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OC ReMix Presents Final Fantasy II: Rebellion! June 8, 2015 Contact: press@ocremix.org FAIRFAX, VA... OverClocked ReMix today released its 51st arrangement album, Final Fantasy II: Rebellion. The album pays tribute to Final Fantasy II, released by Square in 1988 for the Nintendo Famicom (a.k.a. the Nintendo Entertainment System). Featuring twenty-one tracks from eighteen artists, Rebellion represents the fourth directorial endeavor of OC ReMix's most frequent contributor Brandon Strader, and is available for free download at http://rebellion.ocremix.org. Like Random Encounter before it, Rebellion includes a diverse roster of musicians honoring composer Nobuo Uematsu's influential work by arranging it in a number of styles, including piano, folk, funk, breakbeat, and jazz with a strong focus on guitar and heavy metal. Rebellion was made by fans, for fans, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Square Enix; all original compositions are copyright their respective owners. "A great album is the sum of its parts as much as any social movement or revolution is the culmination of efforts from brave individuals. I'm eternally grateful to the artists -- without your hard work and sacrifice, this album would not have been possible," said director Brandon Strader. "To the fans -- I hope that listening to this album fills you with as much joy as it has given me these past several years. Thank you for the rebellion, and may our random encounter continue to bring us liberation." About OverClocked ReMix Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form. Its primary focus is ocremix.org, a website featuring thousands of free fan arrangements, information on game music and composers, resources for aspiring artists, and a thriving community of video game music fans. ### Preview it: http://youtu.be/JMy-icaL6RQ Download it: http://rebellion.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Final_Fantasy_II_-_Rebellion.torrent Comments/Reviews: http://ocremix.org/community/topic/41181-

Preview it: http://youtu.be/JMy-icaL6RQ Download it: http://rebellion.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Final_Fantasy_II_-_Rebellion.torrent A great album is the sum of its parts as much as any social movement or revolution is the culmination of efforts from brave individuals. The sheer amount of dedication that went into creating Rebellion will be difficult to properly appreciate; many of the involved artists worked on their music for months. Some of them worked on particular songs for over a year. At the end of this journey, it was the combined vision, talents, and dedication of each artist that created an album with its own personality. A smooth experience that seemingly has its own narrative, from one song to the next. I'm eternally grateful to the artists that returned to work on Rebellion after the completion of the first album, Random Encounter. I am equally grateful to those who are making their first appearance, and those who have chosen to be on the final album covering Final Fantasy 3. Without your hard work and sacrifice, this album would not have been possible. To the fans - I hope that listening to this album fills you with as much joy as it has given me these past several years. Thank you for the rebellion, and may our random encounter continue to bring us liberation. - Brandon Strader

I'll either be sleeping when it launches or at work (like I am now!) but I'm super excited for the launch too. It took so much dedication from so many people to get this album done (some people worked on their songs for months, or even over a year, of actual working, not just sitting on it and coming back to it later) and I think it shows. So lucky to have been involved with so many talented people.. enjoy the album tomorrow folks

I just read the mixpost writeups and I'm now terrified of actually listening to this album. It'll either blow the top of my head off & leave me with severe feeling of inadequacy, or it won't live up to the hype, and I don't think it's the latter.

Good Lord, Current in my second play through and honestly this is absolutely AWESOME. Thank you so much to everyone for this masterpiece!!! Cheers, paxl13

This is a true Jordanius mix - a lot of crazy shit is going on. And I love this!

Interesting. No problem about sorting them, it'd be nice to have them (well at least the OST, I don't really care about the SFX). Thanks. That remastering project sounds awesome too, the GBA's quality didn't do justice to the soundtrack. Good luck!

aw yea this is happenin' We got this guys!

It's already the afternoon in France, damn those time zones!

Faseeh sent me his finished track That makes 2 completed songs in total and it's great. Let's make this album happen!

I really like the piano, and I didn't mind the melody being high up. I think the choir stood out a bit too much though, and I didn't really like the sound of it anyways. I'd prefer a softer string sound there or something. At 2:10, I think you could take out the instruments more subtlety. Or possibly build it up more before before starting to slow down for the ending.

