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Hello everyone! My name is Nate, and my Dragon Warrior arrangement "To Endor" was posted the other day by the staff (thank you!) and, first off, I wanted to introduce myself. But I also wanted to share with people something I've been working on occasionally in my free time, namely sheet music based on early video game soundtracks. I'm actually a copyist by day, among other things, and I was interested in creating professionally notated sheet music based on the direct source of the music. Although I started off doing it by ear, I decided I wanted to be as faithful as possible and notate the music as it was originally executed by the games. Now that I have NSFtoMIDI working on my Mac (using WineBottler) I can bring the exported MIDI tracks into Logic for clean up (the music is squeezed temporally when it's exported, and it also needs quantizing). Once I've done that, I can re-export them as new MIDI tracks and import those into Sibelius or Finale, where I can then proceed to clean up the notation, add some articulations, time signatures, and basic tempo markings, as well as formatting and neatening. Below is a link to a few examples, including March of the Capricious Princess. Although I've added things like accents and slurs when appropriate, everything is as it was originally output by the system. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1snejmgq813sxvf/AAChy7jV8EmvxMyy7lDGamEMa?dl=0 Is this something that would interest people? The idea would be to produce sheet music for tracks that people requested, or even make whole music books for popular (or obscure!) games. I've seen sheet music around, but it is often filled with errors, guesswork, or is difficult to read. Comments? Questions? Hate mail? Lemme know!

Ooh, damn, love the solos.

This is how we'll take over the world.

Having thought it over more, I do know what I don't want for the cover: No bananas. It's a meme, and memes are not appropriate for a tribute album. Nothing with gravestones or funerals. The album is celebrating his work, not mourning his death. No video game characters crying. It's cliched as hell, and again, celebrating > mourning. Avoid any specific religious imagery. I don't know what, if any, religion he was involved with, and arbitrarily assigning one without knowing could be really disrespectful. Better to play it safe. Other than that, I'd not too picky. Remember, the album is meant to celebrate his work, and his life. I'd like you guys here to submit a few ideas. I'm creatively depleted right now, so feel free to throw some ideas at the walls.

Hey hey, I don't want anybody to argue over the artists' gig. If somebody else already had their feet under the table, I'm second in line and I get that. But saying that, I'm totally eager for this job.

I hate you so much right now. I must listen to that song just because you mentioned it. @pmac: There's Unforgettable Silhouette, in which the Burmecia theme is incorporated into. Same with Freya's Theme. It may not be the entire one, but they got the two songs it's part of. Perhaps they didn't feel the need to remix the whole song because of that?

IPS 4.X is responsive, so the need for a separate mobile skin goes away. We'll be upgrading this year, and it will provide the foundation for many exciting new features that we've been promising for years, so I'm pretty psyched. You can preview how it looks, more or less, @ https://community.invisionpower.com/topic/217868-the-world-cup-2006-thread/ You'll notice that on phones, you still get first / prev / next / last, BUT you can also click on the "Page X of X" and go directly to a specific page. After we upgrade the forums, we'll also be upgrading the whole site to be responsive... that should also be this year, so it's going to be a very busy fourth quarter for yours truly!

I listened to this a few times, you guys did great. I'm not sure who controls the mixing + mastering of the whole album, but the tracks fit very well together. Briggs starts out with a really strong track that captures the wayward feeling of journeying around FFIX's overworld, and each track continues strongly. The genres vary heavily but it certainly works, where each track generally has a genre that reflects it. My only gripe is the track "Birth under a Blue Light." It really fails to capture that unique two-sidedness of Zidane being an adventurous vagrant, but at the same time is a soulful, rich and thoughtful character. The acrostic, dark fuzz of an arrangement really fails to capture that. Also, where is Kingdom of Burmecia theme? The Burmecia theme is one of my favorite themes of all time, it's honestly very surprising of all tracks to cut, the organizers thought that that one would be appropriate to not include.

I'm slowly reviewing and editing my reviews of the album's tracks. I just wanted to post my first impressions. katethegreat19 is above and beyond the standout on the album. "Tribe of the Sandy Treehouse" is by far my favourite track on the album, which is ironic since the source material is my least favourite piece from the OST. Brandon Strader has to be applauded for the contributing three amazing tracks to the album as well. My favourite tracks from first impressions, in no particular order: Tribe of the Sandy Treehouse Vamo all Django Lunar Rebellion Craic in the Castle Walls A Rose in the Storm Spirits of Gaia Four Score and Six-Eight Miles and Miles Away Zero World Arxidopitra I'll probably post a full review up in a month's time once I've had a good chance to listen to all the tracks properly.

Neblix already covered melodies rather well, so I'll focus on instrumentation and mixing. There's also rhythms, but I'll let someone else cover that. Let's use Prisoners for this example. 0:00 Right from the start, the drums stand out in a bad way. This is when you need to figure out what kind of sound you want, and design that sound. Drums are often layered, so that eg two snares with different good qualities are combined into the same snare sound, maybe one with a nice strong attack and the other with a nice long body and tail. They are also processed with different effects to make sure they have their own place in the mix... that they're the right amount of loud at the right time at the right frequencies. 0:04 Once the chords come in, the bells are probably too loud and clutter up the soundscape with their shrill sound. I would bring down their levels quite a bit there, and again when the piano comes in, if I wouldn't remove them entirely at that point in favor of a cleaner mix. I could also combine the bell melody with the slower melody that comes in with the chords, to cover that range and bring a bit more rhythm to the track, but that's not mix/sound design. 0:13 The piano is rather loud and rather exposed, and has an annoying reverb. I would soften its reverb. I'd adjust the piano's sound to give it a little more punch, just so I could play it at a lower level and still have it get through enough. 0:30 The bass is panned. Don't do that. Most of the time, the bass works best centered, for both technical and aesthetic reasons. I won't go into the bass' rhythm or melody. It plays on top of the kick drum, and has a similar kind of sound. That doesn't work, because I can't hear the kick anymore after the bass started playing. For some genres, you'd want the kick to peak at a lower frequency than the bass, for some genres vice versa, but you don't want them to fight over the same frequency. This is where you change one of them so it has different qualities, eg stronger sub, punch at a different frequency, brighter overall sound... The synths/samples you use affect this the most, so adjusting those is the best course of action here. Other solutions include transposing the bass, and separating them with an equalizer. 0:48 The trance synth doesn't quite fit the aesthetic. There's also a ton of stuff happening in the track right now, making it a mess to listen to, especially as there is no clear lead. This is both a mixing and an arrangement issue. The mixing issue is best solved by picking a track to be the lead, deciding a frequency range that it's got a clear sound in, and cutting down that frequency a little from the other instruments. It's good to do, but it's not a replacement for solving problems in the arrangement. My guess is that you're using a lot of presets without modifying them much. timaeus already suggesting learning to make your own sounds. Even if you go back to presets after that, you'll know how to adjust those presets to better fit the rest of the instrumentation. Beyond fiddling with the instruments themselves, you should learn how to use effects. the basic ones, the ones everyone into this should know the basics of, are equalizer, compressor, reverb; and most importantly and often neglected: track level (volume). This track isn't that different than the stuff I made when I was 16, except you've turned to people for criticism much earlier than I did, and are taking music courses in college. Learn to identify things you're not happy with, and find solutions to those things. That's how you learn.