Your Expertise Needed, Please!

[TalentMatters]

If I were to get "less constant arpeggio motion" as a critique, my first guess would be the screener means to stop playing an unending pattern of notes; give the music some phrasing, space for the music to 'breathe', a little pause here and there. Honestly, I didn't get that listening to your piece, so I could be off a bit.

No jokes about me being "off" a bit, please!

LOL! No jokes about you being off! Nice to meet you too, by the way!

I should have included the little piano cue and listing to which I submitted and that might help you understand the screener's comment. Here's a link to it:

https://soundcloud.com/kristen-knight-m ... 4kkrBeTRsN

I submitted to listing https://www.taxi.com/listings/S201008PN - "Please submit original Piano-based Instrumental Cues that have a positive, inspiring vibe and feel. Your arrangements can be simpler, Piano-only Cues, or you can add more instrumentation to create fuller productions – just be sure that Piano is the focal point." Screener also remarked that it needed to be simple and sparse. I didn't think this one was overly complicated, but maybe?

Thanks again - really appreciate the insight!

~Kristen

[TalentMatters]

(Gonna change DAWs, too - right now I'm on Audacity, but several people have recommended Reaper, so I want to give that a try...)

Kristen

Audacity is not a DAW, but a nice waveform editor with which you can record and use a few plugins in. But it has no MIDI-ability and cannot play virtual instruments. If you're interested in a fully-functional free DAW, look into Cakewalk by Bandlab. CosmicDolphin and I, for instance, use that. In the old days it was sold as Sonar Platinum for $100s.

Tom

Hey there, Tom - see? I'm such a novice! LOL! I googled after reading your comment and right on Audacity's own website, it's calling itself a DAW, but I know it's very limited in capabilities as DAWs go - and that is in no way confusing. AT ALL! LOL! Thank you for the suggestions; I've thought about Cakewalk for a long time and heard great things. I think it used to be the standard back in the day. (Didn't it used to be Mac only? I thought I remembered Barry Manilow talking about it, and he was using Mac...) I need to take a class to help me learn how to use all this great stuff; my local community collage has a Certificate of Achievement program in Sound Technology that starts in January. I think I'm going to go for it; "Virtual Studio" is one of the first classes on the schedule.

Thanks so much - I really appreciate your help!

[hummingbird]

There are, of course, a plethora of DAWs. Mine, called Waveform now, was 'Tracktion' and they have a free, full version available. I used to use Kristal Audio Engine (similar to Audiocity) and when I needed something more sophisticated, Tracktion was very user friendly. (I have been using it since Tracktion 2 and they are on 11 now). Upgrades are pretty reasonable. It's not as well-known as Logic (Mac) or CuBase etc (PC) but it does everything the 'big guys' do. They also have a ton of videos on their website as tutorials. Oh, and it works on both PC and Mac.
https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free

they also offer a 90-day trial of Waveform Pro.

[cosmicdolphin]

Thank you for the suggestions; I've thought about Cakewalk for a long time and heard great things. I think it used to be the standard back in the day. (Didn't it used to be Mac only? I thought I remembered Barry Manilow talking about it, and he was using Mac...) I need to take a class to help me learn how to use all this great stuff; my local community collage has a Certificate of Achievement program in Sound Technology that starts in January. I think I'm going to go for it; "Virtual Studio" is one of the first classes on the schedule.

It's actually PC only and been around since the 90's - the original version was a piece of DOS based shareware on floppy disk - I first used it on Windows 3.1 - It changed name to Sonar in the noughties and was pretty popular but Roland and Gibson both owned it for a while but Gibson canned it when they got into financial trouble and sold the IP to Bandlab ( who make a very popular phone music making app )

So it's part of the Bandlab family now but instead of being $300-400 it's totally free with no strings and they keep updating it , so it's lot more fully featured than any of free DAW and on par with many things costing hundreds of bucks. It's crazy that it's free really. but this has been the model for the past 2 years or so.

Other free DAWs are going to be cutdown versions of the paid product, although if your needs are basic that may be enough for you. But definitely get the midi hooked up otherwise you'll never be able to make enough music once you do get accepted into a Library, or make the cutdowns and stems they require easily. Plus if you buy a good VST piano you'll have way more options for sound , and of course a metronome is in all DAWs !

If you go to a class they'll likely be using something that's not free like Logic ( which is Mac only ) or Pro Tools which can be expensive so just be aware. I would say you can learn pretty much anything on Youtube for free at home these days . There's certainly tons of Cakewalk / Sonar tutorials out there and most other popular DAWs.

I like this guy if you want to try Cakewalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqXiL2 ... ativeSauce

Mark