Emunator

I'm in the process of doing a track-by-track checklist-style review, for those of you that can appreciate the feedback of someone who knows next-to-nothing about music Here's my two cents on the first disc. 1-01: Nutritious – Full of Courage + Typical Nutritious-quality samples and arrangement + Flute at 2:16 was exquisite + Appropriate song to start off the album - Doesn’t take many stylistic risks –very solid song but doesn’t particularly stand out compared to other orchestral arrangements by Nutritious (if you can really count this as a negative. I suppose this just comes with the genre, I'm not sure what else could have been embellished or added without possibly ruining what you've already got here.) 1-02: audio fidelity – The Might of Baron + Drums, marching sounds, and rhythm guitar create excellent mood during intro + All samples are extremely well used + Keyboard (?) at :53 onward adds a nice touch + Orchestral and rock sounds have rarely, if ever sounded so good together! + Great flow throughout the song - Interlude at 2:40 fits nicely in context, then transitions perfectly back into the rock verse without a hitch. + One of the best songs on the album! 1-03: AeroZ – Overture ~ Tellah’s Prophecy + Cello at 1:53 was very enjoyable, reminded me of something from Bond. + Outro was well done, this is where the cello playing seemed the best to me. - Took a long time for the song to really click with me. Didn’t have me fully convinced that the song was going anywhere until 1:53, and then it kind of meandered back into questionable territory a few times after that - Not as solid as AeroZ’s other contributions to the project, in my opinion 1-04: avaris – Journey to Solace + Loved the evolution of the percussion throughout the song + Transition at 1:02 felt perfectly natural and took the song in a wonderful direction + 3:04 piano was a nice instrument choice, and also sounded nice for the outro. Good piano sounds for both sections. - Parts of the song felt a bit lacking melody-wise (though this might be a result of the source.) 1-05: AnotherSounscape – Ana(pro)logue + Somehow even happier and bubblier than Anso’s usual work. + Source tune works PERFECTLY for this style of music + Great use of different synth sounds, each one seems suited for the notes that it is attached to + Hilarious cameos! - Lolwut @ the robotic “1-2-1-2-3” voice - Fadeout? 1-06: John Revoredo – The Flying Machine + At just over 2 minutes, it came, did its thing, and didn’t overstay its welcome. One of those times where shorter is better + Beautiful samples and mixing, song sounds wonderful - Arrangement felt a bit repetitive even for such a short song 1-07: Mazedude – Read the Sine + Typical Mazedude quality work – song is completely out of left field and is structurally weird, but it totally feels cohesive and almost beautiful. + 1:43 was unexpected but a completely awesome transition - I keep getting this god-awful buzzing noise on the low frequencies regardless of where I listen to this. I can’t determine if it’s something in the song that’s off, or if I’ve just got cheap speakers/headphones 1-08: Cyril the Wolf – Emerald Beauty + One of the most beautiful arrangements on the album – establishes a mood early on and sticks with it, but switches things up often enough to stay fresh throughout the whole song + All of the live instruments sound wonderful, especially the sax + Good bass writing - The fake violin brings down the mood of the whole song, unfortunately. Everything around it sounds so natural and organic, so this one element does put a damper on an otherwise-amazing song. I’d kill to hear a version of this song with a live violin by nonsensicalexis or someone else willing to offer their talent. 1-09: Children of the Monkey Machine & audio fidelity – RDX Necklace + The Bomb Ring “explosion” in the beginning was pretty awesome, established a great mood + CotMM does what he does very, very well. + The guitar adds a nice industrial sound to the song ? I’m no expert in the genre so it’s hard to objectively review something where I don’t truly understand the intricacies of the music being created. Therefore, I’ll refrain from offering criticism here. 1-10: Tweek – Of Fiend and Man + Nice drumming after 1:47 + The outro at 1:15 was awesome. - The outro sounded like it was leading into something completely awesome and the song was finally about to take the song to the next level, but instead, it just… ended. - Lead guitar sounds too drowned out, though I can see how that might have been intentional - Honestly, this song didn’t sit well with me. It seemed to hover in the same mood/range and never really progressed anywhere except for a few spots. It never really captured my attention. 1-11: DragonAvenger – Interlude ~ Yay! + Um… yay? - I think this would have sounded better after Audix’s track, personally 1-12: Level 99 & audio fidelity – The Skies Hold No Angels for Us + The subtle vocal samples in the intro were cool + Great guitar tones, playing all across the board + 2:03-3:17 was absolutely awesome, the dueling guitars sounded beautiful together! + The piano came in at just the right time, and the children samples in the back reminded me of Skrypnyk’s “A Moment of Tolerance” + One of the best songs on the album, hands down! Bravo to both of you! - The lead guitar at :50 felt like it came in just a bit too abruptly (this is the only negative I can find for this track. I had to really be picky about things here ) 1-13: Abadoss & James George Edward’s Dream Quartet + The mixture between live and synthesized instruments was completely seamless, I couldn’t tell the difference! + Page flipping effects between segments was a nice touch that only adds to the realism created by the wonderful samples + Good job expanding the mood of the song as it progressed. It had a nice balance between ‘sticking close to the source’ and ‘going off on tangents so the song doesn’t become boring’ + Plucked strings were definitely a good choice for the 4th section of the song, nice job mixing things up a bit! - It’s too long for casual listening, so this probably won’t be going on my playlist. However, I can still appreciate what the two artists brought to the table here, it’s clear that a lot of talent went into this one! 1-14: Golbez ‘N Goblins + The drum buildup at :13-:14 (that appears numerous times later in the song, too) always struck me as plain awesome! + Nothing less than I’ve come to expect from bLiNd in terms of production and arrangement - My least favorite bLiNd track from the album (which isn’t really so much of a shot at this song as it is a compliment to his other two contributions!) - I’m not a fan of the short vocal clips used 1-15: OA, Nutritious & The Fabul Men’s Choir + Completely unique, original effort that was epic in scope and didn’t even seem doable to me, but it panned out in almost every way imaginable! + While the choir is the most amazing part of this song solely for the amount of effort that went into planning it, the rest of the instrumentation is flawless and should definitely be acknowledged too! + OA’s synth/guitar work is as stellar as ever! + It’s nice to see Nutritious put his talents into different styles of music, he’s just as good with this as he is with traditional orchestral arrangements! + !!!!

