Diodes

I don't know if this helps at all because they are my "remixed" T-shirt designs, but maybe they'll inspire people to buy T-shirts and do creative things with them? Please ignore my retarded pose in the next one, OMG so embarrassing.

Great job to everyone involved! This song is just beautiful. I esp. love starla's vocal harmonies.

Happy Birthday Jay! Hope it's a good one!

So, so true. I don't have much to add to this, other than to chime in and say "I've been there too." Or possibly, "I'm there now and also working on this." I think loving what you do is the best motivation because then it becomes its own reward, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Sure! BTW apparently the MP3 says it's Cantonese, but it's actually Mandarin. I don't know how helpful this will be to those unfamiliar to pinyin, and also I think I got some of the spelling wrong anyway. But it's better than nothing I suppose: duo xue de tian wo xiang yao chu que wai mian hen hao wan zai xue li wo men hou zi zai yi chi fei fei xiang xiao niao quai na ne ge xiang jiao zuo bian you bian xiao xin mi feng hao wei xian CHORUS: hou zi zuei hao wan zong shi kai xin gan jiu rang wo STAY LIKE THIS hou zi zuei hao... wai mian de leng bu hui dang zu wo men zhe me xing fen de shi hou quai gei wo ni de shou! wo men yong ji qiao hen huei zai bing shang tiao wo geng ni zuei gao xing zai yi chi BRIDGE: quai le de ri zi wo xi wang geng zhe ni quai le de ri zi wo xi wang yong yuan geng zhe ni

I'd like to try my hand at Wendy, though I'm not quite sure how to turn that theme into Jpop ; But I love SMW and I think this project is a fun concept.

I really think there is a need out there to have private teachers in music production for this reason. Following instructions from the internet has its limitations, and much of the information on the internet is unhelpful or even misleading (e.g. guitar tabs online x_x). You can go further if somebody is listening to your work and telling you what you need to improve and how. Even classes have their limitation, at least in my experience, because I did study music technology in college. Classes were spent with the teacher lecturing about how to use the tools (theory), and though I would make projects and submit them for grades, there was very little 1-on-1 interaction with the teacher where they could sit with me and show me specifically how to make my track sound better (application). Teaching music production is a direction I'd like to take in my own career, something I've been thinking about for a long time, but I think I'm straying off-topic now so I'll leave it at that. All that being said, I think we are lucky to have OCR as such a great resource, because there are people here who are willing to listen to your track and try to help you improve. And Arcana, you know that if you have any questions or tracks you need help on, I am willing to help to the best of my ability. ; Also, re: young whippersnappers, I have found that some children experience a similar frustration that we might as adults. I teach many young girls who idolize teen pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. But for some, when they realize that guitar requires hard work and practice, and that having the glittery electric guitar alone does not make you sound like a rock star, they lose their interest in it and sadly end up quitting. Other children seem to have an inherent interest and curiosity about musical instruments, and find it very rewarding when they learn simple tunes, or get excited about just learning the next new note. So maybe we can channel that child-like curiosity and excitement over learning new skills? Like focus more on the learning experience rather than comparing ourselves to the pros and focusing on our shortcomings? I don't know.

I started piano at 4. I picked up various other instruments along the way. I started writing music when I was 9, because I was fortunate enough that our elementary school had a program for young composers. (I actually sort of wrote songs before that, but it was weird, I didn't think I was "allowed" to as a kid, so I sort of wrote them in my head so nobody could hear them. But anyway, having that program showed me that I could be a composer, even at 9.) Growing up, my background was as an instrumentalist and composer/arranger. I would write scores out for musicians to play in a live setting. Consequently, production is my weak point, because I never had to think about things like EQing and adding the right amount of reverb. I've actually often wondered how our experienced remixers got good at the production aspect of music, because I haven't ever heard of private lessons for production like there are for musical instruments. Although I guess a lot of people successfully teach themselves to play piano or guitar, too. I guess you can go to school for production, but I get the sense that a lot of people here just taught themselves to do it by experience, and maybe the help of books/internet. But maybe I'm wrong about that, and I should probably read through this entire thread at some point. Anyway, I find production difficult because I might be able to tell that the tracks don't have the right sound, but if I didn't have Palpable to help explain to me what exactly to do, where to EQ, which settings on the reverb, etc. I'd never be able to figure out on my own how to bring out the sound in the right way. At the risk of tl;dr, I will make one last point: As a guitar teacher, I've noticed something interesting about teaching adults. We tend to have a developed sense of what we'd like to sound like based on the music we like to listen to and our own personal guitar heroes. It's frustrating to us when all we can do is play G, C, and D7, and it takes about 5 seconds to get between any of those chords. There is definitely a wall to break through where it might not be that enjoyable to practice guitar because we're not at the point where we can make it sound like the songs we listen to. This is a problem with hand dexterity, something that can only be overcome with practice. If you can push yourself past that wall, eventually you get to the point where you can play actual songs, and guitar becomes a lot more enjoyable and rewarding, and this can take on a snowball effect. And I've personally been there before, I barely played guitar at all for 4 years in the beginning because I was frustrated at the F bar chord. But I eventually buckled down and pushed through it.

