analoq
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Posts posted by analoq
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it's sorta cool in an extremely chaotic way... but, definately not for OCR. I concur with sending the letter.
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The overdriven drum loop is cool. but...
Digital Coma aready pointed out the real problem with this mix, the delay effect... I know a lot of the music in the game had odd syncropated rhythms on various parts and the delay feedback mimicks that... but it sounds too cluttered.
Also there's some rather lacking instrumentation, just some synthetic plucks and some strings here and there... neither of which are interesting or unique sounds at all.
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indeed. at the very least, using the rejection letter would've saved this guy some embarrasment.
loudest. kick. ever.
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edit- 500th post! whoot!
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Ah ha, the guy finally answers me, here's the e-mail I sent him and his response...
Perhaps one of the other members of the judging panel have already contacted you about this, but we aren't qutie sure what track from System Shock 2 that you remixed. Could you please respond with the name of the original track or where it appears in the game or link me to an MP3 of the original? It would assist us with our judging, most of us are unfamiliar with SS2's music.my apologies,
i was not aware that the track needed to be a direct remix of a song from the game. i wrote this while inspired by the Engineering level music, and sampled sound effects and voice clips throughout the song. when i posted it in the system shock 2 forum it was suggested that i send it in to this contest, which i had no knowledge of.
well, I guess that wraps things up?
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I was able to find 6 tracks from SS2 but none of them seemed to be the one this guy was remixing unless he changed it around considerably. I e-mailed him a week ago asking what the original track was and have gotten no response. I don't like passing judgement on a remix when I haven't been able to review the original, but I guess I'm out of options.
This is pretty good, it's just really really boring. Even the sounds that carry the song throughout don't change much, minor volume & filter env automation on some instruments, but... it's not quite enough. I would give this a yes if maybe it was just a tiny bit more interesting.
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When I was in high school, I composed and conducted a couple pieces for the symphonic band and the chamber choir... so I know that arranging for high school bands is not simple or at least it takes more effort than sequencing for a synthesizer. And this guy's arrangement is fairly nice given that.
However, I also know that I much prefer the 'souless' sound of a synthesizer to the horrid sound of a high school band. And this high school band is no exception, they sound just awful.
eh, I'll get back to this one.
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It's the original... but with a dancebeat, chaotic toms, and very weak piano and strings. Boring, boring, boring. I don't feel I need to elaborate any further than that.
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ok 808 drums. The crazy metallic distortion is wicked cool, but jarring. Some of the ambient effects and sounds going on are pretty nice but the repitition really kills the track, it repeats too much before we get more weird sounds.
awesome wild sounds, crazy frequency modulation and rectifiers, but, a bit too jarring, and much too repititive.
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The strings have a very abrupt release that is in no way pleasing. Also, the way you doubled up the piano melody on separate channels is not pleasing either. I like the choir sounds, though.
Overall, very mechanical sounding, doesn't flow very well and the interpretation leaves much to be desired.
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The strings seem to be sequenced rather mechanically, I don't hear many changes in velocity or volume and these sound like the string samples off a creative soundcard; that's bad. Also, this is much too short...
wow, that's the most anti-climactic and unfulfilling ending I've heard in a while.
oh and anything you gain with 48khz will be lost once you encode to mp3. Please use 44.1 in the future.
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okay, this appears to be the music from stage 4. He changed the structure a bit, that's good. I like the section around 1:30-2:30. But it's not quite enough to forgive the other flaws in this track. The guitar-ish sound is horrendous, and since it's used used a lot, it hurts the track bigtime. What's worse, the bass drum... it hurts my ears - it sounds like you're boosting too high. Boost around 60-80hz.. not 150 or whatever awful frequencies I shouldn't be hearing. Ouch.
Others already pointed out the transitional problems, so I guess that's all I had to say.
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I sent you a "remix" Jan 13, I think. Haven't seen either 'yes' or 'no'. Maybe you've been busy. Here's the link again anyway. I know I'm not very good at this remixing thing, but there just aren't enough Journey to Silius remixes =)
remixer: CED (ced@mail.bip.net)
game: Journey to Silius (3rd Level?)
title: Down to Silius
link:
i'll vote on it tomorrow.
cheers.
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oops, I put off voting on this one and then forgot about it. anyways...
