Meteo Xavier

There's no other way to be about it except blunt: a Kickstarter or crowdfunding thing is very much not recommended for three reasons: 1. If Square-Enix hears about it, they will likely C&D it. Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster or whatever it's called is still fresh and enjoying sales and companies are hotter to protect their copyright from anyone and everyone than ever. That's IF your project is any kind of success and bringing money in, which unfortunately is unlikely because: 2. Much of the world right now is under a LOT of economic instability thanks to gas prices, Ukraine defending itself from Russia, 500% overpriced rent, 2 years of COVID complications and counting, great resignation, cryptocurrency collapse, etc. etc. one right after the other. Whatever spare money people have right now is not going to projects by indies with no experience before for the straight and simple reason that: 3. The general public is pretty sour on Kickstarter projects now. After years of many, many projects with loads of hype coming and failing to deliver (or even be released), Kickstarter has burned a lot of people and made them weary to trust any new ones. Very few people can get any kind of traction on crowdfunding anymore unless your product is a household name made by official people only, and even that has burned more times than not (Mighty No. 9, Cans Without Labels, Project Phoenix, Retro VGS, the list goes on...) It's so much work and gambling to get such a thing going that you might as well use that time and energy to raise up the necessary funds yourself the old-fashioned way - save it up or get additional work hours/job for it, build it, and release it then without having the pressure of backers weighing you down.

Definitely placing importance on the track title is the right way to go. Somewhere in the nebulous study of what gets people to listen to what music and make it a hit the song title makes a difference, but not much can be said on that beyond "It needs to be kinda unique and rolls off the tongue well." Me personally, I go way the fuck out of my way to make song titles as original and "interesting" as I can with various levels of restraint. I can't stand the idea of any song I title being something cliche, trite or not having had the creative effort put in. Some are absolutely ridiculous, like my Sonic 4 remix, some are intentionally pretentious and designed to give a feel of "I don't know what I'm going to hear, but it will probably be substantial somehow", like my ESPERS album, and some have specific thematic patterns, like my Saturn Icarus soundtrack where all the tracks except the first and last track have extensive wordplay on things to make it bring to mind an 80's cyberpunk sci-fi environment along with additional verbage in parenthesis to give the listener a broad outline of a story concept that they can imagine while listening to the tracks. Titling your songs interestingly shows a sense of mindfulness for your art project and demonstrates further levels of artistic credibility for the project itself. This is good for long-term artistic credibility, though, predictably, a lot of will be lost on the chaff that is intrinsic to the population on Earth. I specifically have a policy of naming my videogame tracks something fitting but non-indicative so that it doesn't spoil anything in the game. Artists that are consistently awesome with song titles include the following: Peter Gabriel Motor Sakuraba Paul Simon King Crimson Modest Mouse The Smashing Pumpkins System of a Down And many others that I can't be bothered trying to remember. Point I'm getting at is this: BUY MY MUSIC YOU MUTANT HOBODICK

I love this. I don't remember the last time I so completely identified with and resembled a manifested version of a music concept as this. It is systematically unholy, deeply disturbing in the spiritua personae, and precisely what a sinful world and an infernal bottom feeder like yourself deserves. "Ye though I balk through the Rand McNally of the shadow of deaf I shall bear no eagle for thou fart with me." ~ Yasunori Mitsuda, 2003

People who write useful content get to jeer others. You are not one of them. It's one thing to be useless and brainless, it's another to defend it like a trolldick on 4chan.

Your DAW should have each instrument effects channel a set of things that include stereo width and the ability to turn it all the way to zero. Turning it to zero should be Mono, not just keeping them in the middle. Failing that, Soundspot has a cheap plugin (or was when I bought it, not sure what it goes for now) called "Focus" that has a very easy Mono option on it. It's big, it's unambiguous, you just click it on and it's narrow and Mono. It's useful for some other general sound improvement as well, so I'd recommend getting it anyway.

