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Such an organic vibe. Makes me feel like I'm watching a Pixar-Ghibli-esc movie. The guitar playing is very crisp and clear. Bravo!

This arrangement is cute and charming. It starts with a subtraction on the A section, only focusing on the piano and occasionally some strings - then at 0:33 the drums and bass join, and the strings become more lively. From there, the structure is A into a variation on A and then B, and the second set at 1:31 also differs. The A section allowed the whole band to play the source straight, the variation added a square synth and some double-time chord use, then the B section went into four-on-the-floor drums, fast-moving piano climbs, and the eventual writer-stated anime cameo that I can not pinpoint. And then it ends with adapting the A section into a sudden minor key finish, with hardly any fanfare. As things stand, you've understood how to interpret the source to make it feel like yourself, and yet it still echoes a lot of the original's bounce and playfulness, which is a good thing. Looking at the prior critique of the "silence" at 1:05, I see that you're trying to go for a fun reverse effect, though it sounded like it didn't start properly until the end of that measure and sharply rose for the end of the following one. Try experimenting with an earlier start for the reverse fade to fill in more audio space. It's not essential, but it's nice to have as a change, so go with what you feel sounds right. As for the production side, the soundscape is drier than Lake Valor during the Team Galactic takeover. Combined with the choice of more techno-sounding percussion and mechanical piano writing, the overall presentation of the track feels cheap and inorganic. I'm in favor of experimenting with different types of reverb to shape up the stage, particularly on anything that isn't a kick drum or bass, and looking into the velocity shaping on the keys to give them a more convincing performance. The nature of the source and the overall adaptation mean I don't have problems with the strict timings of your notation. But any other type of humanization, whether changing velocities, note lengths, or anything else, can go a long way. This track is one of those that I'd like to see resubmitted with more focus on humanization and some reverb sound shaping. I see potential here, and if this does become a debut posted work with revision, that would be a great first impression. Keep at it. NO (resubmit)

It got quieter at that moment because I left. No, actually I left because it got way too toxic. At that point I finally discovered that my self worth isn't based on if I can get the unpleasent individuals on OCR to like me so I up and left. No regrets.

Yeah it does! Thanks for the update. Gonna get working at some point this summer

Excellent! Well, feel free to work on it some more if you feel like (you have until the due date, which isn't until late October, to turn it in!) Otherwise, I just need it rendered to the specifics above, and a unique name for your remix. :) Can send it to me via Discord or by private message in the OCR forums > my profile page. :D It can be something that was published previously! :) One of mine I plan on doing is actually a 2-3 year old piece I first made for a NewGrounds Halloween contest, and I think that was back in 2022?? I'm revamping the thing from scratch, adding onto the melody and harmony and putting a new spice / hook to the piece, but it has been published before on NG. So I figure as long as the submitted tracks haven't been mixposted by OCR before, it's cool. :D But you can, however, submit it to the OCR Judges' Panel after subbing it for this album, or anywhere else! ♥ If it's a video game remix, I encourage it. But this album isn't restricted TO JUST VGM remixes. You can remix other sources from other media, and / or make your own original track. Hope that helps. :3

Question: Do the submitted tracks have to be entirely new works or can it be something that was published previously (not on OCR, but elsewhere)?

Those drops are waaaaay too loud, coming in with zero signaling, suddenly nine decibels louder than what came before. That right there is enough of a dealbreaker to sink this mix. I loves me a good loud kick, but holy heckballs this is absolutely ridiculoud. The arrangement should have soft sections followed by buildups, hinting at what is to come, you don't want your listener to leap out of his chair hearing these drops. There are no builds here, just the soft sections and then WHAM my ears are raped. The sections are repetitive within themselves, with nothing too interesting happening once the patterns are established. I think there great ideas here though! I'd love to hear more melodic development, I don't actually hear the source motif anywhere, I think adding that motif plus some variations over the repetitive sections would greatly add interest to the arrangement. As prophetik mentioned, the arpeggio that appears here and there in this arrangement does not really match with the melodies and harmonies you have going in the other instruments. It certainly does not hold water trying to act as a lead. In that final section, the faux-hardstyle, that vocal bit is amazingly too loud also. So this entire mix needs a volume balance as a starting point. But yeah, resist the urge to try to win the loudness war here! There is no need for that, and it's much more jarring than it needs to be. NO

FINAL FANTASY IX - The Final Battle Remix

Ok. I think my prog rock version of Super Castlevania IV - Dracula's Theme would be nice for this album.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

there's still room in the lowend for more sauce. generally it is good to think of the entire EQ spectrum as a a series of curves with the bell curve being the principle curve used to define which frequencies will be cut and which will be boosted in the mix. the end goal is to create a "flat" frequency response that sounds "good" on all devices... of course, you can also ignore this approach entirely and create a sonic weapon with the right approach too, lol https://www.edmprod.com/eq-guide/

