Shadix

Sorry I'm late making my picks, Ethan and Dusty told me about this last week and I forgot to make my picks. This is a hard pick, I want to remix all 5 of these at the same time. 1) Squid Adler (X5) 2) Slash Beast (X4) 3) Blizzard Wolfang (X6) 4) Izzy Glow (X5) 5) Rainy Turtloid (X6) ~Jameson Sutton

boo !!!!

oh wow this started back up.

Wait wait wait are you #srb2 Arrow? Yes it was pretty liberal arrangement. 0 - 20 : Bassline has a variation of the MM8 Wily arp in the piano 31 - 51 : Gravity Man's main melody 53: Proto Man's theme is the pad in the background, the string melodies are playing a variation of the guitarish melody in MM8 Wily. 1:14 - another wily arp. The harsh square melody Timaeus mentioned. 1:35 - Based on the breakdown of Gravity Man. 1:55 - Section 2 from Gravity Man 2:20 - The brass hits from the intro to Gravity Man 2:44 - Cameo from the final form of Falz from PSO. ~ (2:00)3:04 Wily MM8, the last melody before the song loops. 3:15 Wily MM8 Then awkward loop. For those who don't know in PSO the songs transition between a chill ambient piece and a upbeat crazy piece depending on whether you are in combat. 1:35 was written a the part 1 -> part 2 transition.

It was directly trying to emulate the music from Phantasy Star Online games. I started running into problems when it came to finding ways to fit the source in various spots. I do agree there are a few funky parts and that at times it gets more dissonant than maybe it needs to be. Thanks for the review man. Also haha thanks for noticing the square arp. I thought I was going crazy when I thought it was off-key because noone had been mentioning that it sounded off so I thought I maybe got away with it just being super freaking dissonant there. Its weird when you write super dissonantly its super easy to have the wrong tonal center in your head for a chord and then you write a melody and then you'll even think its working but then you come back to it and are like "wtf did I do"

note: You need to turn your speakers up a bit to properly experience my track. Loudness Wars, going for dynamic mix vs. super squashed electronic mix.

Awww don't cry, just remember to compress the brass more next time.

Iono it wasn't that great. )))))

I stole it from an image meme. http://imgur.com/NT2mv

Does Darke even have a home? He's living the Con life, eating klondikes, listening to Kanye West at his Kanye Best wearing a Kanye Vest.

Also btw I don't normally self-plug myself, but whenever the tracks come up please give my track a listen. I kind of went a little... ehh... crazy.

It was two thank you.

Hey Timaeus, I appreciate you trying to offer advice, however I've noticed this several times in this thread but in your attempts to help you often say things that are flat out not true and\or bad habits. If you are going to conduct yourself like an expert you should take the responsibility to fact check your practices or at the very least make it clear to people that your method is just that, your method and is not a defacto wrong\right way of doing things. People are actively reading these forums even in this competition for advice, and if you lack understanding on certain aspects of the craft it can be misleading to fresher blood trying to learn good production habits. If it isn't a black or white issue and is a subjective production choice you make, you should at the very least make it clear when you give advice that your approach is how you do things and isn't a definitive wrong\right way. I only bring this up because when I started coming to OCR back in 07-08 I picked up a ton of horrible habits from people doing exactly this that I had to basically completely unlearn at university.

I agree with this message.

Its a machine swing duder. I plop note for note. I'm all-clicktual. Track was rough because I work 12 hour shifts every day . Wanted to do another pass. Didn't have time because I had to go back to work.

I use REAPER. lol I was making a bad joke. huehue Since, you know, the REAL PRO studio world has a Pro Tools\Mac fetish.

