Liontamer   Judges ⚖️

Opening sounded lossy, and when I looked at WinAmp's spectral analyzer, there was nothing on the high end, but that at least changed at :41. The core beat at :56 had some of that tepid "sounds like hitting a plastic bucket" feel, but it's serviceable. I was definitely getting lead fatigue by 1:42, which I'm sure someone else can better explain why that was. Interesting that prophetik also invoked the word "fatigue" in another context as I hadn't read his vote before using the word myself; given the intensity of the saw lead, I think my usage of it is a fair point. That said, cool usage of the piano at 1:56 and interplay of the saw lead with other original writing bursts starting at 1:58 to finally vary up those sounds. Sharper mixing and some more variations/changes to the beats from 2:25-on would have lifted this up for me. Stuff like 2:56-3:10's section also felt too repetitive with 1:27's section before it; there was new writing added in for the latter, but there's other ways the textures could have been tweaked to not seem so cut-and-pasted, as the new writing didn't do enough in that respect. Even the YESs have "I wish" items for improvement, and I can definitely hear why this split the panel. The arrangement's a fairly solid concept, but the execution has just enough smaller issues adding up with the mixing, sound design and feelings of cut-and-paste repetition where it's not unreasonable to say this isn't quite ready. I'm in the NO (resubmit) camp, but desperately want this arrangement be posted in some form.

Sounded like the SMB2 ending theme chord progression being alluded to from :12-:24, which was a fun coincidence, though the timing of everything sounded clunky and mismatched until righting itself with the "Overworld" theme taking the foreground. Mixing seems jacked up to start, unfortunately, not just the panning Emu brought up. The bassline is too buzzy and was utimately louder than the melody and supporting faux-guitar line as well; it all just steps on each other instead of having synergy and sounding like they're sharing the same space. I liked initial the arrangement treatment though. By about 1:15, I was wondering when the rest of the track would arrive, because the textures were so basic and relatively empty. The sampled pizz strings sound so bad in terms of the fakeness of the sound being so exposed and the writing being too repetitive. Poor transition into the "Underground" theme at 2:25, and then arranged in a way that didn't feel melodious because of the original writing by the lead that was filling the gaps in between the pauses of the original theme. Then another abrupt theme transition back to the "Overworld" theme at 3:26 and it's all the same writing ideas as before just being repeated again aside from different bass and drum writing, albeit about the same level of intensity and complexity. There's so many different directions you could take this in to better develop this, and there's definitely nothing that could be done as it to pull it up above the bar here. I'd try though to apply whatever takeaways you can regarding mixing & textures, variations, and transitions. Some decent initial ideas -- and that shows promise in and of itself -- but there's 0 cohesion here right now. NO (resubmit)

Opening sounds lush, I dig it. At :20, a more distorted/overdriven guitar faded in, and I had to prepare myself, since I'm not a fan of this flooded style and don't feel it's pleasent to listen to. Yep, at 1:06, there it is. Everything's super crowded and turns into a wall of sound until 2:43. Arrangement-wise, I love it; great transformation of the theme, strong instrumentation as well as sound design choices for the clearer sections. The flooded sections (e.g. 1:06-2:43, 3:47-6:30, 7:02-9:46) all have the supporting instrumentation sounding overdriven, which is obscuring the leads and detracting from the composition. I don't mind being in the minority, but at some point, I'll be viewed as being in the anti-black metal camp or biased against the genre. From what I've heard thus far, I currently can't get behind this style from Black SeeD as having reasonable/listenable enough production quality despite this being a known & intentional aesthetic. Perhaps that needs a broader discussion, perhaps not, though I'm open to it. Decluttering the denser sections would be great, IMO. I genuinely appreciate the arrangement, but feel the style of production hurts rather than helps. NO (resubmit)

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Hmmm… I’m currently undecided while leaning towards a borderline YES. Though some of the sounds felt dated, the composition is fairly energetic, and the source usage and transformation aren’t in question. Somehow though, the textures felt too empty and like the proper components weren’t in place to drive this track forward. With the track not going past 2:15, it’s important to me that nearly everything is cohesive and clicking together. Would love to get other Js insights on whether this one didn’t sound fully baked just yet. ? EDIT (10/10): Listening again, I'm gonna go NO on account of this not feeling filled in enough. For example, the bass guitar registers, but the part's so subdued, it might as well not be there. I'm sorry that I don't have any suggestions to at least offer something more constructive, but I'm humble enough to know that, if others agree with me, they're equipped to better articulate what's missing and how that could be addressed. If this didn't make it as it and he were open to revisiting this, I have full confidence in Eino's musicianship.

