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OC ReMix Presents Final Fantasy IX: Worlds Apart! September 9, 2015 Contact: press@ocremix.org FAIRFAX, VA... OverClocked ReMix today released its 53rd arrangement album, Final Fantasy IX: Worlds Apart. The album pays tribute to Final Fantasy IX, released by Square in 2000 for the Sony PlayStation. Featuring 58 tracks from 57 artists, Worlds Apart is directed by OC ReMixer and BAFTA-winning Alien: Isolation sound team member Cain "Fishy" McCormack, and is available for free download at http://ff9.ocremix.org. Worlds Apart includes a diverse roster of musicians honoring composer Nobuo Uematsu's largest soundtrack in the Final Fantasy series by arranging it in a number of styles, including folk, prog rock, gypsy jazz, bossa nova, acid jazz, pop, metal, EDM, chiptune, and more. Worlds Apart was made by fans, for fans, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Square Enix; all original compositions are copyright their respective owners. "Twice in interviews, Mr. Uematsu has said that the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack is his favourite of the series. I definitely think it's the most cohesive effort in the series," observed director Cain McCormack, who also noted that many of Worlds Apart musicians' "joined OC ReMix just for this project because of how much they love FFIX. Spotlighting the game music you really love is what we're all about here, and I feel like that is particularly true with this album." The album's cover artwork was designed by Kevin "TheGreyNinja" Merriman, whose work was most recently included in UDON's upcoming hardcover art book Capcom Fighting Tribute. Supplementing Merriman's cover artwork are 19 visual art pieces by contributors to video game art fan community Game-Art-HQ depicting Final Fantasy IX's major protagonists and villains. Game-Art-HQ founder Reinhold Hoffmann oversaw the visual artwork effort, confident that Game-Art-HQ members could commemorate, in his words, "the masterpiece that is Final Fantasy IX and its rich cast of interesting characters." Hoffmann also anticipates future Game-Art-HQ team-ups with OC ReMix, adding, "This was our first collaboration with OCR, and we look forward to future collaborations to create beautiful tributes to our favourite video games that combine both music and visual art!" Worlds Apart's release also coincides with the 20th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation in North America, celebrating the Final Fantasy series' final PS1 entry. 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. About Game-Art-HQ Founded in 2011, Game-Art-HQ is an artistic community featuring fan-created drawings, as well as cosplay photography, sculptures, and crafts inspired by video games. Influenced by the quality standards and community of OverClocked ReMix, Game-Art-HQ houses individual pieces alongside themed collaborative art projects tributing major video game franchises. ### Preview it: http://youtu.be/ja7S7jcgORQ Download it: http://ff9.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Final_Fantasy_IX_-_Worlds_Apart.torrent Comments/Reviews: http://ocremix.org/community/topic/41731-

Preview it: http://youtu.be/ja7S7jcgORQ Download it: http://ff9.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Final_Fantasy_IX_-_Worlds_Apart.torrent Firstly, credit where it is due! This album project was originally started by Brandon Strader, who you might also know as the director of the FFI and FFII albums on OC ReMix. Please do check out those, and all of the other Final Fantasy albums! As you might have heard, this album has been a long time coming. This is partly because it is humongous, featuring 58 tracks with contributions from 57 artists. Final Fantasy IX has a huge soundtrack (over 120 tracks), and the reason for this is the great number of variations on motifs. There are so many variations that we actually had to limit the number of versions of similar themes. Twice in interviews, Mr. Uematsu has said that the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack is his favourite of the series, and you can definitely tell he got carried away given the depth on display. Even if you don't agree that it's his best, I definitely think it's the most cohesive effort in the series. One thing you might notice about this album is the amount of new faces (or new at the time) who contributed multiple tracks. This is because they actually joined OC ReMix just for this project because of how much they love FFIX. I'm personally really happy for that to be the case, as I've always thought that you can really hear when people are invested in their tracks. Spotlighting the game music you really love is what we're all about here, and I feel like that is particularly true with this album. I'd like to extend a huge thank you to all the contributors to the album including the 57 ReMixers; the awesome artists at Game-Art-HQ; José for working on the trailer; Kevin "TheGreyNinja" Merriman for the cover art; Flexstyle for a bit of mastering; and finally djp, Larry, and the other staff for helping to get everything out the door. Thanks for waiting, and I really hope you enjoy it! - Cain "Fishy" McCormack

http://ff9.ocremix.org

My name is Reinhold Hoffmann and this is one of the best days of 2015. Thanks @DJP and everyone else who made our first big collaboration possible, I believe that it is awesome to see a massive tribute to one of the best video games ever made that is both a fest for the ears and for the eyes. @OCR Album Project Founders, don't hesitate to contact me if you are looking for artists to create cover art and additional artworks like for this album, we are very open to those projects and glad to be a help. RH Game-Art-HQ

