Posts by TJMusic

It would be ridiculous if a stock item wasn’t licensed for lifetime, and without any statement in license agreement that license time is limited. I buy many 3D graphics stock items and it may take even years until I actually use some of them in my production. I’d definitely sue the seller who withdraws the license of stock item I’ve payed for, if no agreement said about a time limit.

As AJ author, when I upload a music track, I consciously decide that this particular track will never be licensed any other way. I might delete and re-publish the items without any sales, or maybe put the previously sold items as Public Domain, but I’d never try to re-publish a stock item with a publisher involving PRO registration. I consider it a really dishonest behaviour, and people who got cheated with licences for such track deserve to get at least their money back.

This maybe puts me in disadvantage if there are people selling their best tracks on AJ, considering withdrawing them out of portfolio when better publishing opportunity arises. I would never put my best music creations for sale as stock items, because doing that means they should never be published as PRO items. I bet neither authors nor buyers like to involve in lawsuits after all.

I really like the mood and instrumentation of this track. Unfortunately, the production quality is really low. In particular, ukulele sounds like it was made from samples. I’m not saying that using samples for ukulele is wrong idea, even if other authors usually play it live. But if the fact of using samples is so obvious, that I can tell it, it means it wasn’t programmed well enough. There is a bit too much reverb on kick. The melody sounds like it was leading nowhere – it might make a decent accompaniment part but when it’s so prominent it should be more refined. Many instruments sound like very cheap sound module. What equipment did you use? Maybe it’s more the problem with mixing than with instruments themselves, but it doesn’t sound like a professional production, even with a decent mastering applied at the end.

In most of my AJ productions, I use following modules:

- Alesis QSR (piano, strings, pads, guitars, synth leads)
- Alesis DM5 (drums – it can do only drums after all)
- E-mu Vintage Keys (bass, pads, synth leads, organ)
- E-mu Morpheus (guitars, pads, bass, whistle, synth leads)
- E-mu Orbit (recent purchase, so no finished project yet, but probably will be used for synth leads and bass)

Probably most production could be done with Alesis QSR alone, it’s so great sounding and versatile module. I use others just to add a bit of different flavour to some sounds, and definitely some instruments are much better made on dedicated E-mu modules. Hammond organ in particular is much better made on Vintage Keys, and nothing compares to Morpheus filters, however they are very hard to master.

The only thing I wished about modules was to have one with ukulele sound But I didn’t find any (while there are plenty of VST ones), so I’m already practising playing a real one.

There is a specific rule about variations and remixes. You just need to browse AJ page a bit to find it. This rule states, that for every song, there is only 1 remix allowed. It must be explicitly names as the remix of the song, and it must be “substantially” different.

Probably your 2nd version of the track is didn’t meet what reviewer thinks is “substantially” different. Maybe the instrumentation, however different, is not different enough.

I guess this rule is to protect AJ from flooding with thousands of alternative versions of the same tracks. It’s clear that I might make 10 alternative versions of every track per day and punch my way to homepage with 3000 uploads per month if there was no such rule.

Your 2 versions were definitely legitimate, but the rule is the rule. If the alternative versions are very similar, they would better be uploaded as one item (preview should include both). If they are really different (one acoustic with ukulele, another hard rock with heavy riffs ;)) the other one can go as a remix, but just once.

Of course it’s arguable what is similar and what is different, but these are the rules I’ve read about and we must do our best to comply with them. Good luck with getting your 2nd track accepted!

The cracking sounds in brass in 0:28 0:38 1:25 sound to me just like a result of too much high frequencies, they don’t sound like typical clipping cracks. Whatever the reason, this is where you should take the most care to change the settings, however my bet is the whole mastering should be improved, not only these spots which only reveal the problem most painfully.

Still agree the composition and arrangement is really good

What monitoring system have you used mastering this track? The EQ settings are extreme in this recording. It seems like the track mastered to sound perfectly on the cheapest PC speakers, so the bass and treble are boosted too much.

I’ve listened to it using Beyerdynamic DT-770 headphones and the amount of ultra-low bass was overwhelming and uncontrolled, and the sound was much too sharp because of excessive high tones. This is not natural EQ setting for orchestral music, even if some extreme techno genres might work out with such settings.

You might need to listen to this track with many different audio systems, including both cheap equipment and high end studio systems and probably some good home cinema system with powerful subwoofer, before you decide on the right EQ setting that should compromise all of them. With current EQ setting, this track might probably smash windows with sufficiently big subwoofer

Good luck improving the mastering, because apart of this, the track sounds great.

Quality and quantity is an ideal, but impossible with 2 hours per week to spare Full time job or full time composing – the day has only 24 hours unfortunately.

Happily, I had 5 sales today. When I get to the point of getting that much everyday, I’ll switch to full time composing and partial daily job!

Impressive amounts guys! How can you make so many tracks without working with them fulltime? With a day job, I’d rather think how many months do I need to make one track

There was a very short period when I didn’t know that front page exposure is such a lousy way to promote. I tried to submit many tracks per month, but their quality was so poor, that after one year I’ve deleted half of them, and also a few of them were even rejected. The whole bunch of such tracks has given less benefit than one quality track that takes about a month or two to complete.

But I can spend only a few hours once or twice a week to create music, so this is a big limitation. This would change a lot if I could earn 25% of my income from AJ and reduce my day job hours to 75% of full employment.

Maybe apart of saying about number of tracks you could say how much time you spend making them?

Sounds much better in this version You may also like to add a referral to ‘Buy’ link on SoundCloud to get additional 30% of sales from newly registered customers. Good luck on sales!

Information about song usage is definitely a good idea. It will give two benefits – first, the author will be able to keep track on item usage, second – the buyer will no longer have excuse to use the music half-legally, by buying one license but using the track in multiple final products.

It’s clear that some buyers might not fill the information honestly, but at least, when author finds his track used somewhere, he can check if this usage has been reported. If it’s not, he can pursue a legal action.

If the usage of the track is directly connected to a URL, for example, a YouTube film, a link to this YT page may be provided. This makes easy to check for legitimate uses of the music.

One small detail bothers me, however. Art-of-Sound says something about licence duration. Is there really a time limit between item purchase and its actual use? I didn’t know about such thing. I’ve bought some AJ tracks just because I liked them, for the purpose of just listening to them, but I considered using them also in YouTube videos after a year or two – at the moment I didn’t event think about subject of these videos. If this is not allowed by a licence, I will just not be able to use them after such delay. But if it’s legitimate, I wonder if it could be possible in the proposed item use formular, to be able to specify the track use long time after buying it.

Obviously, if the information about track use could be specified later, it increases the risk that the buyer will never fill it. But on the other hand, it seems quite possible, that somebody buys the track before making his mind about the exact usage. If this is a YouTube video, it may even take time to create it – if the video is intended to be strictly syncronized to the audio, it might take some work to edit it this way, before uploading to YouTube. This is just a technical problem, but it must be dealt with, to make the item usage form working efficiently.

Maybe filling the usage information would be not required in a moment of purchase, but the licence might contain the requirement, that it must be filled when the final product is made publictly available, otherwise a legal action is about to begin against the publisher of the product. This would allow for adding this information later, but would enforce to fill it before publishing. Also, there might be a deal between Envato and YouTube, offering YT a webservice with item usage information, that might be used in YT copyright protection system.