^ Those points of "advice" are so general and devoid of details that they are completely useless. I have to wonder why you bothered writing anything at all. Actual advice: Keeping frequencies and things like that "even" is a persistent challenge in audio that is pretty much the entirety of mixing in the first place. By NOW I've been doing this long enough and have gotten good enough (especially compared to my first Ocremix here) that I can throw around some weight in authority on the subject, while still "hillbillying" my way through it since I still lack formal training beyond spending 15 years trying to get better obsessively. That is the pretext for me telling you what I do to achieve results: 1. EQ can be simplified here (in my own personal, unpatented and unofficial model) as three things: The Floor (the bass), the Body (the mid) and The Voice (the highs). The bass literally brings to mind a stage floor for the performance on the stage. The Body is the "stage presence" and gives the soundscape a kind of "muscle" to the overall sound. Take down a whole bunch of the mid in your EQ to hear what I'm talking about. The Voice is rather obvious: above the midpoint is where most melody and leading sounds come from above the floor and body. You'd think "mud" would come from the floor, but I find it usually comes from the body below the midpoint. When I'm cutting "mud" from the mix, it's between 100 and 500. Additionally, I find a lot of instruments that come up in DAW are already very bass heavy and muddy. Sixto Sounds used to make fun of me for this, but I also recommend cutting some bass out of the bass instruments themselves. As silly as that might sound, you just need to do it sometimes to achieve the right balance. 2. I never learned how to use Reverb properly and I still have trouble with it, but there are some solid fundamentals I can pass on. 2a: Find the amount of reverb or general sound you want, then go straight to DRY. Then add WET (i.e. adding reverb amount back in) slightly and slowly until it sounds like you're achieving a balance that isn't too echoey or out of touch with everything else while always opting for it sounding too dry than too wet. I only had one college class for audio production and it wasn't even the right class, but my professor said something that (pun intended) resonates today: "You're supposed to make reverb sound like you're not using reverb at all". He was a goofy-ass guy, but this was spot-on. 2b: Not all reverb plugins are equal. While there typically is no such thing as a bad reverb plugin so long as it provides any reverb at all, not all reverb plugins and sounds work for everyone. If you're getting too much mud and slush from your reverb stuff, you might need to go looking for a reverb that does sound like what you want. 2c: For instrument channels that you're using reverb with, a delay effect should be on as well. The trick here is to put it on a very basic 3-step delay, then turn it down to like 3% or 5% where you can't hear the instrument bouncing off the sides (unless, of course, you want it to be bouncing echoes like many instruments in modern productions do). This is a trick to finalize wetness that I learned from Rozovian, who in turn learned it from bLiNd, IIRC. I use a delay effect on practically every channel except the main bus (main channel for all instruments). 2d: Some reverb effect plugins let you EQ the reverb itself, but I find this effect is much more subtle than it might sound. If reverb is sounding too muddy or slushy, you need to fix it in the instrument channel, not the reverb plugin. The reverb plugin is just for minimal tweaking after the real work in the instrument channel. 3. In heavy, thick productions, the bass instruments should have their stereo separation reduced to straight up MONO and then very slightly adding some stereo back in, or not at all. Between the bass and drums, it's the drums that need stereo placement and width and keep them wide while focusing on a narrow bass will fit the floor correctly. I also add a compressor on the bass. I use FL Studio 11 and I just use the FL Studio Multiband Compressor on "Mastering 2.4db" preset, then style the EQ and mixing channel volume as needed. I read this bass tip in some random audio mixing book years ago at a Booksamillion and it has worked ever since. 4. Checking to see which instruments/frequencies are wrong during the song production is just a case of experience with successfully doing it. You won't really know what to fix until after you've already done it right a few dozen times. If I have trouble with this, I just mute and single out the instruments starting from the bass up (or wherever it sounds like the problem is) and automate volume or EQ as needed until it no longer makes me think something is wrong with it. 4a: This deserves it's own line, but learning how to automate the volume levels and EQ frequencies in your DAW is essential. It's complicated and a pain in the ass to do, but it's easier than other hillbilly methods of fixing stuff. If I had learned to do that in my early days, I would saved myself dozens of song headaches. 4b: Also remember that most instruments and frequencies are not supposed to have the same volume and intensity all throughout the song. Sometimes the bass is supposed to be pulled back, sometimes the piano or guitar have to become inaudible, etc. Sometimes being uneven is what makes it sound organic and makes it work. And that's all I feel like typing. Enjoy.

Hell's balls, I just missed Jennifer Lopez apparently taking note and quoting me in a response here. Another big break for my career missed. Damn you, Abrahamic Gods!

I deign that in this accursed era that flows ennui from the bastard supernicae denoma like the great floods of Egypt swelled the fertile Nile River and expunged the primordial populations from this most wretched mortal coil, a single ray of hope escaped from the insane gods' wrath and pierced the miasmatic heavens to deliver unto us, the forsaken children of Earth, a bounty and a blessing from benevolence long forgotten and twice forbidden in our realm of that mysterious solvent of order that, while barest in its presence nevertheless succeeds, in holding together the universe that our monolithic forefathers forged from the blood of their combat, the tears of their shared tragedies and the sweat and spermatozoa from their beshackled and beshriveled loins. My compatriots and fellow forsaken children, I present to you:

Don't you miss the days when topics like this were the norm here on OCR? You'd think our succeeding generation would do some of their own, but no, they just want to do music competitions it seems. 🧐

Well, you got what you wished for, Dusty. Now we're doing crypto and some kind of ungodly thing called "RE-fungible tokens" that are already giving me more ulcers than an army of Yasunori Mitsudas defecating in 7.1 surround. And he's probably got the bass toilets mic'd BEHIND the listener so the BRAAAM farts are piercing in the mid-highs and a reverb so wet that I bet he peed on it.

Probably need some more information before worthwhile answers could materialize here. "What advice can you give me?" for something like this is too broad to really go with even if you're not expecting to make money off of it. We would need to know what you feel like you don't know or know enough of before starting your publishing plans.

I wonder if this is why one of my Xbox 360s suddenly RROD'd without warning recently. It cannot be a coincidence, it can only be an ominous forerunner of the horror to come...

Yes, there's lots of demented Mario fanimation on the YouFace TwitSpace Interwebs, well here's another. Happy 2022. I don't have anything to do with this video, but it does have some interesting sound sample work in it that I'm sure damaged a few eardrums along the way.

You might have some way to extract the MP3 from the game, or take a video of the game while the music's playing, then extract the MP3 and try to upload it around to some of these online "song locators" to see if that helps. It kinda sounds like it might be stock music anyway. Ahh, this sort of thing brings me back to the late 90s when I had this enormous spirituality-meets-computer-technology thing fueling my spirit. We got our first Mac computers at our mom's house over those years and we were big into the whole 90s Shareware scene where these nowhere-near-professional games had these disproportionately great tracks in them. T-Maxx by Peter Wagner was the first of these I got acquainted with and is still in the Top 10 greatest music things I've ever heard among 50,000 pieces of music. Then there was KittenShaver 2, Exile (the first two original games had one little track each because Jeff Vogel hates music in games for some reason), Realmz (which is kinda tied to Exile). That era was probably stepping stone #3 leading me where I am today.

The Korg M1, which was the primary instrument used in Donkey Kong Country, has loads of industrial/machine-type sounds like you're looking for. Korg has a VST of that available.