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If I'm hearing this correctly, you're saying it's cool for folks like me to continue typing those huge ass dissertations with 47 paragraphs about how dat filter sweep had me feelin some type of way, yeah? hoooly shit, the forums are upgraded as fuck.

I know as well as anyone what that can feel like. The relationship between musician and listener is a complex one though and any insight that can be given to that relationship should always be welcomed in my opinion. I had an epiphany of sorts a short time ago when i was talking with a friend of mine who is also a psychologist. For the record he has a fairly (ridiculously) high IQ and yet he has always enjoyed listening to aural garbage and can't even relate to anything with more than three chords. During one conversation we ended up talking about music with mass appeal and repetitive chord progressions when he said "Most people can't hear chord changes!" meawhile i'm thinking how could anyone not realize that something in the framework of a piece is changing? Does it sound completely static to them? Is that what they are seeking in music they can relate to? It's kind of like listening to that one guy in a crowd trying to clap the same rhythm that everyone else is and he's just not quite pulling it off. And the whole time you're thinking how does anyone not develop a sense of rhythm? Did they not watch enough Sesame Street? This got me thinking about how much you can get away with as a musician or an engineer without the listener even knowing about it. (turns out it's kind of a lot) To give you an example of a key difference between someone with trained vs untrained ears, from an engineer's perspective, people with untrained ears can't detect a change in volume that is less than 5 db. Compared to someone with trained ears that can detect a change in volume within 3db or less. This means you can quietly manipulate the listener's attention without disrupting how they are perceiving the piece of music. It's entirely possible that someone with untrained ears could notice something (or more importantly NOT notice something) that someone else would figure was just "good enough." Such as an entrance for a lead instrument not being attention grabbing enough for the average listener to know it was there. So don't think that because your advice isn't specifically "This is what you need to do in order to not suck" that it isn't valuable in some way. It's possible the advice you give could clue a musician in on something they had no idea about before.

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Well said; I just don't view it as zero-sum, nor do I view "hardcore" gaming as something that necessarily needs to evaporate to let the medium truly flourish. It can't be the standard-bearer for the art form, sure, but I don't think it really has been, for some time... I like the enthusiast car metaphor, because I see a lot of parallels. I'll temporarily invoke some biology/evolutionary psychology and put it out there that males are inherently more aggressive/competitive and enjoy tinkering away for hours on end if it means an inch or two gain in whatever pissing contest is going on. I view this as a double-edged sword; it contributes to disproportionate amounts of male insecurity, posturing, & resource waste, but it also motivates autodidacts & fanatics to push boundaries. You see this in enthusiast car culture just as you see this in enthusiast PC build/overclocking culture just as you see it in hardcore gaming culture, which is related to the latter. Most of us drive cars, and MANY of us are interested in different models & partake in associating our own identity with the brand of automobile we choose to drive - no field of advertising is perhaps quite as saturated with identity politics as automobile sales. Enthusiast car culture exists alongside mainstream car culture; the former is largely male, the latter is uniformly diverse, by necessity. Is this problematic? Can there be niches within cultures/mediums that simply tend to break down along gender lines, or any other demographic lines? I think the answer is a resounding yes.... the only problem is when the enthusiast culture mistakes itself for the mainstream culture, I suppose But see here, if you look at how Anita was expressing herself, it WAS zero-sum... her statements were very clearly NOT of a "gaming needs to branch out & diversify" breed (as Larry rewrote them to be) but rather of a "this type of game is wrong and bad and needs to go away" ilk... thus the reaction. It's one thing to tell an enthusiast culture to make room, that the medium is a big enough umbrella for all types of folks. That's a message I can stand behind. It's quite another thing to tell enthusiast culture that it needs to crawl in a hole and die; this is more or less what Anita and Leigh went with, and it's just NOT necessary, or even desirable.

Hey everyone, it's that time of the year again - the OCR Secret Santa! Signups are now! Just mosey your way over to https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HY_84W7Oj-hM1pz9mYzZ6X6pxso3hp2sjTTfhvM9vwM/viewform?usp=send_form and add in your information and I will add you to the list. Then come back here to post any particular items you would like to potentially receive, or other random finds. An important note: how expensive a gift is should not matter - people have given great low cost gifts in the past, some handmade. Do not let money be a deterrent, as it is not necessary for giving a good gift. Participating: Anorax Arrow Bahamut Bardic Knowledge Capa Langley Cash Chernabogue Cosmic Sounds DragonAvenger Flexstyle Hyperion5182 JaDeARanHaRuNo kitty Koriantor Project Spam OA prophetik music Rexy Supercoolmike Tables The Damned theshaggyfreak wildfire

Some of the shading looks off to me, too. Some parts look like the light is emanating from the TV, others like it's a full floodlight in front. Mario in particular looks like a paper cutout except for his eyes and hand. The shadow cast on Balloon Fighter from Kirby actually makes it look light the light source is off to the left somewhere, and the shape of that shadow is a bit odd. Ness's hand is apparently immune to the shadow cast by his own foot. This is all pretty nitpicky, of course. It's just what stood out to me.

