Eino Keskitalo

Many thanks for the valuable comments, timaeus! I think in my arranging I generally have a problem (or maybe just style, but more likely a problem) of not establishing a strong lead or a followable center to my arrangements. This isn't the first piece I get this kind of feedback with. Thanks for the good pointers, I'll look into it! I was actually wondering about the kick myself. The kick is a stock sample, I don't know anything about constructing good electronic kicks - perhaps a good time to start learning. Hehe, good one on the motion sickness (actually it's the name of this arrangement). If I did (over)do the crosspanning accordingly, I *would* probably get some myself quite easily. It's a fun idea, I'll consider it! I'm don't want to polish this thing forever, just to submittable (and passable) status, as I want to move on to other pieces. But I'll try to address at least the clutter & focus problems to some degree. Once again, many thanks for the excellent crits! --Eino

Time to finish this thing for subbing. Still taking feedback, hopefully this will do! Final candidate 3 An update based on Gario's excellent feedback. tweaked some lead & pad sounds to balance the EQ better pitched a couple of the snare sounds a bit higher made some leads follow the source more closely added a bg melody from source tweaked the bass sound for additional life/stereo/detail other small tweaks confusing convoluted source breakdown: What's used from the source: the two slightly different note sequences: 0:51-1:05 "half-time" 0:00-0:07 "fast"; the variation/ending at 0:05 is only referenced once at a bg melody. 0:29-0:36 background stuttering melody-ish support bleep 0:22-0:29 bassy line Source usage in the piece: The bass line - the rhythm is offset to be off-beat: half-time: 0:24-0:53, 1:10-1:23, 1:58-2:01, 2:05-2:09 based on half-time with chord change: 2:01-2:05, 2:09-2:12 mix of fast/halftime: 0:53-1:08, 2:14-2:41 Square lead: 0:53-1:05, 2:13-2:43 half time, the steady rhythm broken up 1:26-1:56 half time The filtered saw lead at 1:48-1:56 based on the bassy line at 0:22-0:29. Support stutter (from 0:29-0:36 in the source): build-up: 0:09-0:11, 0:13-0:15, 0:17-0:18 meat of the usage: 0:20-0:38 0:40-0:46, 0:48-0:53 2:22-2:30 sparse usage (often buried): 1:00, 1:03-1:04 1:34, 1:38, 1:49, 1:53 2:06, 2:09 2:32, 2:36, 2:40-2:43 Other support stuff: * "ticking" square 1:08-1:10, 1:25-1:26, 1:41-1:58, 2:00-2:01, 2:03-2:05, 2:07-2:09, 2:11-2:12, 2:19-2:21, 2:43-2:48 (from source 0:00-?) * bg square lead 1:19-1:21 (fast, part at ?) * bg square lead 1:23-1:24 (fast, part at )) --Eino

Nice loot! I feel so bummed I couldn't pledge anything at all. --Eino

I think the key change in the end works now, you fixed the strange transition into it. I think it has a point of highlighting that section and distinguishing it from the previous part. FWIW I think your sounds are fine apart from the mechanical guitar. Lots of very nice sound design / soundscaping / effect usage I think. I think the guitar as a sound works much better from 3:30 onwards. The track sounds pretty sparse around 1:36-2:46. The section is pretty long. It's mostly the bass line and some spicing, and I feel like there could be a lot more of textural interest there to keep the interest. 1:53-2:03 with just the bass & the low synth do work on their own, it's pretty cool how it's stripped down to that, but overall that section feels pretty empty for how long it runs. I'd recommend trying to trim it length-wise and also add some smart ambient textures to it, even very quiet (high passed?) light percussion touches could work. Lots of improvement, if I recall correctly! Very enjoyable track as it is. I'd still try to work on the long sparse section. Another idea would be to perhaps ask around for a guitar collaborator? --Eino