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Opened with an extended intro with simplified progression until the arranged melody arrived at 1:08. Nice meat to the beats, and good energy and drive with their composition. It's a fun take where the melody's not leaned on, but the writing from the source is still present. Nice spin on the chorus at 2:09. It can feel like the seesaw's tilted toward the production side because the emphasis isn't on the source melody being loud, proud, and upfront, but there's nothing saying that's the way you have to treat a melody; it's totally fine and cool that it's not prominent the whole way. Great sound design with a lush result. Could have even had more ideas brought in rather than what's a semi-abrupt finish, but what's there is still a fun end result. Very nice job, Ly! YES

Interesting interplay of fragments! What are you doing here? YES

Solid arrangement of the theme; I enjoyed the rhythmic changes. The textures could have been denser, but served the piece just fine. The SFX as ear candy was also a nice touch. There were moments when I felt this was dragging out, but ultimately there were enough ear candy moments sprinkled in through the second half to give you a feeling of something slightly different that would help out. The drop off at 3:53 was a fun idea that offered something new for the last moments. Could be more, but it has its groove and plays in that space well. YES

First little note thrown in at :03 seems sour but resolves OK enough; still, that definitely didn't start things off on the right foot. Very audible pop at :41 that can hopefully be fixed. Ooh, nice changeup at 1:02; very different character from the source tune, so that was cool and helped it stand apart from the original on a level besides adding in vocals. The vocals until 1:50 were mixed too quitely relative to the instrumental; not the easiest to understand, though there's no ding for that, since it's a style thing. Note from 2:01-2:02 was flat and should be autotuned, IMO, and probably could tweak some moments at 1:50 & 2:00. Great energy for the performances overall; I enjoyed Connor's vocal chorusing, and the higher notes in particular (e.g. 2:11) are so much fun. Loved the energy of 2:22's final chorus leading into the final big finish of wailing vocals. There are some moments where Connor could tweak some things to leave no holes in his game, and I'm sure other Js will have more insight on that front, but overall strong and fun stuff! YES

My wife loves K-soaps, so I can say without hesitation that this source tune indeed sounds like a song for the tender moments of a Korean drama. Loved the shift into the guitar as lead at 1:24, with nice violin backing. When the flugelhorn came back in at 1:55, I'm glad Logan went for more interpretation; it could have easily just retread the same performance dynamics as before and came off disinteresting, so it was good to hear the arrangement continue to develop rather than rest on its laurels. Awesome ornamentation provided by the string plucks toward at 3:10 the finish. Lovely performances, y'all! YES

The opening piano's serviceable though exposed; the timing's rigid enough where it was noticeable, including when it comes back at 9:18. "Suck a Sage" arrived at :59 and the mixing was lossy-sounding and messy, with the stabs from 1:06-1:15 sounding like they were distorting; solid enough power with this section; the performance felt somewhat stilted until 1:52, though certainly not anything where it would be below OCR's bar. TMNT "Going Up" was thrown in from 2:18-2:34 with a pretty shrill synth. "Star Base" theme was also in there at 3:03, with some more interplay from the shrill synths; part of the issue with those synths was them sounding so much sharper than the guitar, which was a weird contrast where they didn't sound like they occupied the same room. The Goemon source at 5:23 felt like a jumpier transition; at the "Ninja Rap"-style cameo at 5:47. There's "The Parasprinter" at 6:01 with a seamless transition, and I dug the brief doubling of the melody with the chiptune line at 6:37; nice touch! Organ's piercing, mostly around 8:05, along with the Eastern wind instrument at 8:50, some more examples of an imbalance with some of the sounds. So yeah, almost everything's lacking high-end sharpness, and some of the synths had too bright and/or shrill of a presense in contrast, but it's an otherwise solid presentation. Would love another mixing pass to smooth some of this out if at all possible, yet the arrangement & performance are enough to carry it. YES (borderline)

There's a more serious tone to the arrangement, but does so without making the theme feel dark. Some nice weight to the bass writing, which established a nice groove. Good depth to the soundscape; everything sounds full, and I enjoyed how various lines would trail off. Oooh, nice ending too; it can come off as too sudden, but I dug that last set of stabs, as it were, which was a nice surprise. Glad you picked this one back up; I always trust your work, Eino, so I'm glad you found the creativity and confidence to get this to a point where you were happy with it. CHOO CHOO

I'll need to time this out later to figure out what primary game this piece would be classified under. There was a moment around 1:49 where the theme interplay was clunky for a segment, but overall it's a solid arrangement and flows pretty nicely between the themes. The bowed strings could use an upgrade, but overall solid performances and nice textures between the live and sampled instruments. Always good to hear the birds let loose in terms of the SFX; long may they continue. YES