Great film! Great thread!

Got my new machine from Brad Saturday morning, and it wouldn't boot. Called him today and after an hour or so, we figured out that the RAM had become unseated and caused all sorts of mayhem when it attempted to boot. Now it's up and running and working like a charm! Thanks Brad!

Do you find that you're a 'rewards-based' learner or incremental? I've been the former until recently, and we tend to be encouraged by demonstrable results and discouraged by not seeing immediate progress; it was a tough mental habit for me to break, and one that I still have to work on regularly. Easily caught up in 'broad strokes' learning, where you're getting a little bit of everything instead of perfecting the rudiments in each skill set. Not a seemingly direct answer to your question, but check out Josh Waitzkin's "The Art of Learning"; it definitely took away much of the anxiety/overwhelm I was experiencing trying to learn multiple new skills, especially while balancing work and personal life. Since time (and how much of it I needed to be spending on any given task) is what seemed to be stressing me out the most, I started using a Pomodoro Timer app, and would break my skill building and all tasks into (up to 4) 25 minute chunks, punctuated by 5 minute breaks. So say I didn't want to go down the scale warmup rabbithole, I'd give myself maybe just one pomodoro on scales, then break the remaining 3 in to other things (one on jazz standards, one on shedding sixteenth notes, etc) still in the wheelhouse of improving that instrument/overall skill. And then maybe my next Pomodoro set will be tackling something in my DAW that I need to fix/figure out, or getting through a chapter in a composition workbook, or watching a tutorial video and taking notes, etc. Giving myself a limited time on this stuff made me get to the crux of techniques much quicker. I don't usually like time restrictions competing against creativity, but since it's more about developing vocabulary and efficiency in order to be able to express yourself to your fullest potential, thus contributing to your creative output, they go hand in hand I think. That said, I agree that if you're really engrossed in something and making progress, you don't have to cut yourself off...see it through and dig in.

My experience is similar to DrumUltimA's - I built a lot of my skills out of necessity, and I think it's been very productive for me. Due to my distance from good teachers and not a lot of money to throw around, I haven't been able to get lessons for the cello I got a fair while back, and so I didn't practice it much. But in the latest band I'm playing in, a few tunes have wonderful spaces for it, so I've been nicely motivated to work on it at last - even though my self-taught/Youtube technique is probably going to make any proper classical players in our audience cringe. I'm guessing you're asking your question as somebody who wants to be ready to offer these skills at a moment's notice when a sweet job opportunity comes up for you. My advice would be to pick up the basics of the things you think will come in handy, at a pace that doesn't make you hate it. When something comes up that calls for one of those skills, then you'll be ready to offer it and build on what you know to suit it. Sometimes the most productive practice - and the choice of what to practice - comes from a good incentive.

For me, things came about as I needed to learn them. Honestly, it may help to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. For example: while in school (studying percussion), we were playing a piece where I needed to learn a very difficult steel drum part. Now, steel drums are technically percussion, but the technique and note layout of the instruments are completely different than anything I've ever done before. Normally I would say "no, I don't play those", but in this situation, I actually HAD to--so I busted my ass to meet the deadline of the performance. The result? I play steel pans now! As a kid, I took piano and drum lessons at the same time, but stopped studying piano when percussion became more important. I think I should also emphasize that those few years of piano lessons, which I haven't studied in a long time, really stayed with me. Don't worry about studying everything a ton--focus on what you enjoy the most, and work on the other things when you have time. Learning an instrument takes a long time, but it's a gradual process with a lot of cross-pollination. You never know what opportunities will arise that will allow you to continue to hone those skills.

I develop one skill at time, doing a bit of it every day to make it more natural, like muscle memory, but I only try when I feel the need to learn it. I don't really play the drums, but I can imagine someone playing drums and that's good enough for me. Similarly, I no longer play the guitar, but I still can imagine an expert guitarist and sequence a realistic electric guitar as if that person was playing it. If I do something with an instrument in a day, I usually end up aiming to recreate something I hear.