A very, very nice take on the original. The entrance to the main meat at 1:07 or so makes the geese all bumpy. Pretty cool modal shifts (or whatever) towards the end at the quieter section before the final fast part. Love the tale about the trumpet part too! --Eino

The thread replies on the remix page, show empty avatar boxes for me (I haven't got one), and djp (maybe because it's a custom avatar?) http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02855 Firefox 26.0 on Xubuntu 13.04. --Eino

Super smooth and groovy. --Eino

What of the "one track per thread / one thread per track" rule? I definitely don't know what to listen to and critique now and how to keep stuff in check. Also, the link in the top post takes me to a Ken arrangement, not Mega Man X3 intro. I did find the intro stage video though: Interestingly a more straightforward rock take on the original, I'm not familiar with the original but took a listen just now. From a quick comparison I thought the arrangement was decently personalized, harmonically it's different (evident from the very first seconds). I really liked the development at 0:59-1:01, that bit from the source worked very well in your arrangement I thought. It made me pay attention to the track in your arrangement, while interestingly I didn't notice it when I first listened to the source. The structure was repetitive. The rhythm guitar is pretty dominant in the arrangement, I feel like I was hearing it too much. Taking it out for some parts would give a lot of nice feel and dynamics to the arrangement! 1:22-1:35 seems like needless repetition. 1:35-2:02 seems like copy-paste from the earlier part - this would be a great opportunity to vary up the rhythm guitar or replace it with some other instrument or approach - you could even use some synth washes to bring a sense of space to the track. The solo part after that is quite nice, a bit obscured by the constant rhythm guitar. I thought the fadeout was a reasonable arrangement decision (though there are some listeners who will indiscriminately dislike fadeouts). Other than the arrangement, I'll have to criticize that the rhythm and lead guitars are very rigidly sequenced, bass as well. That was my very first impression of the track - "rigidly sequenced guitars". I can't really offer advice for more realistic sequencing unfortunately. The sound is quite balanced, it didn't seem muddy or anything to me. Hope this helps! --Eino

SHELL HYPED! --Eino

Nice stuff! I like the icons on the front page for instance, looks neat and distinguishes the sections from each other. I don't like the new system icons, though. One part is that I definitely have a pixel art bias, but more importantly I feel I need to squint to make out the icons and distinguish them from each other. When I look at the systems page, I literally need to lean forwards to the screen to see them clearly. They're a little blurry. The darker ones don't quite pop out of the dark grey background either. The photographs themselves are pretty cool though. Even though I really liked the pixel versions, those can definitely be aight as well. IMHO they do need another pass at the editing. I also like pics of machines instead of logos (MS DOS, Windows, Mac, Linux) but it's pretty hard to come up with a definite machine for Windows and Linux at least, so they're understandable. Despite the above criticism, I'm very happy to see this update! Good going! The replies on the ReMix page look a lot better now too! --Eino

Kindof. I'd love to tackle The Lab eventually, but I'm talking like next year at the earliest. So probably not good for a claim. --Eino

