Liontamer

I don't need to hit them up, but AFAIK, they had both parties record their separate ends of the conversation (3 parts if zirkietricks weren't recording in the same place), then put them together. Not something I wanna do if I can avoid it, but offhand I'm imagining that that might be the only option I have. In other news, Part 3 of how video game music enriched my already incredible life (read: ruined my otherwise promising life) is available to read at the VG Frequency blog. Be a pal and drop a judgefgt some comments. Everyone's story on how they found OCR and got into it as much as they have is different.

Remixer Name: CFX Real Name : Miz Jones E-mail : ocr-feeback@codef0x.org Website : http://www.cfxmusic.com/ UserID : 20414 Username : cfx Track title : Smooth Magma Name of game remixed: Blaster Master Name of song remixed: Level 7(?) Link to soundtrack : (available on OCR as .nsf) Commentary: Blaster Master is one of my most favorite games of all time. For a long time I shied away from attempting a remix of the music, because the original is just so impenetrable, so perfect. But a few days ago I closed my eyes, opened my ears, and just started to play... This track is the end result, and I think the contrast of something fast and hardcore warped into a jazzy little number does it more justice than any other style. I tried to give the track a hybrid 'studio' and 'live' feel by leaving in imperfections, letting the percussion get a little over the top in places, and by using a bass that isn't quite cliche for this style. Enjoy! ~Miz CFX Music ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wow, what the hell is up with that source tune? It sounded like some goofy ska to me. http://www.zophar.net/nsf/blaste~1.zip - Track 13 171kbps and this somehow sounded incredibly lossy? Doesn't speak well for the production/mixing. The instruments have some decent effects on them, but everything sounds really synthetic. The overall texture isn't very cohesive, as there's a lot of empty space. The unorthodox bass probably didn't help this; IMO, the tone didn't really resonate much or help fill out the track. Purposeful timing imperfections aside, the interplay between the instruments just seems awkward and sluggish at times, with a few potentially clashing chords sprinkled about. The backing piano chords from 2:47-3:17 quickly became annoyingly repetitive, but luckily varied a little bit at the end of some measures. The arrangement concept was very strong and was definitely not an approach I would have expected for a source like this; nice work on that level, Miz. But the execution was really lacking. Flesh this out and tighten the bolts up on this sumbitch. Interesting first sub though. NO

Can't ask for a better mix title than that - LT yes another TERRA remix but hey.....its a great melody.........right? right? ----------------------------------------------------- http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=ff6 - "Tina" (ff6-201.spc) I did like how there were some minor countermelodic instrumentation ideas with the string strumming behind the Terra theme, but that was about the extent of the melodic interpretation. I like the structure, but there needs to be more substance to it as it's too repetitive right now. It pretty much goes: *Terra intro, sans beats *Twinkly sounds + beats, joined by fake-sounding strings + Terra verse, x3 *EXTREMELY exposed & fake-sounding string outro that cheaply/abruptly cuts off Where's the beef? NO

Too emo, of course.

$74.88 from me. Farewell, cash!

Part 2 of how I got into video game music is up over at http://vgfrequency.blogspot.com .It talks about my initial foray into college radio and includes the origin of how I first found out about OC ReMix. Please check it out, and as always your feedback is heavily encouraged (as long as I like it). Part 3 will get more involved with my first days at OCR. What I originally imagined as a 3 part intro series of posts is looking more like 5 parts, as I still have to go over my first days at OCR, the VG Frequency radio show, and my time after joining OCR's staff in 2004. In the meantime, if you're down with writing stuff, please let me know what email address you've signed up to Blogger with and I'll add you on. Onto general queries: Anything generally about VGM is excellent. General gaming is perfectly ok as well, though I'd like the primary focus to be on VGM. I like musician perspectives on it. Hahaha. Yeah, Chad, I'd definitely be interested in what you could come up with. I've settled into a basic black & red color scheme that I'm feeling, but any time you're free to propose ideas, I'd love to sit down with you and talk 'em over. I trust your work. It would be an honor, David. Doujin music is one area I don't know nearly enough about. Your word on it is now gospel. Yeah, prank calls aren't particuarly doable, but I'd love to figure out how to record Skype calls in order to efficiently provide interviews. Speaking from VGDJ guest experience, interviews are harder to edit than they seem, especially on limited time. But of course, I'd want them to be a lynchpin of any OCR podcast. Frankly, I don't know you, but if your background is solid and your writing is good, maybe you'd be game. I'm particularly looking for people with some level of stature in the amateur VGM arrangement and VGM fandom communities. Never! Last thing I need is spam from the likes of you...r mother.

