My Second Song: "Roamin' 'round the World"

[GraysonPeddie]

Here's my second song, this time only in my nimbit music site.
http://www.nimbitmusic.com/graysonpeddie

Track 2: Roamin' 'round the World

Let me know what you think.

[folderol]

I thought tbhis was a bit slow starting, but very much enjoyed it once it really got going. Nice work

[GraysonPeddie]

Thanks. Are there any way I can get my music out other than SoundCloud? I spent $25 to set up an artist page at Google Play Music Store and I cannot figure out how to add an additional track without adding a new album, so I'm looking for ways to get my music out. I don't plan to collect royalties since I want to give out my music for free and allow people to pay what they want in form of donations. My philosophy for music is everyone can listen to music for free and I do not profit from my work.

So I'm wondering what I can do to reach out and share my song with more listeners.

[folderol]

I sometimes post on the Internet Archive. It's a simple but very good store and player. I then link to that from such as KVR

[GraysonPeddie]

So it seems KVR Audio forum is the place to post a link to my music once I introduce myself, although I do not know how Linux-friendly they are.

Thanks.

[folderol]

You'll get honest comments from them, and they are quite OS agnostic. However they do expect it to be a two-way street.
You'll also find some of them pop up on Soundcloud, BandCamp etc. so after a while people get known.

[GraysonPeddie]

Thanks.

Oh, by the way, do you see "protected" link in my thread?
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 4&t=459504

It seems I need to make 5 posts...

[folderol]

Yes. That's quite right. It's done to reduce fly-by-nights, and encourage people to join in the forums and support each other

[GraysonPeddie]

Okay, I've changed out my link to Soundcloud.

[glowrak guy]

https://bandcamp.com/help

Bandcamp is very flexible/customizable, a good addition to soundcloud,
the link above has answers to many questions.
Cheers.

I'd listen to your songs, but soundcloud doesn't like my dialup.
Cheers

[GraysonPeddie]

Here are the links:

Roamin' 'round the World: FLAC Ogg

Update: I read the article and it seems Bandcamp is more commercial-oriented.
http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2012/ ... the-point/

Plus, the Creative Commons license seems more in theory than practical and I've released my songs under No-Commercial No-Derivative license. Since the article states:

This trap door into the legal system, as I have called it, makes Creative Commons licensing of more theoretical than practical interest.

Aren't there any alternatives to the Creative Commons license? My philosophy is that I give away my music for free and that I would like to accept donations (hence Nimbit's "name your price") for my songs I've created.

[glowrak guy]

Thanks for posting a link. I found 'roaming' has some very nice elements,
strong thematic flow, and nice choice of instruments.

piano intro
piano + strings
orchestral crescendos
instrumental sequences (with nice backgrounds/ambience
interesting orchestral parts.

I think you have a bright future as a composer,
worth spending money for tools of the trade.

I did a couple hours of careful editing, removing competing elements,
cleaning up a few anomalies, reducing some repetitiveness,
focusing on bringing out what I heard as the best elements,
and ended up with a 6 minute version I really like a lot.

I also kept a running list of edits, but audacity crashed the system
like a lead duck, and my text editor had no auto-save.
Fortunately I had saved my audacity results often.
(Audacity and/or it's support libs are in a terrible state.
Gonna roll back to V 2.06 era.)

Bandcamp does have a 'pay what you like' option,
and will link to your personal websites, as desired,
and many other useful options. They take I think 15% off the top,
of each sale, for the first $5000, and less after that.
Keep the tunes coming...
Cheers

[GraysonPeddie]

Thanks and I will do my best to keep it coming. Trying to come up with melodies is not an easy task, so it takes a while to experiment until I found a melody I like.

And yes:

• Roland Fantom XR (bought it used for $550 in monthly payments, especially the Crystal Rhodes electric piano used in my song, including Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin's "A Whole New World" during the end credits and I like the sound of a Wet Nylon Guitar)
• TC Electronics M-One XL ("Concert Hall reverb)
• Digital Sound Factory Studio Orchestra (most of the instruments sounded really good, but there are flaws in "5 Violas Spicatto, as the instrument might sound different depending on what notes I play, most notably when playing the D major scale).
• Zenhiser 80s Retro Drummer
• Zenhiser 80s Classic Snares
• Harrison Mixbuss (I got a deal for $40 when I bought Mixbus 2 and paid $40 to upgrade to Mixbus 3; I haven't been using Mixbus 3 until this January when I became motivated to write a song (Car-Free Village) for a one-month, one-song challenge.)

