Liontamer

Vastly underveloped. Not much here besides minimal-sounding reinstrumentation and some effects done in 2 iterations. Might even be overrideable. NO

Thanks to DarkeSword for helping me reconsider my vote; my mistake. The mastering could certainly be sharper and I would have liked some more panning activity to play around with the stereo field, but that's about all I need to say on production. Wasn't the best, but it was good enough. I originally thought this felt like a mere upgrade of "Still More Fighting", but the lion's share of the work is done rearranging the support sections. I'm really thankful we got to the area at 1:34-2:12 featuring some lighter guitar arrangement, which was a breath of fresh air, and I would have appreciated some more being done with those kind of sounds in a support capacity. I agree with DS in that this is a good mix for something that doesn't drastically overhaul the style. It's somewhat like humming a theme in your head while thinking of several slight variations for the support patterns, fairly along the lines of what my remixing approach would be if I actually started doing it myself. YES

I pimped this one back in early August for VG Frequency: Critically speaking, I thought some of the trancier synths zirc busted out were generic-sounding, and that makes me "meh" on a lot of stuff I've heard in the trance genre. Looking beyond that though, there was nothing else here I felt was holding this back overall. I'd have a lot more to say, especially since I went through about 30-minutes giving Andy a detailed pre-judging critique on the mix that I saved on my comp for when it would reach the panel, but since the comp is broke...blah. Though fairly up there, this isn't necessarily DP-worthy, so don't take my enthusiasm the wrong way, but this is pretty much a formality to me. YES

Hate to just quote, but that's a pretty straightforward breakdown of the faults of this one. Beef up the sounds (especially the drums, which function as tango's prominent beatkeeper) to take advantage of the sexiness that a tango motif typically engenders. I actually thought the guitar solo was serviceable (though it indeed didn't add much), but it ended up drowning out your other instruments. Very cool ideas though, Phil, so please come back after reworking the weak areas here. All of Vigilante's criticisms were good. I liked the arrangement ideas here though, and as far as I'm aware of, we don't have a tango mix anywhere on OCR. I'd love to hear this one come back our way. NO (refine & resubmit)

Yeah, seriously, why iN the hell do people still submit songs with low encodings? So so annoying. Does anyone really think 56kbps/22khz stuff is gonna be posted here? Ever? Indeed, the arrangement was prOmising. Come back when the sound quality compliments this. Though aggravating, I suppose that would be adequate grounds for a resubmission.

Gotta agree with the accordian. Some people wouldn't mind it, but it sounds very flat/cheap. Pretty flat with the percussion stuff (shaker/tambourine) all the way until 1:24. Helen's cameo vocals are good per her usual. They almost sound too good for this overall package, honestly. The switch up at 1:51 was a bit too abrupt. I really don't feel Mike's vocals were good at all. They don't sound emotive at all, especially contrasted with the lyrics/message and came across very flatly. Reverb 'em, bro. They need a measure of reverb bad. Yeah the lyrics are basic & cheesy, folks, but hey whatever Mike wants to do there, I'm not gonna let that influence my vote. If anything though, the lack of strength with their delivery distracted me from the lyrics themselves. Fairly cool guitar at 3:21. Little flat on the delivery as well, but give everyone some more of dat funk, maybe as support work during the last verse. What's that little creaking noise at 4:17? The layout is good, but ALL the delivery needs to be spiced up, much like the chef guy in Burgertime running around and hitting enemies with salt & pepper. Most of the instruments and Mike's vocals are noticeably flat. Punch it up drastically. "Flat" is the word of the day here, it seems. With the arrangement ideas being solid here, I'd rather see this posted in some form. NO (resubmit)

Samples are used pretty poorly. The wind lead at :13 sounds very unnatural, drums at :40 are pretty flat. Find out how to articulate your sounds better for a more natural feel. I felt there were sound balance/separation issues at 1:36 once a lot of elements came in. The strings and winds sounded very shrill and overbearing at this point. More of the cluttering happens around 3:42 for the big finish. Basically felt like 2 lengthy iterations of the material with no real dynamic contrast happening throughout the mix which comes across as minimal development (even if you factor in the drums returning at 3:42). 4+ minutes of this isn't particularly interesting. NO

I've usually enjoyed remixes of "At the Bottom of the Night." Beej's "Sines" & Dale North's "Spacecat" are two favorites of mine. This one starts off fairly slow, and I was wondering when it would pick up and get interesting. After going for some admittedly decent straight coverage, things worked up at 1:24. Nice freestyle section at 2:04 that stylistically fit well with the source tune stuff for the beginning; certainly a good atmosphere throughout. Any flubs on the guitar didn't particularly hurt this in my listening. Not gonna be an overly enthusiastic YES, because the beginning is somewhat low on the energy/creativity scale (until 1:24), and the abrupt ending was a big negative for me, but I felt the good outweighed the bad, and I think that's what most votes on this are gonna come down to. Good job, Chris.

