Check it. Lots of good things from this friendship. @constromlie passed me a midi to destroy. Here's the result.

Posting to YouTube later today. Just gotta make a snazzy little bg for it, maybe a visualizer. Share or drop a review if you wanna support. The more people like, the more I'll make.

Watch it. I literally didn't believe it was this simple. @constromlie, you're a freakin genius. Think you might release a drum sample pack some time?

So, first off, big thanks to @constromlie for the "Apologize" MIDII hammered into a trap anthem. If you haven't already, check that shizzle. Most fun I've had in weeks.

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/674368

Second of all, more trap on the way. Tomorrow I'm releasing "Earned It", another original untagged trap beat -- several more being written, and I'm also uploading the backlog from months ago, finishing touches on some older mixes. Lots of new stuff. Sure is nice not having to export every track individually and render in Audacity anymore!

-364

You heard me. This guy right here actually gave me free Mixcraft 7 in exchange for that tutorial last post, when I had just made a video not a day before on how to hack the registry so the buy audios on the trial wouldn't interrupt playback. Feeling hella grateful, not to mention utterly surprised. Holy shit. Life is good.

Also, got a copy of Life is Strange from a school buddy, and my gf surprised me with Final Fantasy Type-0, which I'd been wanting a PSVita for for years. I'm stoked!

I was asked to make a tutorial, if you checked the comment section on my last post. Here's the result.

First, the beat.

Making of:

Probably should have put a little time with writing the actual melodies, but this is the basic idea of the synths and how to achieve the sounds.

Check @BOULLIE's track here.

So, let's start off with my DAW, MX7. It's not the greatest out there, but it's easy to use and reasonably affordable -- although the sample libraries kind of suck, and so do most of the Acoustica instruments. I was fine with a trial until now, but in MX7, Acoustica evidently decided trials were too useful, and they had to cut into functionality somehow to force you to buy the software, which btw doesn't sidechain easy.

They did this by making the previously mildly annoying buy now audio messages unskippable and upped the intervals at which they would play, each time you'd hit a play button, mess with loop region, etc.

So, at my wits end, I did what any frustrated person would do. I hacked the registry to stop the messages. I didn't hack the trial so that I wouldn't have to buy it. I just stopped the annoying, cheesy "buy mixcraft NOW" supplemented with canned music. I eventually intend to snag a legal copy.

I was dumb enough to make a video about it, which will probably get taken down b/c my YT and Twitter are linked.

Why will it get taken down? Well, people have a habit of getting mad when you subvert their attempts to force you to immediately drop monies you have in short supply on their product. Exhibit A on Twitter. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to get me blacklisted, lol. Damn auto tweets.

Anyway, use the info as you see fit, my friends, be it a laugh or otherwise, and let it be a lesson to those of you that dare to give bad business practices the finger. Path to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

No, no tornadoes last night, just 80 mile an hour wind blowing people off of the road and knocking the power out. Going to pretend I never said anything about going out in my underwear.

Anyway, I'm anticipating to release another track tonight, "Wave After Wave". I'll update when it's posted.

Update: Aaaand, released!

So, this is quite literally the biggest surprise in my 3 years of college, finding out that the only thing I lack for graduating with an AA in Music Ed is a three hour college algebra course, which I'm currently taking and hope I don't royally screw up like the last three times I took algebra. I thought I was in trouble when I got called in for the paperwork. Turns out, just one more course to finish out and I can transfer to uni on schedule. Downside of this is if I don't finish out strong, I'll have to pay out of pocket next year, no institutional scholarships, no grants, etc. because I've attempted so many hours (also mostly algebra).

I don't know whether to be ecstatic or anxious -- didn't know what name to put on my diploma either (trans name or birth name). I'm leaning toward anxious since I also found out that campus closes in roughly 30 minutes for severe weather, a TOR:CON 8 I believe. Last bout of tornadoes happened under a TOR:CON 3, and the highest is a 10 on the same scale. Probably going to be hearing a lot of that siren tonight. I guess at least this time I won't be dumb enough to go to the lobby in men's underwear and a blanket.

On the upside, the lyrics for "Thirst" are complete, and I anticipate to record this weekend.

I don't usually do vocals, feel special. :*

Share if you like!

At around 4:15-4:20 PM today, the tornado sirens on campus started up their wail, signalling all the girls in G.A. dorm to herd into the lobby. The dorm has an open lobby with a steel and cement staircase, two wings with courtyards, two floors, cinderblock walls, and suite construction -- for every suite, 3 rooms, a utility closet, and two bathrooms. Each room houses two girls. This is not including the two floor dorm adjoined by a small courtyard, with about 40 girls on each floor and community bathrooms. Honors dorm sits behind that, encased by a fence and reachable by a fire exit on both sides. There must have been about 200 of us, I swear.