Cool, sounding pretty good! I was actually thinking some of those would be direct "nah". Promising. I already link youtube videos to the wip posts. Can the system keep track if other people have posted the same source and offer that? Or will OCR end up in court for that? Being able to enter the source link in some separate manner than in the message might be good. It'll highlight to posters that it is good to include the source, at least. And people who give feedback might find the link to the source in a standardized place. What I would want is that if I make a post with feedback on a WIP, the artist can see my comments in a single place. If the Soundcloud thing can be embedded into the feedback including the comments, then it'd fulfill this. One additional thing that came to mind regarding this synergy is making changes to a submitted mix. I do this since I am still poor at determining if a piece is good/finished/etc. It'd be cool if I could make changes to a submitted track that isn't in panel yet, at the cost of bumping the track back to the end of the queue, which I would find reasonable. The thing is if I try to send in an update in an "unofficial" manner (sorry Larry) I worry which version will end up in the panel/etc. I suppose the same goes for approved pieces too - the system would support an update and there would be some appropriate evaluation process (I would find complete re-evaluation reasonable actually - serves me right but the staff would know what would be reasonable for them). Okay, final->submit satisfies in-site submitting and the opt-out satisfies seeing if the artist is aiming for an OCR submission. The latter would be useful when you give feedback, since if they do aim for OCR, one can try to give feedback that would help them fulfill the submission standards. If they don't, you can keep the feedback more general. I quite often wonder about this when I give feedback. To fulfill that role though, the opt-out should be considered when the thread is created (of course the artist is free to change their mind about that any time). I do think marking the piece as finished should be clearly separate from submitting, the latter should be a process clearly in itself so that the user knows it's important (this might be obvious but it's not clear from the above). So the opt-out above shouldn't control if the mix ends up in the panel queue, it should just be informational. Right now workshop has three categories for ReMixes: Work-in-progress, Finished, Mod Review. I could imagine using: Work-in-progress, Release candidate, Mod review, Finished, Submit(ted). The way I've used the current categories "Finished" means a release candidate where I think it's finished, but am taking in more feedback (and usually end up changing the piece quite a bit). "Release candidate" is of course a software term, not a musical term.. could be better. It might be useful to differentiate "finished" from "release candidate", the latter meaning almost/possibly finished, but the artist is still willing to incorporate feedback, useful for both those who give and want feedback. What else.. Brandon is different from me about wanting to show/highlight unfinished stuff, but it sounds that you'd need to be able to opt-out/in of featuring your WIPs in the database, per-mix basis probably. --Eino

Yeah, I was thinking of VGM with lyrics originally (Zombies On Your Lawn, Still Alive, Great Mighty Poo, Final Fantasy series has some, need more Prime remixes too) but gotcha on the recognizability. --Eino

Ah, somehow I thought this'd definitely be VGM music. Probably bad reading comprehension on my side. I'm still in of course. --Eino

Some imaginable use cases I can think of that I'd enjoy (brainstorming a bit too): click on a favourite remixer's profile, see a list of their public WIPs, go give feedback click on an obscure game in the database, notice there's a WIP from 2010, go pester the remixer in the comments for an update automatic source link for WIPs (dreaming.. legally grey area) see at a glance if the remixer is intending their wip to be submitted to the panel eventually see at a glance if the remix was already submitted to the panel upload the wip mp3 to OCR for hosting submit the finished remix to panel in-site listen to a previous version of a WIP when giving feedback to compare improvements soundcloud-style timestamp comments --Eino

Seems like I lost count of the days. I'll post a link to the snippet I've made in a few minutes, perhaps Bundeslang can add it as a bonus to the round. edit: here we go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xqydd257z0ft6x5/eino_keskitalo_-_pommipomo.mp3 --Eino

I'll sign up in the "just for fun" division too. (: I had a random thought about vocal range - it'd be cool if there were several backing tracks in different keys available, but that is probably unfeasible. Perhaps something to consider from track to track though? --Eino

I have a start. Shouldn't have, but I do. --Eino

Tyrian? I approve. I gather you have collected fan-made Tyrian tracks from the internet, and you want to get the artists' consent & put them out on an OCR-released album, right? What do you mean with "Original Tracks"? "original soundtrack, or original remix"? I don't understand what you are going for there. --Eino

I believe I just took the northernmost position over from Rexy. --Eino

Congratulations to the winners! Yeah, this was fun to do, I liked the original very much. Would've liked to do a more complete (longer) arrangement, there were still a couple of parts to cover.. but didn't have the time. Glad I had what I had though! --Eino

It was pretty cool last round to hear the usual Esperado arrangemential goodness buffed up by the timaeus222 production polish! --Eino

is way beyond brilliant.--Eino

Yeah, that's pretty cool. --Eino

That's a pretty fine source, and a Bomberman source too.. tempting.. must.. resist.. looking forward to what others come up with this round though! --Eino