I pimped this one back in late July for VG Frequency: http://remix.kwed.org/sid.php/2730/Xout%20(subtune%207).sid - Subtune 7 As long as the SID source tune checks out, I'm all for this one; In all honesty, I vaguely recall confirming it since this actually got released only a few hours before I joined the panel and I had given comments while this was a WIP. No differences I'm hearing in this version compared to the VGMix release, BTW. Kinda lo-fi near the end (definitely wanted more distinct sound separation throughout the track, especially from 3:17-3:46 going towards the finish), but like I said the groove is good, the sounds works well together, and the ideas develop well throughout. Been waiting for this one to come along since I got accepted for the panel; very cool work per the usual, Martin. Looking forward to you submitting Gauntlet 3 "Blue Wizard Is About to Die" if you haven't done so already. Always good stuff. YES

Too bad you never heard of/submitted to OCR 3 or 4 years ago. This would have been gold then, but as is now, it's indeed too short and underdeveloped. Don't have the original to compare with (never played DT, I always had Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers; someone go mix that), so this may be just a straight cover, but the feel here is pretty hot, so it's not really worth a NO Override if it's note-for-note. A real keeper just in terms of the style, definitely a great funky vibe here that could use more ideas to pimp it out there. Don't stop with just 90 seconds / 2 iterations of this stuff, rather expand the ideas with some further rearrangement and some freestyle sections. Nice work so far, Henrik. NO

Not really any need to, BTW.

Danny Nowshky might be down for voting tonight as well, and we still need Binnie, Shariq & Steve to solidify the vote on Final Summoning, since that one was so questionable.

Pretty good groove going along for the first 43 seconds, so the buildup towards the source tune wasn't bad. Good stuff until :54-1:04 when those drums came in, since they didn't have much realistic-sounding power behind them. Really disliked the sound of the drums coming in at 1:18-2:00 and later on at 3:05-3:25. Instrumentally, that was probably the weakest link for me as those drums lacked any real punch or realism to them. The rest of the percussion work sounds good, and all of the percussion sequencing/variation was quality, even when I didn't like the sounds chosen during those two areas I mentioned. Those are minor details of the big picture though. More importantly, the Robotnik boss theme melody's all but buried underneath the drumwork at times, and the synth used for the lead is fairly flat, so those things in tandem worked towards the lead (AND the high-pitched countermelody you had) getting buried by beats for quite a while. 1:38-2:00 was particularly lacking with the sound balance as a result, so anything you can do to create some more separation of sounds would help this out. Like Prot & Malc have also suggested above, better-sounding/livelier synth choices for your melody & countermelody, a sharper-sounding mixdown, and working in one or two more ideas beyond the 2:32 mark so the mix doesn't retread its steps so much are all things that can be done to bring this up and over the bar. Promising stuff is certainly in place so far, Kevin. NO

I pretty much agree with Prot's vote. The vibe here is pretty sweet. If this were a 4 minute mix, I might even YES it, though I'd have to compare with the source. Some REALLY bad notes from both 2:43-2:45 & 2:50-2:51. Dunno what happened there, but fix 'em please. While I really do hear the subtle developments here, there needs to be something extra going on to get away from the repetition here. By 4:05, even though there were obvious additions compared to earlier in the tracks, things were still a bit too repetitive with regards to the melody. The repetitveness doesn't bother me so much, except this is a lengthy track and one or two fresh ideas would hook this up. Adding some original note progressions anywhere within this track while not moving away from the great sound you have would serve this well. This is actually pretty sweet work so far, Tuomas. Though the drumwork is actually fairly weak compared to the power of the lead synth, your sounds are really cool and work very well together, including the shakuhachi. I don't agree with Vig saying that it sounded ridiculous; I felt the combination of sounds was a unique approach. Despite my first comment up top, I'd prefer to hear just a couple of brief additional ideas in here to replace some of the repetitive stuff rather than cut the length of the track. To be honest, it's tough to make a vote like this when I'm a big fan of a very repetitive track in SkyHigh's "Snow Motion", because a vote like this is similarly subjective with whether I enjoyed the repetitiveness or not, but I feel that that remix worked in its simple construction, whereas this only partially/nearly works. Nonetheless, this is a really cool genre piece that I could see people enjoying. Just a little more substance while retaining this atmosphere would create a sense of more development occuring over the 5+ minutes of the piece, and that's all I need for the YES. NO (please resubmit)

