[Giant Hamster]

Wow...It turned out to be 8 minutes long...

Park Place (~Right click, Save as.

The song develops a pretty good amount through the whole thing - around 3:30 or so it hits a pretty big change...So I decided to leave it all intact rather than cutting down.

This could strangely enough be clasified as trance even though it doesn't have a general trance sound or beat. Trance is defined by: Upbeat, arpeggiated synths, many rises and falls, big drop outs, a steady evolving groove/sound/parakeet and this has all of that, but in a different way than formulaic trance.

Yeah, uh anyways....enjoy and tell me what you think. =)

[Impaler]

I think you should take a hit o' this bong with me.

But not to steal wind from your spam, I suggest that everyone download this song at once, and steer your favorite media player in its direction.
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QED, sort of.

[Ragnarok]

Giant Hamster, I wanna hear more songs by you, so start workin!

Good stuff as always.
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"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

[Giant Hamster]

There are more songs on my site that I haven't posted here. =)

[Gort]

Buuuuddy!! That's very nice!! You continue to amaze me with your smelted sounds!

btw...this piece reminds me a bit of Sami Takieddin, although yours is a bit more dynamic sounding.

Keep 'em coming.
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- Tom Carter

"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf" - Jack Kornfield

[Awetopsy]

Dang Man, THis belongs in the rolling credits of some blockbuster movie. Good job.

[A.Buttle]

160% CPU
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[Lunatique]

Hmmm, here's a thought that popped into my head while listening to your latest batch:

First of all, you rock.

Now, crits:

I listen to all your stuff and I have them all on my HD, and here are some common things I think you should try to overcome.

1)You have a tendency to repeat a piano verse for too long, and just as it gets repetitive, you add layers of arrangement on top of it. It's like a pattern you go through on many pieces. IMO, I think you pieces would become much more interesting if you actually varied the piano verses themselves.

2)You arrangement tend to be simple phrases repeated over and over, with the layers shifted around. Try varying the actual phrases themselves.

3)You pieces all tend to be phrases of layers combined, but you rarely have an actual melody--like a solo instrument. Having that once a while can be very beautiful/powerful.

4)You don't seem to do key changes. As complex as your arrangement can get, they only live up to half of their potential when you stay in the same key--on top of that, they seem to stay in the same range within a key. I'd like to see you get bolder. Half steps in a scale are usually great jumping points when making a key change.

5)Your layers in your arrangements tend to "stay clear" of eachother. I'd like to hear you do some heavy duty counter melody and complex harmonic stuff. Think in terms of a string quartet--each instrument is playing an actual ongoing melody, not just repeating a phrase. Then, all the instruments are playing an extended ongoing melody aswell, but countering eachother--while staying in perfect harmony, intersecting at points and seperating at points.

I'm pretty sure you know exactly what I mean by all this.

BTW, did you start on any of the music for my film?

[Gort]

[Giant Hamster]

Luna: All good points. =) I need some work on various things musically, yeah.

Some of those things you mentioned I do out of habit, others are intentional - such as the repeating simple melody - because I like songs I can hum and remember the melody to after many years because it's basically 5 notes. The layers though are where I put more sounds in. Here's a piece of Park Place with just string and arpeggio layers on to show some of the melodies in there that kind of get over-shadowed by the rest of the sounds: LUNA THINKS I SUCK!!!!! hehehe. =)

As for working on your film music, I've been Getting Into the mood To work on some real bad-ass shit for ya here. =)

Oh, and just so everyone has stuff to listen to, here's some stuff from another film project I'm working on:

I have my gold watch, my moto, and I reak of CK, I'm also going to work... and this one: Ooh look at that a sky scene, and some NYC streets very surreal why not some echoing Drum and bass we're cool...

All of these sounds in here are basically Lofi like mad because, well, they're tests. Tests are like this usually.

[Lunatique]

You know what, we have art theory discussion all the time at sijun, it'd be fun to have a music theory discussion for once.

I'm self-taught like Hamster, so we'll steer clear of as much classical theory mumble jumble as possible.

In a way, you can sort of break down the structure of your composition/arrangement into melody driven or arrangement driven. Even in the event of a piece that's arrangement driven, the parts that make up the arrangement itself have to go somewhere--and in order to achieve that, 2 things needs to happen(this applies to melody driven pieces as well):

1)The phrases that make up the arrangement has to vary in timing, and notes, as the piece progresses.

2)The general range of the piece itself has to shift--usually from lower to higher. By range, I mean if your piece starts off with the 3rd octave in A minor, then towards the end of your piece(the climax, if you will), you should have moved somewhere to the 4th, even 5th octave of another scale(key change is optional, of course).