Oh by the way, after jamming on bass in Jamspace, I've decided I'm going to pick up a bass and learn to play it properly. Something I've been meaning to do for years, but after PAX I feel really motivated to do it now.

I believe this was djp's idea. It was a lot of fun, I'd totally do it again. Though I was surprised at how quickly some of the songs were gotten, we'll need to figure out harder songs next time. The panel was a great time and I hope everyone watching enjoyed seeing it too

This was an amazing time. Even though, as Andy said, we missed a lot of the con, it was just great to hang out with old friends and new. Yay for our panel of course, jamspace, random games of magic, and old snes/n64 games. Good times!

I'm only on board if every mix on it is done in a different language! NO ENGLISH

I don't have much more explanation for my choice of language than "I felt like it." Actually, I was going for a child-like feeling to the lyrics. In fact, I likened it to writing a children's song in my submission writeup. So if you think it sounds like a 5 year old wrote it, I guess that fits. I wasn't trying to hide anything in the meaning of the lyrics by choosing a non-English language, as I did provide the English translation, and I'm glad that some people do understand the Mandarin lyrics.

I am finding the complaints over my choice of language to be bordering on racism. OCR is a diverse community with listeners and remixers from all over the world. If a remixer's primary or only language wasn't English, I don't think this should prevent them from writing lyrics and singing on a remix. Nor should we alienate non-English-speaking remix fans by only allowing vocal remixes in English. So, maybe to some people, my family's language sounds like "moon language" or "gibberish," but luckily for me, there are ~1 billion people out there who speak it.

Happy birthday!

Oh man I just realized that I had Cubase set to export to .mp3 at 11.025 kHz and a bitrate of a whopping *8* kbits/s. No wonder it sounds like it was recorded in a bathtub. Srsly why does Cubase even HAVE such an option? I'd export it again and post a proper render of it, but eh, I didn't think it was that great anyway. Also I think a compo of covering other peoples' compos would be fun.

chat log from the viewing party

Sorry LAOS .( I'm logging the chat though so you can see all the comments your video got. Ooh here's the link:

We haven't even done the viewing party and we're planning this already? Can't even wait a few hours?

I believe the deadline for submitting videos is 7 PM EST, and the viewing party starts at 9 PM EST? I'll look into the Chanserv thing, thanks for pointing that out. EDIT: After a little mini-adventure... we now have chanserv.

I just realized that this thread hadn't yet been updated with the details of the viewing party, so here's a link to the thread in community: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=27960 And here's a link to the fb event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=349126358706

Hey that's a really good idea. I'll make one right now. Biznut I hope you don't mind me doing this, it's just that it's tomorrow so we don't have a lot of time left to get the word out. I'll post the link when it's ready. EDIT: Here's a link to the Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=349126358706 Please pass this around and invite people! Biznut, I made you an admin so you can make any changes if necessary, or let me know if you want me to change stuff. EDIT 2: Yes! And we got djp to promote it on the OCR fb page

I am finding this thread way too fascinating considering GrayLightning was way before my time on OCR and I really have no idea who he is (besides what I read in this thread). But yeah, after reading all this, I hope we find him...

Yay happy birthday Jill!

Yaaaay OMG so excited for this, my video has been done for a while and I can't wait to see everyone else's awesome videos!! Do you think we should make a separate channel for the IRC viewing party? #ocrmvc or something?