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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!

Hello again, five years later. This is still being written (very slowly). It is now over 200k words (?!) and is now on A03. After Chapter 30 (the next chapter) I will no longer be posting on FFN. If it's taken me this long to write 30 chapters, I don't want to know how long it's going to take to write the planned 60 more (so far) I have to use a lot of various documents to keep track of everything, because there is a lot.

Thanks for also keeping the light version. )) Not fully sure about this one (due to a missing comparison) - it might be also a thing of adaptation. But my very first impression was that the former font was easier to read.

Hey all, I've updated our default theme to the new dark mode theme. This new theme reflects some of the style changes that have been made up front on the main site. If you notice any glaring issues with the new theme, please make a thread for the specific problem you notice in our Site Issues & Feedback forum so that I can address it specifically. Our old theme is still available in the theme selector at the bottom of the forum page if you prefer the light version. ENJOY! -- DarkeSword

Ah, thank you! Yeah, I need to learn how to mix because I really have a high end issue :/ I doubt lows are a issue I think?

You're right, I did say that I enjoyed your work in progress before, but felt like it needed more. I still feel that even though this one is pretty close right now and feeling borderline. I love the addition of the choir parts and the oboe, they sound beautiful. More adaption and parts added to this that would put this over the bar in terms of arrangement as we've had even more conservative stuff pass before. See: https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04768 for an example of such. However, in that case there was also genre adaption going on for more personalization. This one feels almost like the same genre even though the instruments are changed. The opening is particularly very close to the original, until 1:07 when the cello enters and is giving some countermelody. The humanization and rigidity is also something needs to be brought up as well. I love Seph's suggestion of adding rubato to bring some more life to the piano part, right now it's very locked into the grid. Also the dynamic range is very small, more contrast and variation would also help the expression really shine through as well. Right now it's more robotic and not as expressive as it could be. Beautiful, but not up to par. NO

sounds good compositionally mixing is a bit loud on the high end