Rozovian

Hey, thanks! For a few years now I've just listened to this music by going to the OCR album page and running down the Soundcloud playlist of each game I'm familiar with, so I always look and see the comments at the bottom and how there aren't many recent ones. I made myself de-lurk to post a few thoughts as a kind of COVID "do something different" thing a few months ago, so that if any of the creators look in they know someone's still listening. I hoped things would be normal again before I got to the present day. Not quite. But listening to the music remains a good way to eliminate other distractions and focus on getting stuff done.

It's fun listening to this one in a similar way to my enjoying the Secret of Mana OCR album - this is not something I bring any childhood/teenage nostalgia for, and since I didn't "do the splash hop" of finding the translated version over the long years it existed, I don't have any adult experience of it either. I plan to correct this eventually with the Switch version! But for now listening to it is neat to experience the music and imagine where the source would happen in the game.
I'm glad I read the director's comment at the top because you can certainly hear the way that the pieces here straddle eras of this site with who was involved and what the mixes sound like. "Oh, that's X's style from Y older album" occurred to me a handful of times throughout.
The way that different themes appear in multiple mixes is also a distinct thing for this album and it helps give a "whole game" feel rather than just tracks that are lined up in the order you come across them in the plot. I like it. World journeys certainly are part of the game experience from that era. I'm intrigued to play both Secret and Legend of Mana after listening to both of these albums to hear how much the music has in common between the two games since it's hard not to notice what I, knowing nothing, have come to think of as the "main theme" of Mana (from 1-01 of the Secret album here) popping up in at least four different tracks for the SD3 album.

I wrote a bit on feedback in my remixing guide, back when. It's less about giving good feedback and more about identifying it among the feedback you get, but it might still be useful to you.
The checklist mentioned above.
I think good feedback comes from good listening. This means understanding what you're listening to, understanding the artist's intention but also a typical listener's reaction and negotiating some kind of useful response out of that. Knowledge, whether music theory, audio engineering, performance, sound design, mixing, music history or anything else is also useful, so learning any of that will help.
Be aware of the artist's intention. On this site you might come across releases, works-in-progress, experiments and all kinds of things, and some of it is made with to suit ocr's standards and some of it isn't. And elsewhere on the internet ocr's standards aren't relevant (the vgm interpretation stuff anyway).
Then comes the psychology of how to actually deliver the feedback in a way that's constructive. I've screwed up on this a few times (apparently the word mediocre means bad), and you will too, probably. Don't tell the artist what to do. Offer your perspective. Suggestions are fine, but be more descriptive than prescriptive. There's a saying about how usually when people say something's wrong they're right, and when they say what's wrong they're not. I try to offer multiple solutions when I identify a problem, as in "you might be able to solve this by EQ-carving some space in the other instruments, or side-chain compressing them out of the way". That gives the artist options to consider rather than directives to obey.
If you make music (I haven't seen you around), think about the feedback you'd want on your mixes, and how you'd want it delivered. And then write it a little softer, a little nicer than that, because tone is difficult to convey in text.
I'm not exactly in my best head space right now, so this might not be entirely coherent. I hope it's still useful.

What the... again?

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.

