Liontamer

Uh, just because someone's very good, they shouldn't be allowed to compete? No reason to psyche yourself out. Anyway, everyone is eligible. The only people ineligible are the contest judges, i.e. Seth, Michelle, djp and myself.

We may be doing PAX, otherwise I might have tried this.

Both bands are excellent. You don't have to like Armcannon, but you don't need to hyperbolically shit on them in order to make your point. You've clearly never heard Armcannon's stuff, including their latest album, if you're claiming they never use interpretation in their arrangements. We're not gonna get into a big dramarama over which band is better or the best.

Dedicated thread! http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=24134

Founded in 2006, Kongregate is a place where independent game developers, artists and musicians collaborate to create great new Flash games, upload them to the site and then share in the ad revenue. For example, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix lead designer David Sirlin also designed Kongregate's first premium game, Kongai, which has over 6 million plays since being released last year. Kongregate is now teaming up with Scion for their Artistic Intersection Contest to offer talented musicians the chance to win BIG, including a US$5000 grand prize of a digital music studio, just for exercising their creativity! Join the hunt now by heading to Kongregate's Sound Collabs contest page, powered by Scion: http://www.kongregate.com/collabs/sounds Many of OC ReMix's musicians are professional-grade artists or industry professionals, so you guys are a great fit with Kongregate Collabs' goal of bringing people together to create games! Upload & submit your own original tracks meant for games and through Tuesday, July 28th, FIVE musicians EVERY WEEK will take home a US$100 cash prize for having the highest rated tracks and will also be entered into the grand prize round, where Kongregate's expert panelists will select one lucky winner of a brand new home studio setup! Take a look at what you can walk away with: Artistic Intersection Contest: Sounds Category Grand Prize! (US$5000 value!) Apple 15in MacBook Pro (including 4GB RAM, 320GB hard drive and Apple Care support) Ableton Suite 8 Akai APC40 Akai MPK25 Presonus Firebox AKG K240 MKII headphones Kongregate and Scion also have a corresponding Art Collabs contest for visual artists with more huge prizes, so be sure to spread the word to every creative mind you know today! Good luck, everyone! Links Kongregate Sound Collabs, powered by Scion: http://www.kongregate.com/collabs/sounds The Artistic Intersection Contest, for both musical and visual artists: http://www.kongregate.com/pages/scions-artistic-intersection Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com Scion: http://www.scion.com Kongai: http://www.kongregate.com/cards

You buy! You buy!

If your driver's license says male, I'm gonna kick your ass.

Love that song. Glad he can't touch the kids anymore. Sorry, MJ, not your fault your were mentally gone.

http://tzone.org/~llin/psf/packs2/FF7_psf.rar - 416 "One-Winged Angel" Ohhhhh. OK, NOW I get the usage on this; thanks a lot, Cain. That 8-note melody at :54-1:10 of the source is also used beyond the intro as the light vox backing pattern from :45-1:06 (would have made that louder) and the backing tone from 1:07-1:29, so there was always something connecting this to the source while the more overt OWA interpretation was going on. As soon as you make out that connection above along with Cain's other comparisons, the source usage is obvious. OWA's such a long track, it was hard to get a bead on it. Meanwhile, the latter half of the arrangement had a lot of very brief source references and chopped up usages of the source. The guitar work was liberal, but generally connected, moreso than what I felt Palp gave credit for, but it's not really a big deal to me, as there's more than enough source usage combining the foreground and background usage. I had no problem with the volume. It was loud, but it's meant to hit you in the face. Really glad to sign off on this one. Keep kicking ass, Jack. YES

Really smart arrangement. It really expands on the source nicely and is a great example of doing a lot with a little. Excellent ideas on the whole; welcome, Dennis!

Marathon - "Flowers in Heaven" HALO Original Soundtrack - (06) & (17) First things first, my source usage breakdown. The track was 3:41-long, so I needed 110.5 seconds of source usage for the arrangement pass: (:07, :09, :12, :15, :17, :20, :23, :25, :28, :31, :33, :36, :39, :41, :44, :47 - "Flowers in Heaven" dum-dum-dum string pattern adapted to drums) x ~.75 seconds for duration = ~12 seconds :49.75-1:32 ("Flowers in Heaven" melody) 1:49-2:33 (:00-:15 of "A Walk in the Woods" - e.g. 1:49-2:00 simplifies :00-:08 of the source, then 2:00-2:11 uses :08-:15) 2:44-3:00 (:42-1:03 of "The Maw") By my count, that's about 114.25 seconds of source usage. I'm not counting the "Flowers in Heaven" reference after 3:00, because it's way too liberal and just not overt enough in the slightest. That said, the arrangement is still an easy pass for me once I (finally) made the A-to-B connections. Thanks to Nick for providing his breakdown. He didn't give me ALL the information I needed, especially for isolating usage of "The Maw", but once I did my own checking, it was fine. Really intelligent interpretation with a great mood and a solid weaving of the themes. The thing to keep in mind, NONE of these source themes are super memorable or possessing big hooks and Nick's style is subtle, so it's easy to not make the connections. I certainly didn't and that's part of why this track languished on the panel. But the connections are there and are actually very direct. I really don't think this merits a NO on lack of source usage or lack of overt source usage. On the production side, I'm sure there could be some tweaks as suggested, but this was definitely fine as is. The textures were excellent, and I'm loving it. I definitely encourage NOs based on arrangement to do another check against the sources and reconsider their votes. YES