While I'd also prefer specific associations for composers and songs, I'd like to also point out that it ain't that deep.

shadowolf wasn't contributing any first-hand info, but all of the hearsay he mentioned about VGMix2 and Wikipedia was actually true. Still, your info is such a mixed bag though, shadowolf, it's better to avoid posting about stuff you just "heard".

Got off the phone with Jimmy and called the Kennedy Center's Group Sales. Spoke with Natasha, who was very helpful. All relevant info in this post has been handled by BGC in the first post, but here's my breakdown as well. *Ticket cost and availability This info is for the Friday, June 29, 8PM performance. I've reserved 25 tickets in rows Q & R, Premium Orchestral Center, generally held to be the best section in the house. Since 3 seats had been purchased in row Q, 25 covered the entire rest of the rows. Tickets (and I asked at least 3 times to verify) are 20% off with the group discount, and as such will be $37.44 each which includes any and all taxes and surcharges. We have until May 22nd to pay for the tickets in full. That leaves everyone exactly 3 weeks to solidify their plans to attend the concert. *How to buy your tickets through OCR In order to reserve your tickets, please use OCR's PayPal Donation button (top left of the sidebar) and provide the appropriate amount depending on how many tickets you plan to buy. As soon as you do this, please post in the thread indicating that you've paid and under what email address your PayPal account is under, just to help verify things. *Accomodations djpretzel has limited space at his house for people to crash, particuarly helpful for those who don't live in the area and would prefer to avoid hotel costs. Aight everyone, ya got 3 weeks to get your plans into place. This is the meetup to end all meetups. Attend VGL, meet-and-greet with various pros, potentially crash at djp's house and possibly attend the following day's concert as well if you can stay the weekend. Let's get it going!

Contact info * xanZion * Preston S. Bingham * warning11@gmail.com * www.myspace.com/djtraction * http://www.ocremix.org/forums/member.php?u= 20301 Remix Info * Game Name: Metroid (NES) * Remix name: Kraid's Lair Reconstruction * Original song name: Kraid's Chamber (Theme Song) * Original Composer: Hip Tanaka, System: NES, Game Year Released: 1986 * Original Song Location: (you will need a fileplanet account to grab this.) * Reason: Well to put it short and simple, I reconstructed this track for 2 sole reasons, 1 that I could not find a hard trance version, and 2 that this song really struck me as "amazing" when I first heard it as a kid. It was begging remix, so I decided after not finding it, to do it myself, and after many challenges, this is what we get. I am very satisfied the way it turned out, and hope that you enjoy it aswell. Reconstructed with FL Studio 7.0.2, XXL Edition.

It's better to defer to people who knew the guy, rather than pass off vicarious information. Ari has shitloads of things wrong with him that there's no need to make anything up.

Nah, that's a complete lie, and I dunno where you heard it from. As a panelist, lots of people hated Ari, but he was primarily responsible for the quality bar significantly going up, as well weeding out guidelines violations. I think his votes could have used more detail in a lot of cases, but that was the older days, and he usually gave his reasons. The whole time I was there, he wasn't biased in his decisions and never "refused to quantify" anything. In terms of speed, he was the most frequent voting judge on the panel before I joined. He did a lot to help the process, both in quality and speed.

Man, where's that Wingless/Khan Photoshop? "I'LL DIE BEFORE I LET LAOS ON THE BLOG!"

Pretty senseless, but the incident will ultimately blow over.

*What are some requirements for writing on the VG Frequency blog? Your own topics. It's mostly about music, but I'm not gonna dismiss general gaming rants here and there. Fun day @ Midway? Cool. Working you like a dog @ Midway? Coo. Got some weird fanmail from a fan? Coo. Do you seriously wanna comment on this? Coo. Do I care if the subject matter is old? Not particuarly. You dress that up with the euphemisms "retro" or "old school". Problem solved. No major length requirements as long as you say something substantial. If you write capably, it'll show. No particular deadlines. If something springs to mind and you really wanna write about it, chances are it'll get done. If you're not interested in writing, you're not gonna get anything done. Who the crap are you? Finish your project!

