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Shout-out to Jarel Jones aka Arrow for creating midis for a ton old games years ago:

Music is up. Worked a bit on scores today. Will work more this week to get up to date.

Lyrics: verse 1: I'm back in the lab while I brew a new gab with this lyrical jab, concocting a dab of this and that shit that's so fat that the rest will sound flat while they look at just how many addicts we make every day. They can't keep away it's like crack or cocaine. Am I really okay or am I insane but my drug is this music it eases my pain. I'd take a syringe and shoot straight to my veins, but unfortunately I can't get it quickly enough so just hit me. Bear with me I'm sickly from listening day in and day out to music I can't get to leave. So is it just me, or did we hijack this whole compo spontaneously? But seriously, these myths we create will be legendary. It's scary just how far we've come in these weeks, becoming so viral we spread to the streets, with just a few beats from the myth lab. Chorus: Rock Hard Mandrills, Bringing it down, Rock your body, To our hard sound, Verse 2: We go triple bard when our mixes bombard, straight from the yard they call us rock hard, we're the man drills, we got mad skills. Bringing dope ass tunes from the streets to the hills so listen to the sound, while we bring the house down, we don't mess around our lyrics are profound, when this whole thing is over who you think will get crowned? cause it's not gonna be just anybody Well let me see, who else could it be who, maverick ashtley? They do the same thing what, every single week? Comeon don't get hurt but the Rick roll, it gets old. I never wanna lie, just let truth be told. We won't let you down watch our legend unfold You don't have to cry man up and be bold, so lemme say goodbye you punks just got trolled. Verse 3: Will Rock here with another clean rap The Rock Hard Mandrills don't give a crap As we make musical songs on OC Remix with lots and lots of really really cool tricks We've got Ghetto Lee Lewis on the keys And I rock shredding my guitar with ease Jason Covenant brings the big epic choirs And all of us together.........???? Man, Will really lost it at the end. The guy has some anger issues I guess.

Phony Phanto is my attempt at bringing back an old enemy that I'm pretty sure everyone hates. 8F37-0000-0062-807B

I think this is my favorite of this flood, because 1) I love the source material 2) I love experimental music. It's great to hear how the song keeps changing, every new section makes me love this song more and more, and the ammount of instrumentation is truly impressive. Especially love part which starts at around 4:30 - I quite like that glitched thing, no matter what it is. And the percussion near the end is pretty nice as well. Also, creative (and fitting) title. I really enjoyed the song. Great work.

"Never Gonna Give You Up" is definitely growing on me. It's a catchy little tune, and I found myself getting a little smile when it came up in "You Know the Game". I'm finding myself looking forward to it more than to some of the Mega Man X themes. I'll be sad to see it go.

Aw I was gonna give Big Boss a go, but I guess Coop beat me to it. I might look into the others instead.

Yeah you should probably know thats not me...

Will, "flyers", "liars", and "suppliers" are a few examples of words that rhyme with "choirs", FYI

Amazing album! My absolute favorite are (in no particular order) You and I A rose in the storm fixations vamo alla django in the hall of the gangster king save the queen to be forgotten freyas theme doomed lovers zero world ambitious whispers

It is, indeed, our very own Arrow.

Thank you for all that responses everyone, you guys seem to have understand it just right. What Jorito and Garpocalyse said: "to me the sky is the limit and any style and genre is possible" and "you are relying on the humanization inherent in sample libraries and don't really understand how to replicate that in a midi file for a synth" makes sense because synthesizing your own sounds gives you that, no limit, and it's overwhelming, and if you don't understand how to replicate what you're wanting in a synth, makes you quit quickly when you want to try something new, and that stop you from growing up as musician. What Timaeus said may also be true, that my lazyness is what makes me not wanting to stop and make my own sounds, because I always have that "shortcuts" that I can always use to make music quickly. It's my job to work on making sounds now and I should study more other genres, true. Also thanks for your tips as always. And what AngelCityOutlaw said : I didn't meant to say that I want to abandon the orchestral music, because I love it and it's probably what I'm going to use most in the future, I just said that I want to learn more about electronic music to grow up as musician. Your idea of hybrid scores is a good idea and maybe I should try to start doing that and getting more into my "panic zone". Thanks for the example too, I'll try to learn from Zircon some things (he has good tutorials). I'll try to no repeat one same thing over and over again, I hate that, so long live the melody of the songs. And one last thing, thank you Rozovian for the synths and tips too. I didn't know the Elek7ro II but the NoiseMaker was probably one of my first VSTs, but I never thought it could be useful, because I didn't like most of the presets and is just... free. (In my head, usually free = not useful) I tried to reply to everyone so thank you everyone once again