The structure definitely doesn't pull off the "Far and Away" style completely effectively, but I can live with it. I don't think that's the main problem, and the arrangement is fine. I also kick Jesse in the face for not realizing the entire break section is the second source that I linked. But yeah, while I don't agree with Jesse's arrangement reasons for going NO, I'm not feeling as generous any longer with the conditional YES. I'm taking another listen and there's just too much wrong with the production where it would take too much effort to lift it over the bar, rather than some straightforward tweaks that could be implemented to get the balance & mixing sounding right. I think it's a solid enough idea that's just not executed to it's best, and as long as you continue to learn & improve, you'll look back on this in a year or two and wonder how you thought this mixing sounded OK. If this doesn't make it, move on. It's just not working right now for reasons previously stated by the other NOs. Very sorry to drag this out, but when something is middle of the road or a close call, that's means it winds up on the panel for a long time. NO

I do like that too, as far as the color scheme goes, but Jose's hit you with the info a lot better. Getting Dave to give me feedback on what he would tweak with José's art is like pulling teeth (i.e. he's busy and this, understandably, isn't a top priority). That said, I'mm nag Dave though so we can move fwd with something this summer.

As long as the original files aren't modified, distribute away. That's kosher for VGMix as well.

Caught up with comments and additions as far as I can tell. Danke.

Just got off the phone with Brandon (Harmony) to confirm that he's DOWN with being there at 6PM for the show to help with the meet and greet as official OCR representation!

Brandon & Jose, mail me ASAP. larryoji@ocremix.org Sorry about being MIA on tickets, but not enough people were locked in, so that's OK. The group rate is only a couple dollars less, so don't feel like you missed out on the sale of the century (which was a cool game show, BTW; I'm dating myself). I'm not able to go myself because I got called down to Atlanta for a job interview this past weekend and am there until about July 1st. That said, I'm not in a position to be the one organizing things, but will help where I can. We still have a good group looking to go, and I encourage y'all to make it out, because OCR & MAGFest are doing the meet-and-greet at the venue before the show and will be hanging out! EDIT: Dave (who is posting below) smells.

You da best, mayne!

Yeah, as long as the majority of the arrangement uses the source tune and it laid out cohesively, feel free to structure it how you want.

Yeah, that's fine, Phil! That kind of stuff is hunky dory.

Nope. Twitter's downtime is today, the contest is tomorrow, so we should be free and clear to give away some SEGA stuffz!

Got a breakdown from Nick that's worth checking out up top. I'll try to (finally) get to this weekend. Sorry this has taken so long, Nick! We still love you!

Nope, you're NOT supposed to sample the original tracks, you're supposed to create an arrangement from the ground up. A little bit of sampling is OK, but it can't be a case where if you removed the sampling, there'd be no other connection to the original music. We did link the MIDI pack to use as a reference if you need it. There's definitely no BPM requirement, so uptempo or downtempo, it's all your choice!

THIS WEDNESDAY, June 17th, we're teaming up with SEGA Europe to give away SEGA swag in support of the US & European releases of the innovative music/rhythm game Let's Tap, out this week for the Wii! Along with other goodies, we've got THREE copies of the awesome Let's Tap official soundtrack that we want to hook you up with! The contest is open to EVERYONE worldwide! (NOTE: It's throughout June 17th according to GMT-4/United States EST time. That may go into Thursday, June 18th for you Japanese, Australian and other Eastern hemisphere fans!) In order to qualify, YOU HAVE TO BE FOLLOWING THE OCR Twitter, and then respond to our open-ended questions including the #LetsTAP hashtag! Meanwhile, I'll be randomly selecting winners from the responses! Remember, you have to be following http://twitter.com/ocremix to have your chance to win! Be sure to join us for this 1-shot OCR/SEGA Europe "Win Stuff Wednesday!" And be sure to follow http://twitter.com/SEGA for the chance to win cool SEGA merch EVERY week with their Free Stuff Fridays! Links Follow OCR on Twitter! Follow SEGA on Twitter! SEGA Europe Let's Tap