Manji

Fantastic, thanks for the swift response! I'll drop you a PM when I get back from the office- will probably include one of the songs I recorded with my band which isn't a videogame remix but shows what I can do re: writing and playing parts. I'm more than happy to just provide an arrangement and stems and let somebody else take care of the mixing/mastering since I'm much more confident in my writing skills than my overall mixing/mastering prowess! Also dropped Chimpazilla a PM, cheers

I would very much like to get involved in this (I have my eye on the song "SeeD" which nobody appears to have claimed yet) but I don't have any posted mixes on OCR - I've got a resubmission in the Judges' Queue at the moment but it's been there for the better part of a year. How would I go about submitting an audition and what should it contain? Apologies if this should be common knowledge, I've not gotten involved in any projects before! Thanks for your patience

Sign me up- Uematsu-san is one of the best composers of all time, in my humble opinion, and I can't wait for the Distant Worlds show in London this November!

*applauds Fratto* I got many lols from reading your usage of 'fallacious' in every paragraph there. Oh, also, since I missed the point about 'metal musicians respecting Yngwie "so immensely"' in the midst of that 7 post splurging vomit heap... Bullshit. I'm a metal musician. I don't jerk off to Yngwie. There are much better (and faster, coincidentally) guitarists out there... but I don't give a shit how fast they are. That's not what most other metal musicians that I know care about either. Death metal isn't just about being fast and technical, moron. It's about creating an atmosphere once again- except this time, the atmosphere is one of violence and anger that is cathartic for the people who listen to it. Case in point; Carcass. Any DM fan would call them one of the pioneers of death metal. Probably their most famous song, 'Corporal Jigsore Quandary', is not very fast, and not hugely technical (except perhaps for it's use of different time signatures, but feh, they flow together easily)- it just has a fucking stomping riff which is firmly intended to make people bang their heads. You are not a death metal musician. You know nothing about death metal. Do your research, and then come back and try and argue with me about one of my favourite genres. Finally, I would say that Yngwie plays fast because he's rather arrogant and wants to show off just how good he is, not because of any "consequence and entailment of the musical aesthetics" or whatever shit it is you're claiming there. But hey, what do I know, I'm obviously not as big an Yngwie fan as you are, with your fallacious arguments.

Allow me to call bullshit on this one aspect of your stupidly-long posts. From what I can tell, you're not in a band- you just do solo guitar stuff. As such, you obviously have absolutely no understanding of how a band actually works. It's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT thing to classical music, which is why I was hesitant to bring it up here in the first place; it's very rare to have a band where one person composes all the music and tells everybody else in the band to play it EXACTLY as it's been written. You know why? Because in modern music that leads to lifeless, boring tripe with no personal flare from the other musicians. The process of creating music with a band should be a fluid, natural act, whether built from improvisation between people with similar mindsets or triggered by a single composer with a vision. I like to think I do have a vision; my idea for the song I write is communicated through the guitar lines and through the 'feeling' I have in my head for that song. I'll communicate that feeling to the people in my band (maybe I should have mentioned that in the original post) by saying "Okay, this song is about so-and-so, and it should ideally evoke a feeling of this, that and the other..." or something along those lines. They then go and do what they do best- take those ideas, along with the suggested parts I've given them, and make something infinitely more awesome. That's the way we do it, and I think it works much better than whatever other route you're suggesting; sorry, I can't tell exactly what you're suggesting, because I can't decipher what the fuck you mean from the maze of unnecessary words you're using. On that note: saying "The construction of all of these arguments is extremely fallacious in that it has to capitalize on a false dichotomy to attain any veracity" categorically proves that you have no penis. And I'm done.

I have been toying with the idea of throwing in a shredding guitar solo over the latter part of the acoustic mid-section to give that a bit more of a progression... or perhaps shorten the acoustic section and put a solo over the variation on the main theme after that? Three guitars doing different (but in harmony, obviously) things = very nice, in my book.

I don't really intend to get too involved in this argument since I've never been classically trained and don't consider myself a classical musician in any way, shape or form (I rather like classical music, but that's about it), but what I will say is this... I write music that I think sounds good. I play this music to the people in my band. They listen. They say "Hmmm, interesting!" Then they go off and play what feels right to them. Recently, we started working on a new song. I'm still playing the same guitar lines that I wrote down... but the drumming's different, the flute parts are different, the bass is different, the keyboards are different. Does this make me angry and filled with rage because I am a composer and my vision is being ignored? No, because it makes the song sound a thousand times better. They interpret it in their own way. This is how music evolves. If I tried to force them to do exactly what I wanted them to play it wouldn't be a natural process, and it wouldn't be half as enjoyable to play. Probably completely off the topic of the original argument, but hey. Also, xRisingForce... to make an unfounded assumption, I think you really need to get laid.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I played around with putting some arpeggios in, and they sound pretty nice played slow under the second part of the main theme, from 1:17 until 2:00. I mixed up the drums for that part a little bit as well... it was kinda a copy-and-paste job at first so I could move onto the rest of the arrangement, kept on hitting the same cymbal every other beat As for speeding it up... ehhh... I'm not going for anything particularly fast and rocky, more a sort of mellow, melodic guitar ballad type thing. A tempo change might be possible somewhere, but I'm unsure as to where to put one in without completely ruining the flow of the piece.

