Still working on that big video gig, here is a couple of song samples I came up for the lady.

http://soundcloud.com/devin-currie/goal ... k-sample-a

http://soundcloud.com/devin-currie/goal ... k-sample-c

Who/what's the video for/about, anyhow? You've probably mentioned this in the past, but I'm drawing a blank.

Nice work on the drum programming. It sounds like you took some serious time to make the realdrum-parts sound not fake, the snare and hats especially. And if I may ask, what are you using for the horns on the second clip?

Yar, no messing with the velocities on the Sample C clip either, but I have spent a good bit of time working with the mics and bleeds in SD2 (Allaire on Sample B and Hit Factory on Sample C, both parallel bus compressed) to make them sound more like ... drums.

The horns are Aerophone (the top one on this page: http://www.xoxos.net/vst/vst.html#models ) with a pretty harsh EQ to kill a lot of the digitally high end buzziness and such.




The video is a three minute animation (motion infographic) for a organization trying to get high school kids in Florida to seek higher education. My lady had a conference call with the client today and it sounds like they kind of want a blend of the above two songs, which is what I was kind of hoping was going to happen because now I have a broad spectrum of sounds to work with.

Niceynice that you get to use both. (I'm of the opinion that the more clients get to see, the better, so you don't get pigeonholed)

I remember the SD2 bleed + mics thing has come up a few times here over the past year-and-change; the end result being better drums across the board for all the SD2 users on here. (Though I've recently switched to NI Kontakt for my realdrum-fakedrums.)

Those plugins look interesting. I'll stick with my samples, but getting a peek under the hood of physical modeling like that is neat.

just wanted to pipe in and say I like both of these clips. Nicely done.

I need to look into the NI stuff.

I am thinking of snagging a Mac for myself for work things but honestly I don't make enough money to justify it. Plus do we really need to 27" Mac books right next to each other?

The answer is always.

There's a whole bunch of freebies on the NI site. http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/?category=1339

The included stuff is cool, though it barely touches what Kontakt can do with the drum libraries, and it doesn't have Absynth or FM8. It's a shame, in that regard, that they discontinued Kore, 'cause the old Kore Player was loaded with lots of synth goodies. And also not CPU-intensive either.

And yeah, you need two of them.

Both are interesting.

Second one is very third wave ska style and i diggit.

Aslo, that vst site looks like it has some ridiculous shizz. And i just downloaded most of them.

I listened to them a couple times now. At first i thought there was some velocity wonkiness still on the first one, but on second listen, i don't so much.

The second one does want a bit more attention with that though. Or at least some levels mixxingsabout. The tom is a bit up there. And the smashy crashes are a bit... smashy.

Toms are no nicer mixing programmed drums than they are real ones. Re: crashes, I still haven't found something that really has the articulation of crashes sorted out, especially not repeated hits- you do not get the same attack from a crash that's still swinging. Rides, though, are a lot better than they used to be re: the wash of them, if you do it right. The hats, in SD2, to really make sense of them you have to drop the velocities on the soft hits way down. Like, really, really, really far down, and then hit them with a compressor to bring the soft hits back up in level. There isn't enough variation in the harder hits to really make them convincing for dynamic playing. For snare ghosting I've found something similar as well, but that's a little more obvious than the hat thing. You can totally work hat hits with 40-60 velocity in a rock track and make it perfectly passable. It's a quirk or shortcoming of SD2. You really have to go nuts on the hat velocities.

Yeah I didn't even mess with the velocities on the second one yet, because it is just so time consuming for just rough samples. But with the live guitar on top the non-velocified drums sound a lot fakier.

Wee I like this! The stereo synths are some flittery and nice. And you programmed the drums very well, I must say. Maybe a little less swelling compression on the left guitar track of the second recording, but then it doesn't actually matter than much.

Thank ye. Yeah the guitar is pretty untouched, I just slammed it with a hard compressor for ease of making things audible on laptop speakers, as that is what the client is listening on. Know your audience and such.

Per predicted and affirmed through today's conference call I am making a blend of the two songs to have a cheerful intro bit, an "intellectual" and serious sounding middle bit all wrapped up with a "open, inspirational, motivating...." and climactic finish.

I promised a rough sample by Thursday morning

The project is behind, but that has nothing to do with us. They had some fact checking to do and were slow on sending us the info the wife needed to animate, but I figure I can pull a couple of late nights and whip up a soundtrack in three acts. Kind of challenging bouncing around from emotions described as "Yay this is Florida!" to "Oh no we have a problem!" to "But we have a solution!". Jargon is a bitch so I asked her to describe what emotions she was looking to convey, so I guess I got what I deserved.

Here is what I have so far in the whole combining the two samples thing:

http://soundcloud.com/devin-currie/g2025stsd


It is very badly mixed at this point but it is a rough cut so fuck you whatever.

It works as a concept and the transition from more guitar-oriented to synth works as well. Fix up whatever you need with the mix and I'd say you're good.

Uploading a full length and better mixed version here in a couple of minutes.

Ist vunderbar! Have you ever seen that Discovery Channel show 'How It's Made'? Reminds me of the background music they use while things get made.

That's a pretty accurate description of what I was shooting for, so I think I did my job!

Sent it out to the client this morning, hopefully she likes it as much as I do.

Not sure if this will work, but here is the song behind a low-low-low quality version of the video, just to illustrate the timing:




The video is unlisted (and I am work so I can't see if the above player works) so just in case here is a direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce9h-vHX ... e=youtu.be




I doubt I need to say this, but please don't share this link.