There's a weird 'snap' on a lot of these sounds, as if they had 1ms decays on the amp envelope or as if the sounds weren't sampled properly, like the waveform was at a high phase angle. Whatever the cause, it's not easily noticed but when you do hear it, it's quite annoying!
Samples sound rather dry, they're not high quality but try using some delay on the leads and some reverb on the pads.
The structure on this track is a bit erratic for my tates, it just doesn't seem to flow at the right pace, especially that weird ending. This track defintately needs improvement.
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Ah, the shademan theme...
What Malcos said, too much reverb on the drums. And the reverb on the bass? Bad idea also. Everything sounds cluttered. Lower the amplitude envelope release on the pads playing 5ths, they clash way too much, it sounds awful. The way the melody drop out at 2:47 leaves something to be desired. I like trancey stuff, but this is sub-par.
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A bit repetitive, but after listening to the original, well, not too much to work with there. Ideally he would've picked something with more musical ideas to ReMix, but oh well. Anyways, the sounds here are great, there are some really edgy and different sounds here mixed with familiar sounds. The drum loop isn't overused in my opinion, there's some variation in it, maybe this was a Recycle loop? oh yeah, and crackling was used well. This is over the bar in my opinion, not by much but I liked it.
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The first time I listened to this, I had some doubts, but after finding and listening to the SPC it's apparant very very few liberties were taken with the structure, melodies, chord progression, and even the instrumentation.
Given the simplicity of the original, I think a lot could have been done here musically, but instead it comes off as lacking.
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I gave this one 3 listens, there are a couple good ideas here, I like what he did with the drums at parts, makes me nod my head. But there is little variation on the theme, it gets traded around by different instruments, some of them interesting, most of them a little dry... but the melody is the same each time.
I could tell right away this was tracked, I recognize some of these samples. He probably ripped them from various other MODs or S3Ms. Most of them are lofi, you can clearly hear the 22khz or maybe even 11khz downsampling artifacts, aargh! is there any excuse for that? Find decent samples online or make them yourself.
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I downloaded 3 of this guy's works and gave them each a couple listens, the one I liked was the Tyrian one. Now, it's been a looong time since I've played that game and I only vaguely remember this tune but this is a very peaceful piano arrangement and it's overdubbed with a simple but soothing string part. There are a couple flubs but it didn't ruin the piece for me like Metroid ones did (ugh!)
yes to Tyrian
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This isn't a bad arrangement, there are some good ideas here, but overall it leaves much to be desired. I really would expect more than this from an instrumental Tetris arrangement.
Breaks from the theme are your friend. Add interesting original material between repititions of the theme. do more than just add instruments as the track progresses. Also, panning is desperately needed... why is the intro mono? The rest of the track has some stereo but not much. The ending is too abrupt. Traditional ingredients like key changes and crescendos wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Like the orchestral samples used, this track is mediocre.
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I gave this song a couple listens and I thought the intro had an interesting buildup, but then the boss theme came in. ouch. What Malcos said: way too sudden. Very few liberties taken with the source material, it sounds little different from the SNES and the complete lack of highend on this mix helps that; this sounds lo-fi. Too much bass, the mix is muddy, and the instruments are dull.
not too bad for a first ReMix but this is definately not OCR material.
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Thanks for posting this, djp! Also thank you all for your kind comment and constructive criticisms. Now for The Making Of Thin Glow ... First, this was my entry for IMC8 and it won by 1 point. Please check out Classic Smack's and Maniac's entries here.
Guitar - Guitar tracks are me playing my strat through the Amplitube VST plug-in. The riffs go through an automated highpass filter at times. For the lead guitar I automated the auto-wah unit over time and gave it a deep chorusing effect.
Bass - It's a similiar patch to the bass I made in Sonik Azure but this time I overdrove the analogue input. Distortion = Fun.
Drums - I purchased these samples from my local Guitar Center and sequenced a 4 bar rhythm to hold the track together. Ran it through a 4.4:1 compressor for punch and did some eq to give the snare some snap.
Marimba - A marimba patch off my JV1010 but run through a deep chorus and stereo echo... this makes it sound more like a bell and less a marimba.
Warbly Lead - Two detuned sine waves with lots of portamento, with analogue overdrive. It sounded too unusual to use by itself, so I paired it with the marimba during the chorus.
Pad - Interesting string pad off my Waldorf MicroQ. I didn't make it, it's a preset I downloaded. Interesting: The first time the melody in the middle-section appears, the pad is delayed behind the marimba. The second time, it attacks before the marimba.