I'm so thankful people in the community love these themes. I was initially scared to dig in, just because it's so many source tunes, but I actually recognized all but the MvCI theme, since I played MMX1 and the community's arranged all of the other themes at some point. Veni's video is also extremely helpful in showing the timing of all of the source tune references, and there's no major melody changes, so everything's straightforward as far as observing the source usage. Opens up with some fakey, but serviceable piano. Transition around :35 to MMX5 was fine, but there were some lines with a lot of unpleasent buzziness. The structure's not feeling interpretive with MMX5, so it's more about enhancing the textures. Good transition into the MMX1 Zero theme, and then into MMX5's X vs. Zero theme. I also liked the smooth change in the drumming with the brief change into the MMX3 theme before going back to MMX5 and then switching out to the MvCI theme. All good attention being paid to making these transitions feel smooth by keeping the backing instrumentation consistant. Another cool change around 5:23 to the MMX1 Demo theme followed by the MMX4 theme. The transition to the MMX7 theme felt abrupt, but not by much. If you'd told me this was all one extensive, proggy composition, I'd believe it, so kudos for gluing it all together in a cohesive way! The mixing could be clearer, and I don't like the underlying buzziness at all, so I'd love for it to be tweaked, but it's not bothering me enough to NO this or go conditional YES. The strength of the arrangement carries it. YES

ReMixer & real name: Eino Keskitalo e-mail: Names of games arranged: Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap Name of Arrangement: Vastentahtoisia muodonmuutoksia Names of individual songs arranged: Vs. Dragon, The Dragon's Trap Sources: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5L4EIKljCM 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScoAICcNJNY MP3 link: FLAC link: Hello dear panel! I'm continuing my journey of polishing up my old work in progress arrangements for submission. This one dates all the way back from 2009, from People's Remix Competition round 156! https://compo.thasauce.net/rounds/view/PRC156 It was always a fun track I was pretty pleased with. I recorded live bass, guitar and keyboard on top of a non-standard sequenced drum kit. The recording quality was bad, playing was out of time, and the keyboard sounded atrocious! Regardless, the result was a fun short jam, based on music from a game from my childhood, with lots of fond memories of friendship and family attached to it. And the game is still pretty great to play, and the music is still an example of eight bit gold. For the polishing work, I mostly replaced the synth jamming with a couple of synth presets that come with Renoise. I did leave the original playing as a quiet layer in there. As far as the guitar goes, I "reamped" it to give it a lot more brightness, then pushed it to the background in the mix as it was both hissy and lacking in high frequencies. I also doctored the timing quite a bit and completely dropped it for some parts. It's there for colour and a bit of rhythm - I don't have a guitar to re-record at the moment. The bass playing however I was reasonably happy with - I just EQ'd it, fixed some of the worst timing issues (but not all, so it's organic and garage-y) and added a bit of distortion here and there. I was actually pretty pleased and surprised I was able to "rescue" the track up to this level of quality! I hope it's good enough. I also hope you don't mind it being so short - to me, it doesn't need to be any longer. It's a good homage to a game I actually have played substantially! (That's the case for only less than half of my OCR tracks still.) Big thanks to the Workshop hero Hemophiliac for a couple of listens and good comments, which pushed me to do a couple of extra rounds of mixing tweaks.. for example, one of the synths got some chorus effect automation added, which was a very nice additional touch to the track overall and gave it some variety that makes the overall impression nicer. cheers --Eino

I watched through a pair of the most recent videos back in 2019, and it didn't sound like Kegy was using other OC ReMixes beyond "Gypsy Jazz". But I'm happy to look through any other specific Kegy videos that you offer up; if there are other OC ReMixes they used, we should be able to identify them, I'm just not sure if he any others.

I reached out to Je via email, but it was missed, so I forum PMed him yesterday wth the same comments and was able to then get a hold of him; sharing our convo: I hinge my decision-making the most on "identifiable and dominant," which is why I end up lovingly timestamping and stopwatching stuff. Part of it is showing the artists that we're actually paying attention to their tracks and understanding what they did. Part of it is to sanity check that they aren't just doing their own thing with a small amount of VGM usage in there. In my opinion, the VGM source material must always be the dominant/majority component of any arrangement. My personal guideline for this is identifying the source tunes in use somewhere within the arrangement for at least 50% of the track's duration. For this specific track, for example, consider sliding in the first two notes from the source melody (you use it from :35-:36) -- but more quietly or with a different sound -- as a background element underneath at 1:30 or 1:39 until 1:48 when the full melody returns at full volume. That would be enough to nudge the source usage over the 50% mark without making big changes. For the timing, the sound could trigger either at, say 1:39 at the same time as the lead sound, or at 1:40, almost like a call-and-response in between the two flourishes at 1:39 and 1:41). That's just one potential idea, with the intention being invoking the source just a bit longer. For me and sometimes other judges, if it's 49.99%, that's automatically a NO, but some judges will entertain stuff below 50% and go with their gut. It always safest to be at 50.01% or above. But artists can and do range all over the place in terms of how much of their arrangement is actively referencing the source tune at any given time, so as long as the VGM "dominates" the arrangement, invoking the VGM from anything from 50-100% of the track's duration is welcome and allowed. You don't have to necessarily have to add wholly original sections; as long as the presentation is personalized enough, people often do refer to the source during 70-80% of an arrangement. It's up to the artist! Hope to see you in the Discord for sure, Je, it's a great community there, and I always enjoy your work! -Larry To summarize: 1) 227 agreed that my timestamping was accurate and matched how he described things in his submission comments; 2) 227 is OK with whatever decision we reach and has a clearer understanding of the source usage expectations/guidelines; 3) Unless he changes his mind, since he changed DAWs, revisiting this track is effectively a no-go; and 4) A failure to more quickly resolve the decision -- or at least communicate the issues -- may result in our inability to obtain a revision, which we'll need to address.