You mean Pro Tools amirite. ;D

If you guys are the ones that skim tracks, please give them all listens this week before voting. There are TONS of amazing tracks this week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENC5MEzrRp8

Where do you come up with this stuff buddy? KgZ is probably one of the best all-around producers in this contest. He's an extremely talented Berklee grad and has tons of prestigious credits to his name. Also his music is off the wall, so you might want to give him the benefit of the doubt with his approach. In the big time, you'd be lucky if you could get a record exec to listen to your track for more than 10 seconds. Is it right? Maybe not, but its how the game works and its super important to get your listeners attention right away. I actually tend to be pretty bad myself at getting to the point. If the piece\band is good I'll listen to that stuff all the way through all day. This also doesn't mean you have to start your piece of hard, you can have ambient stuff, just make it interesting. Though, I will also say depending on your genre a longer intro may be required, in those cases I'll jump ahead if I want to get to the meat. A great example of this is Octavarium and Trial of Tears by Dream Theater. I actually have a pretty bad habit (bad?!) of listening to albums all the way through if I like what they are doing, even if the song I liked is the only good thing about the album haha. I also like listening to their influences.

I find it rather ironic that you just made this response without reading my whole post when you are getting upset at people for not listening to the whole songs. I actually agree on that front. I was stating that the 30 second approach does indeed have merit because the first 30 seconds are very important from an arrangement standpoint. I definitely think it is a good idea to listen to the whole pieces to get an idea and see if there were well executed ideas. I've actually been kind of worried people aren't even listening to all the entries before they vote.

I understand the importance of clearly using both sources, but good arrangement can't be exclusively dictated by "source usage". I feel like it hampers the creative process and is why at least some of the tracks feel so calculated and dead to listen to. There's soooo many more important factors to arrangement; like conveyance, structure, dynamics, timbre, instrumentation, chord voicing, orchestration, counterpoint, layering. I'll listen to most of the tracks all the way through to see if there are well-formed ideas, but if your piece can't effectively convey a moving musical idea to your listener within 30 seconds the arrangement probably needs a gloss over, even if the source usage is clever. I mean, look at some of the best arrangers in the VGM scene, like XPRTNovice, Prince of Darkness, Snappleman, Stemage, Virt, Harmony, Star Salzman if you want to get retro. The source melodies and ideas themselves are merely ingredients for them to express their musical ideas with vivid detail. If they depart from the source completely it doesn't feel jarring because its usually to further express the musical idea they were going for. Pete's track is a great example of this, which I think is a good indicator why he's getting so many votes.

I just wanted to note that Parallel Fifths have nothing to do with 3rds. Its when you you have two voices in a chordal texture moving in the same direction with a 5th interval between them, which sounds awful if your goal is tonal harmony. Edit: Mah bad Darkesword's already on this

It definitely takes some stones... you know... being one of the Hard Men.

Yeah, it wasn't so much for me wanting it to be more competitive, I wanted it moreso so that I could fully realize my arrangements, as for instance, I didn't have a really good sax library but I do know some great sax players that I could've printed up sheet music to. The barebone's arrangement being played by live players is an interesting issue to bring up. However, addressing a problem like that I think might be better addressed by setting up different voting categories for arrangement and production. Simply mixing a live ensemble you aren't playing in takes SO MUCH WORK on its own, between coordinating, transcribing, editing, mixing, etc. just to get it to a professional production level. There's also the variable of whether the live players you are getting can actually play the music you are giving them to. Lots of psychology and prep work required. Right now, an individual with great sample libraries and good production skills can get away with getting more votes with a simpler arrnagement than someone with less that has an extremely complex, thought out arrangement. I hope that people will factor other things into their voting decisions as this is a contest to see who can arrange the best. I think this actually will be a good thing to get people to look at the arrangements themselves more objectively in the long run. It enables the people who want to go the extra mile to do live arrangements to do the work and if everyone catches onto it hey, we all benefit as producers. As long as you are explicitly the one writing the piece I don't see a problem, and not just tossing music to people and telling them to play something over a section. For instance if you want a solo section I'd say you should either be the one playing the solo or should have every freaking note in that solo written out on paper. The reason it appeals to me is because I'm still in engineering school and need excuses to get more experience with that convoluted workflow. Thank you Darkesword for considering my proposal! I'm really excited to see how people might utilize this new resources, and I'm sure it'll make for some absolutely killer mixes.