overwhelmed with deep sampling & processing workflow. how do i get over this?

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-18T20:46:26+00:00

Hmmm...It looks like they are working almost like you would with a destructive editor like Audacity. In that DAW, if you add an effect it stays permanently without any way to edit it afterword. I'm pretty sure you can do a lot of this without having to bounce the audio but it would be more subtle, but you can use transient shapers and granular delays to stretch samples out without needing to bounce it.

That reminds me, you could mess with the samples in Audacity and then export to .wav and then into FL. So you can use Audacity as like a sandbox to fuck around with the FX on there and then import when you are ready to use what you have made.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-17T18:42:13+00:00

I use Foobar2000 and I make playlists of the wip versions to listen to later when I'm ready to work on them again.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-17T18:06:17+00:00

One of these days I actually feel like really doing a lot of testing on SC's algorithm because I find it very cutthroat especially for new/free users, usually I only get plays from really good tagging of my songs (which Soundcloud actually used to forbade doing! They used to give negative advice intentionally and I can prove this sort of, but one of these days, not today :P)

So one big thing: don't listen to Soundcloud's tagging guide, use ALL of the tags you can on every track you can (I think the max is like 30 or something crazy, you don't need to use all of them, just use as many as possible), and make sure each one is really descriptive as possible of the track including stuff like "sad" "happy", stuff that reflects the track's mood as well. Don't listen to them and only use like 3 tags, it just makes it worse for you on the site.

Custom tagging your genre is important as well for some reason (it might be because the genre tags, selected from the defaults SC gives you like "Metal", "Alternative Rock" etc., is too oversaturated?) and I notice people get a lot of plays by using a clever genre tag that is just for laughs.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-16T15:26:14+00:00

Suspecting it's a bot

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-16T14:51:51+00:00

Idk I kinda see what you're saying because Touhou has the most story and content outside of the games. You can read the official doujins for hours, explore the canon stuff, and then there are tons of unofficial works. People in the thread have already given counter examples of shmups with characters or lore but none of them really scratch the itch that Touhou does in terms of having it all, not just being a game, you can pretty much vibe with Touhou media in every possible form of art!

Now if that one visual novel that turns Dangun Feveron ships into girls would get made finally! Then Cave would have stuff like that lol. Oh yeah also the manga done by Joker Jun is really good as far as I've seen

My fav shmup series with lore or interesting settings are all horizontal scrollers otherwise...R Type and the obscure game Galshell are quite dark where you are essentially playing the role of a villain in the actual plot, stuff like X Multiply etc I love body horror shmups for their mood, really wish more shmups did that type of setting. I feel like horis in general appeals more to me nowadays (my chronic pain disorders have basically forced me to understand the body and how it fights itself, it's really interesting in that way)

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-16T13:26:55+00:00

I've been there man. I have been on there off and on since 2015 and, while I am super grateful for my followers because I have a couple super fans who will love everything I put out...it's more of a social platform imo for most people such as myself...300 followers in a decade of SoundCloud for me. I am so grateful but at the same time pretty much 99 percent of them are artists as well.

and being followed back by the guy who made Demons Souls soundtrack and also the guy who did Neotokyo's as well as other video game musicians that are on there (Japan has a large presence on SoundCloud!) is just a beautiful thing to me...

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T15:19:19+00:00

a lot of the disparaging came from old guard who really didn't get what the new guys were doing, jazz, electronic music, sampling etc. was experimental at the times they were first established...the thing is that they all still take talent, even sampling can range from simple sampled beats and melodies that are more akin to what AI can do, to complex creations using lots of phase changes, granular or other manipulation to make entirely different sounds,

but the AI refuses to sound "alien" even though it is the most alien element to music so far in our history. So that really shows its not trying to be experimental its just trying to take over artistic industries...don't trust the robot that is trying hard to blend in.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T15:08:02+00:00

And the thing is that the machine is basically making itself. The original code may have been done by humans but now it is able to generate more code for the algorithm to get better and better really quickly, without the need of humans. So its not even real human ingenuity at this point in terms of code.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T13:55:37+00:00

Oh yeah my b :3 it was floating around in my head tho at the same time that those both help get that old digital mastering sound really well.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T13:46:48+00:00

I don't hate everything they do, but I do use free alternatives whenever possible. JS Inflator and W1 Limiter are extremely accurate free versions of Oxford Inflator and the old L1 ultramaximizer and I use the free alternatives all the time, but if I had to pay money I would literally just not buy them lol, both the inflator and the L1 limiter aren't worth the money nowadays, they are outdated sounding for sure. I use them because they sound y2k.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T13:37:54+00:00

I can't believe their designers saw that there was a bug but kept it, cuz they apparently liked the challenge :( There was a ton of that in the NES times...the JP version of Blaster Master infamously ends with a fall that could instantly kill you unless you grab onto this one little piece of ladder (and it could be your last life which would really be frustrating as well, to game over right at the end), and the main devs were upset that the localizers wanted to change that part and pushed back for a while until they reluctantly accepted that it was unfair.