YMMV, but just going to elaborate on some of this with my own thoughts/perspective. I agree that arrangement and orchestration is a great skill. What I think is that the difficulties of traditional orchestral soundscapes, specifically, lie in not the textural diversity of the instruments (because of the more-or-less set structure of the orchestra after its development over the years), but the complex compositional layering. Sometimes you may hear talk about a "wall of sound", which is this idea of complex layering that makes it sound like a large portion of the orchestra is working like a single "unit" to sound big. That contributes greatly to the "completeness" of an orchestral soundscape. You also tend to use cohesive reverb on many instruments so they sound like they're in the same room, meaning few variations on reverb qualities should be apparent and the reverb isn't excessively washy necessarily, so rather than depending on reverb nearly as much to fill in the soundscape as in some electronic arrangements, you depend more on adding particular instruments to fill particular roles to fill in the soundscape. Because of the more-or-less set structure of an orchestra, you have fewer choices to pick from. In terms of arrangement, well, there is the fact that each orchestral instrument is designed to play in a certain way; you can try to bow a regular woodwind or blow on a regular string instrument, but it won't sound conventional. There are more ways you can play synthesized instruments (which don't have physical restrictions necessarily), and they don't usually have as restrictive pitch ranges or as particular playing techniques as orchestral instruments do. As a result, in order to really make impressive arrangements, you have to understand the intricacies of (1) what playing techniques are possible for particular instruments (is it possible for anyone in real life, ever?) (2) which are natural for live players of particular skill levels to do (would they do it in real life? Could they succeed?), and (3) which sound better than others in context, purely in reference to the song itself. That doesn't yet include the chords, melodies, expression controls, and so on that you could do. That overall, IMO, is much harder than finding the right sound to fit into your electronic soundscape and writing the most suitable chords, melodic contours, and expression controls for your synths.

I'm going to offer a much different perspective - Honestly, I find it weird that you consider abandoning orchestral music to be musically "growing up" when command of an orchestra in both the real deal and sequenced is a coveted skill. Not to mention, the orchestra is the most versatile ensemble there is. With just the strings alone, you can write a piece evoking any kind of texture or emotion you can think of without actually having to change or rebuild the timbre of the instruments completely like you'd probably have to with a synth - depending on what you're going for. My thoughts are that instead, you should stick to classical for the moment, but start making hybrid scores. Start integrating synths in your work - maybe take an older piece of yours and try arranging it to incorporate a synth bass or something. This way, the process of learning how to use them will feel much more "organic", if I might dust off the hipster music terms, to you than just throwing yourself completely into uncharted territory and saying "Okay, I used to write symphonies, but now I'm gonna do an acid-breakbeat track that will put the Crystal Method to shame." Eventually, you'll go from "classical with synth elements" to "electronic with some classical elements" and then inevitably "full on electronica". I started by using synths in rock music and that made learning how to do other, completely electronic genres much easier - Worked for me, anyway. EDIT: Though to be fair, when you do get to the stage of purely electronic, you'll realize that the composition of many electronic tunes of the EDM variety are a lot more "bare-bones" than orchestral. Usually, there's not much in the way of melody and the structure often follows this "build-up and breakdown" idea, adding more layers of synths and effects until it breaks down and starts again, rather than a verse-chorus kind of thing (unless there are vocals). An example, is if you listen to something like "Now Is The Time", it's pretty much the same shit over and over, but each time it repeats, it re-introduces the elements in a different order and a lot of the "leads" are more like synth-sound effects. This isn't to say you can't do more melodic stuff like what Zircon and a lot of VGM composers do, but I know I ran into the problem of my songs just sounding "wrong" compared to what I was going for and this was the most obvious thing I was over-looking.