Cool. I read his e-mail but just wanted to be clear how much of the source was used overall. When Alex said it turned into Tetris near the end of its development, I wasn't sure if that meant he weaved source material throughout whatever he was working on earlier, or if Tetris was just the latter half of the track. http://www.zophar.net/gbs/tetris.zip - GBS Track 2 Pretty slow build for the first two minutes, but the development was pretty engaging so it wasn't a detriment to the mix. Around 2:30 though, I was waiting for the actual Tetris to come in, which it finally did at 2:45. The arrangement of the theme works well; fairly simple/straightforward, but the countermelodic elements are very nice and Alex got into some genuine rearrangement ideas as things picked up. The horn samples could/should have been more realistic moving from note-to-note, particularly during their very prominent section from 4:04-4:30, but were servicable overall and also outshadowed by other stronger instruments/elements that were present throughout the entire track, i.e. the piano, strings, and drums. Although I didn't pay too much attention to the war motif when I was judging this, it was certainly pretty cool when I casually listened to it. Like Protricity mentioned, the sound effects worked well without functioning as a crutch just to make things interesting. For example, the marching sound effects worked well as a beatkeeper yet also contributed to the militaristic feel of the mix. Fairly solid work. YES EDIT: As much as my Russian heritage enjoys the folk music from Tetris, I also agree with Binnie that technically Tetris's use of Russian folk songs is in violation of our policy that any music arranged here should come from a game first. Tetris might be one exeception, but I don't believe it should be. I'll retain my YES if we won't change our standards to disallow the Russian folk songs from Tetris to be remixed here, as I didn't have as serious problems with the brass or the use of Tetris in only the second half, but for the record if we push this issue on Tetris's music further, I'll be switching my vote to NO on policy grounds.

So...my laptop is the brokez. It won't be looked at for a week, so the organized show has gotta be postponed until I find out what's wrong with it. Could be a week, maybe 2. May even have to format my hard drive. Just gotta roll with it. In any case, this Saturday, we will still play crud and hang out in the NEW VG Frequency IRC channel (#VGF @ EntertheGame), but we will do what is commonly known as ze freesty00L and bullshit around. Should be some good stuff as we play any requests that I can download onto the radio station computer and shoot the shit with people on the air, although Species will have to help out and record the stream if he's around, since I won't be able to. Oy! We're down, but not out.

This isn't the rejected version. http://www.vgmix.com

I hear track 2 from the Game Boy soundtrack in the second half, but I'm wondering where the theme arranged for the first half is from. Certainly sounds like something from Tetris. Any need to confirm that further?