Here are some reviews for you guys (Round 5). KingTiger ~ Es-cop-ay Great execution on the rapping; the words are clear. I kinda wish there were less words though, so some sort of instrumental portion can be incorporated that emphasized the source usage more prominently. I found the source usage to be hard to notice (and I prefer to listen to the track with the rap on it to give it a fair shake) since the rap is so prominent and busy. The production is pretty solid. Cam3 - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Maverick I actually get a spy-like feel from this, almost. Man, that kick is subby. Nice sync lead. I didn't find the arrangement to change gears that much though; to me it feels like you relied on the same groove the whole time, and so you could have incorporated a second, distinct energy level to the arrangement to give it a greater dynamic range. evktalo feat. Jorito & Tuberz McGee - Subtle Haystack Tibulation Nice ambitious arrangement. I like the varied textures you used, and these are particularly hard to mix together. Clean+distorted guitar with violin and organ... it's a bit too dense IMO, and could have used better separation, especially at 1:44 - 2:30. The frequencies just smoosh together and the harmonies become hard to hear. As a result, it was also hard for me to hear your source usage in its entirety. I still voted for this in the top 3 though, based on the pure guts you had doing it. Garpocalypse - Straight Outta RAGE I found the soundscape to be rather strange; you have a pretty upfront bass, distant padding, and distant leads. It's almost as if you were going for a chillout track of some sort, but I thought the important instruments were too distant, making the track feel... I guess, not busy enough. Try examining the amount of reverb you have on the piano at 2:48, for instance---that's a high decay time and low low-cut! WillRock feat. Jason Covenant and Ghetto Lee Lewis - Palace Of The Beast The orchestral instrumentation at the beginning was okay, but it was a bit stiff. I thought what came after, at 0:39, was much stronger. Unsure why there appeared to be so much reverb... I can hear the harmonies pretty well, but I also felt a high amount of ambience. How ironic---Will, now I'm the one telling you that you have too much reverb! The arrangement was definitely varied in energy and showed great understanding of dynamic range, so that convinced me to put this in my top 3. However, the orchestral portions and the piano part were fairly mechanical or tonally invariant, so I ended up putting you guys as #2. Props on the ambition though. Amphibious - Chiral This was a cool concept. To me it felt like glitch hop (or it could have been that). Personally I felt like it somewhat missed the mark on perceived production effort. Relative to general similar tracks, I thought the snare could have had more low-mids strength, the bass was rather plain, and the leads could have had more body. So basically, more substance to the soundscape, plz! The arrangement felt straightforward but certainly not low-effort. I think you should keep polishing this because I think it's fun to listen to. I also want to collab on this if you find the time. Anorax - Beached Whale in Miami Cool glitched drums. Man, what is with people and subs this round? I do get that watery feel you were going for, though some instruments felt rather dry and stuck out, like the bells at 0:44. Also so short! Usa - Requiem for a Reploid Woah, that first impact is too heavy. o.o And the track is quite loud, by like 2~4 dB. Surprisingly decent humanization on the orchestral instruments (although some of the pizzicato trilling was too quick to be human and some of the legato strings could have used more emphasized volume automation to increase the dynamic range a bit more). I love how expansive the arrangement is though. At 3:05, I kind of feel like I'm in a rocking ship in a stormy sea or something. Really, the main things holding this back for me were the overall volume, and the general handling of expression and dynamics of the orchestral instruments, and they weren't major issues. If you do sub this to OCR though, please fix those things! Great stuff, and voted it #1. Cash - Victory at the Palace of Rejects I do kind of get this party vibe, if that's what you were going for. You've definitely improved since last time. I dunno, I just thought the arrangement didn't have much going on. At 1:02, the melody felt rather random IMO. Keeping the whole track in a coherent key can be hard, and you are getting better at that, but there were still residual off-key portions unfortunately. At 2:09 and on, it felt to me like you ran out of ideas on a solo and just wrote something with an arp randomizer to begin with, and then wrote something to match that, IMO. Keep working at it! Ivan Hakštok - Leap of Faith Great work on this despite the amount of time you had to record/mix it. Personally I feel like this is in your comfort zone, so I just get this idea that you were playing it safe for the sake of time (which is understandable). It's why I thought this wasn't particularly stand-out relative to your other works, but it's solid work nevertheless. Straightforward rock with great solos. I can see Rock-lovers voting for this. pu_freak - Rise of the Sigma Seems you were going for kind of a dramatic tone with this. I thought the reverb amount was pretty high, and the low cut on the reverb could be higher to minimize low-end mud. The piano could also have more variation in tonal hardness to make it seem less mechanical---the timing I'm not so much worried about since you play piano. In terms of the soundscape, many of the important instruments are in the back for some reason (such as the organ and percussion). As a result, the whole track sounds oddly distant and tame when I think you meant it to be powerful and big-sounding.

