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ESTHER'S DREAMS! Mellow VGM ReMixes & lullabies for gamers of ALL ages!! June 29, 2016 Contact: press@ocremix.org FAIRFAX, VA... djpretzel is the founder of OverClocked ReMix. His first daughter, Esther Fiona Lloyd, was born on December 19th, 2013. To celebrate, artists from the community came together for an album of lighter VGM arrangements, centering on themes of playtime, downtime & sleepytime. The end result is Esther's Dreams -- OverClocked ReMix's 59th arrangement album -- a free tribute to video game music that babies, infants, toddlers, kids, adults, parents, grandparents, and young & old alike can enjoy. Except for teens. ...Okay, teens too. Esther's Dreams features nearly two hours of music, including arrangements of The Legend of Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario 64 & more. We hope you enjoy it, and we especially hope that new parents get their little ones to sleep & play while introducing them to some of the best music there is - video game music! Esther's Dreams is available for free download at http://esther.ocremix.org. This album was produced to help promote video game music, the cuteness of babies, and the wonders of parenthood. Esther's Dreams was made by big fans, for lil' fans, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the publishers or developers of the original games; all original compositions are copyright their respective owners. "The response to the call for tracks was tremendous, everyone was super-enthusiastic, and we received enough varied tracks to create three separate discs: Playtime, Downtime, and Sleepytime, with a mini-bonus disc of Sillytime," album co-director Kristina "Chimpazilla" Scheps explained. "We've got music for every baby mood!" 33 artists arranged video game themes as mellow music and lullabies suitable for your favorite young gamers and gamers-to-be, with 28 total games represented including: Animal Crossing Bravely Default Chrono Trigger DuckTales Final Fantasy series Gradius series .hack//Infection ilomilo Kingdom Hearts The Legend of Zelda series Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Pokémon X & Y Secret of Mana The Secret of Monkey Island Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure Super Mario series To the Moon Yoshi Touch & Go; and Zone of the Enders. "Thank you especially to the artists for their inspired work, baby photos (!), and for sharing pieces of themselves in their music," album co-director Larry "Liontamer" Oji said in praise of the contributors. "They've not only come together to do something cool for lil' Esther, her mom Anna, and proud papa Dave as OCR's founder; they've also come together to create music infused with the energy of youth, innocence, love, and family. From our VGM-loving family to yours, enjoy!" 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. ### Download it: http://esther.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Esther's_Dreams.torrent Comments/Reviews: http://ocremix.org/community/topic/43841-/ Preview it:

