Meteo Xavier

It bothers me that a music maker with your level of knowledge in this line of work seems to have ignored the part where not everyone is even physically capable of singing, much less has the proper talent for it. Things like autotune exist to help people in that capacity and unless you quit doing music via software and are using hardware only, don't argue it back.
Something more helpful - MIDI is a universal electronic language that lets you automate music, effects, knobs, etc. between software, hardware, and much more. It's a bigger subject than I could really delve into here, but a good, specific starting point for you is that NO, you do not need a MIDI keyboard. Your audio software should be very equipped to let you program MIDI language, so you just need to learn how your software let you go in to edit MIDI data, learn how your autotune software is set up to accept MIDI data (they're all different in my experience, you just need to refer to the manual) and get to practicing on it.
An example: In FL Studio I have a plugin called "MIDI OUT" that goes into the same list as the instruments I have loaded up. In another instrument, I have to go to a window, have it assign a MIDI channel, go to MIDI OUT and set it for that same channel and now I can control things for that instrument. There are virtual knobs on MIDI OUT and I can assign them (via a universal code set called CC numbers) volume, panning, vibrato and a lot of other things. I program the MIDI language by drawing shapes in a specifically assigned window in FL Studio, like having a song fade in or fade out. If I have described that simply enough, you have a starting point for how MIDI works in a capacity that is relevant to you.

MIDI is kind of a pain in the ass, but if I can learn how to do it, you can. It just takes some practice and memorizing where to assign things. Consult your manual, look up some tutorials on Youtube and practice it. You'll get it.

The Gameboy Advance had a pretty inferior sound chip for ambient-type sounds, and many types of songs in general. Not incredibly fair to compare it to Metroid Prime and even Super Metroid is a stretch as, IIRC, the GBA sound chip was inferior even to the SNES. They did the best with what they had.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before.
Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before.
Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before.
Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

It happens in your 30s. You just keep looking around local and online as best you can and fill it up where you can. Get outside the box and try things you probably wouldn't have tried before.
Pretty hard to be more specific as to what things those are from there, but with the will to move can inevitably reveal the path to get there.

It IS pretty shocking because it gloriously overlooks a lot of key points that goes into that for this context. You guys just see it as black and white and call it protecting your work and its value, I call it chasing windmills and confusing a stubborn attitude for a principle.
Let's figure out how a completely subjective item should be determined an objective value that also somehow has no limit for how high that value should be:
1. What is the value of a single remix you've done? What is the value of your time spent working on this based on your lifestyle expenses and spending habits?
2. What is the estimated value of the tools you used to work on this?
3. What is the estimated value of its potential of exposure?
4. How many times has your remix been played on Youtube?
5. What is the value per video view?
6. Has it directly contributed to additional album sales or music commissions?
7. Have you signed an appropriate tax form relating to your work on OCR?
8. Are you paying taxes or taking tax incentives from your work on OCR?
9. Have the companies you have re-interpreted IP from commissioned you to do so?
10. If YES to 9, what were the contractually agreed-upon payments you are expecting from them?
11. What was the final rating of quality for your work as agreed by committee of the OCR judges and conglomerated public perception?

Now take the sum total of that and apply your state's current income tax percentage.
Go ahead and work on the math there - in the meantime you can answer why you seem to think just doing work itself deserves to be rewarded without any additional context to that point and why you deserve to be paid for work you were not commissioned or contracted or to do and did completely on your own compulsion for a website that was well known to not provide financial incentives for doing so in lieu of simply being a popular passion project for celebrating VGM.

Yessir, that would be a particularly sharp/dirty sounding Saw Lead with some monophonic glide and vibrato modulation on it.
A lot of major synth VSTs will have something like it - Synth 1, Zebra 2, Omnisphere, z3ta 2... Particularly, I think you'll want to get Zebra 2 for that because someone here made some Zebra 2 presets that were based on some of the later Mega Man games and one was a particularly dirty bendy Saw Lead that sounded pretty close to what you're looking for there.
Not the pinpoint answer you deserve, but hopefully that will get you closer to what you seek.

It's when a mommy core and a daddy core decide they love each other very much on the night daddy core forgot to get condoms from the store...

Wait a minute... would it be funnier if I called it "Seiken Densetsu Threever?"