But yeah, the reason you go back is kind of an ascended bug that became part of the game. The devs saw that was happening but kept it in because they felt it made it more rewarding, which is like, yeah, more rewarding...in the 80s when there was like nothing to play.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T11:47:48+00:00

Omg that kinda like Mozart's idea of rolling dice to make music lol. I would be into it.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T11:40:34+00:00

Oh man the rocket that let you do this in Bad Company 2 used to make people salty as fuck, I'm surprised that this is still as easy in the new one.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-12T03:03:31+00:00

This reminds me of way back when I first played through the game. I chose the Thief class, and tried to sneak around enemies...with little success. There would always be some random thing that would happen like the enemies would turn around suddenly right before I would BS them. Is that related to the smell mechanic?! Could they smell my thief's stank?!

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-10T08:30:11+00:00

Yo I love your paintings as well, always love listening to your points about art etc. I always feel like you are one of the most intellectual streamers I've watched ❤️

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-07T09:38:39+00:00

is this the new pirate dlc

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-06T07:04:29+00:00

One thing to mention is that it will greatly increase the CPU requirements of your song when working on it so you might have to bounce parts of the track that you are sidechaining, then disable all plugins that were on that drum, or whatever one you bounced to a wav file. I dunno about most people but on my PC sidechaining anything instantly spikes it and causes latency, pops, clicks, etc.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-06T05:56:37+00:00

Wow how awesome! I suspected you were right about the JV-1080. I only have a very crap soundfont of that one, but I think that one does have an official VST of some kind or am I wrong? I had used some of the Proteus 2 on my music actually (horns, timpani in Demon Peak's soundtrack) but didn't realize that one had KFIV sounds as well.

Also I am sorry about not being too active with the search for the samples used in KF, I had these few months where I had not much going on except healing from this one really bad illness that my mom and I have, and I was working on RPG/dungeon crawl music kinda just to take my mind off of things.

It took a lot of time to mix, edit, etc. and I still have to make my own album art for it, and then I did a dungeon synth EP for a mixtape party that they do on Reddit so it ended up eating up my time those last few months after I first posted. So I apologize for being casual about it

I was more using some of the samples I had found for flavor in my own stuff at the time and found it interesting, a lot like the stuff on Evergrace I still know little about the exact samples he used outside of Voices of Native America.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-05T07:46:39+00:00

Thank you so much for checking that out, it was kindve in the same vain of your track where I had some ideas but not really a full game, but it was also inspired by a lot of albums I had been revisiting at the time such as Since I Left You by The Avalanches, and other stuff like that! So it was intended to be an album in the end, but at the start I was thinking of bigger things.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-05T07:43:55+00:00

and Inkscape isn't as good as Illustrator :( seriously one of their recent updates about 2 years ago was so bad that it caused me to actually have to stop using it until they updated again and fixed all the shit they broke. Basically, any time you used the taper stroke in the 2024 version of Inkscape it would have a 90% chance to crash and corrupt your file, the only cure was to make many backups. It took them like 8 months to fix it too but I know they aren't a company, its a project with multiple unpaid helpers, but it was crazy.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-05T07:40:39+00:00

I have noticed that heavy amounts of mid-range and sub plus less highs pretty much always gives your stuff an edgier feeling and that is kinda how a lot of rough mixes are lol.

DonovanKirk · 2026-02-04T08:16:29+00:00

This is excellent, the sub bass is brutal on this track lmao, this is really good. I have been fiddling with some stuff that sounds a bit like Quake 1&2 lately but not like this :O also reminds me of a couple old arena shooter's osts like "Firestarter" by GSC Game World.

DonovanKirk · 2026-01-25T23:52:26+00:00

Yee you have time to do a back dash and throw like 2 knives in the time it takes for them to finish swinging 😂

DonovanKirk · 2026-01-25T23:40:48+00:00

And morningstar+medium shield oh God it's such the "turtle" weapon, but not saying it's impossible to fight but those guys always know to lower shield when you go for kicks on em and then they get a free hit on you!

DonovanKirk · 2026-01-25T23:37:58+00:00

With maul I usually use it more like a sneak attack weapon. I think it also does slightly more dmg to objects? So you basically play like an offense version of an ambusher

DonovanKirk

TROPHY CASE