Preview Esther's Dreams: http://youtu.be/_RO1P0E2jAM Download Esther's Dreams: http://esther.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Esther's_Dreams.torrent Before djpretzel's daughter Esther was born, Dave's sister Emily emailed me wondering if I could coordinate a baby-themed album as a celebratory surprise for the baby shower. I loved the idea and the lullaby focus was an obvious choice. That said, I'm a relaxed kind of guy and took my time; being completely honest, I also didn't want to jinx anything before the little bundle arrived, but envisioning this being released after Esther's successful first year of life really resonated with me and gave the community ample time to come up with some fun and relaxed pieces. We privately shared the community's work with djp for Esther's first birthday, and now that Esther's two AND joined by bouncing baby Sarah, we're finally ready (and possessing enough free cycles -- barely, I've got my own daughter now too!) to release this joyous musical effort to the community at large. When I told Kris about the album concept, she let me know from the start that she'd be involved in a big way, and indeed she was the driving force behind making this happen, always asking for status updates and ensuring things moved forward. In life, the squeaky wheel gets the grease (live by it!), so be sure to surround yourself with good people who won't tolerate you being in a state other than motivated and focused. Kris's idea to segment the album based on energy levels was excellent, and I love how things turned out by going for three different discs, Playtime, Downtime, and Sleepytime. For those of you who are parents with young kids, please let us know if they work as good background or sleep-inducing music for your little ones. Thank you so much to Emily for asking me to make this happen, Kris for reminding me to make this happen, and thank you especially to the artists for their inspired work, baby photos (!), and for sharing pieces of themselves in their music. They've not only come together to do something cool for lil' Esther, her mom Anna, and proud papa Dave as OCR's founder; they've also come together to create music infused with the energy of youth, innocence, love, and family. From our VGM-loving family to yours, enjoy! - Larry Oji (Liontamer) I became a judge on December 13, 2013, and six days later on December 19th, djpretzel became a first-time father to beautiful Esther. During a flurry of new-judge chatting, Larry casually asked if a few of us could throw together some baby-friendly tracks for Dave, to celebrate Esther's birth. Larry was looking for about five tracks, to be completed within two weeks or so. Haha! This was just a few days before Christmas and MAGFest, so the response was lukewarm at best. Busy people, busy time of year. At MAGFest, halc and I hatched a plan to collab on a track from Yoshi Touch & Go that totally fit the bill for the baby concept. We got the track ("Baby Blue Sky") finished by February, but ours was still the only one. Fast forward: one enormous mass-email written by Larry, much bugging of Larry by me, and one full year later, and we had 32 lovely baby-friendly tracks we presented to Dave for Esther's first birthday! The response to the call for tracks was tremendous, everyone was super-enthusiastic, and we received enough varied tracks to create three separate discs: Playtime, Downtime, and Sleepytime, with a mini-bonus disc of Sillytime. We've got music for every baby mood! Congratulations, Dave and Anna, on Esther. She really is the most beautiful kid I've ever seen (besides my own kid, OF COURSE). We hope you enjoy these tracks, and we really hope both Esther and Sarah enjoy these tracks. - Kristina Scheps (Chimpazilla)

Here's the notes that apparently fell through the cracks (though the write-up is now quite funny): "This summer our family has been spotting flowers, which is what this song is about. The lyrics consist of a list of Finnish wild flowers. The arrangement was done together with Birgitta Susi, who sings. We picked some tunes we both liked from ilomilo as sources. She thought Esther might like hearing a child's voice in the song, so there's the daughter and me talking a bit about the flowers in the background." There was a bit in the call-out e-mail about reaching out to artists who weren't exactly obvious choices. I never figured I was one of them! I wouldn't say this was out of my comfort zone but I guess it's different from my previous submissions. Big part of course is that it was co-arranged with Birgitta; we are long-time collaborators. It's great to have the album out!

I'm going to remake 1 song from Ninja Gaiden 3 Castle Rock Entry Hallway into Chip Hop!!! We have a rapper/ DJ duo that remakes NES songs:

The what? lol

Composition, regardless of genre. The false assumption here is assuming that composition is orthogonal (independent) as a concept to production, as if they don't influence each other. In genres like orchestral, the production is simpler because the arrangement takes care of filling the sonic space and providing interest. In genres like EDM, production itself becomes an element of composition as it begins to shape the timbre and dynamics of the music. "Composition" isn't just notes. That's, well, notes. Composition is literally a mixture of composite elements, the notes are primary, but rhythm, timbre, dynamics, articulation etc. are also compositional aspects. There are tradeoffs, and you can supplement deficiencies in one by enhancing another. Complextro, for example, is an advanced form of composition entirely based on rapid firing between different musical fragments with various timbres. Some people would consider that production, though, since it's often done by chopping up and processing different wave files. However, if we're just talking about production as a means to an end, i.e. "mixing and mastering" where we're EQing, balancing, just trying to get an overall good "quality" of sound, that's secondary to composition and its performance. You can still communicate a good idea through a murky lens. What you can't do is expect a bad idea to look shiny through a crystal clear lens.

Hey guys, So I dropped a new song called 'Game Over' over the weekend. I'm pretty proud of this one. I do my own recording, mixing and mastering; and this is probably the most quality track I've ever released. Let me know what you think.

I understand that the violation is for COPYING copyrighted song material, such as complete and/or partial quotes of copyrighted material. Any modification to the original work so that it is different from the original - ie. a parody - is not technically copyright infringement. How different it needs to be depends on the laws of the land. Apparently this is how Weird Al and other parody artists can do what they do. What's your opinion on this, Nathan? True - but it's all fun and games until someone loses a potential buck.

