FreeOrion

overdrive guitar in 'Tension'? hmm........ [listening...]

ahh yes... wow, I never would have guessed. Its subtle. cool.

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

AI is really growing on me, from listening to it on the v.2 release. Good galaxy map music; sets the mood and compliments the interface--though I find myself wishing the pianos played around a bit more.

Yes.. 'AI' fits great!

drek, I think when there are more tracks and you aren't hearing the same tune over and over then maybe the somber piano rhythm won't stand out as much, but I know what you mean.

But I like it... I think it really works. It does a nice job of blending in, and after a while you don't notice it as much. Exactly the job of background music.

GOOD JOB!

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

Relatively minor update here, in the grand scheme of things: Portal Dance removed and replaced with Portal Ceremony, my second attempt at title screen music. Actually a rework of the zero-th attempt if you will, that I mentioned before as having been bleh incarnate and never posted... Well, hopefully it's somewhat less bleh now. Anyway let me know what you think.

Just when and listened to all the selections on your IDisk Mongoose, their all very nice so I will just give my opinion on how each one "feels" to me and what part of the game I think would be good to atatch it too.

ArtificialInteligence - Galaxy Screen Music and I am incressingly feeling this should be Splash Screen Music and in essense be the leading song for the whole game, make it omnipresent

Encounter - Seems to sugjest spying or posibly diplomacy, might also be for a Race that had that kind of orientation

InthePaleStarlight - Definatly Battle Music

Legend - Think this would be good for playing when your at the Hero/Character managment screen or after a successful Mission

Meoff'sBattle - Also Battle Music (anything with Drums feels like Battle to me)
PortalCeremony - Also Battle Music

StoryBattle - Dosent seem as Battle oriented as its name would sugjest, could be used for Galaxy map

SunRise - Science screen perhaps seems like its got an "Enlightenment" feel

Tension - Spying or the Galaxy map

Theircanbeonlyone - This one is hard to nail down to any particular usage, it could easily go anyware

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

Well thanks for your suggestions, but I'm pretty firm on where most of these should be used... AI is too long for splash screen only, and if you did that what do you propose take its place on the galaxy map? We have nothing else even remotely as long yet, let alone that fits. Legend is a bit long for what you propose, not even sure we'll have a dedicated hero management screen -- will probably just be a matter of name, pic, rank, and stats like MOO2 had -- and this track was specially designed for ending credits or game victory, note the same theme in Portal Ceremony for symmetry... Story Battle I'm aware of the issues with, it's on my list of things to work on. Interesting idea making it galaxy music, if I tweak it in the opposite direction of where I was planning to go that might work. Sunrise is specifically designed for some sort of opening cinematic, it's another one that needs work and I'll be revisiting when I'm in the mood. Portal Ceremony is targeted at a grand theme kind of thing; perhaps I need to ditch the timpani hehe. I can see why you might think of it as battle music but it's really not supposed to be, not enough tension. And I have no clue how Can Be Only One would ever be anything but epic battle music, but maybe I'm missing something... Lastly Tension is for a pre-combat scheduler or manager or whatever, again pretty firmly... I don't see any empire-management type things like spying having different music as they're part of the galaxy map, ie your default non-combat ruler-mode view of the game.

I'm really more interested in comments on the actual content of the tracks, which help me make them better.

Feedback, people, feedback... You really need to work on the feedback. :p

<sigh> You know it's a darn good thing I enjoy working on this stuff, otherwise you all might find yourselves mongooseless with the quantity of feedback you give me, and you wouldn't want that now would you... <glares>

<ahem> Pale Starlight updated to v2. No changes, just lengthened a lot. I realize this one wasn't met with overwhelming enthusiasm the first time around, but I personally am quite fond of it, so ha. Or, something.

Portal Ceremony - I like the melody..very cool. This is definitely a keeper. As far as the arrangement, the middle part with the breaks sounds a bit abrupt, although it could just be a sequencing thing. Also, I would just add somesort of ending, it doesn't have to be a huge cadence, maybe just a climax and release... or a drone or something that makes it feel like its ending. Currently the ending is sort of a surprise when I hear it...

but overall it good stuff...

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

hello every one....I'm very new to this form...I was inroduced to it by Mongoose months ago,but I havn't had a chance to post at all yet.

