Rozovian

Long-time necro post! I have no memory of this thread, but now I want to hear your old song. Do you still have it saved somewhere? It'd be fun to compare.

Same as Jorito on point 1, although I won't just take the lead melody, but other elements in isolation. A cool bassline can be a lead melody. Or vice versa. I'll then iterate on whatever elements I want to use, over original backing, or in isolation. It helps to be able to play an instrument here, even if you're not very good at it, as it's much faster to iterate on the parts you're using that way. Just improvise, jam, mess around, and you'll come up with a lot of cool ideas that you'll want to incorporate into an arrangement. This is why my arrangements end up a bit loooong. Then it's just a matter of tying them together in a way that makes sense. Sometimes I do that well. Sometimes... not. Making "originals with stolen melodies" (great phrase) is a good way to break away from the structure of the sources. You can start from a rhythm not found in the original and add elements from the original to it, and adapt them as needed, or write new material to support them. A new rhythm goes a long way to preventing a remix form being too much like the original, even if chords and melodies are the same.

Frederic's delay trick works great if what you want is a pan effect (the Haas effect), since that's what it'll do in stereo. If summed into mono after that, it might have phase issues, something of a robotic sound. Not always a bad thing, but not how to get a good guitar sound. Playing and recording twice would make sure the waveforms don't line up, and means chorus and delay effects aren't necessary for separation.

Yup, looks fine to me.

This new plugin might have broken the tags on the wip board. At least on firefox, mac. They're gone, save for work-in-progress, which is now only "work-". Tag numbers and colors still show.

I'm noticing a great variety of games being remixed and posted here. This is great. But there aren't that many replies to them. Quick reminder, things you can do to get replies on your mix: Comment on other people's mixes. They might return the favor. Do unto others, lead by example, that stuff. Ask a forum regular or staff member to have a listen. So long as we're not swamped, we can often make the time for a quick listen and catch something you've missed. Title your thread informatively. I like Seth Skoda's inclusion of "SEGA Genesis" in his threads. It immediately tells me something about the sound. Don't clickbait, but sometimes genre or style, specific song, console, or other relevant information gets people interested. If anyone's posts "Octopath Traveler reggae", I'm on it. -- Then some things you can do while waiting: Find a good reference mix. Compare it to your own. Never mind that you might not be good enough to make everything as good, but strive to have the mix, the levels, the frequency balance, the dynamics roughly the same. If that mix has a lot more clarity than yours, see what you can do to create that clarity. Work on another track. Rest your ears. Listen to different music. Then come back to your mix and see what stands out. Review posted mixes, read judges' decisions for them and for rejections. This helps you figure out what ocr considers suitable for the site. Do experiments. Make a track that's only your own synth patches, or only using one instrument (multiple instances is fine). Make your own samples. Write and mix muted, just to see what you can do without your ears. Don't use any plugin effects, only use what's in the instruments themselves. No sequencing, only recording. Never use the same chord twice. Chromatic bassline. Sequence it, then humanize it manually. Use a bass sound for lead and vice versa. Experiment. Sort your presets. Make some new ones. Sort them too. Listen to your older work and realize you've improved. Even if you haven't (which is unlikely), figure out what your next step towards improvement is.

Oh look, the forum notifies you when someone replies to the thread you're replying to. Neat. From what I can tell, everything Julien just said is true. The good and the bad. My quick listen suggests you could work on the mix and its sound a bit. Frequency balance. Levels. Find a good reference track, same style, same sound as what you're going for, and mix accordingly. The crashes sound especially dull, and things are panned so much that there's little energy in the center. I'm not an evaluator anymore, and I'm not sure what's public information and what isn't, but I think I can share that there weren't enough active evaluators for the workload, so there's probably a lot of tracks that have been waiting for an evaluation for months. Nothing's stopping you from asking evaluators or forum regulars directly, submitting directly to the site to get judges' feedback (if it's good enough to make it to the panel, which I think it is, but not yet good enough to get posted, which I also think is the case). Also, commenting on other people's mixes here can make them return the favor.

To diagnose the issue, try filtering out its low frequencies. It might be that there are excessive lows screwing with a compressor along the way. I don't know if hardware itself would do this, but there might be a software compressor in the system output that's doing it, and responding to inaudible sub frequencies. Subs doing it would explain why it does it with the kick but not a piano sound. Check system sound settings for any kind of signal enhancement or something turned on. As for why it's not showing up on the headset, they might use a different port. USB headset? Via USB rather than system audio output would be a different output and thus different settings. Also, what kind of studio monitors? And how are they connected to the computer?

I just noticed real name and location aren't visible either. Dunno when that changed. It was cool to see that we're an international community. And when people randomly change their username, the real name remained useful in identifying whatever rando that posted before you. I think the forum experience has gone downhill (for a lot of reasons, and I think we discussed this in staff chat at some point), and I think the de-personalized forum appearance (avatars going from pixel art game characters to people's logos or default letters, sigs removal, location and real name removal) are part of that. It's a related question, not exactly sigs removal, but worth taking into account. De-personalizing things in a community makes a crucial part of the community go away, and then the people in the community do too.