Please keep in mind that right now, the draft, the submissions gathering, the encoding, tagging, and uploading; the voting, vote collection, and tallying; it's all done manually by either you guys or by me. There's very little that's automated about this process for gauntlets, and it's why scoring hasn't gone up yet (I have spreadsheets to help me tally but it's still some manual labor on my part to get everything in there). In my spare time, I'm working on a database-driven web application that will help me manage and automate practically everything having to do with the competitions I personally run on OCR. This is a large-scale, complicated software development project and I'm still in the data design phase of the whole thing. These kinds of ideas can certainly be incorporated into that, but it's a long ways off. I don't anticipate this application being done any time soon. It's also worth noting that the more complicated you make the voting process, the less likely people are to vote at all. VGMix had a lot of these problems with their review system. They attached scores and weights to reviews (through meta-ratings on reviews) which ended up intimidating people from participating, which led to a total crash of the entire system. Building the kind of things you're asking for into the current competition's scoring system is pie-in-the-sky; it sounds great and I understand the intent, but to be honest it's needlessly complicated for the purposes of this competition. If you're interested in detailed feedback about your track, please feel free to ask for specific feedback either here or in the Workshop forum. Nonetheless, I appreciate the comments and aware that feedback can be an issue. Perhaps next Gauntlet we do (rest assured, we will be doing one next year), we can have a one-week break in between blocks where people can be encouraged to review and dissect tracks from the previous three rounds. Maybe setting up a separate review thread per round could also be beneficial next time. On a related note, this December 18th will be 6 year anniversary of the first Grand Robot Master Remix Battle, which is the first of the large scale choose-your-theme competitions that everyone has enjoyed so much over the years. I'm happy to say that I've seen so many awesome artists who've either gotten started or gotten better by competing in these large scale events, many of them honing their skills to the point of going pro and making careers out of music. I'm not pretending to take any credit for any of that, but I will say that I'm proud of everyone that's given the compos a shot and have managed to push their skills higher and higher.

Guys, I've already decided against using Google Forms for this competition. I appreciate the thoughts but I'm closing the book on the discussion as it pertains to SFRG. I appreciate the offer, but I'm a professional web developer. I build database-driven websites for a living.

EUROCREMIX EUROMAGFEST GO

Welcome to the club. I want to do a listening party but the prime OCR audience is mostly US, and it's almost four and a half hours long which means if I want it to be at useful time for them I will be awake until like 4am. I'll see if I can make it happen though.

Morning in Denmark Light and Darkness in the sky Evening in Gaia

Thanks for taking your time to give feedback on all our tracks! I can give you a bit feedback about the feedback, as there are some things many people seemed to complain about with my track, especially the volume. I did this on purpose because most of the tracks in these compose are metal/dubstep/techno, and I didn't want my track to be like 10dB quieter. I's still not really loud with an average of -13dB, but of course since this is a long very dynamic track this is relative as some parts are pretty loud already. In addition, I also forgot the -0.1 dB when mastering, so the WAV got clipped during the MP3 encode. It was fine as WAV, but the encode caused several thousand clippings which also add to the perceived loudness. Something to consider when I do my next round mix. And for all the automation, I really didn't have enough time this round, so I threw this together rather quickly, I only had like 2-3 days in total. But yeah, I guess for that it was decent. I also only halfway optimized the reverb for this piece because I ran out of time. Not to defend my sloppy work, just saying I know i's sloppy and can be better when I have more time to invest Glad you enjoyed it as it is though! Thanks for your appreciation and the nice reviews for all of us!

