Eino Keskitalo

Solid bunch of tunes for sure. The artwork is great!

What a fun tune! The arrangement is seemingly straightforward. After the intro it seems like it's the same endlessly revolving chord sequence plus a melody on top, with softy and/or gated instruments carrying the changes along with a fairly steady beat. But the blippy, non-stop leads sound like a smile. Ticklish! And a lot of variation on how the source is handled. Nice how the two minute mark brings back the intro (which doesn't clue you in how the rest of the piece will go, while fitting perfectly - nice!). Feels kind of an old school OCR arrangement in some sense. Easy to listen to, easy to enjoy!

Certainly! If you can (be bothered), host a copy of the image yourself. Not sure if I can keep it up in that address.

It's working! I have gotten a bunch of reviews on my tunes and that makes me happy. Also I'm working on a new review method.. Feel free to use the above as a signature. (If you can, host the file in your own space please..)

Pretty much an in-joke ReMix. Fun as such for me, as a fan of both OCR Talkback and NGI. Production and arrangement are serviceable if not wowing. The main meat is the vox sampling. The other meat, WillRock soloing was quite good. I can see this tune being a bit incomprehensible to fans of just the other Larry, but if you're into both, it's a fun one-off!

One of my favourite tracks from the compo, so I'm glad you're revisiting this! I'll try to check this out with something other than laptop speakers (ouch), but two things; I disagree (for now at least) with timaeus222 that this needed more chord changes, what's there works for this piece. Second, I feel like many of the longer synth notes towards the end could use some more expression to them; vibrato, filter stuff, bend up/down, velocity trickery.. lots of opportunity there, right now it's a sorely missed opportunity!

I was actually replying to Avaris' post; you slow-ninja'd a post in between. (-:

Traverse Town!

Cool to hear an arrangement from Sonic Rush Adventure, I played this to near-completion not too long ago. I agree it's pretty close to the feel of the original. A bit more mellow and clean if I recall correctly. Some of the writing seems to clash harmonically a bit. I'll try to find the time to give you more feedback on that (at least timestamps).

Another huge Shining Force 2 fan here! We did a little tribute a year ago on the forums & on Sega Mixer Drive on Radio Sega, you might want to check that out! The sound of synths is actually very Mega Drive-y to me, many of the sounds seem very reminiscent of the original. Listening to the source & this arrangement back-to-back reveals more difference, but the palette isn't that far off. That's neither good or bad, it was just something that seemed like an interesting thing to me. The drumbeat adds a new element, since the original doesn't have any drums. It's not a very dominant element, but it does add something of a steady drive to the feel of the track. There's some subtle changes to bass line, and the rhythm of the sequencing, that also has this "steady drive" feel, whereas the original is kind of skipping and hopping a bit. As far as OCR submission, two things stick out: first, this is very close to the original structurally, compositionally and even the genre and tone, apart from having drums, so I doubt it'll satisfy the "arrangement must be substantial and original" part of the submission standards. Second, structurally, he piece loops verbatim, or very close to it. It makes it feel less like a standalone track. (The fadeout at the end is also unsatisfying. I don't have an allergy to fadeouts, but it didn't feel like a good conclusion to the piece. But it's kinda moot point since the structure would need work anyhow.) Luckily, you can solve both these problems in one go by creatively rearranging the second go of the source material; original soloing, changeups of instrumentation & structure.. get creative with it, see what the composition inspires you to do. One very specific feedback would be to make the intro bass notes longer, to give some more impact to the intro. I thought that this was pretty well mixed: nothing seemed too quiet or loud to me, everything was audible and pleasant to listen to. I also liked the swooshing, reverby percussive/sfx sounds, they added a great deal of sense of space to the mix.

I don't feel like I would want to see ratings on my tunes, I don't think I would find them useful. But it's interesting you say you might be more inclined to write open-ended comments to go with the ratings. I'm reminded of that workshop forum checklist, which listed common problems found in the judges panel. Not sure if anything like this would apply to approved ReMixes' reviews, but perhaps the checklist could be more integrated to workshop commenting - like, you could actually check the items from the list when commenting on a WIP:

That's one well-scoped Kickstarter. 91$ to go!

I could finish the Traverse Town arrangement I started for the MnP round.

I'm still ASAP-ing.

Uuurrrggh, I really don't have the time, but I would definitely feel the pressure to try to update the tracks I headed in time for the album. It's just that I leaned on Jorito for the final production each time, so that'd also put pressure on him as well I guess!

Nice timing with the pick! Both seasonal and also current thanks to VV3. It is a good theme. I just started playing CV4. I'm familiar to the theme beforehand thanks to fan arrangements, but now I've got the theme really stuck in my head thanks to actually playing the game.

Third spot ain't too bad, especially as the competition for it was so close. Wow! Thanks for running a cool compo, Shariq. I hope to work some more on all of the tracks I headed, not before long. It was so cool to team up with Jorito & Tuberz again!

Awws, I should've gotten myself posted earlier. 1. It takes me a lot of time to give thought-out comments, and I rarely have that lately. I can usually think of something more to say than "hey I like this cool" but processing that into actual sentences takes a ton of time for me. 2. I wonder if reviews could be made more profilic than just forum posts.. maybe counting them separately (not just posts count, but also review count, why not also "workshop comment" count.. would raise their profile). Not as much to reward people who do the reviews, but highlight the importance of the comments. I often find a lot to criticize or comment on that the panel or writeup didn't cover, and I'm sure there's a lot that can be said about my posted pieces that hasn't been said already. This probably isn't what you mean with "what is happening in the piece", but I really like to read "readings" of pieces, what they say or seem to mean to a particular listener. You don't have to understand music in a technical/theory level to do this, which is nice (though you have to be able to write about what you think or feel) Of course, constructive feedback for a specific piece is most useful when the piece is in progress, but I find feedback after the song has been released very useful in a more general sense, where I can apply it to current work, or just get my bearings where I am going. Maybe it matters that my rhythm when making things is very slow. I take a lot of time to finish a piece and finished pieces stay long with me, I like to listen to them a lot. So they're still within my "active knowledge" so to speak, and I can apply feedback on them to my current work too (this is also why I don't mind the long wait on the panel etc that much, personally). Man, you should definitely not stop from commenting. You're not pushing your views to anyone. You're making your view available to them. It's their responsibility to handle that. And if you said something controversial perhaps, more people would hopefully join in on the discussion. It should only be a good thing, right? Self-discovery in a vacuum sounds like a bad idea! I never get that. O_o Haha, "evktalo" and "active", I've fooled you somehow. Now this timaeus222 guy, always posts good, helpful and thought-provoking stuff whenever I post a wip myself. The mindset I've had when posting reviews (to finished or WIP pieces) is that it's an opportunity for me to learn. If I can articulate my thoughts and feelings about a piece, it'll improve my own music making. I'll also learn to listen better and closer, and I'll learn more about e.g. mixing, about which I definitely didn't have a clue about before coming to OCR and I've improved a lot in that regard. But I try to review other people's work so that I could improve myself, it's a selfish motive which I think makes it more honest - I'm not aiming to influence others (as much) but make making music clearer to myself. I've been thinking that we should definitely have that December reviews thing, especially noticing that the newer mixposts need to catch up with the number of reviews. Let's do it!

Only from a distance.. certainly on my checkout list.

Very nice, impressive!

I'm still humbled by Callum's enthusiasm for our track, and generally to all three guys who stepped up to help out with it. It wouldn't be on the album without these guys I'm sure! YAYYYY LISTENING PARTY! Maybe, just maybe I'll be able to make it.. certainly hope so!