Woah, are you THE Mew2King? http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=15145 There's a WIP done by the talented Audix, but I'm not sure how far he got into it.

Woah, I just need to comment and say that the title for this project is awesome! Good luck all! Somehow, I envision this project getting completed VERY quickly, it looks like you've got a lot of good names on the track list!

Haha, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant that your style of music is typically a lot harder rock than this, I wasn't sure how you'd approach a source such as Forest Interlude ... I swear I've already posted something like this in this thread before. Weird.

In the best possible way, man! At first, I had no idea how a remixer like you would handle a mellow song like 'Forest Interlude' but you definitely rose to the challenge You touched on lots of great ideas without ever becoming repetitive. Thanks for doing great justice to my favorite game song of all time!

It's working fine for me right now, I tried accessing the PS3, Wii, and 360 pages and they were glitch-free for me.

Well, one of the tracks on the original post (Dancing Calcobrena by John Revoredo) somehow ended up being a bonus track. So if you take that away, the number of tracks should be correct. I'm not sure if Avaris had a different mix for "Cecil Becomes a Paladin," but my guess is that it was a remix of "Sorrow and Loss" and was just mis-named in the first post. Everything seems to be in order, even though the original post is a bit inaccurate.

http://dkmusic.karmus.dk/remix/Donkey%20Kong%20Country%202/VGMix/Darangen%20-%20Take%20Me%20Away.mp3 Here's a vocal/acoustic mix by Darengan... The vocals are a bit iffy at times, but the song is undeniably beautiful!

