.1 makes this dull and muddy. -Dan.

no, you don't need them matched. -Dan.

This is essentially like arguing about whether or not I can take a good photographs. Just like anybody else, I can take my wife's $1500 Nikon, put it on a tripod, set it to auto, aim it at a mountain/flower/supermodel, and push the button. What will come out is probably a reasonably accurate representation of what I saw. If what I saw was attractive, then the picture will be as well. But that doesn't mean I'm a good photographer. It means I knew how to push a button and not f' things up in the process. I don't know a thing about lighting, color theory, composition, exposure times, depth of field, focal length, aperture settings, filters, etc. If I happen to take a pretty shot, that doesn't mean that photography is easy; it means that I got lucky. -Dan.

If you want orchestral samples, you're better off buying an orchestral sample library than a keyboard. If you already have a good Mac, I wouldn't switch to a PC just to do music. Plenty of good software is available for the Mac (lots of composers like Logic), and you could put that money towards something else. Here in Boston, there's a pretty vibrant game development community w/ a lot of students and indie guys doing projects on their own - all of which may need music. However, there are also a ton of entry-level composers looking for the same thing. Berklee's got a pretty active video game music club that, AFAIK, opens up their meetings to the public. I know they've had some big-name composers come through to give lectures. That may be a place to start. -Dan.

BellyAcres Productions. Named for my parents farm. -Dan.

You can't hear up that high, so your focus on 50K vs 40K vs 20K is a bit misguided. The main "benefit" of having such an extended frequency response is that it generally means that the response of top-end that you can hear is fairly smooth/flat. Frequency responses are generally listed having a range of something like +-3dB. If a piece of gear is described as having a response extending all the way out to 50KHz (which is only an octave above 25KHz), then you can be fairly certain that it's response through 20KHz is smooth. Whereas a piece that is only listed as going up to 20KHz may have a rather precipitous drop above 18KHz. Of course, all of this assumes that the figures and charts are accurate and that the marketing dept. hasn't massaged things... -Dan.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no - it depends on the context and how egregious the error is. Trying to polish poorly-played turds has actually helped me appreciate good music and good playing, regardless of the audio quality. The more I do this, the more powerless I feel, because I am continually reminded that regardless of how amazing I may (or really, may not) be, I am but a cog in a machine. If I screw up, I can hose the project, but even if I'm completely on the ball, there are still a million things outside of my control that can tank the whole thing. That said, I'm now a lot more inclined to notice sibilance on a bad VO track or feedback during a show. -Dan.

No - thankfully! I'm not a big fan of figured bass because it's not relevant today. Sort of like learning Latin. IMO, it's a usefull tool for forcing you to recognize the way that different chord inversions work together. -Dan.

I decided to put my scanner where my mouth is, so to speak. Here is the Back Chorale I mentioned earlier (175 KB GIF file) : Bach Chorale #8 Analyzing this piece was one of the most productive homework assignments I ever had in music school. The task is to identify every chord, understanding that the chords change at each quarter note. There are passing tones on many of the eight note beats, but they don't count for this assignment. So anyone who wants to learn harmony - and I mean really learn harmony - should download and print this out, then write the chord names (in pencil!) over each quarter note chord cluster. I wonder if I should start a new thread inviting folks to write the chords they hear at each beat, and upload their version for critique and further discussion? --Ethan Did you have to write out the figured bass notation, too? I was good through about 3.5 semesters of theory; It got kind of ridiculous when we started charting out 12-tone 20th century pieces on a grid. -Dan.

Originally posted by blue2blue but where it REALLY shines is in documentation and responsiveness to the developer community -- two places where Microsoft is UTTERLY ABYSMAL. (NO other company I've dealt with on an ongoing basis has such INCREDIBLY BAD DOCUMENTATION as Microsoft. It is an UTTER DISGRACE.) Really? I always thought the MSDN library stuff was pretty good, albeit a bit tough to navigate at times. -Dan.

Originally posted by loner22 Okay. That's it. I am giving up. I can't make my amp sound the way I want it to. What amp do you have? What guitar do you have? What do you want them to sound like? -Dan.

Originally posted by littledog 100+ hour per week? Wow! How do you do it? That's 17 hours per day, six days a week! Try doing live sound during a busy summer festival season. 17 hrs a day; standing up; in the sun/rain; lifting heavy {censored}; running around like crazy; coated in sweat, dirt, grease, and beer sludge; being blasted by 105+dB sound levels. m/:evil:m/ -Dan.