This is the video game music remixing forum. Here you can get feedback on your remixes, and provide the same for others. Whether or not your remix is intended to be submitted to OC ReMix, you can post it here. 
Threads
One thread per remix, one remix per thread. Exception: albums, see below.
Don't make a new thread just for an update. We're okay with a new thread for a remix you're picking up again after many years since last update. If you can't find the old thread with search or other means, you can make a new thread.
Don't post too many threads at once. It feels like spam, which might make listeners ignore you.
Set the title of your thread with the name of the game. Information such as the song(s) remixed or the genre might also be of interest to listeners.
Use a thread prefix to let listeners know what state your remix is in. Use thread tags to make your work easier to find based on keywords.
If you're asking for general feedback on your music making, you may include several remixes in a thread (please include this in the thread title), but we recommend focusing on a single track at a time. Albums are an exception, of course.
When your remix is finished, and you want to submit it to OC ReMix, follow these instructions. You may also request an evaluation (previously "mod review") before submitting.
Releases
Individual tracks, music videos, and albums of video game remixes can be released here.
Albums
You can release your VGM remix albums here. The one-track-per-thread/one-thread-per-track policy obviously doesn't apply to albums.
If you're looking to submit an album to OC ReMix, read the relevant parts of the Project Guidelines and the Project Guide, or contact one of the Project Evaluators.
If you're already a posted OC ReMixer, or in the To Be Posted-queue, you can post in Community to promote albums you're involved in. That includes VGM, remix albums, and original music.
Hosting
Some online hosting services offer streamed playback of the audio uploaded. The problem is that these sometimes compress the sound quality, which might make the music sound worse than is actually in the file, and might mask some problems in the mix.
Instead, use a hosting service or web space that doesn't do this. Some of them have a streaming option. There are many free services for hosting your remixes, whether finished or works in progress. These are a few that we like.
Tindeck | Box | Dropbox | Google Drive | Soundcloud*
* Uses stream compression, but it's a music hosting site, and some users find the ability to timestamp comments useful.
Feedback
When posting a remix, consider if there's something in particular you want feedback on, and feel free to mention that in the post. You might also want to mention any particular purpose of the remix, such as whether you're looking to submit it to the site or not.
Just like you want feedback on your remix, other people want feedback on theirs. Let them know what you thought of their remix, what they did well, what they could improve on, and they might return the favor.
You can also get feedback by asking people on the OC ReMix works-in-progress irc channel: #ocrwip at irc.esper.net.
You can also just ask remixers, judges, workshop mods, and others by sending them a PM or contacting them by other means. Most people on the site are cool and approachable. We're all game music nerds anyway, aren't we?
Getting feedback
The Checklist
A feedback checklist was developed to cover common problems in remixes submitted to OC ReMix. Feel free to use this to enhance your feedback to others, or to critically listen to your own track. Check (typically with an X) the boxes that apply. Then delete the lines that don't apply, so it's easier to read.
Guides to remixing
Tutorials category | zircon's guide to getting started | Rozovian's remixing guide
Workshop Discussion

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.

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.

Reading along for a while made me think that it's maybe worthwhile to start a "how to keep OCR hip" threat in order to generally discuss what it is that the community wants and what they're hoping to see on this platform. I'm personally not much of a forum gal, but I do still love the whole video game remix exchange/discussion/whatever thingy that people have going on here on multiple different levels and in many different ways. However, I do also feel that it might be worthwhile to up the game on social media and such and get more involved with whatever the youngsters are doing these days. It actually took me a few days to find out that my own remix got posted a few days ago, since I'm not on the forum so much, and it simply didn't show up on my Facebook feed or on Instagram and such, even though I follow OCR on all these platforms. These are the places people are on nowadays, and I think that that's the place to hook people into the OCR life and keep them coming back.
On the other hand, this might not be what OCR is going for in general, as this would also imply a shift in focus from traditional "foruming" to a more involved and generally bigger and different kind of OCR medium. I remember the discussion on the decline of reviews on remixes from a few years ago where people were already discussing the influence from Youtube and such and how this was influencing the decline of people making reviews on the forum. This might be a bit unrelated to the disabling of signatures, but reading all the suggestions and discussions above gave me the feeling that different people have a different idea of what OCR is and what it's going to be and what it's supposed to be and how to get there and why to get there and all that, and discussing this very important (and in my opinion also urgent) question among the community could be a good idea, seeing how this topic and issue keeps popping up in varying specific threads. I think it's time to start looking at the bigger picture. 

It's funny, forums seems to have died out but nothing really replaced them.  Reddit-style commenting makes it impossible to discuss things in a conversational format.  Discord is a throwback to old internet chat rooms, where it's incredibly difficult to find old comments or discuss more than a handful of topics at the same time.  I for one appreciate the old format.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is so lame. Who would do something like this, and for so many years?

This is the thread for questions, opinions, concerns, complaints, suggestions, and discussion about the Workshop and everything going on here. We're starting fresh with a new, empty thread so we don't have to edit the previous thread. For those interested, here's a link to the old one.
This thread will not be stickied/pinned to the top of the board. We're trying to avoid having too many stickied topics from now on. This thread will climb to the top of the regular threads when there's something going on, and will disappear down the list of threads when it's not being used. Links to it will be found in the pinned threads.

