As you may know, when it comes to pets I'm a cat person. I generally don't dislike any animals, but cats I get better along with than e.g. dogs. Ever since me and my girlfriend moved in together a year and a half ago, she's been nagging me about getting a rabbit. My experience with rabbits is largely negative. We had a big fat specimen when I was a kid who was just boring and unsociable. A childhood friend of mine had a small black rabbit who was extremely nervous and would bite you whenever you got near it. So unsurprisingly I wasn't keen on the idea. But a few months ago I finally folded, saying "OK, fine -- I wash my hands of the cleaning of cages and litter boxes and all the chores, but if you really want a rabbit, get one". So she did. Guys, meet Märta.
Little did I know how social, silly, inquisitive and surprisingly intelligent creatures rabbits can be. She's been with us for around three months now and I must confess I was completely mistaken. Her bunny highness has really won my heart. It took some time adjusting to rabbit peculiarities -- if you know just cats and dogs they're unintuitive, since they're prey animals with very different behavioral patterns -- but once I started getting a grasp of how she works, she certainly grew on me.
I had a number of unused snippets of music lying around after I did the Talisman: The Horus Heresy soundtrack in 2016. One of them turned into Aftermath a couple of years ago, and over the past weeks I've been working on extending the other ones into complete pieces as well. I have decided to release them all as a mini album (or EP I guess) called Imperium once they're done. There will be no mention of the Warhammer 40k brand name of course, or Games Workshop will surely have my hide, but I guess you could call it a spiritual sequel. Below are the three four most complete tracks so far. There's still a lot of stuff missing but you should get an idea.
Plot twist: Everything was done with free samples. Or, well, almost everything. I've decided to consider the $2 Majestic Horn from Orchestral Tools "so cheap that it's basically free". The synths used are also not technically free either, but both Hybrid and SynthMaster Player are offered at huge discounts once or twice a year, and Dune CM is magware. And I'm sure you could do something very similar with freeware synths only, I ended up using these because I needed a few presets from the HH music.
All thoughts and comments on the mix are welcome. Since there's so much stuff from so many sources, it's kind of difficult making everything sound like a whole. The woodwinds in particular are hard to get right, and I'm not happy with them right now.
Also, I should mention that orchestral realism was not a priority here, so if that's what you're looking for you will probably be disappointed.
I'm not sure if anybody around here has done anything like this, but just curious, can one of you recommend a good book on programming digital signal processing algorithms?
After working on the Dragonfly Reverb plugins, I feel like a fraud that has fooled some of the masses into thinking that I know a thing or two about developing audio effects. The truth is that I just put a nice wrap over the stuff from freeverb3, and I don't really know much about what's going on inside, other than a bit of poking around in the freeverb3 code and searching wikipedia for the terms that I find. I'm thinking about digging deeper into programming my own audio effects, but if I'm going to do that I will need some good resources to learn from.
So I started my music production journey less than a year ago and have recently been inspired to venture into Virtual Orchestral
Music.
Been listening to Waters of Redemption by Mattias and am awestruck by the sheer beauty of the compositions and the virtual orchestration prowess. I had made this simple hybrid piece using pure synthesis and all the sounds were made without any samples/resampling.
My aim is to explore orchestral compositions (cinematic or otherwise) but this is all very overwhelming for a complete beginner like me and wanted some guidance on how to approach learning orchestral composition from scratch. Looking forward to your views and responses.
Growing up in 1980's Sweden with only two government-owned TV channels it would seem like there wouldn't be a ton of things to spark your imagination as a kid. But as a matter of fact, that couldn't be farther from the truth. I don't know why, but boring old SVT broadcasted a number of good sci-fi shows back in the day which along with the more popular movie franchises like Star Wars and Alien has made me the ageing nerd I am today. Here's a few of them.
DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1981)
This post-apocalyptic drama creeped the hell out of me when I was young. I still vividly remember that knocking sound the Triffids made, as well as that lashing tongue.
CHILDREN OF THE DOG STAR (1984)
I kid you not, the theme melody from this NZ show has been stuck in my head since when I first watched it in 84 or 85. And it blew my mind, the way this girl named Gretchen (that was an odd name for 10-year old me) finds an alien probe in the swamp not far from her house. It was kind of like E.T. but more mysterious and creepy.
CHOCKY (1984)
A really weird science fiction show about a kid with an "imaginary friend" that is actually a being from a different dimension. This story was originally penned
by John Wyndham -- same twisted mind that dreamt up the Triffids.
THE TRIPODS (1984)
This was Hunger Games sci-fi long before that was even a thing. A world that has slipped back into the 19th century after tumultous events.
There were other things as well, like the still-awesome Edge of Darkness (not sci-fi per se, but a very dark techno-thriller) and Sommarens Tolv Månader [The Twelve Months of Summer], a Swedish sci-fi show from the late eighties. We may live in the golden age of television, but I find it interesting to return to some of the better (and lesser known) shows from decades past.
Do you have any old favorites that you've found have stood the test of time and have made a lasting impression on you?
So we want a list of every free instrument and samples ever? Full Orchestra, String sections, Violins, Violas and Cellos or is done in at least a rough draft.
Can anyone recommend me a good free church organ? Samplephonics has a 3.2GB one but that seems a little excessive; I'm not looking for a 100% realistic emulation complete with all features but rather something for blending with an orchestra to get that gothic sound. I don't really know a whole lot about church organs so I could use some suggestions.
I still return sometimes to read the "Freeware favorites" and "Orchestral template rundown" articles to read. Their commentary, and especially the rundown, are unique among what I read for, well, the commentary, and, in the case of the rundown, being a unique peek into the workflow of the composer (our beloved Westlund). That and I always have new thoughts each time I come back to them - "why don't I try this synth out", or "can I find that soundfont."
(Which reminds me, I need to dive into Polyphone sometime and figure out how to use it, 'cause I've got a bunch of samples that I'd love to be using but don't have sfz for... but that's a separate thing.)
I wasn't sure where this best belonged so I decided on General Discussion.
So now that my own upgrades are finished, I'm helping a friend put together his first dedicated music PC. While planning the build I realized that I know very little about CPU coolers. I lucked out that the manufacturer of my PC shipped it with some sort of non-water based liquid cooler that keeps the thing running at near room temperature; but we probably won't have that available for his build. We were looking at those Cooler Master fans that you basically paste onto your CPU. Something like the[url=https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu-cooler/][/url] Cooler Master - Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler. He's currently looking to stick with Intel CPUs.
Obviously we'd like the whole rig to run rather quietly.
Any suggestions? A specific cooler brand or type? No cooler at all?
![[Image: IMG_20190712_214630371.jpg]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/IMG_20190712_214630371.jpg)