I do it by ear. Most do it via MIDI files found on the internet, I think. I play it in a different position on the fretboard on my guitar or hit shift+up/down after playing it in as MIDI via Keyboard. Finale, Sibelius and MuseScore and basically any notation software out there have functions to transpose sheet music to any key you want.

Thanks for the WIPs, guys! I'll get some feedback out soon; I've been pretty busy.

1) The subtitle should be "A Tribute to Satoru Iwata" 2) I will co-sign on Mario having crazy eyes; and 3) I believe Pikachu's body shape needs another pass, especially because all of the other characters are much more true-to-form by comparison. Good job so far, Odai!

I'll see if I can provide any insight here based on what I remember about my 'younger days'. I do agree with this, actually. I didn't really gain an appreciation for chord changes until two years into my remixing experience (August 2013), and I in fact had had about 9 years of music experience by that time, the latter 4 of which also involved high school choir. Obviously I'd see a lot of chord changes in choir on paper, but apparently I didn't recognize them that well by ear at the time! By the time I got into high school choir, I already had pretty competent rhythm, at least in terms of reading sheet music and clapping it. But when it came to rhythmic accuracy on the level of machine precision (5~50 milliseconds of rhythmic error), I didn't notice that kind of rhythmic error until later in 2013 (December), when I had gotten the experience in composing something very long via live MIDI + rhythmic fixes (a Bohemian Rhapsody instrumental recreation). (That said, I consider myself pretty lucky to have the rhythmic precision I had in high school. It might have developed when I was taking piano lessons from 2004~2012.) Loudness differences is something many people have trouble with, and I'm not surprised at what you said here. I agree that in general, many people who aren't accustomed to listening closely to volume changes have difficulty noticing them, and that 5 dB is a good general mark. I remember that before 2013, I didn't notice that zircon's "Vessel of the Void" as an album AND OCR solo track are both mastered at -3 dB, and if you look at the waveform, it's extremely obvious that someone other than zircon just lowered the volume in an audio editor by 3 dB. By around mid-2013 though, I ended up emailing zircon about it and he didn't realize that someone did that. (He said, "Maybe someone changed it for the project release? Not sure..") As for that second part, I would guess that it might be due to simply being more familiar with what they are noticing. For instance, a hardcore guitarist would probably want to pay attention to a guitar in a rock song to figure out the tabs, while a hardcore drummer probably is trying to figure out the drum rhythm instead, and they may notice errors in aspects which they are respectively familiar with. (When I say "familiar" though, I mean REALLY familiar, and actively listening for and noticing errors in that particular aspect, not just being a great instrumentalist of that sort who doesn't challenge himself/herself to listen to errors within machine precision.) ----- There is some speculation to all this though, as we've all developed particular skills at different times.

I recall there being a study that said you could most often tell if a female avatar in a video game was played by a guy if the character jumps and walks backwards often. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/13/world_of_warcraft_gender_switching_why_men_choose_female_avatars.html Not sure if satire...

I believe there have been some studies that suggest (not conclusively, but being conclusive about something like this is VERY difficult) that heterosexual male gamers often play as female characters simply because they'd rather spend more time staring at a female body than a male one. Personally? Guilty as charged. No shame.

Chern of bogues, you gotta truncate the tracklist down to (1) key tracks, and (2) remove all copyrighted / music not made specifically for the game! We could all remix Under the Sea, or This Is Halloween, but that's not allowed on OCR

OK I'm nearing completion on the front cover now. I've been staring at this constantly for the past two days, and I've lost my glasses to boot. Couple of fine details and I think I'm calling it done. Unless you guys say otherwise

