Flexstyle

There's nothing that really stands out glaringly on this one, but I'm not feeling the fact that it's nearly an exact cover of the original, just with metal instead of a symphony. There's no personalization given to the structure or the melodies. Even a solo that riffed on the original melody would have helped, and I was waiting for it as is typical for the YouTube metal scene, but even that never happened. Production is also just so-so. Drums are probably overcompressed (and that's coming from someone who compresses the snot out of his drums), the horns seem to be fighting with the guitars for sonic space, and nothing's given any finesse at all. Orchestral sequencing is also stiff and could use a bit more help, although I realize it's hard to get horns right sometimes. Same stiffness critique goes for the drums--they're locked to the grid, and while that can work, a little humanization goes a long way. I'm sure it works well on YouTube but I don't think it's quite up to the needs of OCR yet. More in-depth arrangement would be helpful, for sure! NO (resub)

Source is actually pretty minimal, so you've squeezed a lot of song out of it. No complaints there, necessarily, although you could stand to maybe add some callbacks to a second source to keep it interesting. Other than that, I'm gonna side with Emu on this one--it's a little too relentless for me. We never really get a break, and there's some harshness in the upper midrange that really gets old after the first minute. I'd say either the mix or the energy management needs to be fixed. Just adding a proper breakdown in the middle, like Chimpazilla mentioned, would really give this song room to breathe. It's really close, but I can't sign off on it just yet. NO (resub!)

Link: ReMixers: KingTiger & Flexstyle, under group alias Desert Catz #selfpanel Super Cartography Bros track Sorry in advance for the crazy multi-source dealio. Michael's notes: This one was a TON of fun to do. Like Corey mentions, he put together a really neat smorgasbord of source tunes into a fairly cohesive track, but it needed to hit the metaphorical gym and lose weight and get gnarlier. So, I added a Le Castle Vania-esque set of drums, guitars and bass, trimmed the arrangement down, and this is what came out! I'm super proud of it and I know Corey is too. Corey's notes: When we started the project, Michael asked me to make a list of map themes from Mario games, and somehow I completely neglected the Game Boy games. The only games on that platform that would really have maps are Super Mario Bros. 2: 6 Golden Coins, WarioLand, and WarioLand 3. Unfortunately, it was kind of late in the process to add more sources to the list of potential claims. Since I’m a bit of a Wario fan, I had to remedy my regrettable mistake (I even forgot his Wii game, WarioLand: Shake It, which happens to have a pretty cool map theme), and I decided to take a stab at a Wario source. Since I love to bite off more than I can chew, I decided to arrange *every single* WarioLand map theme into one song. So um yeah, I’m pretty proud of this arrangement and how I was able to integrate each source so well. (But writing that source breakdown was a *&$%#!) After giving it my best shot, Michael took over, cleaned up some of the production and arrangement to make it more club-friendly, and just basically beefed it the hell up. I am super proud of this song, it hits hard just like Michael and I wanted it to, and it just freaking rawks. SOURCE BREAKDOWN: Kitchen Island (World Map) - main melody during 1:05 - 1:34 & 2:31 - 3:01 Rice Beach - background EP during 3:01 - 3:01; Also, the agogo bells you hear throughout the song are meant to mimic the percussive bits at the beginning of this source Mt. Teapot - main melody during 0:36 - 1:05 & 3:38 - 4:06; also the crazy vibrato insanity is meant to mimic the same effect the music has in almost every Wario game when Wario gets hurt or flattened or turned into a zombie or etc. etc. (basically any of his “transformations) Sherbet Land - arpeggiated notes during 0:06 - 0:34 & 4:07 - 4:36 (the intro & outro) Stove Canyon - the riff at the beginning & end & at 3:30 S.S. Teacup - arpeggiated notes during 0:36 - 1:05 & 3:38 - 4:07 (accompanying the Mt. Teapot melody) Parsley Woods - the background percussive chords during 1:34 - 2:03 & 4:07 - 4:35 Syrup Castle - 1/2 note synth notes during 0:06 - 0:34 & 4:07 - 4:35 (the intro & outro), also during 1:48 - 3:01 with the bass Course Selected - the little 5-note blips that occur periodically during the intro and outro - 0:13, 0:27, 4:13, & 4:27; also after every other set of 4 measures during 0:36 - 1:05 & 3:38 - 4:07 (the Mt. Teapot sections) Life Lost Life Lost - - every other set of 4 measures during 0:36 - 1:05 & 3:38 - 4:07 (basically alternating with Level Selected in the Mt. Teapot sections)