I usually do different things on different days. I tend to get sucked into whatever I'm doing, so I don't want to have to stop immediately and do something else I'm not interested in at the moment.

Good work again, zircon! I'm sure there will be more hairy man pics to come. Soul Splint: how's Romanian deadlift for you? That's what I've been doing, and it seems like at least there's less action on the knees, if not necessarily less stress. I've been busy as hell so I haven't had much chance to log in here or Fitocracy even. I need to get on it, I suppose. My cut has been going okay, if slow. It's hard for me to really keep to IF and my calorie count given two jobs, a four year old, and a 21 year old girlfriend who is not bound by the same dietary and time restrictions. Less qq, though, more pew pew. I know. My lifts have mostly gone okay considering that I am usually working around 2000, 2100 calories a day (at least a few hundred under what I figure I should be at.) It's hard to know, really. My activity level is all over the place from day to day. Like I've said before, my life's a mess right now. Still though, I made all my new 1rms: 225 bench, 285 squat, 165 push press, 345 deadlift. I got squashed a lot though, on my 5's and 3's. That was mostly on my upper body stuff, so next mesocycle I'm going to keep the same targets for bench and push press. I probably will make my goals for push press and squat for the year, but I'm really not too worried about it for bench and haven't set one for the deadlift. 405 lol? No idea there.

Feel free to submit it. Cool piece!

Wow! I wish I had composers like you at Metroid Reorchestrated! The runtime is fine with me. I wouldn't remove any instrumentation or change pretty much anything. The only thing I would work on is the panning, making sure that the field is balanced.

My brother likes Metroid and Metroid music, so I decided to share it with him. I really love the atmosphere in this remix. It makes me think of the colors jet black and light blue.

nicely done!

For me, 0:24 was a substantial jump in volume. Maybe a riser or reverse that covers a larger dynamic range could connect this part a little less jarringly. The volume in either part is fine, and I think it's just the connection that's the issue here. I agree with Moseph on the brass being boomy at 1:22, but it's just slight on my side. Other than that, at least for me, although I agree with Moseph on the reverb, stereo field, and MIDI CC, I feel like it's not a very big deal. Still sounds quite good to me. Try listening to this as an example of a very polished orchestral piece. Maybe it'll help.

Really good orchestration and arranging. I don't think the seven minute runtime is a problem at all, because you have enough development over the course of it to keep things interesting. My comments here mainly have to do with production and sample use, because those areas aren't as strong as the arrangement itself. It sounds like you're mostly relying on velocity to set dynamic level rather than expression control (CC11, or whichever CC your library(ies) uses). As a result, there are a lot of places where sustains feel lifeless and where phrasing doesn't hang together so well. The brass line starting at 1:38 is a good example of this. Am I correct in thinking that you're using EWQL Symphonic Orchestra? If so, you may want to experiment with the DXF (dynamic crossfade) patches, which crossfade between velocity layers in response to CC1, unlike the standard patches which have a static velocity layer set by the note velocity. Regardless of which type of patch you use, though, you can probably be more liberal with CC11 -- I think it will help to breathe some life into the performance. There are some places in the brass where the midrange is boomy -- particularly with the horns from 1:22 to 1:38. This should be pretty easy to fix by EQing the offending frequencies. Spatialization and reverb are not bad, although I think there are some details that could be improved. I find that EWQL SO (again, I'm assuming that this is what you're using) tends to have note connections that sound a little too clean in the context of a full orchestra, which is kind of what I'm hearing here. You might try adding a short reverb on everything to smear notes together. It'll be a subtle effect, but it may help the ensemble gel a little better.

Really enjoyed this! It's now one of my favorite Metroid orchestrations. My favorite section was around 5:00-6:00 with the cool harmonies and string parts, and I loved the ending. Samples sound great and so does the mix. My one piece of feedback would be that I think there are too many twinkle things.. (windchimes, glock, even some of the gongs, etc.) The name is great; it nicely coincides with the 45th anniversary of the moon landing.