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).

Reverb - Big halls don't work for all tracks, so yeah, you might want to use a smaller size. The parameter might claim it's 40m, but don't believe it. Use your ears, adjust to taste. And you don't have to have a long reverb. Length can be fairly short. The dry/wet ratio lets you adjust how clear a track is, so less wet means more foreground-y. You can filter and eq the reverb too, and the reverb plugin might have some options for that, like low ratio or something. At least filter out the lows. If you can set early reflections separate from reverb, you can give the reflections of your leads a longer pre-delay, so their attacks are clear, while the attacks of background instruments blends into the wet signal.
Of course, you can do a single reverb bus for the whole thing, or multiple (e.g. foreground, background, distant), or give each track its own reverb. Or some combination. Different methods give you different options, like full control over a reverb bus with eq and side-chaining, for example. Reverb levels per track matters, more reverb means more background-y sound. But track level is ultimately determines foreground-y-ness, reverb is an addition/enhancement to that. As is panning and eq.
Panning - Our ears easily tell where high frequencies come from, not so for low frequencies. Center is usually best. Usually. A stage-like plan can work, depending on the music, but I find the better way of thinking is to spread out frequencies, to spread instruments depending on their roles. Kick, bass and snare middle. The rest of the drumkit mimics what a drummer hears (so stage, but mirrored) with the amount of panning adjusted to taste. With the hihat panned left, other high-frequency percussion can go right, eg shaker. If a guitar goes left, another guitar (or any instrument occupying roughly the same frequency range at the same time) can go right. For this track, I wouldn't hardpan anything, I'd go for a kind of jazz club thing, with some instruments panned a bit, others not at all.
There are different schools of thought when it comes to panning. I can think of a few:
-No panning (stereo is just for stereo-recorded tracks and for effects)
-Listener-like panning, with variations:
  -Drums from drummer or listener POV
  -Drumkit and bass centered, or placed according to band
-Center and hardpan only
-Frequency balancing (works well for my tracks)

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.

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 can't not hear Brentalfloss' lyrics to this track anymore.
Anyway, this is beautiful, this is fun. Not much else to say. Well done.

Mixflood selection sounds like a lot of fun, but when you're actually doing it it's so much harder. For me it was about narrowing it down to categories and also knowing a few artists that had to be represented in the mixflood. I went for collabs to try to cover as many artists as possible, and also ones where I could explain something about the album, not just where the tracks themselves were representative. But that too. It's a big dumb puzzle to figure out.

This is so lame. Who would do something like this, and for so many years?

eval
Right off the bat, I don't like the bass drum when it's exposed. It fits better in once the track gets going, so not a big problem there. But why does the track keep going back to parts where it _is_ exposed?  It makes for a weird arrangement and breaks flow when that happens out of nowhere. You could mitigate this by making the bass drum softer, by reducing level or filtering it or using a partly different bass drum for those parts. Many solutions.
Source is undoubtedly there, and there's definitely a lot of interpretation going on in the sound. As for arrangement, it feels like a bunch of disparate parts stacked on top of each other with little thoiught to continuity and progression. Take the 2:31 part. It just starts. New chords, new set of sounds, new rhythm... It just happens out of nowhere. That's a recurring problem with the arrangement. As a lot of the track seems to be source parts placed on top of the beat, you can probably move those parts around to make a more intentional-seeming structure, something with better flow, better transitions, better overall structure.
The sound is loud and aggressive, and overcompressed. There are instances where the lead feels too loud or otherwise poorly integrated into the mix, like at 2:31 or 2:59. The overall sound design works though, despite my misgivings about the bass drum. I'm not a fan of the voice clips, but that's a very subjective criticism. I don't think they do anything important for the track, and are mostly there because one of the sources had it. But I might be wrong on that.
At the very start, there's also a weird fade effect, as if the first bass drum note was faded in. That's a really annoying problem once you notice it.
Not ready for ocr. Overcompressed, messy arrangement. I think all the right parts are there, though, you just gotta put them together in a way that makes more sense.