I'm getting some good music for my person. Not expensive (as I haven't got a lot of money to spend), but it looked like our tastes matched up pretty well so I've gotten some good stuff.

I'd re-touch Sins of the Syndicate if I were to sub it to something like this, and I'd probably rewrite the string parts to do something of my own, just since I'd have time to do it. If I did that, then bLiNd wouldn't actually be on the album, which would be a shame. None of the tracks are actually in a state that I want to submit yet, though, and I do not give permission to include any of my songs as they currently stand.

QFT +100.

I'd just say you should avoid Seagate hard drives if possible. This WD Caviar Black is likely going to perform faster than the Seagate drives, and it also has a great 5-year warranty, as opposed to the usual 2-year warranty I see on Seagate's drives. This would get you a whole 2 TB of storage for less than the one TB you're looking at with those two drives combined, and the warranty is better as well as the performance. Serious no-brainer. Use the cash you've saved there to help get an SSD boot drive, which will at least make the computer much more enjoyable to use, even if you're not seeing massive improvements in your sample library load times. Install your DAW and all your VSTs to the SSD as well, and it'll run nice and smooth.

A little bird told me it could even be released within a week or less. WHAT.

I like how the non-judge chimed in here with no basis for that claim. Depends. I can usually get what I need out of the 128 kbps streamed file in order to judge a track, but if there's something going on where I think the quality would make a difference, of course I get the better MP3. Really, though, it doesn't always make a difference. If the arrangement isn't up to par or the mix is off by a certain amount, then the stream is all I need, and no point downloading anything.

I feel like if someone notes in their email that they absolutely will not resub, it's not even worth our time to judge. If it's not insta-pass, why even bother?

Oh sweet mercy YES. This song right here. I actually ended up placing just behind this one in that particular DoD with my XPRTNovice collab, and I couldn't be happier--this is everything good about the early '90s right here. I feel like the DoD version was shorter...am I off base? Anyways. It's polished, that rap breakdown is completely ON POINT, the source usage is all over, Yusef kills it on the solo...yeah. It's a complete package that manages to punch me in the nostalgia feels and keep me on the dancefloor at the same time. YES YES YES YES YES

OH HEY THIS GUY. Hi Jack! I've actually had the privilege of hearing this particular arrangement LIVE, thanks to the fact that Jack is a local here. He occasionally breaks out the jams at Endgame, a local video game bar, and tends to rock the house completely! Anyways, on to this track. I have a few nitpicks: the drums are locked to the grid and not sequenced in a super-interesting way, but the guitars are so superb that it doesn't matter as much. The bassline is also pretty vanilla, and I would have loved to hear a bit more interesting work there, but that's also masked by the guitars. Mix is pretty decent. I'm hearing what you mean by the distortion between :30-:45ish, Emu. I'm not sure it's a dealbreaker but I'll ping Jack and see if we can get a re-render quickfast to make this easier. Solos are excellent, per what I'd expect, and I really love the arrangement overall. YES

The guitars are (rightly) getting a lot of love above, but those drums are where I'm falling in love with the engineering on this song. SO good. I'm a little less pumped about most of the synth mixing, as the patches for most of the leads could have used more bite and more movement to sit alongside the guitars better, but that's nitpicking. This is otherwise a stellar song, and yeah, it's conservative, but it's executed incredibly well and there's obviously personalization (is that a word? there's a red line under it) as well. On a side note, I'm rather impressed with the source tune as well, since it's a great usage of the Genesis FM synth without getting too gnarly. Anyways. 3metal5me. YES

