at bunny meetup
gonna kiss NotASenator tomorrow………….. anything else anyone wants me to say to him….
June 2011
76 posts
Listen
my new hit single…
my thoughts on recent updates
Okay, I thought the updates were awesome, but I did feel a little disappointed initially that it was all a doomed timeline. You know, the feeling of that time being a psyche-out waste or something. I KEPT THINKING OH THIS CAN’T BE A DOOMED TIMELINE, THAT WOULD BE A DUMB WASTE. But actually the only updates that are invalidated are the ones from the last 9 days, and the material in the alternate timeline is probably going to become relevant later, AKA Vriska is probably going to come back and kill Noir somehow, because holy shit her powers are awesome.
Anyway, I love Vriska as a character, but… she was gon’ die. Her entire character arc has been leading up to her hubris-ridden death at the hands of Bec Noir. Even though she was forced to because of her timeline, she was the one that created him, and the only reason why was so she could fight him, even at the expense of her friends.
The best part about all this, now that I’m thinking about it, is the doomed timeline. Because it’s not like Vriska wasn’t strong enough to win - in fact, that’s almost never been her problem. That’s Vriska’s character - the character that’s obnoxiously arrogant but always has something to back up their claims with. But Vriska was never able to learn to show weakness or compassion, even when she wanted to. She was too afraid of coming off as a weak coward. Amazingly, the moments after she kills Tavros - who finally finds some semblance of misguided courage - are the moments she finally admits she feels weakness and compassion for others.
If Vriska stopped being so arrogant and stayed with Terezi, or called off the coin flip, she wouldn’t have died. Her problem wasn’t being outmatched in strength, her problem was that she needed to give a shit about the idea her friends might die. Important life lesson, right there.
I can understand if you’re upset if your favorite character died. If you’re cheering over Vriska’s death (i havent seen any of this because i dont care enough to look), you’re kind of a weirdo. But if you cheered when Tavros died, then you can’t be annoyed at the other people cheering. In that case… it’s karma. These are my rules of hypocrisy.
I'm that fellow that Geebee asked you to critique musically, and I actually do have a couple of questions for you, but I can only ask one right now.
That one question is the one that bothers me the most, so I must ask you as you are one of the artists that I look up to overall:
Where do I start making my improvements, and how do I go about teaching myself to make these improvements?
I only ask because whenever people listen to my music and say it's good, I always listen to the track over and over and over to see how it could be BETTER, and yours is an opinion that I place some amount of weight on.
I do the same re-listening thing. But what is equally important is listening to other people’s music and seeing if there’s anything you like more. Then you can try and figure out their technique from there.
I told you a bunch of things that could be better, it seems like you could start any of those places. As I said, your work overall is fairly solid but not SUPER exceptional. You cannot improve and become exceptional unless you make mistakes, unless you’re somehow a master at observing other people.
So start doing the following:
- use FX, use sequencing tricks. if you don’t know any sequencing tricks, listen to some sega/snes songs and try to figure out if there’s anything unique or different from what you are doing. using FX is as easy as throwing on a plugin and seeing what sounds good and what doesn’t. everything might sound good at first. that’s where mistakes come in. as far as better synths and samples, there’s loads of free crap on the internet. everything I used in Rumble at the Rink was something I found.
- for composition improvement, just compose outside of the box. learn more chords, more rhythms, more basslines. I hope you play piano/keyboard or another instrument. Improvise and try to create new songs based off of chords you have heard in other songs. listen to other songs. what type of melodies do you like? what qualities does a melody have that makes it likeable? how do different parts interplay with each other? how can you make them interplay in ways that are more interesting? how much “interest” is too little for an extended period of time? how much interest is “too much?” how do songs you like develop? what is the contrast between the different parts? what is your favorite part of a song? how can you do that?
just listen to a lot of music that you like, FIGURE OUT THE LIKEABLE QUALITIES, and then try to make something you like. what parts of other peoples’ music are “better” than yours? then try to do it, and fail and learn or succeed and wow you improved.
oh you're doing music critiques
what if i sent you noise stuff
I don’t know what standard noise music is judged on so I wouldn’t be able to critique it.