Up to you! If you feel like you can do more to work on them, by all means, either take the time to work on them more, or workshop them either here on the forums or via the OCR Discord server. :) Otherwise, if you feel they're ready to go, just send me: a WAV of your mix, in 44.1kHz, in Stereo, 16 or 24-bit, -6.0 dB, triangle dithered (if necessary). This is a pre-master, WITH NO HEAVY COMPRESSION OR A LIMITER ON THE MASTER BUS, except for any very soft compression and EQ, for warmth and tone and gluing the full track together. If that all sounds like gobbledygook, just sending me the thing at -6dB, unmastered, is cool. :D Can send it to me on here as an attachment or GDrive / Dropbox link through private messaging, or on Discord if you add me. There's some other submission criteria, but the TL;DR is -- as long as your mix doesn't have any weird glitches or artifacts that'll mess up mastering the track, and you give me the source name and game (or movie or whatever) you remixed it from, and give it a unique name (something that isn't the original name of the song), that's fine.

Hey friends :) I'm in! can i just submit my remixes or how is it working?

Hallo hallo, another "long time listener, first time caller" for the list A long time fan of VGM; Vinyl & CD collector, obsessive fan-music listener, occasional VGM remixer with my partner. I was finally able to make it to MAGfest this year (I come from far off Europe, and it only cost.... Ye gods, over a thousand buckaroos!) where I met so many amazing friends, and even more amazing strangers, and had so many amazing conversations with 'my people', where I had a sort of, 'wait, I'm not alone, thousands of people are just like me!' moment. Especially it was great to hang out with the ever wonderful KyleJCrb, who I went to the con with, and spent a lot of the weekend with (and crashed the room of many times) - I was planning to check out the OCR panel regardless, but as he was one of the speakers, I made extra sure to clear my con schedule - and as I sat there at the panel, I wondered suddenly why I was lurking, because I felt like I would very much like to be a present part of all of this. I spent a while after I arrived home observing the site much more closely, asking around interestedly to my friends of their own VGM projects, then I decided to poke my head in for real. So... Er... Hello!

Haha! Love it!

Kweh! Or maybe more conveniently to say "meow!", I dunno. Yeah, that baddass kitty artwork you see above is the album's front cover. And the title... all started when the gray baby was yawning at the moment of taking that photo of her. That inspired me to try some silly ideas for a hypothetical album cover artwork. I used "The Placeholder of Something" in the logo and a nice person (who might prefer to stay anonymous) told me: "I hope you use that title in an actual release sometime". So, why not? So in April 1st 2024 I released a quick and short collection of new original compositions with that name and artwork. And more recently, for the April Fools of this year, I repeated the action. This one I'm posting here now is bigger and longer, tho. And a lot more varied. Basically I guess we can call that as very synth instrumental metal with a wide variety of influences ranging from folk to electronic, now also some ambient and more. Sometimes cheesy, sometimes agressive, always weird. Not suitable for trves, but if you are open-minded enough and you like variety in metal and you give more importance to ideas and originality than to budget and production, you might definitively enjoy this thing. This is pretty much the kind of stuff you'd expect to find in a day of random browsing on MySpace or Soundclick profiles, or in the 128k MP3 links on a personal artist static HTML site in the mid-late 2000s. The pure essence of amateurness in the best way. That wasn't intentional but it just happened. I guess I like the underground sides of art and everything too much, and not into the mainstream and the crowds and masses at all. Each track has its own story behind its inspiration, and many of them were also started as a participation in the quick compos of ThaSauce (OHC and 2HTS specifically). Just takiing a moment to show my gratitude to that community and the nice people on it for their acceptation and their lack of MIDIphobia. This period of time, especially for most of 2025, got me in a time when my main hobby and source of joy was taking long walks in the outdoors, exploring interesting places as far away from human civilization as possible and staying there with no more company than the sound of the wind and the (real) birds. That sure had some influence in the compositions and the vibes. And so I also though of using and editing some of the photos taken during my routes to make individual artworks for each track as well. A nice way to combine both music and visual art, I guess. And I have to plans to extend that to full videos for each track in a future as well. Anyways, stopping the boring wall of text for now... if this description didn't scare you yet and instead you have some interest to hear what I'm talking of... you can get the full album collection of demos for free (just put 0 as price) in Bandcamp. Includes 3 bonus tracks and the full artwork. https://unknownpseudoartist.bandcamp.com/album/another-placeholder-of-another-thing Alternatively I also uploaded the full thing to Youtube in a single semi-static video. Basically toying with silly ideas to make the ubitiquous "visualizer over image" format a bit more dynamic and fun. You can see the metal kitty dancing there with her Flying V guitar! If, despite all odds, you dared to listen to this thing... please, let me know what do you think! :)

That's nice. I moved to "the dark side" around 1 decade ago and the classic "black font over white background" always burns my eyes. If the classic version is still available for whoever prefers that, I see absolutely no problem. I personally love the typical 2000s forum aesthetics in this theme particularly too. Simple but effective. As a funny fact, I use a Firefox extension named "Dark background and light text" to adapt any site to this format. Maybe because some inconsistence between the HTML colors and the background images, the classic OCR theme didn't work well with the Default mode, so I had it configured to invert colors in order to get the dark theme experience. So when I checked OCR today that's how it looked like, since it kept inverting colors :D (obviously I have it normal now)