Everyone?

Great choice of source of inspiration, and you've managed to stay very close in both sound and feel. How inspired is this, as opposed to remixed? Because there were a few places in the trailer that really felt remixed, and others I couldn't place at all despite having listened a lot to the soundtrack over the years.

Staff probably knows the gist of what I have to say already, but for the sake of discussion: There is too much white blank empty space. After every post, there's a bunch of white space, including an almost empty bar with Quote and Like features. And look at the quotes themselves. Large margins. Large, white (and gray), empty margins. And short posts. The profile picture expands the post's height, leading to more white empty space between posts. Even after long posts, the space from one person's text to that of another is huge. I could 160+ pixels. Minimum height for a post is 250 pixels with that profile pic, so I can have a conversation of 4 posts on screen at any one time, at most. So that's actually an argument FOR the removal of sigs. But if sigs are removed because there's to be a focus on content, why is the content so sparse? There's clean, and there's clinical. I don't mind minimalism when done well, but Invision's super-sparse look isn't. To accentuate that, I'm using double line breaks here. To be funny, and to help make a point. So I'm not as annoyed at the removal of sigs themselves, but by related issues. While sigs can be annoying, they can be turned off (or individual sig images adblocked away). I will miss the compo and album banners though. And occasional animated little stories about a wolf and a ball. But we could do vertical equivalents under the profile pic. It's a BIG DUMB WHITE SPACE. So we might as well use it for something. Selectively. Adaptive. For long enough posts. And since that probably requires screwing a bit with Invision's styles, maybe we can get a look that's more community and less fancy art gallery.

So uh... I have a track. It's tradition by now. It's not quite done yet. But it's getting there. I used an old, unfinished remix because I thought that'd make it easy to quickly finish it. Easy, right? It was a mix from back when I thought I could do orchestral reasonably well, adapted to DnB the first time I thought I could do DnB reasonably well, then adapted to my more typical beats and grooves. I figured that would be easy to touch up and make a decent winter jam out of. It was 4 minutes long. Was.

I skimmed through some of your tracks. I'll second Shariq's criticisms, all of them. Then there's also the matter of price. 10 bucks for this many tracks might seem reasonable from an artist's perspective, but you're competing with a lot of other remixers, with their own albums free and commercial. And it's incomplete, so 30 bucks to get the full experience? If the tracks were really good, and/or different enough from what's been done with these sources already, maybe people would want to pay that much for it. But even then it's a bit steep. Hence why many artists nowadays live on donations/tips/patreon-like things rather than sales, especially in the remixing scene to the extent anyone's making a living remixing vgm. Besides developing as an artist, you might want to build your audience/fanbase/following/whatever (eg on soundcloud or youtube or maybe tiktok or whatever makes sense). This will help you gain both listens and sales on future releases. I commend you for doing the licensing and trying the commercial album thing. Initiative, procedure, legalities. That's a good experience to have, you now know how complicated (or easy) that is.

That post might need an update. I'm still in the "active" part of the list.

Nice art for the vid. Them colors. I like to hear these modern takes on old dos games, since so many of them don't get the attention that their console contemporaries got. Not that I recognize the game or its music, so I can only comment on the overall sound and composition with little regard for in what ways it's an adaptation. But that's cool. This is cool. I like the sound design. It's a little caught between being a mellow synthscape kind of thing and a trance track. I'm not sure this hits the right balance between the two styles, but there's plenty to like.

I like the guitar performance. Lots of stylish, Dave Wise-y bends. The mixing could use some work. It's not good, and the bass suffers the most for it. I think you've tried to solve it by giving the bass too much lows. You should probably carve some space for the bass in the other tracks using eq so it can have some clarity too. Then it doesn't have to be so loud in the lows, making for an overall better mix. Lead guitar levels could be a little lower. Drum writing in the early parts of the track is pretty boring, but gets better as the track goes on. If you like the fade out at the end, no problem, but you could probably write some ending stuff for the other instruments and let the lead guitar end on that long A. Fading out is a useful thing to do when you don't have a clear home chord in your progression or when you just don't want to end it with a fill and/or an increasingly sparse sound. Or when that's what you want to do. But it can also sound a bit cheap. I don't mind it here.

Staff isn't doing much to this board, sadly. But I've got some time. I'm technically not staff anymore, so this isn't technically an ocr evaluation. Around 1:40 you've got an interesting mixing situation. The bass is nice and clean, though it could probably stand to have a little more lows. The mids and highs are a bleeding mess. Use EQ to carve some space in the accompaniment so they don't compete with the leads. It's difficult to say which frequencies are best to carve in, but probably somewhere in thethe 1kHz-4kHz area. That should make the mix overall more clear. I quite like the instrumentation, except the bass. It's a bit dry, a bit raw, it doesn't quite blend in. Maybe eq shaping, tweaking the filter or its envelope, something like that would help. Maybe giving it a touch more lows (carefully) and cutting some low mids Or using a different patch altogether. Maybe something silly like a filtered reverb on it would work, difficult to tell. Or it might sort itself out once the mixing in the mids and highs is done. In any case it's not a big deal, though still worth looking into. The tuning difference isn't a big deal. It's gonna bother some people, be interesting to others, and others still aren't gonna notice it at all. There are always things you can do to improve it, but I don't think it's cost-effective to make a lot of changes at this point. I think it's best to just try to correct the mixing, adjust levels slightly after that in case the leads are needlessly loud, maybe do something about the bass, and then sub it. It's pretty good already. And I don't think it's cost-effective to spend too much time on the same track (I know from experience).