I.m a sound designer and programmer for Kid Nepro Prod. part time and work in music retail the rest of the time

I like all of the MP3's I listend to on you web site... the compositions are very good...I think I can help a bit with the mix and sounds... I would like to get you into Cubase SX I think that would add an huge amout of flexability to your sound and mixing capibilitys...some reverb and expansion would add allot of dynamic feel...youe music is already there...the mix is all that is needed

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As grey traces of dawn tinge the eastern sky, the three travelers, men of Willow Dale, emerge from the forest shadow. Fording the River Dawn, they turn south, journeying into the dark and forbidding lands of the Necromancer....

hey that's great to have someone aboard with good mix techniques! I suck at mixing...

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

Greatings Patchlord always good to have another hand on board and with unique skills as well (oh yea what is mixing anyways... )

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

mix means what it implies...

mixing instrument levels (or volume, eq ,fx) so that things can be heard equally or satisfactory to the listeners ears.

i.e. Lets say you record something that has drums, bass and piano. You would probably record each to their own seperate track. As you listen back to each track, you'd make adjustments in the volume, eq, fx etc.. You make adjustments depending on what the other tracks sound like. So if the drums are too loud, you turn them down a bit. And maybe when the piano takes a solo, you give it a little bump up in volume so it stands out. When you are done you copy the song to mp3 or whatever. Then when you play it, you may realize you have to go back and remix it because you can't hear a paticular instrument or whatever.

And its very easy when you are writing something to become bias. Because after a while your ear fools you. You know what everything sounds like because you wrote it. But you may be working on a paticular part and have the volume up so you can hear it over the other instruments. Then you get used to hearing it loud and you think it sounds normal. So when someone hears it, they say.. "the drums are so loud I can't hear the other instruments". So its nice to have a fresh set of ears to listen to what you produce.

Thats why its best to always have someone else master or mix your tunes. And there are a lot of things to consider when mixing. Everyone likes to hear different things... how can you mix it so that everyone will like it? And don't forget, everyone will be playing this tune with different speakers. While those kettle drums may sound great on my studio monitor speakers, some PC speakers are trash and have no low end making the low bass frequencies impossible to hear. So you may need to bring them up a tad for that reason.

Mixing really is an art unto itself.

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

<hugs StratCaster>

<nods respectfully at patchlord>

<glares menacingly at the rest of the forum lurkers>

Legacy v1 posted. This is another update of an old file (originally called Castle Ruins for those that care :). Obviously shooting for another galaxy map track here -- this time probably something sad and lonely but noble race-wise.

I've downloaded all of the current offerings on Mongoose's site. Here are my reviews for each.

Artificial Intelligence v3 - very mellow. I agree with the rest of the reviews... definitely galaxy view music here. Might also make good diplomacy music for a cybernetic/purely mechanical race. Only complaint was that it was kind of boring. I think it needs a little more body to it in order to keep things interesting... but not much.

Encounter v3 - a good offering for pre-combat planning or perhaps a FMV cinematic. It ended very suddenly... intentional?

More reviews inbound as I listen to the tracks...

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Lead, follow, or get the hell out of my way.

Sorry to SirRogue for breaking the potential continuity of his reviews with this interruption, but... :)

Sword of Stars v1.5 -- Okay, I've never used a fractional version number before, but it seemed appropriate here. So sue me. Small amount of new material on the end. Massive instrumentation overhaul (think I changed the patches on every single line heh). I am *not* entirely thrilled with this release, but it's sufficiently different now I thought I'd let you all try it. Definitely more subdued, still targeted at a ship design screen, and yes the attack/decay envelopes on the new primary line synth are painfully slow to the point of being out of phase, but I liked it enough in some places to use it anyway. I'll be upgrading my Roland module to the new Fantom-XR and buying a bunch of SRX cards to go with it next Saturday, so I'll probably revisit this track then.

Portal Mastery v1 -- Third attempt at title screen music. (I was *going* to call this one Portal Overwhelming, a pun on Starcraft's archon unit speech <wink>, but it ultimately seemed too cheesy. Ahh I crack myself up...) Timpani line loosely based on Darnassus' one, otherwise this bears little resemblence but at least it's finally a fanfare of sorts. I'm quite happy with this track so far, hence the name choice. :) Hope you guys agree.