Beginning sounds an awful lot like Cleanin' Up The Town from the first Ghostbusters.

hey, just got to now this amazing piece of software via this forum. been browsing the web for some advice what to do against a dying SID and then landed here. : ) i think this collection is kinda essential - why bothering with dying hardware (and full working hardware gets more and more hard to find) when you can have some perfect sounding and authentic versatile sample library?! i think it is really worth 150 bucks. oh, by the way? is the promo-code still working? guess i need to buy this.... NOW!

I like how the syncopation makes this feel like 6/4, but it's actually 4/4. Birgitta's vocals were nice and upfront; apt and effective!

Alright, it's finally here!

Right. This is Scoring 101. Melody is often inappropriate in many dramatic contexts. But I have two things to say: 1) Just because you can get by in the career by playing some Omnisphere presets or a piano + harp doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. It's certainly the minimum effort way to do it, sure. Subtlety doesn't have to be simplistic, it can still be creative and designed according to thematic sound identity, and a huge sign of a good score is how good its subtle parts are with respect to the rest of it. 2) There's way more to composition than melody. Like, way more. Melody is actually one of the simplest/most exploitative mechanisms in composition; it's everything else that's really advanced/complicated. And sure, you can argue that stuff is unnecessary to get by, too. But I find the discussion on how to "get by" kind of bland and unnecessary. I guess it's worth observing for those who aren't really in the know, but personally I'd never give advice to someone to settle as a "low-hanging fruit" composer, so to speak. Their careers never really go anywhere. No, they don't have to be Bach. But the great thing about creative work is that there isn't some ridiculous dichotomy where everyone is either a super-smart academic fugue composer or someone who plays some drones. There's a lot of in between talent, you know, and that's a perfectly okay place to aim for. I'm not asking people to be the next John Williams, I'm just asking them to put some thought into their work.

I... am confused at how any of this is disagreeing with what I said. Your second point seems to imply that all of those considerations aren't compositional ones, which I explained isn't true. Both "composition" and "production" themselves are nebulous terms, so in my post I clarified that concerns of timbre, dynamic and articulation are counted into "composition" when I say "composition" is more important. Performance is also in there by extension of "articulation", and humanized samples (or a good live recording) falls under performance. But I mean... yeah, there's a baseline of bread and butter production (like, the mixing and mastering kind, not the sound design kind) where you won't get gigs if you're bad. But as a general question, or career advice, I'm kind of confused what the thread is asking for. For career advice, yes, probably bread and butter production trumps composition if other composers serve as an example. But I'd say only to a point, there's a point where it's good enough that the layperson (game developers count too, just because they're paying you doesn't mean they know what they're doing) thinks it sounds good without noticing maybe stray frequencies or a slightly muddled reverb tail and it stops helping. If you want the career to grow and have CONSISTENT gigs (being a composer devs go back to, devs recommend to devs, and composers recommend to devs), you need to create a sonic identity, and that starts delving back into (my liberal referral of) compositional aspects. Would also point out that the film industry example is a little moot, because films (at least ones with budgets for live orchestras you're talking about and proper management, so not indie films) generally have audio handled by a team, and the composer isn't really solely responsible for the production aspects. Obviously the ones who do multiple jobs well are more valuable and see more work, but the way it tends to happen is that there's a dedicated audio engineer(s) making everything squeaky clean. If talking about indie films... the bar is lower (lower than you'd think) for production, considering what a lot of indie filmmakers dig up from licensing websites and are satisfied with. Otherwise, a composer with good production is well-equipped for those in-betweens, tight deadlines, TV, games, low budgets, etc. There's no reason *not* to get good at production.

like most others, I was also a lil cramped in my schedule. Sent Fenix the wip so its better than to hear nothing at all and have the other particpant(s) win by default. Meaningless victories are worse than being completely shutdown in the votes imo since there's nothing to gain from a default win.

alright fine