Violations: 1. Die Hard Trilogy 'I Love The Airport' YES texx tried to do some things with it both arrangement & rearrangement-wise, and no one's condemning it for having a very minimalist sound style. In terms of working with the source tune however, I believe this is too simplified of a reinstrumentation effort overall that doesn't give of a unique-enough take on the original. 2. Ys 'Beat of Terror' YES Definitely a verbatim rip/cover 3. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun 'PharoTeknical' YES Very cool track, but I felt the area of 3:10-3:40 was the only section that didn't specifically rely on the foundation of the original. The rest of the track featured the most prominent parts of the original with minorly-arranged percussion from the original on top and some light synth modulation underneath. If the changes of the arrangement of the percussion were more dynamic compared to the source, I definitely would have NOed this. Definitely a great remix, but not one that I feel fits the ReMix standards here. 4. Streets of Rage 2 'Funkdreamer' YES I'm somewhat biased, because I like the original and the funk vibe here is good. There's nothing inherently wrong with straight arrangement, but the creative take of the artist in terms of the sounds and/or additions has to be pretty dynamic in order to get my support. "Tactile Freefall" & particularly "Space Cowboys" are recent examples that I feel illustrate how to stick closely to the structure of their source tunes but also feature substantial instrumentation ideas that significantly change the feel and upgrade the original. I feel "Funkdreamer" is about halfway there in doing this with the style, but is ultimately only a minor genre adaptation compared to those other post-1000 examples; even the bongos that are here are actually punched up from the Genesis version if you listen really closely. If I heard some substantial sounds additions (rather than changes) compared to the original, I would have been down. 5. Donkey Kong Country 'Strolling The Mines' YES As much as I hate to remove an actual composer's work, this really is a trance original simply built around the source material, even though the source material usage isn't a rip. I didn't hear anything significant done to weave aspects of the source into this original trance work, much like the Metroid submission we rejected fairly recently only more sophisticated. 6. Usagi Yojimbo 'Homage to Amida Buddha' NO As I said when I flagged this for consideration, I say this is a good cover with VERY basic additions. I may be in the minority here, because this doesn't change the feel of the source's sound enough, like "Funkdreamer", BUT this adds a lot more here compared to the SID via several varying types of countermelody that are somewhat hard to notice without active listening, along with the inclusion of the original guitar work for a notable portion of the track. Not much in the way of polyphony at times, but there isn't any specific formula/context for how a straight arrangement's additions best sound, and frankly I feel it's a lot easier to get a straight arrangement of a SIDtune or NEStune up to par given how minimal-sounding many of those source tunes are. While not as sophisticated or substantial as "Space Cowboys" additions, I felt this worked in adding other support sounds/instruments to give the remix enough additional elements compared to the original, especially since the SID sounds flimsy as hell and you get the aforementioned guitar work coming in over the top of this one from 1:43-2:15 & 3:21-4:22 to add something to it for over a third of the track. 7. F-Zero GX 'Dr. Stuard (Jeff & Toad Air Team Challengers)' YES Relies way too much on the original for the foundation of the mix. No offense meant at all, but whereas Scott Peeples' "PharoTeknical" is an example of a great remix that nonetheless doesn't fit the guidelines, I felt the changes made here were less substantial than that. I would have loved to have heard the SIDtune-style section used more. 8. Earthbound 'Dreaming on Distant Shores' NO The four notes of Rellik's first measure (:04-:07) are a viable arrangement of the first four notes in the five-note pattern in "A Flash of Memory" (:00-:01), then Rellik alters those notes in a slightly different pattern for the second measure from :08-:11. The four notes of Rellik's third measure (:12-:15) are also a viable arrangement of the four notes in the five-note pattern in "A Flash of Memory" from :02-:04, then Rellik alters those notes in a slightly different pattern for the fourth measure from :16-:19. That 15-second rearrangement is the basis of this ReMix. Muting all but the 7th voice of the SPC helped isolate the source tune melody. I placed this one up for consideration on account of all the reviewers who stated that they didn't hear the original in this. But Rellik's arrangement of the source is used prevalently throughout the course of the remix and is undoubtedly the foundation of the track. The question was whether the use of the original was recognizable in the context of the mix, and upon close inspection of the SPC I now understand that it is. I'll be the first to admit that the connection was tough to place, but it's there. Great job of building up a minimal idea into something much more. The usage of this piece of the source tune is very minimal, but I love remixes of minimal pieces of a source tune as long as the connection I hear is solid. May be violations: 9. Final Fantasy 10 'The Final Summoning' NO Not even considering the direct sampling of the vox from the game itself, the baritone horn plays the recognizable arrangement of "Song of Prayer" female/lead vox from :47-1:00, then a slight rearrangement of it from 1:00-1:07. The horn uses the recognizable arranged structure of the female lead of "Song of Prayer" from 1:23-1:29. The cello arranges from 1:50-1:57, with the last two notes providing the main connection to the note pattern of female lead vox. At 3:19, Abram McCalment's transition into the guitar solo, especially with the last three notes from 3:23-3:25, is a simplified arrangement of "Song of Prayer", before he provides direct use of source's note progression through call-and-answer with the sampled vox from 3:26-3:53. Checking the original PSF, the choir singing the source tune, "Song of Prayer", is a full choir. That being said, I focused my attention to the male vox providing support chords for the more prominent female vox, and indeed Jared's whole note cello moves in a note pattern similar enough to the notes of male vox support in "Song of Prayer". Though that probably wasn't a purposeful thing, that wasn't my concern. You hear Jared use the cello this way throughout the mix (e.g. 1:16-1:22, 1:30-1:43, 1:57-2:09, 2:25-2:38, 2:45-3:11, 4:07-4:34). Considering that I feel Jared referencing the male vox support chords of the source tune with a similar note progression from the cello is viable rearrangement, there's nothing making me feel this needs to be removed. If I hadn't made the connection of the cello to the male vox, this track would have been too original in my eyes.