The last two sample libraries are for adding some 80s vibe to my song.

...are all worth the money. I also have linuxDSP SR-2B that I've used for the first song, "Car-Free Village," and I've had trouble using this as a "concert hall" reverb.. Not to offend OverTone developers (formerly LinuxDSP), I don't find it worth the money except to use it as a glue reverb and that's about it.

Oh, if you want to listen to my first song called "Car-Free Village, here it is: FLAC | Ogg

And I'm curious about what anomalies you are referring to. Could it be that the contrabass might be a little too bright in the mid-range? I didn't want to mess up with the character of an instrument, although one thing I did when it comes to the loudest parts of the song is to compress some of the "out-of-whack" peaks that exceed 0dBFS and smooth them out nicely. I don't know why some instruments such as contrabass (8 contrabasses legato) don't sound smooth when played stand alone. I'd like to not use compressors at all, though.

Perhaps I'm thinking of upgrading to something better than Studio Orchestra without depending on either Windows or Mac and not succumbing to Digital Restriction Management (DRM) such as iLok. I cannot afford $1,000+ for orchestra library outright, though.

(Pardon my bunch of edits to my post... )

[glowrak guy]

Carless Village is fun, you've got a nice way with countermelodies and instrumentation.
freesound.org has a variety of street sounds clips from villages, parks, towns etc
and a range of birdcalls and nature sounds, might be fun to add some street ambience.
Google up the song 'Vas Adelante', the last part is mainly instrumental, with
people (perhaps celebrating) with street,cafe,bar/party sounds, very uplifting.
It's part of the 'Jet Lag' movie soundtrack, which has some very nice instrumentals.

If you PM an email address, I'll attach my edited ogg of Roaming,
probably the best way is load both versions in audacity to see/hear
the changes. I'll listen the the Village a few times, and make some suggestions
by PM. Make sure there is no lid on the roundfile...
Cheers

kvraudio.com has a useful marketplace forum, one section is devoted to sales, with zero chat,
another allows chat, and the main marketplace is mainly members selling to members,
and a 'feedback' thread exists, to verify the 'good guys'.
Shop til you drop...

[GraysonPeddie]

Cool, thanks! I will check out freesound.org.

Update: It might be tricky to find out which ones have city/park background sounds that do not have any sounds of cars (even faint ones), although I did find one that could be an example. CityPark AtmosSprint NL sounds good but I could hear the vehicle engines in the background, so I'm thinking the park sounds might be more suitable for my kind of music and my dream.

However, I do like to keep my music free of noises such as people walking or birds chirping. I'm not sure if the background sounds could help with listener's imagination.

Have you read the article about the original concept called "EPCOT?" From what I've read, it's Walt Disney's dream (1901-1966) about making a city car-free and it's under "Transportation" heading in "The City" section. And I've made a post in YouTube that I shared in Google+ before Google disintegrated G+ from YouTube about a year ago and RetroElectroville mentioned The Venus Project. And yes, I've listened to Horizons music a lot, especially during my sleep.

That (The Venus Project), along with Walt Disney's visionary, inspired me to write music. I once believed in Jacque Fresco, the founder of The Venus Project, but that is a long time ago and didn't keep up with the events. Some people in the Internet think of The Venus Project as a religion, but I didn't think so. I'm not interested in debates when people bring up topics about Buddhism or atheist, so I walked away from it. However, one thing I do believe in is resource-based economics.

But I wasn't motivated until Graham blogged about starting a one-month one-song challenge the week before January and I was stuck in vacation at Disney World and felt determined once I catch up during the second week of the challenge. With the exception of the melody, I've written my entire song in muse-sequencer version 3 using a mouse and humanized my it using QTractor. Even 2% would have been a bit too much though I did not spend time re-importing MIDI sequences back into MusE once humanized. As for my second song that I released last week, I did not use my keyboard, as my fingers are not too good for composing a melody. Even I get stuck in entering the next note in "Car-Free Village" and decided to add the missing note using my mouse and it worked! So yeah, I'm no keyboardist or pianist.