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First Tune: Copyright issues with samples and MT2 tracks?

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arkham
Registered User

Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Location: Brussels

Posted: Thu Feb 19 2004 18:20 First Tune: Copyright issues with samples and MT2 tracks?
Hi everyone, I'm a new MT2 user. First of all, let me say I'm sorry for this long post. I am trying to start making some short movies with a couple of friends of mine. We have pretty much no money to produce them. Of course, you all know how difficult/expensive it is for zero-budget movies to use copyrighted music, especially as we plan to attend to some festivals. To be honest, there is almost zero chance we'll make any money out of it. So there is no question in our mind: we MUST produce our own music, period! Being no musician is why I came to the "tracking scene" and choose what I personnally found the best out there: MT2! I wanted to learn MT2's interface as quick as possible, so I downloaded some of the songs available for download to play around with them (see how they got made). Some of them are pretty amazing, let me tell you! But some of them have "good ideas" but are also full of what I found to be "not so good ideas" (let's be politically correct ). The issue I have is that I took one of these "waiting for improvement" songs (from someone nicknamed "synop") and played around a lot with it. I changed the samples, trashed out most of them except 2 (that I modified though). Then I reworked the song from A to Z, patterns as well as structures. I've added so much stuff in it that I can tell you: there is pretty much nothing left from the original, EXCEPT what I found THE pretty good idea was: the main melody, which sounds quite similar (although not 100%)! Now the "problem" I face is that the reworked version is almost good enough (but still needquite some work on it) for being used in one of our shorts. Please feel free to download it and comment! As you've guessed, I was wondering if I could (legally) use it in one of my shorts. What would you do if you know that I can't find any info about "synop" (who doesn't leave much info in his songs)? Doesn't seem to be registred on this forum either... And more generally, I wanted to launch a discussion about copyright issues with trackers (for non private use I mean): what can we do, what can't we do? Thanks for your comments. Arkham
Last edited by arkham on Fri Feb 20 2004 00:50; edited 6 times in total

arkham
Registered User

Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Location: Brussels

Posted: Thu Feb 19 2004 18:52
FYI, you can download the song I talked about here: http://arkham.madtracker.net/Grandfather-reworked.mp3 It's still far from being "finished" yet: no panning has been done as well as no mastering! BEWARE: this is no house-techno kinda track! It is very very "easy listening" kind of stuff
Last edited by arkham on Sun Feb 22 2004 02:43; edited 2 times in total

QBical
Registered User

Joined: 04 May 2003
Location: Utrecht , The Netherlands

Posted: Thu Feb 19 2004 21:55
Well I guess you'll need to ask his premission, first off all by using all his samples, but when he says no, you should respect that. maby in the future you could ask the people who's music you liked here on MT.org to compose a track specialy for your scenes. Me as an indie film-maker myself find it amazing when other people compose music on the images that I shot. it always brings a kind of new light on the scene onw that you as director ( or whatever ) never thought of... But I should ask the guy if you can use his samples get in touch with yannick for that, I thought you need to submit an E-mail adress when you submit music. Grtz Ray
PC: P4 HT 3ghz, 1gb ram, 500GB+ Storage, plextor DVD-rw, M-audo Audiophile 2496 Laptop: Apple Powerbook G4 15inch Other Stuff: Phonic MU802 mixer, Alesis M1 Active Mk2 Monitors, Ipod 2nd gen. 20GB, maxtor firewire HD 80GB

Yannick
MadTracker Author

Joined: 16 Apr 2003
Location: Belgium

Posted: Thu Feb 19 2004 22:26
Synop is registered in the forum, so you can PM him. It is all a matter of being fair - not legal stuff. I guess Synop won't sue you if you make a good tune out of some ideas of him. I suppose he will be proud instead. But in a fair world, it's always nice to ask to original author. Especially in such a community were artists are accessible and open-minded. Yannick

arkham
Registered User

Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Location: Brussels

Posted: Thu Feb 19 2004 23:11
Thanks for your replies! I agree: this is all a matter of being fair, and that's the first reason I wanted to make this post: I didn't actually know how to reach Synop. Thank you Yannick: you were right about Synop being a registered user of this forum. In fact, I did a search on posts from him, but couldn't find any, so I guessed he wasn't registred... I now found him, thanks to the user list. My main issue is now solved. Thanks also to QBical. I fully understand what you mean when you say "maby in the future you could ask the people (...)". And I like that idea very much. But you see, the point I was trying to make is that I really didn't actually plan to make something good out of my "funny experiments". Just for the sake of learning if it's possible at all, I wanted the music to perfectly "stick" to the end-scene from a script I am working on. Hence the fact it is a bit "raw" in the first half, as you've probably noticed. Timing also is made on purpose, to stick with what needs to be shown (as per my script). Anyway, don't get me wrong: I won't use/finish that reworked tune if Synop doesn't want me too. But I think that would be unfortunate for both of us... BTW: Did you have some time to listen to my reworked-tune (and quickly compare it to the original)? If so, what should I improve (just for me to learn a little bit from the PROs on this forum)?

arkham
Registered User

Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Location: Brussels

Posted: Thu Feb 26 2004 00:04
I could not leave this thread open without telling you that Synop just replied to my email request and he definitly agreed me to use his song (reworked). He said the movie scene's script I explained to him was very close, from an emotional point-of-view, from what he felt when he wrote this song. So, here we go! Now, we're gotta shoot these shorts That's gonna be quite some work, h�h�! ;^) The whole project (6 to 9 short-movies, all seemingly separate stories linked in a last 2 hours movie) will be named Project-H (H for Humanity) and each chapter will have strange names like "Project-H://XXXXX", where XXXXXX is a each time a name taken from the Roman-Greek mythology.

Sunbuster
Registered User

Joined: 05 May 2003
Location: Finland

Posted: Thu Feb 26 2004 12:28
any chance you'll be able to place the finished short movies on the net somewhere for our viewing pleasure (as medium-quality quicktimes for instance)?

arkham
Registered User

Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Location: Brussels

Posted: Thu Feb 26 2004 14:12
Of course. In fact, this will be one of the major way for us to publish the movies. There will (probably) be a catch though: the (mostly) flash web site we will design for that purpose will give the impression it is totally protected "top secret" kind of government stuff. And it won't give you instant access to the "files" (i.e. the movies). For that purpose, you'll have to dig a little into the site to find a proper login id. It won't be very difficult though (quite easy in fact), but the idea is to make you feel a little like a "computer hacker". This is of course totally related to the stories we wrote. As an additional advantage, this might spare some Bandwidth, h�h�! BTW: Sunbuster, I've listened to some of your tracks and I wanted to congratulate you: I really like what you did, especially "source of light" which is very often played when I write my scripts

Sunbuster
Registered User

Joined: 05 May 2003
Location: Finland

Posted: Thu Feb 26 2004 17:39

arkham wrote:

BTW: Sunbuster, I've listened to some of your tracks and I wanted to congratulate you: I really like what you did, especially "source of light" which is very often played when I write my scripts Smile

thank's mate! I'm happy that my music has worked for you Smile

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