Can guarantee that's not happening. Shooting for 2015 though, if possible!

Dear Sega: RELEASE SOME SEGA SATURN GAMES FER THE 3DS FGTS Signed, President Obama.

I ended up feeling more inspired by the Dragon Warrior soundtrack (as fun as the golf one is) so I have a tiny bit started for that. I should have a concrete WIP to show you this week some time.

I actually have a print copy of 'The Sky', which is pretty much all of Yoshitaka Amano's Final Fantasy I through X concept art. I'm sure that picture will be in there somewhere, I'll check when I get home :3. It's not that expensive, highly recommended.

If only! Would love to have one closer to home.

Ah man I'm sorry dude, that was disrespectful of me to not consider the tremendous manual undertaking this contest is, or the factors that go into it. I'm kind of an outsider here so I'm going on surface level observations. That is really cool that you are still developing that competition system in your spare time. Also dude, I've said it before and I'll say it again, these contests are an amazing thing that you orchestrate and I know people have really grown and gone places from all the hard work you've put in helping out. Have nothing but respect for you and what you do Darke. Superior X: Great points. This situation is more complex than I imagined. In addition I'm having a strange deja vu that I probably presented a similar idea during the Wily Gauntlet and have just forgotten about all these factors involved. KingTiger: That idea is great! Hey Darke, what if we just had threads for each round just for feedback? I can help peel through the thread if you want and collect reviews and we could maybe encourage people in the op to come at it from different angles if they want to? What do you think? Trying to think of something that would be as little strain on you as the event organizer as possible.

Strongly considering going to Magfest this year. I will have vacation time and I would love to come out and finally meet more people that I have not had the pleasure to meet.

Just hours remain Hype builds up to maximum Soon, so very soon

Taking a break between blocks to write reviews sounds great to me at least in theory. I really admire and appreciate everyone who has written reviews for rounds. I just don't seem to have the time to sit down and write down what I have in mind from listening (at least for me, it takes a lot of time & relistening).

Thanks for the review! The reverb there was suppose to simulate a live environment. Apparently I overdid it? Oh well That said, I do feel compelled to point out that the piano part was actually played live by Ghetto Lee Lewis. Could have been the playing style or possibly the sample? Wasn't sequenced tho.

You mean caffeine, right?

Hey Darke, I have a crazy idea for future competitions like this that might be unfeasible but I wanted to drop it by you anyways. Obviously my entry this week was a joke, but I noticed with the way the voting is set up that there is an opportunity to make this a more rewarding experience for everyone involved. It'd be interesting to see something where people could rate a mix out of 5 based on different categories, like production, arrangement, source usage, mastering, etc. Maybe bring in one of the OC superstars that aren't participating in the competition like BGC, Zircon, Will Roget, yourself etc every now and then to give some external professional insight on the mixes on a round. Either just adding this to their top 3 picks of creating a simple form for people to check box out. It would allow people to see where their mix falls short and the areas people liked. Right now, and I had this happen with the Wily competition too, but it kinda feels like you submit your track into a blender and its not heard from again unless you happen to get voted for or participate in the listening party. Luckily people volunteer feedback in the thread, but you kinda have to hunt for it. Its why my team mates dropped after the first one and I think thats why people might struggle to be motivated to keep submitting with the long format nature of this competition. The consistent feedback could help everyone improve on each other and know what areas they should focus on. Under the current voting scheme its extremely unclear what qualities people liked in a track or why they prioritize certain tracks over others, because different people are listening for different things, but the system doesn't really give any insight into what those things are. Overall, introducing a more categorical system for voting I feel would be beneficial to OCR as an organization as well because it can help you guys refine your content creators to publish the highest quality of mixes. There are a lot of really talented folks in here that have areas, that, with proper focus could turn them into truly top tier composers/musicians. I'm no exception. If any of those guys go on to become great film\tv\game composers, you guys can take pride in knowing you helped foster that talent.

Apparently Rainy Turtloid has done so much cocaine he thinks the entire world is out to get him.

Alright guys, I'll take on the group registration. I'll need you guys to PM me your details. Looks like group registration is $40 and will increase to $45 on Sept. 30. I'll keep this open until Sept. 20, so get me your info before then! From what I can gather, I will need from you: First name, Last name DOB email address Zip/Postal code Emergency contact number Your Cell number I will get paypal info from you guys a little closer to when I reg!