Sorry you feel that way, but that's just how it worked out, dude. Some of it has to do with human error and a majority of it has to do with life simply getting in the way for a lot of people in involved.
Sure, we could've looked at the incredibly slow progress and said, "well, we're not getting this done as quickly as other people who made multi-artist, multi-disc projects on OCR are doing it so, fuck it, let's just quit." - but we didn't. We could've just cut out a lot of material other artists worked hard for to get it done already, but we didn't. Neither Rozovian or myself could've foreseen it taking this long and it wouldn't have mattered if we could - life would've still gotten in the way. That's just how it happens sometimes.
I myself would rather not dwell on things we could've done better or how it SHOULD have gone - I'd prefer to keep going ahead even if its at a snail's pace. This is a passion project and we aren't asking any more of you than just some patience as we keep going forward (except maybe to virtua-sign some red tape, need to confirm with DJP on that). I can't tell you the exact month it's coming out, but it is - we got the music all in and there's just no point in reminding you over and over again that we're working on the administration behind it if we weren't still moving forward to some degree. 
If it's any consolation of any kind, I'm almost done digging myself out of the personal hell this whole year has given me and I expect to have some better time and availability to get back on things that have slipped down my priority totem pole like getting shit back together behind the scenes for SD3. I could give you a lot of specific details as to what those obstacles were for me and Rozovian, but that would be very impolite on a number of levels as well as not being constructive. Please just be patient with us - this isn't like a bad installer that creeks by at the 97% mark and then just freezes up, we will get to the finish line!

I'm late to the conversation, but I feel compelled to comment anyway.
I'm baffled at the extreme reactions this topic brought out in people, particularly those of you getting panties rocketed up the wazoo over not making money for your fan remixes of music.
This line sticks out to me particularly.
"Great, instead it goes to the publisher and probably some to YouTube - who can make money off a totally for fun fan arrangement I made. [...] If there is going to be money involved in fan arrangements, I'd just not bother with OCR or YouTube and licence the tracks myself."
Good lord, dude. Go check your couch cushion, you'll find your royalties there. These things, from my continued experience and reference, really don't generate people much money. You're not missing hundreds of dollars here, more likely, you're missing hundreds of cents. It's not worth getting upset over.
I'm also baffled why so many of you are opposed to Youtube's ads from a financial point of view anyway. Youtube is in the running for the most important, most used and most influential website since time began on planet Earth and has billions upon billions of videos, data exchange and much more that it never asked a penny from you to provide unless you yourself were purchasing advertising on there. Did you really think Google is doing all that for free? If Youtube wasn't doing things like that, there wouldn't be a Youtube where you'd be complaining about your lost royalties in the first place.
It's taking a fair amount of restraint for me to remain civil instead of diving into more far biting, sardonic criticism I feel is better owed to this sense of entitlement from grown ***damn adults with college-level educations. I don't get why you did something for free, without the idea it was going to directly make you money, and then suddenly change that mindset when something changes to make you think you could've directly made (not much) money from it or where that chump change is going. Is it the principle of the thing? That's just something people say when they do something knowing it's not really logical or reasonable in the first place and still want to complain. If it's copyright, Nintendo and Square-Enix and CAPCOM and Konami and NAMCO et al all know how to get a hold of us if they want. If you're worried about copyright, you best stop doing fan remixes in the first place - it's potential infringement from the first note on.
In short, I feel nothing about this warrants the criticism it's receiving. I feel this has at least some to do with my overarching thesis that composers these days are adopting an irrational, ironclad, black-and-white financial defense mechanism for any audio they do no matter the scale or how trivial it is. Very little has actually changed, so very big critical backlashes for it are unwarranted.

Yeah we dove off Cape Rational in this topic some time ago. When it comes to VGM composers and $0.37 being owed, you just can't fuckin' reason with'em.
#truth

Non-profit is not the same thing as a charity. The money being made only goes back to administrative costs and, again, it's really not that much to start with.
DJP has paid more out of his own pocket to keep OCR running all this time than anyone else has been owed anything resulting from it, so again I remain unimpressed with the criticism of it.

I'm late to the conversation, but I feel compelled to comment anyway.
I'm baffled at the extreme reactions this topic brought out in people, particularly those of you getting panties rocketed up the wazoo over not making money for your fan remixes of music.
This line sticks out to me particularly.
"Great, instead it goes to the publisher and probably some to YouTube - who can make money off a totally for fun fan arrangement I made. [...] If there is going to be money involved in fan arrangements, I'd just not bother with OCR or YouTube and licence the tracks myself."
Good lord, dude. Go check your couch cushion, you'll find your royalties there. These things, from my continued experience and reference, really don't generate people much money. You're not missing hundreds of dollars here, more likely, you're missing hundreds of cents. It's not worth getting upset over.
I'm also baffled why so many of you are opposed to Youtube's ads from a financial point of view anyway. Youtube is in the running for the most important, most used and most influential website since time began on planet Earth and has billions upon billions of videos, data exchange and much more that it never asked a penny from you to provide unless you yourself were purchasing advertising on there. Did you really think Google is doing all that for free? If Youtube wasn't doing things like that, there wouldn't be a Youtube where you'd be complaining about your lost royalties in the first place.
It's taking a fair amount of restraint for me to remain civil instead of diving into more far biting, sardonic criticism I feel is better owed to this sense of entitlement from grown ***damn adults with college-level educations. I don't get why you did something for free, without the idea it was going to directly make you money, and then suddenly change that mindset when something changes to make you think you could've directly made (not much) money from it or where that chump change is going. Is it the principle of the thing? That's just something people say when they do something knowing it's not really logical or reasonable in the first place and still want to complain. If it's copyright, Nintendo and Square-Enix and CAPCOM and Konami and NAMCO et al all know how to get a hold of us if they want. If you're worried about copyright, you best stop doing fan remixes in the first place - it's potential infringement from the first note on.
In short, I feel nothing about this warrants the criticism it's receiving. I feel this has at least some to do with my overarching thesis that composers these days are adopting an irrational, ironclad, black-and-white financial defense mechanism for any audio they do no matter the scale or how trivial it is. Very little has actually changed, so very big critical backlashes for it are unwarranted.