I've seen multiple computers where the Windows 10 upgrade introduced weird driver issues (for instance, I couldn't actually install my Intel USB 3.0 drivers on the new machine, as detailed in that link I posted a while back), one person had their start menu quit working completely, etc. Just too much of a risk for me. This is the case I built the new PC in, and there are many variations on it with different colors and with or without side windows that you can usually find floating around. Favorite case I've ever built in at this point, and it looks classy as hell.

I'm building a fledgling live sound / DJ / IT contractor business, have moved into my own place for the first time this year, and can therefore use very practical things...mostly because I have very little time for entertainment these days, anyways, although there are occasions in which that enjoyed as well (usually in board or card games with friends). Specifics were included on that form anyways, but I really enjoyed participating in this last year and look forward to this year!

Also to chime in: I'm using FL 12 on Windows 10 (fresh install, NOT upgraded) with zero stability issues. W10 is my personal favorite OS Microsoft has ever put out--it's clean, fast, and is definitely the way forward. For longevity, I recommend it, since Windows 7 will lose support within a few years, and Windows 10 will be the one that keeps getting updated for quite a long time. To be clear: don't actually hit the Windows upgrade button on your PC, since that could introduce a whole host of issues. However, if you're going to get a new PC, get it with Windows 10--that's my recommendation right now. Here's the thread for the last one I built, if you want to see it. Granted, it's packing a whole lot more power than you'll probably be able to afford or even really need right now, but still.

There's not really a difference between those two. There might be differences between manufacturers in terms of warranty, build quality, etc. (and I can tell you that Dell builds all of their computers very solidly, you can't go wrong with them right now), but really it's going to boil down to what's the best deal you can find at the time you decide to buy. Or you could save even more money and get something purpose-built by doing it yourself.

I have nearly a terabyte of large-format (Kontakt, STEAM, EastWest) libraries at this point. plz send halp and moar SSD

If you want to just have a monthly subscription rather than paying up front for a great set of orchestral and other samples, East West's Composer Cloud is something you should really look into. $30/month gets you access to East West Symphonic Orchestra Gold, Hollywood Gold, and a huge host of other great products. One of the best deals in music creation right now for those of us without a substantial EW library to begin with.

PC for sale: http://phoenix.craigslist.org/nph/sys/5308307873.html Quad-core Phenom II 3.4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, Windows 10, 1.2 TB storage (2 drives), full copy of Office 2010, any questions just PM me. Will ship, but you'll need to pay shipping costs, and you'll probably want to be able to reassemble as the video card is huge and heavy and not good to leave inside the PC while shipping. $550 for OCR folks. edit: sold.

Gonna have to disagree, as a live sound engineer with over 10 years of experience in many different venues. That high clipping distortion is unlikely to have come from the PA system--I'd expect a more midrangey, saturated distortion if the venue's speakers were the culprit. Plus, if you listen to the rest of the video, that clipping is consistent with the way the rest of the sound gets recorded and distorted.

Yeah, I'm gonna say the buzz is a result of the phone mic. You could probably recreate that effect with a bit of reverb and then some distortion, which, while the wrong way around, is essentially what's happening here.

Just keep in mind that a lot of student discounts don't allow you to upgrade to the next version without paying the full price of the next version, whereas buying the regularly-priced software will give you upgrade rights.

I may have played this out live on Halloween night. Brilliant treatment of the voice clips, production is super clean, soundset is tasty. I know you already stopwatched it, and it *feels* like a Portal 2 mix all the way through, so I'm not gonna nitpick. Having the constant kick drum gets a little old, and we could really use a breather in the middle, but I don't think that's enough to hold this otherwise-stellar mix back from passing. <-- That issue is fixed with the new version, and it's fantastic now! This mix is not a lemon, and I am not sending it back! YES