Just to clarify, first off- I'm looking for comments/tips/etc on the arrangement of this ReMix, not the sound quality; the whole thing was done in Guitar Pro, so obviously the midi guitars sound like ass compared to real ones. I'll deal with sound quality once I'm sure the arrangement is rock-solid. That said, click below to hear it: Shinra No. 26 I've wanted to do a really kick-arse guitar version of Cid's Theme for about... ooh... three years now, so this is really just me revisiting my absolute favourite song from the whole game (and probably from any Final Fantasy game... or any video game at all, full stop) and making it prod just a bit more buttock. I'm aware that the second part of the Main Theme, the first time it plays, is rather empty with just two guitars, bass and drums; any tips or suggestions on how to fill that up/what to fill that up with compositionally would be greatly appreciated, keeping in mind that I'm going for a very symphonic guitar-type thing. Thanks!

Not taking music at GCSE level. I got convinced by my mother to take drama/theatre studies instead, and I f**king hated it. Wanted to drop it after a couple of months. >_< Even more so because when I was in primary school I played tuba in the school band and could read music - then I stopped music completely for several years until I started playing electric guitar, and in that time I'd forgotten how to read music. So I can now only do tablature. Sure would be nice to read score

Hey everybody Okay, the story is as follows: recently, my friend and I decided to jokingly do an RPG project based on the really messed-up backstory we have for a sort of grind/noise/experimental band we made called T.A.N.K. My friend decided to write the story and I thought I'd tackle the music. So, I shall link you now to some of the songs I've done for his (rather messed up) story to see what you think of them. I'd classify them as sort of 'death-metal orchestral', but keep in mind that they'd be intended for a 2D SNES-style RPG, and thus are done using a type of midi. It's a type of midi that sounds much nicer for strings and stuff than General Midi though Without further ado: http://nekuramanji.googlepages.com/TheGoodShipAccess.mp3 This is the music that would be played when the characters find a ship (called 'Access'- that's a reference to one of the messed up grind songs we did with the band ) and sail on it across the sea. And: http://nekuramanji.googlepages.com/EvilsCastle.mp3 Kinda explains itself - the music that plays whilst the characters are in a big ol' evil castle near the end of the game. I've got craploads of songs for this... if anyone's particularly interested I might get a couple more into .mp3 format and post them up So yes. Have a listen and let me know what you think! Keep in mind they're intended to be looping BGM though, even though I've given them a definite structure and finishing point. It just makes them easier to listen to.

Fair enough, no offense taken Thanks for the suggestions- although I generally work by tabbing stuff out explicitly, learning it off by heart then playing the guitar parts to the others for us to then build something up, I reckon I'll try a different approach. I was thinking primarily of using the song as an intro track- so it starts with the normal song (playing on the PA or something) for the big chords, then when it breaks into the melody line the band comes in with a bang. It'd be a good start to the show

Well, I meant it wasn't composed solely in midi like some older games, so you can't find the original midi file anywhere. Oh, and Kanthos- this is just an idea that I've personally had right now, I haven't discussed it with the others. Also, thanks for putting me down- while I could write it out myself, logic dictates that if there's an easier way to do something you take the easier way. Finding a midi will eliminate a lot of hard work. I wouldn't be in a band if I didn't have any musical transcription/composition skills. Thanks.

It's probably going to be difficult since the music for Oblivion wasn't done in midi at any point... there must be a user-created midi out there somewhere! Thanks for looking though.

I was wondering if anyone can help me out- I'm trawling t'internet to see if I can find a midi of the main theme of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for possible adaptation with my current band. Basically, I'm planning to import the midi into my tablature/scoring program so I can work out guitars and drums and various other heavy metal elements for it So far I've had no luck- does anyone a) possess such a midi (the track is called 'Reign of the Septims' if that helps) or know where such a midi might be found? Thanks in advance!

I sent this one to the Submissions email and got an instant rejection email back the next day- however, I can't really figure out why it got rejected without even being evaluated by the panel. Here's the file: http://nekuramanji.googlepages.com/Manji-FinalFantasyXThisHolyMountainO.mp3 If there's something fundamentally wrong with this that would stop it from even getting listened to by the judges then could someone tell me what that is? I'm as confused as a very confused person at the moment. Thanks for any feedback.

If it's available and you're still accepting remixers for the project, I would love to take on the Sephiroth Boss Battle remix. (FF Fanboy and all that ) Admittedly, I am a complete n00b (working on some WIPs but I haven't got anything on OCR), but you don't have to worry about delays- I've got nothing to do until September, really, so plenty of time to work on a Remix And just out of interest, which song would be being remixed for the Sephiroth battle? One Winged Angel would be pretty difficult since it's already been done in plenty of different ways...