It lives up to the hype, and I'm almost certain it'll be even better once it's fully mastered.
I'm still excited to listen to it once it's posted on the site, so stay hype, peeps.

Is this a remix project or literal remakes (taking a MIDI and redoing it with different samples)? If it's the latter, I'd probably be interested if time allows.

You can't make a dev pay $100/minute for music anymore than Samsung can make you buy a $15,000 HDTV. There's no magic trick to landing paying jobs in music - you have to be at the right place at the right time, the right man for the job working for the right people who just happen to have thousands of bucks to spend on a new guy.
Why would they not want to spend thousands of bucks on a new guy for music? Because from a musician's point of view, the music is the most important part of the game, but from a developer's POV, it's one of the least essential components to making a game that might be quality or successful. The fact that most games allow you to turn down or even OFF the music without objectively hampering the gameplay pretty much tells you everything you need to know there. As far as I know, a game has never failed or succeeded from the soundtrack alone. If it does happen, it's very rare. They have to think about more important things like programming, gameplay and, yes, graphics are more important.
I recommend you not think about getting $100/minute without even starting to make money doing music yet and focus more on the art. Don't be "confident" in your ability, keep going and improving, because THAT is the only thing that will help guarantee you make any money at this all (notice I said HELP guarantee). You have to earn that position. You have to start at the bottom doing it for free and peanuts just like the rest of us and earn your equity as an artist. Being hardline about money and payment just for noodling around like all the composers tell you to do is going to stall or even counter your progress.

For the love of God, man, it's a miniature NES with a healthy-ass supply of NES classics right from the get go, accepts Wii Classic controllers, has an HDMI output AND is an official Nintendo product that you have to do nothing but plug it in, and you shit on it?
Such distasteful elitism. The closest thing wrong here is that it's oddly missing some other games on it, but at $60.00 it's such a good deal all the way around that it's a ultimately a moot point.

For the love of God, man, it's a miniature NES with a healthy-ass supply of NES classics right from the get go, accepts Wii Classic controllers, has an HDMI output AND is an official Nintendo product that you have to do nothing but plug it in, and you shit on it?
Such distasteful elitism. The closest thing wrong here is that it's oddly missing some other games on it, but at $60.00 it's such a good deal all the way around that it's a ultimately a moot point.

I'm waiting for... whoever owns Turbografx now to wise up and make their own remodernized PC-Engines or whatev...
...hey, does the Japanese version of the Mini-NES get a different game set? I should look that up...

I'm waiting for... whoever owns Turbografx now to wise up and make their own remodernized PC-Engines or whatev...
...hey, does the Japanese version of the Mini-NES get a different game set? I should look that up...

First off, chill out, this is not a life and death problem. I respect your exuberance, but you're focusing too highly on it and I'll tell you why.
Second off, yes, it could have something to do with the limitation of emulation and just the basic simple problem of recreation from synth alone. Emulated synthesizers often only sound like the real thing at the forefront - most of us who aren't pros are satisfied with it, but people with great listening talent find they don't compare up. I'm not personally familiar with FM Drive or Genny (I do have YM2612 though), but even hardcore professional synth emulations like Arturia don't always match up to the real things they are emulating.
Third off, FM synthesis is famously hard to program and it doesn't surprise me at all that you're having trouble recreating it. I'm not an FM synth guru so I don't know if YM2612 programming is as hard as that holds up to, but I think that's the summary and the real cause of your problem here.
I don't have a very helpful solution for you, I'm just reassuring you that you are not really the problem there and that much of it really is just the limitations of what you're working with. Keep practicing, keep looking for tutorials and asking around synth forums and you will get closer to your goal there. 

Wait, we could've submitted baby pictures to this?
I mean, I don't think you'd want to use mine anyway, but I didn't know that.

Wait, we could've submitted baby pictures to this?
I mean, I don't think you'd want to use mine anyway, but I didn't know that.