Hamster's pieces like "Power," "They're On the Roof-Unfinished 2" have a lot of variation in general, and are some of my favorites from Hamster. But one thing I've never heard Hamster do is a key change.

"Park Place" has nice variations, but the tonal range itself stays pretty constant throughout the piece. The advantage of instrumental music over vocal is that instruments can hit notes that humans can only dream of. Not taking advantage of that would be a shame.

Here's a couple of my crap music to throw into discussion:

(These are from early 90's, played with crap Roland D-10 on a 2 track sequencer, with no quantizer, and encoded to mp3 from old cassette tapes...so excuse the crap quality of the sound both instrument wise and recording wise)

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/music/Lunatique-%20Passion.MP3
This one is definitely a melody driven piece. I didn't have a guitar with me during the months I was in Taiwan, so I had to substitute the Guitar with my Roland D-10(yuck). What I think works in this piece is the variation in melody, arrangement, and intensity. What doesn't work for me is that during that last part, the arrangement it'self became stale due to lack of further variation.

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/music/Lunatique-%20One%20Morning%20in%20Summer.MP3
This one was written for a popstar. This version is the demo I gave the record company without the vocal track. What I think worked is that the elements in the arrangement carried the piece with their own progression--even when the main vocal melody was missing. What doesn't work is that the whole thing's a bit too linear.

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/music/Lunatique-%20Jazzvibe.MP3
This one was just a little jazzy ditty I did for fun. For these kind of pieces, letting a main instrument take over and focus on the actual melody played by that instrument is a good idea(in this case the vibraphone). What I don't like about this piece is that it was quite boring until the vibraphone came in.

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/music/Lunatique-%20Deadline%20Blues.MP3
This one was definitely an arrangement driven piece. Having the brass elements cross and getting away from each other is what worked in this piece, but what doesn't work is that it should've been done to a much greater extent.

Ballistic? Shizo? Your turn.

[[Shizo]]

Hehe what am i supposed to say?
Except maybe.. I CANT CONNECT TO YOUR DAMN HOST!!!!!

But yeah i'm following up at your "pro level" discussions always, as well as read pro tutorials for remixing and using synths. Although i dont really use that knowledge.
I just kinda press some buttons and the sound comes out :0

PS: send me up a couple of your crap songs on email shizo$comcast.net $=@

[Giant Hamster]

Ack, it's invade hamster's thread day. o_O heh, ohwell...

Just to make it clear, these aren't attacks - they're statements.

Yeah, I've been working on a lot of music designed for my friends album, so a lot of my pieces are just 'background music' for her to sing over. She'll be the main instrument in there. It's been affecting the rest of my music aswell, not like it's a bad thing, I just kind of flow and morph in and out of phases - and I'll most definately bloop into another one soon. So yeah, you'll get lots of new music from me in varying whatnot and with so on and such.

"The advantage of instrumental music over vocal is that instruments can hit notes that humans can only dream of. Not taking advantage of that would be a shame."
hurr, I have notes on octaves 7 and 8 with one synth in Park place. heh...and yeah, Listen to Zero Measure Destination, there's a big squealing high thing and various low sub-human drones. =)

and Just a quit retort onto one of the points you keep bringing up that's bugging me:

Key changes. I hate key changes. I don't like songs with key changes - 70% of them sound sloppy. Truely, that's how I feel about them. =)

the other points are fine.

and try to steer away from the words, has to and should have when talking about music, cause you don't have to do anything in particular. wheeeeee!!!!!!
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The bottom line when I work on music is that I like it.

This is the music I like to listen to because I don't like most of the music I hear out there already. Sometimes, like in park place, a song will sound very very similar to a pop song out there already and people wonder why I would make a song like that - if I don't like most pop music - but in this case it's because that particular style/song/whatever didn't bother me that much and I thought of a way that I would do it...so this is the way that I wish it sounded like...the variation I put on the original sound might be slight, but it's enough for me...sometimes it's just a, "Man, I really wish they would put that lame synth down...and get rid of that four-on-the-floor beat...it's incredibly annoying." - thus Park Place.

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Anyways, Thanks for the Tips, Luna!! Very Appreciated, I will look into those and see about incorporating them into things sometime. =)

[Lunatique]

Hamster- Yeah, it seems music is a far more subjective thing than art. If it wasn't, punk music and industrial music would never hve been born. There are definitely no rules when it come to making music. I was just going by standard conventions that do apply to the kind of music you make--but as such a subjective thing, it's almost impossible to use any guidelines.

I didn't mean to step on any toes dude. We do this sort of thing all the time in the Digital Art Discussion section, I just thought it'd be fun to do a music one for once. Maybe I should've started a new thread instead?

Shizo- When did my website become unavailable to you? Last year? This year?

[Giant Hamster]

Nah, man; you're not steppin' on any toes. =) T'sall good in here. whee