1: Why, if applicable, don't you comment on new mixposts on OCR? I used to leave feedback as much as Crulex some days... Then I ended up working nearly every day for almost a year and disappeared from here. I'd put my reason in the 'over time you will lose people for no fault of your own' pile. As for the workshop forum, I tried posting for a while in there. I had a back and forth with one mixer over a piece, giving feedback as best I could, but eventually I said I couldn't give them the technical feedback they needed -- they'd need a musician's reply instead because I didn't know how to help more. After that, I felt too embarrassed to post anything else there. I may do again, though, after reading MindWanderer's comment here. (I could point out which parts don't work or merge together well.) 2: How do you suggest the number of reviews is brought back up again? A lot of good suggestions so far. As a non-musician, I give mostly 'I liked it! -- especially this bit and that sound!' feedback on pieces I like. But that's not what some musicians want, which is review from peers. That said, I wouldn't use a stick to encourage people who don't review to review. I actually like the review count and badges idea. Of my 350 posts, probably 80% are feedback comments, and I'm proud of that. (To some artists, nothing is more maddening than utter silence, and even if only half my comments perk up someone's day, that's a lot more than if I never posted at all.) It's also encouraging as a reviewer to see a remixer post thank you the week after a mix has been posted. What else can be suggested? Giving people forum titles can be encouraging in that they feel more connected to this place. Like, if someone is in the workshop giving feedback a lot, brainstorm names to give those people even if they're not moderators. (Workshop Helper, Assistant, Tinkerer,... or something less lame. ) On the Shadowrun forums, I remember some of the active people, who often greeted new members, were given the title of "Face" (in game terms, they'd be the social or business face of the party). You need some active people to attract others to post more often, even if the most active people take breaks every so often. Also, I keep a VG music thread on another forum, but so far I've been pointing to the youtube page and not ocr's page. I'll start posting the ocr page link with DJP's write-up alongside the youtube video link.

OOooooh, yeah. The couple of years I've been doing this have been pretty good. Last year, I think I filled up someone's bookshelves with sci-fi books. Hard cover, if I recall.

OCR usually don't, actually. But having a full set of artwork allows fans to print it themselves.

I had a longer response but I'm gonna try again... I don't believe this is an accurate description of Anita's views; her videos actually focus less on storytelling and more on presentation, and she's very plainly demonizing some things being unacceptable to her, instead of criticizing the lack of variety (i.e. well-roundedness). I honestly & truthfully believe that had her videos advocated for "more well-rounded storytelling for female characters in games," that she would not have received 1/100th the hatred and attacks. There would still have been some, mind you, but we know from experience that even posting free VGM arrangements will piss SOME people off, and there's an undeniable vein of misogyny both online (in general) and in the gaming community specifically. Nevertheless, I feel that it was quite specifically the demonizing, negative tone, questionable knowledge of her subject matter, inconsistencies, sex-negative attitude towards objectification, and re-hash of failed second-wave feminist arguments that fueled the flames. A thoughtful analysis on the lack of variety, a critical exploration of the potential impacts (not certitudes, as she expresses them) of certain behaviors/depictions, and a thesis that truly emphasized improvement of the medium... coupled with a stronger grasp of her subject matter... very difficult to see how that would have had the same effect. Her views, as she has expressed them, very plainly deserve a great deal of criticism. Well, there's some seemingly-deserved criticism about lack of creation & following through on the KS on Anita's part, is there not? Especially given the degree to which it was over-funded? Surely this specific criticism can be acknowledged objectively & independent of anything else... As for magically getting a following based on harassment... no, it helps when you are: A member of a group that is oppressed/marginalized in some fashion Doing work that arguably involves exposing/fighting this oppression/marginalization Are able to successfully publicize this harassment in a context relevant to your work That's NOT a list of criticisms/faults, but it explains why not everyone being harassed is getting a following, even if they are creators. If the work they are doing is perceived as somehow relevant to combating the harassment they are experiencing, publicizing attacks can dovetail very nicely into efficient fundraising. It's hard to fault anyone too much for this, as it appears to simply be the new reality - hatred can be monetized, for better or worse. My objection is that this might tend to create situations that make it very tempting to characterize ANY criticism of you or your work as being an attack, or representative of those who have attacked you, to discredit the criticism outright AND to provide further evidence of the challenges you face... which require continued donations. It's not a great situation for meaningful discourse when you continually give your worst, most ridiculous opponents a megaphone so as to make your OWN case, then lump ANY criticism from other outlets into that same group... It isn't admirable.

GG may not have been primarily about "ethics in game journalism," as it has been thoroughly lambasted for claiming, but it also wasn't just about being in "favor" of harassment in the abstract. More of a sociopolitical schism between gamers at large, who are a diverse lot, and game journos, who seem to not only lean hard left, but be okay with injecting that ideology into something that ostensibly should be a little more neutral... if you ask me. No need for a reductionist counterclaim... much of what GG has been associated with, accurately or otherwise, impeaches itself without the need for oversimplification. Speaking as a liberal, I think the medium is rich enough to support works that speak to many different audiences, with criticism & coverage to match. I'm all for resuscitating this thread and seeing where people stand, a year later... as for this movie, well... do video game movies ever work out well? Will nuance even be considered, or are we looking at a feel-good tale of "good" vs. "evil"?