What OCR song has the most number of parts?

[aardvarkusa007]

Hello,

I'm an old member of OCR, but fairly new to the discussion boards. I'm not a music major, but I enjoy all sorts. I really appreciate that such a niche exists here on the net, and especially here on OCR.

My wife and I were having a discussion, and she's a music major. However, I am a physics/chemistry/biology major.

The question goes something like this; how many parts can a piece of music have before it becomes noise? Such a questions confused her and in trying to clarify it, she got mad. So I turn to the creators of my favorite type of music and ask a similar question. Only, lets limit it to the bounds of what OCR has does.

What song in OCR has the most number of parts, voices, or lines of music (or whatever the term would be)?

-Aardvarkusa007

[zircon]

It's a fun question to think about, but the technical answer is one you might find disappointing. The number of parts is really not as important as the content of each part. You can (and I have) used 10-15 different drum sounds or loops in a single track simultaneously, but it sounds perfectly natural. On the other hand, if you were to play 64th note orchestra hit arpeggios - technically a single part - it would sound absolutely awful and almost like noise. So... "it depends" :<

However, the posted ReMix which has the most total layers (that I know of) is "Black Wing Metamorphosis (http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01623/)." There's a full choir, female soloist, an entire orchestra (strings, winds, brass, percussion and all the parts therein), rhythm and lead guitar parts, bass, breakbeat drums and synths. It's absolutely massive.

[Meteo Xavier]

My remix (http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01790/) had so many layers that it about wouldn't process.

I'm trying to count them:

- Acoustic guitar, like 2-3 different samples
- Piano
- 3-4 different choirs
- Over a dozen SFX and other samples
- French Horn
- Really terrible violin
- Taiko Drum
- 6-8 different string sets
- Synth bell
- Bass guitar (I think)
- Synth Pad
- Loud Splash Cymbal
- Bell Tree
- On average about 6-7 other things I know I put in there to fill out the sound structure that I can't remember.

[prophetik music]

i'd lean towards star salzman's Pillar of Salt, or Valse Aeris. i tried to count the different articulations used in Valse and i lost count mid-woodwinds.

[José the Bronx Rican]

Obviously, unless it's your own track, there's no way of knowing exactly how many disparate sounds are used in a song, not even mentioning double-tracking, added delays and overdubbing, and especially things such as sampling from a source that was already densely layered on its own. I do wonder if any artists here take after Phil Spector. Music-wise (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhbGaCwBzs), that is, not... well... you know.

But yeah, it's all about arrangement. "Good" examples include whole string sections playing notes either in chords or in octaves; "noise" examples include 95% of all those amateurish "mashups" on Youtube.

[Meteo Xavier]

Some of Nutritious's mixes make me dizzy trying to imagine actually sitting down and coming up with all that.

[Power Smoothie]

Hey, this has got me thinking...

Aside from solo piano/guitar mixes, which ReMix is composed of the LEAST number of tracks?

[BardicKnowledge]

Hey, this has got me thinking...

Aside from solo piano/guitar mixes, which ReMix is composed of the LEAST number of tracks?

Any acoustic duet between two single instruments.

An interesting track along these lines is Mazedude's "Read the Sine" from the FF4 album (http://ff4.ocremix.org), where he (afaik) utilizes only sine wave generators to make a cohesive track. It's really well thought out and designed, and the end product sounds great also.

[Neblix]

It really doesn't matter, like Zircon said, how many parts so much as what's in the parts. If you do it right, there are an INFINITE number of parts you can create. No one has ever done over 100 parts or so, but it is possible, so the answer is there is no amount where it becomes "noise".

[The Womb]

No one has ever done over 100 parts or so, but it is possible, so the answer is there is no amount where it becomes "noise".

Gustav Mahler says hi

[Neblix]

Gustav Mahler says hi

I meant on OCR, which was part of the OP's question.

[The Vagrance]

This question is also quite weighted as some sounds that can be used (speaking from experience the womp-ey ambience and the arp from my two remixes) are multiple sounds layered on top of each other but to create one specific sound. Also, are we talking strictly different instruments or largest number of polyphony at the same time? Most complex arrangement perhaps? There is no real answer to this question, and music can quite easily turn into pure noise with few instruments anyway (see Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges)

[Neblix]

The least track-y way to get noise is to record noise and then export it as a wav.

[Olarin]

Hm, now I need to make an OCRemix with thousands of recorded tracks just so I can lay claim to having made the remix with the most parts.

No wait, I'm far too lazy for that. Nevermind.