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It is with great pride and joy that I release the tenth An OverClocked Christmas album today. Thank you to everyone who participated and tried to participate. Thank you to everyone who listens to the wonderful work of every single musician involved. Without all of you, there would be no An OverClocked Christmas! Thank you, and enjoy the album! Get it here: http://williammichael.info/aocc/index.htm

Hey guys, Another update--I'll also be performing with Austin Wintory on Friday, and for the GANG remix competition with DiscoCactus, and I'm doing a panel about making big collaborative arrangement albums Thursday at 8:30 pm! I'm a busy boy~

I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS GUY IS BUT HE KEEPS SENDING US MUSIC... (don't know source that well) - djp -- OA Skies of Arcadia - "Blue Skies, Pirate Surprise" Source: Blue pirate's ship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNKWn8nxu_E It's a dance rock version of the Blue pirate's ship. THis was a fun game that I enjoyed a lot in the early 2000's, even though the encounter rate was super high. It was fun to explore and find cool hidden places, and the constant battles were made bearable by me doing 5 pushups for every battle. Literally thousands of pushups later, here is the remix!

I tried the wonder trade once just to see what it was about and sent my level 2 caterpie (was just testing), and got a mimikyu holding a master ball in return. Felt pretty bad to get something awesome and trade something so lame away. I'll definitely send out some good stuff to try to realign wonder karma here.

This was entertaining. Interesting mental image - something between Mario Kart and How High. LOL I get why you liked the soundscape, but I'm with S4L on this. You have such definition and clarity with the rap compared to the rest of the soundscape that the background and beats seem more muffled than they should, IMO. Some clearer kick and snare or at least a bit more boominess with the percussion you have here would really help the soundscape back up the 'power' of the rap. I like your idea of letting the voice shine through - but I don't think a little definition to the background is going to steal the spotlight.

Great to hear some love for the MSX and for Aleste. I did quite a few MSX remixes and even Aleste remixes, so I can totally relate. Heck, I think I even did a cover of this on the MSX, years ago I like the EDM approach you took, sounds good to me (in so far I can judge on my Macbook speakers). Of course the source track is pretty short, so that makes it a bit harder to make a full remix out of it. The intro and outro might be a tad long; it takes about 1 minute before the source really starts kicking in and becomes recognizable in stead of just hinting the source, and the same goes for the ending. Would have been great to have some more elements of the original track spread out over the intro and outro for more nostalgia. Other than that, I enjoyed it, thanks for sharing

@noTuX, it is! @pu_freak, i'd love to hear it. get me a WiP and it's yours.

I'll be attending as part of the Radio Hyrule party this year!

And that wraps up the Christmas album for 2016. We ended up with 8 tracks and I'll be sending the package to Dyne shortly with the final art and all the MP3s tagged. Gotta give props to everyone who finished and tried to finish their tracks this year. Thanks for taking part

Deconstructing old sequenced music and listening to the separate components is one of the most interesting things you can do, and an extremly efficient learning tool. Not just for learning how chiptunes were made, but just growing and becoming a better musician in general. Elements that sound very simple and detached on their own but fuse to become more than the sum of their parts, or just knowing when to kill your darlings (like getting rid of the root note of a chord to save channel space, which the bass is already playing anyway) is not just a chiptune thing but also arrangement 101 and ultimately a means to getting a well balanced mix (since arrangement and mixing is largely intertwined). I feel as though it's a skillset that is becoming more and more rare in today's production climate. Top-tier arrangers do this kind of stuff all the time even when they're not beholden to technical limitations. I think it's worthwhile for any musician, no matter what genre, to dabble around with chiptunes. And by that I mean specifically working with getting the most out of these constraints and not just resorting to "bleeps and bloops" which is the usual reductive thinking applied to this type of music. It's such a great way of training yourself in these elements and really start thinking actively about them overall. I have provided 2 "stem" archives for some Genesis soundtracks I find technically interesting, by just isolating the channels and rendering them into .wavs so you can load them all up in a DAW and thoroughly analyze what's going on in them. You can do this yourself using the [url=http://www.smspower.org/Music/InVgm]in_vgm plugin for Winamp with anything from [url=http://project2612.org/]Project2612 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Thunder%20Force%20IV%20Stems.zip Notice how the rhythm guitar here is split up into 2 layers with different sounds. One for mids and one for treble. Then these are "dubbed" once again and panned (as well as detuned slightly for a chorus effect), taking up 4 channels in total to create this huge wall of guitars that is pretty much equivalent of a fully fledged studio metal production. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Devilish%20Intro%20Stems.zip I really like how the simple PSG squares synergize with the FM bells here to create a very vibrant sound. You can also hear how the "choirs" are really the same kind of synth string section you often hear on the system, but it just has this fast upwards pitch bend in the attack which adds this kind of formant quality to it that we usually associate with voices.