I was gonna write an excellent post on perfectionism but screw it, I don't have time or energy. Perfectionism is okay for learning but terrible for productivity. Do it 90% of the way, rest your ears, and correct the most glaring problems still remaining. And then release it and move on to the next thing. Otherwise it'll never be finished. As for tutorials, the more you know, the more you forget you had to learn. The less advanced stuff is so obvious to you at that point. Drawing the line between broad strokes and hand-holding in feedback is hard. Tutorials, which people don't go back and edit, are kind'a the same thing.

A good way to learn is to pick one thing you're gonna experiment with and have fun with it. I made Beyond Velocity with only synth patches I had made myself. I challenged myself and that was the result. I had to learn a few new tricks for it, like how to make a shaker sound from white noise. That's what you get when focusing on one thing. I should do that more often, actually, I've got some mixing things I need to learn or refresh. Make a new track where you only worry about panning. Boring instruments, vanilla arrangement, but crazy panning fun. Then make a track all about reverb. Super distant stuff, super close stuff, and stuff moving forth and back. Come up with your own ideas for these little tests or challenges. I guarantee you'll learn a lot from them. And not a bunch of fancy audio engineering terms, but practical, useful, applied knowledge. And books are nice. I've picked up a few of those, too. I learned parallel compression from one. It has its uses.

I'm interested. Not sure how the scheduling will work out but I'm sure we can figure something out.

This isn't specific to metal guitars. The basic idea of it is to have different signals panned opposite to get that wide sound. To experiment with the effect, use a synth, duplicate it, hardpan them. Unless there's some randomization in it, it'll sound mono. Then if you even slightly alter one of their pitches, it'll go wide. Changing other settings on the synth (eg waveform or filter) will give you a different frequency distribution left and right. This is probably not what you want for this effect, but it's good to try to hear what it does to the stereo image. Because human hearing is better at picking out direction from higher frequencies than from lower, you can eq out the lows from your hardpanned sounds and have a copy (also similarly altered in pitch) panned mid. The mid synth will provide the low frequencies cut from the others, but they'll still contribute width. You can also experiment with track levels, have the mid synth louder or softer than the side ones. Even if the signal is the same, you can modify it. With two synths sounding exactly the same, hardpanned, you can put a slow chorus on one of them to make it different. Many effects shift the waveform in interesting ways. While this isn't as good as multiple tight guitar performances, or even duplicated synths subtly pitched apart, it's still doing the same outcome: giving you a different signal left and right. Put different amp sims on the left and right signal and you'll have even more of a difference. While working with virtual instruments, you can also subtly randomize note timing. This will (obviously) make the two tracks different. This might give you the Haas effect, where subtle timing differences in otherwise identical signals make you think the sound is coming from a particular direction. Not a bad thing necessarily, but I wouldn't use this trick alone. It's a nice addition to synth/sampler doubling though. An inverted signal is the most different a signal you can get. This sounds like a good idea, but when the channels are summed (as might happen in some mono listening situations), the instrument just disappears. Positive copy completely negates and is negates by the negative copy. It's a good trick to be aware of, because together with the other tricks it might be useful. But it's a dangerous one to use on its own. Even if you distort the two signals differently, you'll likely have the lows and much of the mids completely gone if summed. If the left and right signals are different, you can use the same amp settings and still get a wide sound. But differences in the amp sim make the signals more different, so it's good to use different settings there too. In summary: Different signals. Record multiple, if possible. Make different with plugins otherwise. Use duplicated samplers/synths with slightly different pitch otherwise. Pan opposite. Use other tricks if needed/wanted. Distort. Enjoy width. Summary summarized: Hardpanning broadens differences.

Nice work, dude. I'mma get this at some point. A quick skim through and I know there's some tracks I like, like Cyborg Stardust Journey. Nice chill sound on that one. I also like Hobo Cavemen. So that's at least two, from just some quick skim-listening.

I gotta buy it and give it a proper listen later, but after a quick skim through the tracks I can already say there's some good percussion stuff in some of them. Good choices for loops/writing/whatever. And a cool overall sound. Here's hoping the game itself manifests, and I'll echo the "awesome album to show for" sentiment. Nice work, dude.

The 1:20-1:50 part has some weird rhythm choices, unexpected triplets or some mix of triplets and dotted notes, or something. Pardon my small theory vocabulary. But man this is a fun idea for a remix. Nice work on it, too. 2:50 sounds especially Russian.