Ok! Thank you very much for the feedback, i will send my remix of the Asgore's theme of Undertale instead Contact information: Remixer name: Gabriel Busarello Remixer real name: Gabriel Dell'Agnolo Busarello Email: Website (Facebook page): https://www.facebook.com/BusarelloGabriel Submission information: Name of the game: Undertale Name of arrangement: The Spooky King Name of individual song arranged: Asgore's theme Composer: Toby Fox Link to the original soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKLxc2NsNcg Comments: This is an orchestral version of the Asgore's theme, with the intention to change the mood of the music for something more "halloween style", spooky, etc. Remix: Sincerely, Gabriel Busarello.

Cool vibe with fun sound design choices; I initially thought some additional elements earlier on wouldn't have been a bad idea, but the texture's actually filled in very nicely once you pay attention to and appreciate each individual part. Super clean stuff. Later you have the nice rhythmic change at 1:45, which was a nice idea to keep things moving, and you filled in the textures even more to altogether bring more intensity ahead of the crescendo-ing beats at 2:06. The arrangement certainly stands on its own, yet since it's from a Mickey Mouse game and I've heard the source, it somehow still feels kind of quaint. LOVE that another Master System game is getting some coverage; awesome choice, Eino! YES

Eventually, yes!

Love the opening with the lush sounds and water SFX; very cool feel to start. The beat comes in at :37 and it's surprisingly tame, one of those tracks where the beats have no meat and sound like a plastic bucket's being hit. Meanwhile, all of the other instrumentation and sound design is so strong, so the beats are an unfortunate quality disparity. Nice drop at 1:43, though this is full of amazing ear candy. By 2:04, I was also tired of the beats, so I'm genuinely glad they dropped out for something else by 2:13 (followed by the first usage of "Infinite Blue" at 2:19). Ah man, beats back at 2:29. Another great dropoff at 2:42. Don't let my focus on a weaker element take away from the fact that this arrangement kicks all sorts of ass. Look at those last creative arrangement ideas at 3:15 before referencing the verse at 3:28. Wow, awesome, Dean. Amazing energy and dynamics throughout. The beats needed more body & heft, but that doesn't take away from this being a super-fun thrill ride! YES

The track was 2:24-long, so I needed to make out the theme for at least 72 seconds. Since this is a gimmick arrangement, I just wanted to check that the source tune was in play enough. I found what I needed! :02.5-:10.5, :13-1:09, 1:30.5-1:35.5, 1:49-2:04.75 = 82.75 seconds or 57.46% overt source usage Also, 1:44-1:47 = Honnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnk One weird goose honk amidst an otherwise sound concept and performance. I... SEY YES P.S. Honnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnk! LT Edit (7/11): Sorry, guys, I'm listening again, and the sax control is indeed too unsteady. I was too nice, which I'll never be again! I'd love for you to try this again, if you're willing to re-record it.

A bunch of goofs goofin'. YES

The source tune feels like Ghosts'n Goblins with beats; I dig it. Track was on the crowded side for me. It's not muddy in terms of parts stepping over one another; the different parts actually seem fairly clean, but something about how they all form this texture makes the track seem cluttered and less sharp than it should. Maybe the grimier/crunchier sounds that start around :04 could have been saved for the repeat of the verse & chorus at :31 or later at 1:18, which could have made the middle seem like a subtle escalation of the energy instead of a retread. From 2:29-on, I would have liked to have heard something new with the textures and writing ideas to make for a stronger close, especially after the dropoff section at 2:00; right now, ideas (albeit creative ideas) are cut-and-pasted with the same sounds and intensity (e.g. verses at :03, 1:18 & 2:43); instead of feeling like a satisfying bookend, the lack of variation in places made the finish repetitive and disappointing. That said, maybe other Js won't mind the structure as much as I did. It's still a solid arrangement by Ernesto with driving energy! YES