Well, here we were in this open lobby, sirens wailing so loudly that it was like being in a loud night club, minus the music. I had to yell to speak to someone half a foot from me. The lobby has a central post on the bottom floor, some couches, chairs, and tables. The TV isn't even tuned to the weather channel yet. Minutes go by, and we're panicking. This year's crowd is about half-again bigger than the last, and the dorm is woefully unprepared to shelter all of us too well. I know that much. This, and not even everyone is here yet. Girls from the basketball cottages on the other side of the old cafeteria, now a gym, are interspersed between the sea of bodies. I recognize a few by face. Their coach, a bald red-bearded tower of a man, is here too.

So the sirens go off for the moment, and our dorm mother begins speaking. We have about 20 minutes to find shelter. She herds some of us into the two adjacent bathrooms, and more into a washroom. You can hear people bumping into the machines, the claustrophobia setting in. There are three storage room besides, but she says only one of them will hold a decent amount of people, and the basketball coach goes to clear that out as we all text our families. The tornado we're about to weather is rain-wrapped, and we're hearing damage reports from DeKalb, the next town over. My hometown was missed, but my mother is already telling me that Collinsville took a major hit, and my sister confirms.

Friends in the boys' dorms on the other side of campus are huddled into suite bathrooms, 4 people to a shower and some sitting on sinks, as some of us are then herded into the now cleared out storage room between long-hall and the lobby. Glass doors are everywhere, and so are windows. The remaining approx. 20 of us girls, myself included, are told to get out from under the concrete staircase in the middle of the lobby, and a shield of couches is arranged about us -- little good it will do once the glass actually starts flying, most of us are thinking. We huddle as close as we can manage. People are singing worship songs like "Jesus On The Main Line" and "Wading In The Water". I haven't been so content to hear worship like that in a long time.

There is no sitting without sitting on top of one another, and for once I don't mind. We're all probably dead, I'm thinking to myself, hoping for once that somebody really does have Jesus on the main line, until the power blinks, and the wind gusts, and the praise of the Lord picks up to an all time high. Our dorm mother with her curtain of spiralling hair and piercing blue eyes hobbles her way over to the glass double doors by the guard desk, peeks out once, and hears the telltale freight train. Get down, she urges us, and the last thing I see is a curtain of rain crash over the 12 foot high ivy growing on the fence on the other side of the court yard, the side nearest the old cafeteria and the main road. The only things I hear are the locked front door shivering, a high wind outside, my girlfriend's "I love you", an apology from the girl on my left for using my leg as a pillow, worship songs, my own whispered prayer, and the sounds of the other girls covering one another until the siren drowns even that out.

Then, after a few minutes, it's over, and we're alive. The sky is still dark as pitch, but the rain has stopped, and it's absolutely silent. No one dares open the doors, but the praise echoes through the otherwise murmuring lobby. They don't open until a girl with corn rows has already passed everyone fashion magazines as makeshift fans. We're all suddenly aware of how hot it is, and the power keeps blinking. I recognize Katy Perry on the cover of one magazine with a nose ring, so airbrushed I hardly manage to know it's her. Coming through the doors is Dr. Huebner, our school president, to tell us the news. I honestly hope I'm spelling that right.

Anyway, it comes out that we are safe for the moment. The only damages are a flipped baseball cottage on the other side of campus, some light poles down, a tree through an instructor's house, torn up fencing on the baseball field, and some trashcans flung a few meters more than one would expect. Suddenly, I'm worried about the staff, and not just the dinner I was almost certain we wouldn't have tonight. This is quelled, however, as our dorm mother dismisses us, with the instructions we are not to drive past the student union to see the damages. Although dinner is late, the staff are all okay, and a warm welcome is extended to all. I don't think any of us, all 700 people I saw in the cafeteria, had been so happy to see one another in a while. I certainly haven't heard "I'm glad you're alive" as many times in a 30 minute period, or been so happy to eat a chicken sandwich and some corn nuggets.

Back to the damages, this is the flipped baseball cottage, which I'm told someone actually watched topple over.

Anyway, everyone I know of is safe and accounted for, which I'm glad of. Classes are cancelled tomorrow due to damages. I just hope we're not in for another bout tomorrow. Might not be as lucky.