My friend makes some p good music (Well, anyone who's heard it thinks so) and I was wondering if you could give him some kind of critique or something.
http://soundcloud.com/dj-he-then
His tumblr is http://shortbussuperfuntimes.tumblr.com/
Okay, I’m listening. These are pretty good, I like the choice of synths/etc. on some songs, there’s some cool stuff going on.
Structure is fine, stuff is something I’d expect to hear in a weird Sega game. I don’t know, I can’t hear anything “wrong” so I can’t say anything is bad, it’s all decent stuff.
But the stuff he does have there is quite simple. The melodies always repeat themselves with no variation and one main instrument is often used as the lead throughout the whole song, making everything sound quite repetitive. Oh, and the production. Nothing strikes me as “bad,” but the weak production and simple composition stops the music from being “really good.”
What I say when I mean “production” is that the synths and samples he’s using are pretty basic-sounding. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of vibrato/slides and FX such as phaser/chorus/delay/reverb, even though they are not a necessity, contribute to a feeling of unnecessary simplification. If you make electronic music, you HAVE to be really good at production and sequencing. That’s simply it. The balance between instruments is great (way better than I usually do lol), but in terms of EQ and FX, the instruments could be a lot crisper and the bass could be thumpier, if they are indeed “dance songs.” There’s a lot of middle-high-end and it ends up sounding weak.
I would say his best song is Song of the Desert. The dissonance works well there, ethnic percussion creates a good sense of place, the bassline is nice, and the accompaniment almost makes up for the lack of change in instrumentation. I hope he wrote the drum parts himself, they’re great! But what is up with the section from 4:30 to 5:48? There is seldom a time when you want to repeat something for a whole minute. And then it comes back pretty soon after.
Listening to a lot of these songs, it seems that there isn’t really a strong rising or falling motion within the pieces. They’d work well as game songs for that reason, but there needs to be more than a build at the beginning and a drop-off at the end. It doesn’t need to be a HUGE contrast between A and B, but the level of intensity needs to draw us into the song.
That’s all for now. Ask me if you have any specific questions. ^____^
your voice acting is actually really really good, you could be a voice actor if you wanted on top of making sweet songs :>
I think voice acting is REALLY fun, and I’d love to do it if I knew more about it and people wanted me to. I kinda don’t feel like it’s really high in demand though, and the people that do have VA jobs are super-talented…
Listen
RADIATION DOES VOICE ACTING….. UH OH…
I read through Homestuck out loud with a friend a while back and these were the voices I used for the characters, + a few more minus some others I forgot.
A few notes/problems:
- I didn’t do Jade, I can’t do Jade now. I can’t even approximate her voice. Fef is another terrible one. Aradia is pretty embarrassing too. Gamzee is kinda weak, and Terezi and Nannasprite sound kinda similar. In fact a lot of the voices might sound similar because they’re all me and I sound like I’m 12. O H W E L L. I had fun doing most of ‘em!
- My girl voices do not sound like girls (especially Vriska and Rose lmao). I am not attempting to sound like a convincing female. I tried more to be accurate to the spirit of the characters. And then sometimes I just did what I think would be funny.
- Eridan has Skipper Plumbthroat’s voice.
A troll romance translation would be great.
Btw I love these translation things never stop. <3
im doin it, tomrowoe
ok
That’s enough translation for tonight, I’ll save more for tomorrow. Then onto Doc Scratch translations, and anything else that might need to be translated for some reason? Throw any suggestions in my ask.
yes brandish your brandish
I THINK ABOUT IT EVERY DAY but I dunno the LAB0RATRY just kinda blows, maybe when I…. work up…. the willpower… to make a route……..
update your LP
you mean brandish right