I can make an exception for you.

Check in here for what's already publicly available: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=3480 In terms of trying to track down sheet music, it's usually a better shot contacting the artists themselves. Asking here's not as likely to give you many answers.

*Blog In an effort to have another outlet for my video game music fandom/geekery, I've finally moved forward with a blog. Check it out at http://vgfrequency.blogspot.com. We're big pimpin'. We're spendin' cheese. *Today's Shill Before we get into the meat of VGF, blogging about the game arrangement community, pro albums, and whatnot, today's initial topic is Part 1 of the legend of Larry - who is he and how he came to be. Parts 2 (Radio) and 3 (OCR) will be coming soon. It's all scintillating material. *Post Comments If you have a Gmail account, you can easily sign up for a Blogger account and leave praise-filled/scathing feedback for said blog. I'd honestly love to know how you came to enjoy video game music; everyone's stories are different. *Join or Die If you are a respected member of the community, I'd love to have you aboard as part of VGF's team of blogging whores (read: hos). I'm aiming for a mere 5 posts a week of content between everyone, which is both fun and manageable. Drop me a line if you're established. *Podcast? In an effort to have another outlet for my video game music fandom/geekery radio show, it's been suggested by the higher-ups (read: higher-up, djpretzel) that I think about taking over for the late and lamented VGDJ as OCR's official podcast, of course featuring the usual banter about any and all other VGM arrangement websites for maximum pimpage. You down? Drop some comments on what you wanna hear. We'll see how long we can keep this up. I'm not a student anymore, and definitely don't have 18 hours a day free like I used to.

Original Decision: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=6931 Greetings once again OCR! The Tallest Band on Earth remastered their previous Toejam & Earl remix under your suggestions, so we thought we'd give it another go. Some changes made were making it less bass heavy, as well as adding some effects and reverb. And (once again) here's the info! * Remixers: The Tallest Band on Earth * Real names: Jeremy Dutcher - Drums Emily Bosse - Flute Greg Anderson - Bari Sax Jon Dutcher - Alto Sax Chris Nyarady (Moo2u) - Keys Willie L. Pacey - Bass * Website: http://www.myspace.com/thetallestbandonearth * email: tallestbandonearth@hotmail.com - Moo2u ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://project2612.org/download.php?id=82 - "ToeJam Jammin'" Nice extended nonsense intro. Those were some sloppy-sounding brass notes from 1:29-1:42 (a bit awkward, but better, from 2:24-2:40). The textures were fairly good overall though. On the negative side, the volume on some of the melodic material sounded rather low, inadvertently placing too much emphasis on the backing elements and making the track seem rather meandering at times (e.g. 1:28-1:47). The effects on the lead at 2:06 were a bit overboard, but it was a unique result nonetheless. Good call-response stuff from 2:43-3:01 before working together from 3:01-3:19. Brief but awesome changeup with 3:20-3:38's section. The sound was decent, but felt pretty lossy; I'd have tried to push the 6MB limit myself. This would still benefit from some further re-balancing of the parts. Right now the foreground material is too quiet, IMO, undermining the energy and drive of the writing ideas; unfortunately still a holdover problem from the first version. Going very simplistic though, even an overall volume raise of, say, 3-4db (taking care not to clip, of course) would do the track some good without having to do much work, and it would solve a lot of the problems. More should have been done with this in light of the previous criticisms from the panel last time around. While clearly still rough around the edges, there was enough tightening and spit-polishing via the production to fix enough of the issues for me. If you're a really particular listener, this will likely seem too sloppy, but I thought the expansion and interpretation aspects of the arrangement carried this most of the way. Dancing on the line still, but it gets by this time. Good luck on the rest of the vote. Y'all will need it. YES (borderline)