303ish - A patch I made on my Virus C automating a filter envelope, going through the analogue overdrive of my Sherman Filterbank. Much delay.
Ending - This seems to be the dominant criticism so I will address it: It is abrubt. In retrospect, too abrupt, it hadn't bothered me enough to change it so I left it the way it was. In the future I will try to give more attention to abrupt endings. But hey, going through your playlist with crossfading... you'll never notice!
Take it easy, everyone!
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I remember a while back djp saying he'd like more ReMixers to use the review board on their own work. So to thank djp for posting this, I will do just that
Like DarkeSword already mentioned, I wrote this for TimerWolf's IronMix3 competition, and it was unanimously declared the winner by the judges. You can read their reviews here and listen to the other entries over here. For those interested, you can download this track in Ogg Vorbis from my website.
Here's a rundown of the sounds, in order of appearance:
The guitar parts are played by me. I recorded my Fender Strat direct, using a dbx386 to get it to line-level. I used the excellent Amplitube VST plug-in for the guitar parts, I do own a vintage Gibson amp but I really did not feel like dragging that thing out.
The bassline patch I made on an Access Virus C synth, it was just a square osc and a saw osc an octave apart going through a LPF. Add a nice phat bass boost in the EQ.
The whiney sawtooth sound was a simple saw osc on the Virus with lots of portamento. From there it goes into my Sherman Filterbank 2, for that analogue filter envelope sound, mixed in with the unfiltered signal. Add lots of delay.
The drums are made from a hiphop kit I downloaded off some website. As one can probably tell, they go through a LPF plugin that has the cutoff and resonance automated.
There's a subtle string patch from my Waldorf Micro-Q, I think the only thing I added was reverb.
There's an interesting guitar-riff sounds after the lead guitar, I took a patch on my Roland JV-1010 and buried it in a flange and delay plugin. Being able to sync flangers to the song tempo is very cool.
Finally the piano ending, it's a patch on the JV-1010, added reverb, and then through a DirectShow plugin called Isotope Vinyl, it's free, search for it.
The ending itself was almost a cop-out. I was going to use that theme for a big wall-of-guitar section at the end but to be honest, I just got lazy. Guitar parts are rather time consuming for me while piano parts tend to write themselves. I decided "less is more" and just went with a vintage sounding piano solo to end the track, but it worked pretty well.
Overall, I'm pleased with how this turned out. seeya.
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I just wanted to say thanks to the judges and to djpretzel for posting this mix. I know OCR has high standards for music placed here, and I am elated to know that I have met these expectations.
Also, thanks for your kind comments everyone, a little praise can go a long way...
OCR00953 - Phantasy Star "Wanta Phanta"
in ReMix Reviews & Comments
Posted
Thanks for posting this, djp. And thanks for the reviews, everyone.
Like TimberWolf said, this was originally written for IMC Popcorn #2 which was a 24-hour compo. I worked on it after the contest before submitting it to OCR so this is slightly different from the winning version. Still, for the amount of time I spent on this I was pleased with how it turned out even if it is a bit simple. anyways, here's a rundown of the instruments for those interested.
bass - saw+subosc through resonant filterenv and then through a lo-fi or rate reduction effect for that crunchy distortion. Lots and lots of compression. Add some delay and eq automation.
piano - a thick chorusing on a reverbed JV1010 piano patch that goes away as it comes in. I get a mental image of a grand piano rising out of the ocean when I hear it.
strings - reverbed and flanged JV1010 string patch... why do I like flanging on strings so much?
lead - I set up two square oscillators in sync mode on my VirusC with chorusing. I was going to set up an lfo to change the pitch of the moduator but decided to manually move the knob myself as it was playing with very lively results. Almost too lively. Finalize it with some delay and reverb.
Also, like DJP pointed out, there's some interesting panning and volume changes in the B sections. It gives the illusion that the lead is circling around your head if you're wearing headphones.
drums - acoustic drumkit samples I had purchased, I used an algorithmic composer, Band-In-A-Box to help me reach my artistic vision for the percussion sequence. It worked out quite well.
guitar - that's me playin' my strat. I used my Boss VF-1 for the effects on it.
Put the whole thing together and mastered it in logic audio. EDIT: You can listen to the other entries here.
cheers.