... wow. That was intense, and it should go without saying that I've never heard anything remotely like this on OCR before. It's great to see new ground being broken all the time on this site, so thanks for perpetuating that notion of expansion and creativity! That being said, I have no idea how to go about reviewing this. I've never listened to Viking Metal in my life so I don't know how this stacks up compared to the professional stuff. I liked the growling vocals, but the spoken word felt pretty corny to me, honestly. That's about all I've got to say.

Your guitar/bass sounds work great here. I wasn't a fan of the spoken word stuff particularly but I can see how it works here; I just thought the cutoff before the spoken part came in was a bit too abrupt. The growling vocals are intense and well-performed, you should be proud of that! This is a very cohesive package that fits together wonderfully and creates an ambient, dark song that I won't soon forget.

You absolutely did justice to the mostly-underused sources used here. The drums are intense and captivating. The whole mix really clicked for me when the Castle theme from NSMB kicked in; that's a source I completely overlooked when playing through the game, but it works great for this genre. At times, the organ/strings can be overpoweringly loud, but that might just be my cheap $20 headphones at work! I would have liked to hear the synth elements that you briefly introduced towards the beginning of the song employed more, but I could see how that might clash with the overall style you're going for. When you did use them, it sounded pretty neat though! Great job, though. Part 2 needs to get up on the front page ASAP!

Hoooooly crap, you played my two most anticipated songs off the entire album Granted, the podcast was skipping so I wasn't really able to appreciate the flow of the songs, but Fishy & Audix are sounding awesome here. Thanks for the preview tracks!

http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=3480 Post it there so it can be added to the master list!

Holy -- Someone remind me why the vocal version wasn't submitted instead? The instrumental is nice on it's own, but really the rapping brought it to a whole another level and it deserves to be heard by a bigger audience. Great work on all fronts guys!

I've only been lurking these forums for a little while and even I saw this coming! OA definitely stands out as one of the most motivated, talented individuals to emerge from the community in the past few years, so I guess I had a sense this was coming sooner or later - I'm just surprised at the timing! Congratulations!

Bumped, because I'm excited to see this project fill out!

Ah yeah, you'd love Dwelling of Duels. A lot of the remixers you mentioned have submitted there, and the majority of the songs there are in the style that you'd probably like. http://dod.vgmix.com/index.php A few artist recommendations: Prince of Darkness Darengan SnappleMan Joren De Bruin Dr.Manhattan (from DoD; he's won 1st place in the last 4 competitions.)

Really melodic and bubbly mix, it definitely makes me happy to listen to I can't be the only one to have drawn the connection between this remix and the Rainbow Road song from Mario Kart Wii at certain parts, though. I asked my girlfriend about it and she immediately drew the connection to Rainbow Road, too. Of course, I've been playing that game all day so it might just be stuck in my head http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRbm_v9DHpI

Dammit, I don't think I've ever been so sad to hear a song end. I wanted this one to keep going on forever, I just got lost in the vocals and the simple but entrancing instrumental. The source tune is excellent too and you most definitely did it justice! I'm going to be looping this all night - I daresay this is the most emotive vocal act I've ever heard on this site, or at least on-par with my current favorite ("The Place We Knew") Thank you so much for sharing this awesome song, please keep submitting stuff here!

Oooh, the suspense!

This is a friggin' stellar artist list so far! I hope most/all of these artists follow through and finish the tracks they've claimed. This could be really great, best of luck to all those involved!

Any project with Audix and Fishy showing up this frequently on the track list has got to be good! I can't wait to hear the finished product!

Well, I can't say I'm a fan of the spoken intro, but the rest of it is pretty sweet!

So wait a minute, is that Party song actually a part of the project?

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c163/Emunator/Game%20Collection/IMG_1829.jpg That was taken two Thanksgivings ago, IIRC. That's the combined possessions of my whole family though, it's not just mine. There's no reason I would buy that many DS's or duplicate games for myself