Quake 2 Soundtrack - 7 "Quad Machine", 2 "Operation Overlord", 3 "Rage", 4 "Kill Ratio" & 9 "Descent Into Cerberon" Yeah, I'm pretty much feeling TO's conclusions. Once things get moving at :25, the drums are just buried and the tone on 'em is really weak; just doesn't sound properly balanced or fill out the track. The drum writing's aight, but the writing tends to be too plain; it's probably more a matter of the production, as a beefier snare would solve most of the problems. There's some slight timing issue as well which prevent the total delivery from sounding smooth (most exaggerated example, piano playing late at 1:12), but it's not too bad. During 2:50, things started clicking together more with the timing. I agreed with TO that the textures don't quite gel right per se, and it's difficult to articulate, but the overall mixing is ok even if it could be adjusted. On the plus side though, the instruments all sounded pretty clean. Bass at 3:41 sounded odd in the back briefly; seemingly didn't quite match up right with the melody. What were those clapping noises at 4:30, 4:33, 4:44, 4:47 & 4:49? Was that hissing underneath the guitar from 5:21-5:30? Not quite sure what that was, but didn't necessarily sound intentional; not a huge deal. Solo at 6:59 was rockin' the casbah, but the sheer volume got a bit grating on headphones. The structure was fairly similar to the previous submission, but I was glad to hear more personalization of the arrangement this time around. I'm still on the fence about the overall instrumentation approach being different enough from the sources, which are all heavy rock, but it got better during the second half. The drum writing in the originals was very steady and beat-keeping, whereas that was usually not the case here. The progressive influences helped, but more of them would really help push this over the top. More instrumental variation and better attention to dynamics helped this one improve though. I mentioned last time that the arrangement hovering at basically the same energy level the whole time was a big problem. Here, it's less so but only for the second half. I'll throw out there that more pronounced dynamic changes would, IMO, only make this more like the progressive rock style you're going for. Transitions like those at 4:15 & 5:15-5:21 (good energy change and good writing joining the sections) would have been welcome earlier on, but it seems like those ideas were only truly embraced in the latter half and not in the first half. The sum total is all about polishing up the minor issues here: *More cohesive textures *Slightly tighter playing (not a major issue) *More meat on the snare *Bit more dynamic contrast in the first half of the arrangement This is pretty close to being postable, but I agreed with TO on the textures not quite clicking and that's enough to sway me. It's all pushing me to a borderline NO, but in case this doesn't split the panel, I would really prefer to have more than 3 judges weigh in this. I really wanna see this receive a lot of feedback and make it in some form. The Nordins rock, but the presentation could be lifted up just a bit higher to really make things undebateable. Please give it one more go, gentlemen, with a final spit shine.

The Wiki is used by staff members, i.e. you yourself can't sign up for it. You're already signed up for the main area of fan interaction at OCR, which are the vBulletin forums. There's nothing else to sign up for.

Original Decision: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=5075 1st RESUB Decision: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=7716 Remixer name: Brain Cleaner Real name: Kai Brooks Email: cpl.kai@gmail.com Website: http://braincleanermusic.com/ Userid: 20389 (Brain Cleaner) Game Remixed: Unreal Tournament Song Remixed: Foregone Destruction Comments: Made entirely with Live 6 ReMix Link: Updates: It doesn't suck anymore. Non-mix-related note: This is a resub, submitted under SuicideKai previously. Same remixer, but a sudden change of heart with naming conventions, and the new OCR forums account (and this submission) reflects it.

Hahaha! Yeah, even if there are hiccups, I'd never tolerate a dead project. That's my e-penis on the line. Just wanna thank you again Jason for such a kick-ass Magic Johnson track. If you have time for any other tracks in the future (the release date is very open-ended, like "2007" open-ended), or are willing to field suggestions, please lemme know. Cain "Fishy" McCormack (who has a great Pokemon mix that'll go up eventually) sounded interested in an Incredible Crash Test Dummies mix once I threw him the source tune (track 10). A track like that sounds really up your alley as well, which is why I pimped it to him and you, Jason. Perhaps you'd like to give it a shot or collab on it. Hope you and everyone else like the tracks that are completed so far. Looking forward to Abadoss, OverCoat and VQ getting their tracks rollin', perhaps after school finals.

Best of luck, bros. Y'all will do very well, I'm know it.

Housecleaning.