Interesting, I never really realized that MIDI CC has been called "Continuous Controllers" before---I've also seen "Control Change". ----- What it sounds like to me is that you like these orchestral instruments because they're already made *for* you, as if they were "organic presets", and you can just pull them out as a "shortcut" to getting music written relatively quickly (not out of laziness, but ease). With electronic genres and the usage of synths, it basically asks you to put more effort into making or editing your own sounds, but with practice, over time you should end up with a pool of sounds that you can pick from and tweak for context, nevertheless. I understand that these sounds may feel more diverse than orchestral instruments, but if you continue to work with a variety of sounds, you will implicitly be training your ear to pick sounds that match not just by convention but by your own judgments as well. It'll take a while, but eventually you can get your synthesized-sound selection ear up to par with the perhaps more "concrete" task of picking orchestral instruments. What I would do if I were to shift over from writing mostly orchestral music to mostly organic/electronic hybrid or fully electronic music, is: - Find what electronic genres interest you. Drum & Bass (fast tempo)? Dubstep (halftime tempo)? Trance (medium tempo)? A mixture? Other? - Find a synth that you think would introduce you to the sounds you would need to practice writing in the genre(s) of your choice. As I always do, I would recommend Zebra for its diversity in sounds and intuitive workflow (although it's expensive, I truly believe it's well-worth it), or if you want to ease in, TAL-Noisemaker has been recommended several times before by Rozovian. - Practice using that synth, maybe gather presets that have already been made by other people, and perhaps pick ones that you think fit together and organize them. It tends to be that the preset developer tells you outright what genres their patches generally fit into, because it helps them target specific audiences. - Try using those presets in a song and seeing what you can edit in them to fit your context - Maybe try making your own presets that match your "musical identity" if you find it fun to use the synth

Sounds to me like you are relying on the humanization inherent in sample libraries and don't really understand how to replicate that in a midi file for a synth. Get really familiar with the midi tools in your DAW and also learn how to use Midi Continuous Controllers. It takes some careful, slow and repetitive work which is really much more akin to painting sound than playing it but take a passage you think sounds good with your sample libraries and try to replicate the playing down to the smallest detail. It's not going to sound 100% authentic because it's a synth but you can at least get close to all of those details that were recorded in the sample library. When I started that was a huge hangup for me. If I couldn't get exactly what I wanted from playing it for a few minutes then I gave up immediately.

Challenge yourself. For learning synths, make a song using only presets of actual synths (no samples). Think of all instruments in terms of timbre rather than as synths, samples, or recorded instruments. Read about how different kinds of synthesis works. Create an initialized patch of a relatively easy synth. Experiment with it. Make your own instrument patches for it. Make a song with only original patches. Make a song without any added effects so that all the mixing (eq, levels, reverb) has to be done in the synths themselves, preferably in a synth that doesn't have its own effects so you're just using the filter and envelopes and other principal parts of the synth to mix it. I did stuff like that, and I can now create the kinds of sounds I want. I tend to use FM8 these days for most of my synthesis needs, as it suits my style, but Omnisphere and Logic's built-in synths are just as useful. For freebies, I recommend TAL's synths; Elek7ro II and Noisemaker are versatile but not too complicated. FL should have some built-in synths you can use, too.

I essentially approach my DAW as my instrument and embrace the limitless possibilities it gives. So to me the sky is the limit and any style and genre is possible. Sure, that can make it overwhelming at times, but it also makes you grow if you try to do (your version of) a genre you never tried before. I would personally out with something "hey, what if I create a drum & bass or dubstep track"... or "let's create a reggae track", or "how would this sound as a chiptune?". That makes me want to listen to these genres for inspiration, read a bit about general elements and instrumentation of the genre which helps me learn and grow. I also find that doing competitions here is a good way to learn quickly, with short deadlines and sources that you probably wouldn't have picked yourself. It's a great way to get out of your comfort zone. Heck, since becoming more active on OCR I've done quite a few remixes of games I never played and that really helped expand my horizon. So TL;DR: force yourself to make something in other genres

Like hell there won't be.

Sound effects. Great. Not a fan of them, most of the time. They're annoying. There's some cool rhythmic uses of them here, but not enough to make me like them. Not everyone will. The melodic parts here are really loud. If they're high pitched, they already cut through a lot, so they don't need to be as loud. The many shrill, ringing things could be less so. It also sounds like the track is missing mid-range instrumentation. Though the bass get rather high at times, something in the mid range would probably help with the balance. Sound design seems to draw a lot from the fm synthesis of the original. Cool. It runs the risk of being cheap sound design, but I think it's a cohesive sound design aesthetic, so I don't mind. Structurally, this track is all over the place. On the whole, the sound design and recurring elements keep it together. Source is there, and I like the arrangement. But there are parts where it feels a bit aimless. The big change at 2:02-2:12 is one of the stranger parts of the track, but it soon finds some familiar elements again so I don't think it's a big problem. A more clear direction might help, but that's difficult to create out of an existing arrangement without messing it up. Mixing is a mess. I have concerns about other parts, and I don't like sound effects, but I don't think the other things are problematic to the extent the mixing is.

