Q: im trying to organize a few hundred sounds by "type", and ive got all the "percussive" stuff on in pile (where the pitch doesn't matter) but i'm not sure what the call the other pile, any good names for non-percussive musical sounds? (pianos, guitars, horns, synths, basses)
A: besides drums and perc, the 3 categories i use are 'BASS', 'VOC', and 'NON'. bass means bass, voc means my voice, and non means anything besides voc bass drums or perc. These are the functional categories i use for mixing, and for that purpose the category devisions are nearly rock solid. Within the non, there's always a vague attempt to find some categories for arrangement purposes, but the lines always get blurred and break down and argue about how specific to be or not. lead, pno, rhodes, organ, bell, guit, strings, twinkle, pluck, pad, flute, syn, horn, trumpet, miscnon, ..... as you can see there would be a lot of overlap and many things can be used for both, so there never seems to be clarity on that level. i've noticed the same thing when trying to deal with the categorization of my website. at a certain point you just have to accept that real life ultimately will resist total categorization, yet always seems to invite you to try