I'll be workshopping one of my AOCH submissions tonight for the Office Hours if that's going on. Saying so for the sake of transparency. Maybe the bit of showcasing will drum up some more interest in this project and promote it, and show what people can do (e.g. 'genre-melding' / bending) with a Halloween track! :) It's an original, too, so not a remix!! Express yourself and show the world what you can compose! So peeps, don't be afraid to workshop your WIPs whenever, if you want to! I encourage it and collaborations! :D

Original is indeed a very chill piece! Your take begins with a piano/pad combo doing the main chord progression at a faster pace. I enjoy the sound of this combo. At 0:14 the main flute melody is played on a synth, I think adapting the track to a faster pace sounds great so far... However, we eventually reach 0:27 and all balance is lost. A drumkit enters at an insanely loud volume and completely drowns everything else, with the LUFS reaching -5 (which is extremely loud), and there's even clipping on my DAW. Even the waveform looks kinda silly here: As far as I can tell, the background keeps the same parts from the intro here. There's a breakdown around 0:52 with a fairly intense snare for some reason, then a build-up and more loud drums at 1:08. I dig the rhytm idea here. There's been a recurrent synth arpeggio on this percussion sections that sounds off-tune/off-key, unsure since it's hard to hear. 1:33 has a similar break to 0:52 and at 1:43 the main melody returns and then the drums return at 1:57. We then repeat the break and build-up of 0:52 but there's a fake-out and at 2:41 we get the percussion "pay-off" again. As before, the overwhelming volume doesn't make it that enjoyable... At 3:07 the track ends abruptly, with even the tail of the sounds cutting off abruptly. In terms of arrangement this is fairly basic, I really like the idea of speeding up the original but you kinda exhaust all your tricks in the first 25 seconds. There's definitely space for chord progression variations or incorporating more of the source's melodies. I like the idea behind some of the percussion breakdowns as well, but I don't think they're enough to sell the arrangement alone. Production is, however, the main issue here. The track is extremely unbalanced, with the percussion being so loud that it makes the track very hard to listen to, even clipping at some points. It's hard to critique the mix behind this unbalanced approach but I'd take a look at the higher frequencies since the mix sounds shrill (but this may simply be a consequence of the loudness). Overall, while I think there are good ideas behind this, the production is not enough for this to pass. First, look at balancing the percussion with the rest of the track. Second, check if there are ways to make the arrangement more interesting as right now it's way too simple. NO

Backwards pantsless hug

Come join the fun, if you'd like!

:D

Updates on progress is certainly welcomed, yes! When I get the Discord channel sorted, that'll be much easier to achieve, but in the meantime don't hesitate to post whatever you're doing up on this forum page, by PM to me on here, DMs on Discord, OR via OCR Workshop or Collabs (I do stalk around those parts frequently enough). It will help to tell me what you're thinking of remixing, or informing me if it's an original song, so I can update the list and people won't end up doing the same sources. When it's finished, I'd like for a PRE-MASTER to be sent to me, either as an attachment or a link to your G-Drive or Dropbox, etc. I'll probably attempt to batch master them myself. :) BUT, I do encourage putting ample time towards your work for this, making sure there's no unnecessary artifacts and workshopping the WIP with others. This isn't a closed-off, secretive affair, but at the same time, think of this like you would for AOCC or any OCR or Pixel Mixer-related albums. Similar process, just not as formal and there's no judging criteria. There is quality assurance / control, but just on a basic level. :D If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask. Does this work for you, @H36T?

Ok... Back in the saddle! Sorry for the delay in replies! Hey! Welcome! Nice to meet ya'. I'll try to note down people who are "up for collabing" soonish, when I go in to edit the front-posts, again, so people joining in known who they can turn to for advice or collaboration on their mixes if they want it! Got you and Bonnie down for drums/percs & vocals, respectively. :) Depending on things, might knock on your DMs myself! I gotcha covered. ;) Stay tuned! Is this your "claim", so to speak? :D Let me know, and I'll update the main post! Aww, that's sad. D: Albeit, doing like a mini-EP of those does sound very intriguing... :) Well, hopefully this'll last longer than 3 years, (fingers crossed!) But you're welcome to do any or ALL of the songs you have in mind. :D There's 0 limit on how many you can submit, just keep the number reasonable. x'D @colorado weeks also voiced helping out with website-making and hosting, and I'm sure between ya'll, we can get that done! I'll also ping @gravitygauntlet because I know he's done some CD label-esque artwork and formatting, and his GF does as well. So if ya'll wanna jump in on this, song sub or otherwise, count me in! Just DM me in the meantime, but I will also be in touch when I consolidate more ideas together!

Signing into my 20 year old account to say how much I love this track. I was just playing the IT file through XMPlay tonight. Love Virt forever!