Finally throwing my hat into the ring on the making side rather than the playing one. Eversion: FD0B-0000-005B-0E90 If you've played the indie platformer by the same name, you have some idea of what to expect, though obviously this Mario-based take on it is far less terrifying in the upper numbers.

I'm pretty sure they're some Xbone peeps in here. Don't know if they'll respond tho.

So as you can tell from my account, I'm not at all a newbie to OCR. I just recently logged back into my account to see some 7 year old posts from 2008 asking the community about composition and the sort. Looking at my questions back then, and how misguided and innocent they were (I would have been 14 or so years old), I absolutely CANNOT BELIEVE the positive response I got from the community. I wanted to thank everyone for being so kind, in fact, DarkeSword, I believe some advice from you was quoted in that thread! Now, I am returning to the community (after listening/lurking since middle school back in 08 - lol), an Ableton user who has recently taken it upon himself to learn how to make music. I've been about 15 months into it now, and I hope to add some remixes to the community soon! My soundcloud is http://www.soundcloud.com/o-c-e-a-n-b-o-i Hope to make some tunes with some of y'all soon!

Nothing new to add from me after the detailed stuff above--it's solid, has a couple issues but definitely above the bar. YES

The string and woodwind samples were good, but they each had their brief moments where they strained for realism. Wasn't a big enough deal to timestamp, because it wasn't a big issue. Really wasn't feeling the mixing of the woodwind interplay from :49-1:05; the two parts were stepping on one another in the same frequency range. The string and light vox stuff at 1:05 was mixed much better. Other than those more minor criticisms, this was a straightforward but solid take on the Twilight Princess Light Spirit source, with the SoS and RoS cameos smoothly and tastefully woven in. Good job, Kyle! YES

Good stuff... a little simple, at times, in a way that seems underdeveloped and not stylistically minimal... for example, at the end, I really wanted that harp to glissando, or at least strum, as that's one of the "neat things" that harps can do that helps define their sound & their relationship to other instruments. Simple plucks are nice, and can be very dramatic, but they work best when contrasted against the more elaborate playing styles the instrument is capable of. In gamer terms, it feels like the harpist was nerfed, in other words... My second observation is that, while attention HAS been played to dynamics, I think you could do even more. Right now the dynamic shifts are something like a 3 in magnitude/contrast, and they could easily be more like a 9... if that numerical abstraction doesn't help: velocity is one way of achieving dynamics, but with sustained woodwinds and strings, you need to think about each note and how its volume can (and should) change over time. Pull the strings way back for the solo/duet wind parts, for example, and within those parts, have melodic lines that flow from one note to the next with a volume curve that feels more natural, like a human being is breathing into a tube/pipe, not pressing a key on a keyboard. The mod wheel is generally your friend for stuff like this, but you can also draw in curves after the fact in your DAW of choice. A good mantra is: "Dynamics are not just between notes, they're within each note," especially for a genre/style like this. These two things, very specifically, are what can make a good ReMix like this one into a great ReMix, so I really hope the feedback is digested & considered for future arrangements. That being said, what's here is pleasant, well-constructed, and enjoyable... there's room for improvement with regard to the above two points, but I still think this passes muster. YES

I adore Twilight Princess, but I hadn't realized how awful the fake vocals are in that theme until now! Haha! Your version is so much nicer! I like the oboe lead, the sample is used well enough. Between 0:49-1:05 , the oboe lead and flute countermelody end up stepping all over each other, though. I like how you wove Song of Storms in, although the piano there sounds a bit stiff. Requiem of Spirit following with the bell is very nice. Nice use of choir samples. I like this overall. I wish you had changed up the violin chord progressions even just once, but the melodic variations of the leads gives it enough variety and the arrangement conveys emotion well. The violins are sounding a bit loud and up-front; a touch less volume and more reverb would put them better in the soundscape. Still, this is lovely! YES

Ok, I want to apologize for holding up this project. It's my fault not Swifthom's. I've just have too much real life stuff in the last year to do music or really be involved here much. I'm moving mid-June, once I do I'm pretty sure I'll have a lot more free time on my hands. Just wanted to drop in and do some 'splaining.