You got that right, bro. The WMRE webstream is current fucked and I can't reset it right now, so VGF33 is postponed for a couple of days. I'd go through with today's show, but people prefer it to be live, so we'll be going with that. It'll also be more of a 3 hour show rather than a longer episode. Please keep an eye out for when it's rescheduled, and sorry for the incovenience. If you miss it, the MP3'll be out later in the week.

No plans to have djp on the air. Yet, anyway. Not to goad him into calling in, but I'm sure he might drop by at some point in the future, Silent. Aight folks, should be a good show tonight. Be there for material from Beatdrop, tefnek, zykO, Christian Pacaud, Joecam, binster, Joshua Morse, Jaxx, Quinn Fox, Reuben Kee, SuperGreenX, DCT & more! Be there, foos! Happy birthday, DCT!

I don't mind the use of the source tune verbatim, since Rapture actually used the same soundbank as the Rare team; that's actually pretty cool. My main problem is the fact that the I agree that the trance structure isn't tied into "Life in the Mines" nearly enough to consider the track a rearrangement rather than original trance material with the source tune referenced on top of it. IMO, the source material is not integrated with the original material, it's just over the top of it. I didn't hear any chords from the original used in the trance work to piece it together with the source. To me, it's just a more sophisticated example of using, say, the Mario theme and then putting a good beat underneath it that sounds good but has nothing thematically to do with the Mario theme. At some point I feel the two aspects should piece together through rearrangement. I've got zero problem with Rapture using the same soundbank the Rare team used. Just the fact that it's source tune placed on top of an original; if you removed the source tune use from the track, you wouldn't hear a single thing that's from "Life in the Mines", so I'm not feeling it as a rearrangement. My votes are coming sometime either shortly after VG Frequency or later tomorrow, no later than that.

Ha! That's true, bro, although I preferred the glib NOs myself.

What happened to the melody from the last time??? That was the best part but it got gutted compared to the first version. The thin strings didn't seem to really work with the thick percussion & pulsating electro beats I heard in the first 50 seconds. Just thicken the sound on those guitar/wuteva strings a bit. Also some bad note progression I felt I heard from 1:38-1:45 with the string accompaniment. Ah man, at 1:09, I was just floored by about half of the notes of the melody being taken out. Bring 'em back, baby! I was thinking that you would bring the melody back to full power (like in the first version) later on in the song, but it never arrived. I think this would come off a lot stronger by not letting the melody be so sparse, at least for most of the time. Overall though, things were sounding decent at least, and I wasn't really having too many problems until the awkward transition at 2:28. Those are hit or miss, and I felt it didn't work effectively, so ease into that change of pace there. I didn't really see where Prot was coming from when he said things were messy until we hit the drumwork at 2:40 during more of a freestyle section. The notes get iffy/random-sounding at points and the percussion sounds very loose from both 2:40-2:50, 2:59-3:05 & 3:18-3:28. Good energy, but still a bit over the top. Tone it down a little bit. The ending there at 4:07 dropped off a little suddenly; might wanna just reverb the end for a slightly slower fadeout. Those were all the little problems I had. Unfortunately, the main point here is that there isn't much development going on with this theme. The second half pretty much felt like the first save for the break section from 2:28-3:09. Then you just rehashed what you had done before. That wouldn't have been a problem if the melody was more exciting to begin with. The production is awesome now, but looking back over what Prot said, the issues of some ugly notes, haphazard sounding percussion and repetition are all still existent, only a bit less prominent than before. Hate to say this, but keep working on it, bro. NO (resubmit)

http://www.alpha-ii.com/snesmusic/spcsets/dkq.rsn - "Kannon's Klaim" (dkq-s-01.spc) I haven't listened to the source tune in a little while, but it really kicks ass. I also pimped this one back in early August for VG Frequency: With that said, yeah, the percussion wasn't particularly engaging, but like Ari said, the arrangement here was pretty good and really gave the original a new dimension, especially considering that Mike remixed a section of the original (:35-:55 / 1:24-1:45) more promimently, while subtlely altering/referencing others (the countermelodic synth support from :15-:25). Not my cup of tea, personally, but very solid work regardless. We might get into the same situation as Bladiator's recent rejection where others may feel not enough of the original is being used here to fulfill the submissions standards, so I encourage all of you to compare with the source material, but, as I felt with Bladiator's mix, Daragen did a good job of taking a small section from the original and simply working within the framework of that. As long as I'm able to make tangible, significant enough connections to the source material, I'm willing to approve fairly liberal ideas like that. YES